When memory speaks: Remembrance and revenge in unforgiven

Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages 236-259

  Sarat, Austin ^a  

^a AMHERST COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 33646936809     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (84)

1. Video stills are from The Unforgiven, Malpaso Productions/Warner Bros., 1992.
2. See John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy From Aeschylus to Armageddon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
3. As Martha Minow notes, "To seek a path between vengeance and forgiveness is also to seek a route between too much memory and too much forgetting."
4. See Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), p. 118.
5. "Forgiveness," Minow argues, "involves the one who was wronged in renouncing resentment, stepping out of the wave of repeating rage, and welcoming the other into the circle of humanity, reconnection, and even reconciliation."
6. See Martha Minow, "Memory and Hate: Are There Lessons From Around the World?" (chapter 1).
7. "In the last analysis, it is upon the individual and the individual alone that the constraint of memory weighs insistently as well as imperceptibly. The atomization of a general memory into a private one has given the obligation to remember a power of internal coercion . . . [W]hen memory is no longer everywhere, it will not be anywhere unless one takes the responsibility to recapitulate it through individual means."
8. See Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations 26 (1989): 16.
9. Terry Aladjem, "Vengeance & Democratic Justice: American Culture and the Limits of Punishment," unpublished manuscript, 1992, p. 25.
10. William Miller, "Clint Eastwood and Equity: The Virtues of Revenge and the Shortcomings of Law in Popular Culture," in Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, eds., Law and the Domains of Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 161.
11. See Susan Jacoby, Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 115.
12. "Insofar as humanly possible . . . , law attempts to remove personal animus from the process of apportioning blame and exacting retribution. It is the removal of personal animus . . . that distinguishes the rule of law from the rule of passion."
13. See Terry Aladjem, "Revenge and Consent," unpublished manuscript, 1990, p. 9.
14. Jacoby, Wild Justice, pp. 2-3.
15. Also Francis Bacon, "Of Revenge," in Hugh Dick, ed., Selected Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1955).
16. "A society that is unable to convince individuals of its ability to exact atonement for injury is a society that runs a constant risk of having its members resort to the wilder forms of justice."
17. See Jacoby, Wild Justice, p. 10.
18. For a discussion of the role of emotion in justice, see Samuel Pillsbury, "Emotional Justice: Moralizing the Passions of Criminal Justice," Cornell Law Review 74 (1989): 655.
19. As William Connolly puts it, "Once revenge infiltrates the call to punish, this eminently desirable drive can expand indefinitely."
20. William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 42-43.
21. St. Augustine, The Writings of St. Augustine (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1947), pp. 168-169.
22. See Jeffrie Murphy, "Getting Even: the Role of the Victim," Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1990): 216.
23. Also Jeffrie Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
24. See Miller, "Clint Eastwood and Equity," pp. 162-165.
25. See Marvin Henberg, Retribution: Evil for Evil in Ethics, Law, and Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
26. Also, Michael Davis, "Harm and Retribution," in A. John Simmons et al., eds., Punishment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
27. Lawrence Becker, "Criminal Attempt and the Theory of the Law of Crimes," Philosophy & Public Affairs 3 (1974): 262.
28. Quoted in J. Ferrer, Crimes and Punishments (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880), p. 190.
29. See Roberto Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1976).
30. See Gary Peller, "Reason and the Mob: the Politics of Representation," Tikkun 2 (1987): 28.
31. See also Allan Hutchison, "Identity Crisis: The Politics of Interpretation," New England Law Review 26 (1992): 1173.
32. For a particularly interesting example, see Jon Elster, "Norms of Revenge," Ethics 100 (1990): 862.
33. Revenge, Elster argues, "can be rational in terms of the selfish, material interests of the agent. If broader motivations-like the concern to uphold one's honor-are allowed, the task of proving the rationality of revenge becomes easier but also less interesting" (p. 872).
34. Jonathan Reider, "The Social Organization of Vengeance," in Donald Black, ed. Toward a General Theory of Social Control (New York: Academic Press, 1984).
35. See also William Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chapter.
36. In Durkheim's words, "The need for vengeance is better directed today than heretofore. The spirit of foresight which has been aroused no longer leaves the field so free for the blind action of passion. It contains within it certain limits; it is opposed to absurd violence, to unreasonable ravaging." See Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1893, 1964), p. 90.
37. Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 93.
38. "Revenge is neither something which can be left behind in nature nor is it a transferrable right. Like Locke's state of nature, it always is with us."
39. See Aladjem, "Vengeance & Democratic Justice," p. 36.
40. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, p. 48.
41. Minow, "Memory and Hate," chapter 1.
42. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
