The Ethics of Cosmopolitan Memory

Abstract

The fact that the memory of trauma can travel and solicit shame, outrage, pain, tears of sincerity and even spasms of hate in the global subject can be considered within a specific ethical register, which can broach new analytic possibilities in relation to collective memories and their general significance for our understanding of solidarity and human rights. The deterritorialization of memory and its affective appeal over and beyond the borders of its immediate significance suggests the possibility of an ethics that precedes cultural and historical significations within which memory is articulated: an “ethics of ethics,” as Derrida suggests in his early reference to Levinas’s work. It is the precariousness and vulnerability of the other, the fact that suffering is inexcusable, that cuts across the historical and cultural limits of memory, making its meaning accessible across a heterogeneous terrain. Suffering of the other is the primary signification of being in Levinas and this suffering comes as an effraction of my right to inner repose. It sobers me to my responsibility, which can account for the diasporization of memory and the affective implications of its global impact. Cosmopolitan memory implies that the most intimate recesses of human history can mobilize humanity against suffering and this paper will consider its articulation as well as the concerns that may emerge when related to the concept of archive and the concept of the witness upon which it rests.