43. On the distinction between history and memory, see Jacques LeGoff, History and Memory, Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
44. Nora, "Between Memory and History," pp. 8-9.
45. But see Davis and Starn, "Rather than insisting on the opposition between memory and history . . . we want to emphasize their interdependence." Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, "Introduction," Representations 26 (1989): 5.
46. Or, as Burke argues, "Both history and memory are coming to appear increasingly problematic. Remembering the past and writing about it no longer seem like the innocent activities they were once taken to be. Neither memories nor histories seem objective any longer . . . In both cases . . . selection, interpretation and distortion is socially conditioned." See Peter Burke, "History as Social Memory," in Thomas Butler, ed., Memory: History Culture and the Mind (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 97-98.
47. See John Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
48. Also Nathan Wachtel, "Introduction: Memory and History," History and Anthropology 2 (1986): 218.
49. Barry Schwartz, "The Social Control of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory," Social Forces 61 (1982): 15.
50. and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991).
51. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 21.
52. David Thelen, "Memory and American History," Journal of American History 75 (1989): 1119.
53. Nora, "Between History and Memory," p. 13.
54. Gillis, Commemorations.
55. M. Yacovar, "Re-membering the Western: Clint Eastwood's 'Unforgiven,' " Queen's Quarterly 100 (Spring 1993): 247.
56. See also, L. Engel, "Rewriting Western Myths in Clint Eastwood's New-Old Western," Western American Literature 29 (1994): 261.
57. M. W. Blundell, "Western Values, or the People's Homer: 'Unforgiven' as a Reading of the 'Iliad,' " Poetics Today 18 (1997), 533.
58. Miller, "Clint Eastwood and Equity," p. 183.
59. For an interesting analysis of the name Will and Munny see Thomas Dumm, "Unworking Death in 'Unforgiven': Law, Ethos, Violence," unpublished manuscript, p. 9.
60. Miller, "Clint Eastwood and Equity," p. 184.
61. Thus legal systems in the United States and Europe have been confronted by stern challenges in the name of victims' rights. See George Fletcher, With Justice For Some: Victims' Rights in Criminal Trials (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995).
62. See also Lois Forer, Criminals and Victims (New York: Norton, 1980).
63. Here and abroad a movement has emerged that seeks to speak for victims. "Hard on the heels of the civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement, and the movement to expand the rights of criminal suspects, the victims' rights movement burst on the scene in the early 1970s and quickly became a potent political force. Part backlash against what it considered the prodefendant romanticism of the 1960s, the victims' rights movement was also a spiritual heir to the '60s ethos. With its suspicion of bureaucratic government and its concern for the disempowered, the victims' rights movement spoke for the 'forgotten' men and women of the criminal justice system." Stephen Schulhofer, "The Trouble with Trials: The Trouble with Us," Yale Law Journal 105 (1995): 825.
64. The tendency of criminal justice systems in Western democracies is to displace the victim, to shut the door on those with the greatest interest in seeing justice done. In response, those who speak for victims are demanding that their voices be heard throughout the criminal justice process. David Roland, "Progress in the Victim Reform Movement: No Longer the 'Forgotten Victim,'" Pepperdine Law Review 17 (1989): 35.
65. "Historically," Roland argues, "crime victims have been forgotten in the criminal justice system. The system, as it evolved, protected the rights of the accused with zeal, while ignoring the victim's plight."
66. Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy From Aeschylus to Armageddon.
67. Austin Sarat, "Vengeance, Victims, and the Identities of Law," Social and Legal Studies 6 (1997): 163.
68. Miller, "Clint Eastwood and Equity," p. 184.
69. "Consciousness of ethnic difference . . . only turned into nationalist chauvinism when a discredited Communist elite began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power." Michael Ignatieff, "The Balkan Tragedy," New York Review of Books (May 13, 1993): 3.
70. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, Adrian Collins, trans. (Indiannapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), p. 15.
71. Miller, "Clint Eastwood and Equity," p. 195.
72. C. Plantinga, "Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in 'Unforgiven,' " Cinema Journal 37 (1998): 65.
73. Miller, "Clint Eastwood and Equity," p. 197.
74. For a more complete exploration of this theme, see Dumm, "Unworking Death . . .".
75. Also Plantinga, "Spectacles of Death."
76. As Dumm suggests, this is "a hard truth that may be acknowledged by the killer, a truth that cannot, however, be known."
77. See Dumm, "Unworking Death in 'Unforgiven,' " p. 11.
78. Miller notes what he calls "equivocations on the morality of revenge" even in the shootout in Skinny's saloon, where revenge seems most clearly justified. See "Clint Eastwood and Equity," p. 192.
79. Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, p. 5.
80. Dumm provides an insightful reading of these denials.
81. See Dumm, "Unworking Death in 'Unforgiven,'" p. 9.
82. Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, p. 9.
83. For an analysis of this refusal see Miller, "Clint Eastwood and Equity," p. 197.
84. Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, p. 20.