Making sense of traumatic events: Toward a politics of aporetic mourning in educational theory and pedagogy

Educational Theory

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 85-104

  Zembylas, Michalinos ^a  

^a OPEN UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS   (Cyprus)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63849175019     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2009.00308.x     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. Auschwitz, South African apartheid, 9/11, and the other examples mentioned here are clearly not equivalent in terms of the issues involved but they can all be connected with trauma and deep sorrow.
2. A basic assumption made here is that mourning is situated in what Basil Bernstein calls an emergent totally pedagogized society, that is, a society in which all sites of socialization and work become, in effect, pedagogical sites. See Basil Bernstein, "From Pedagogies to Knowledge," in Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy: The Contribution of Basil Bernstein to Research, eds. Ana Morais, Isabel Neves, Brian Davies, and Harry Daniels (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 363-368.
3. Penelope Deutscher, "Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism, and the Politics of Friendship: Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Sciences 10, no. 3 (1998 159 186.
4. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1917), 243-258.
5. Greg Forter, "Against Melancholia: Contemporary Mourning Theory, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the Politics of Unfinished Grief," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Sciences 14, no. 2 (2003): 134-170. See also Andrew Hebard, "Disruptive Histories: Toward a Radical Politics of Remembrance in Alain Resnais's Night and Fog," New German Critique, no. 71 (Spring-Summer 1997): 87-113, for a critique of contemporary psychoanalytic theorists (for example, Dominick LaCapra and Eric L. Santner). Hebard's argument is made on the grounds that psychoanalytic notions of mourning and working through rely on a form of identity politics that is no different from the one that psychoanalytic theorists set out to critique.
6. See, for example, Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), and Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man, rev. ed., trans. Cecile Lindsay, Eduardo Cadava, Jonathan Culler, and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) and The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
7. Ewa Lonowska Ziarek, "Encounters Possible and Impossible: Derrida and Butler on Mourning," Philosophy Today 50 (SPEP Supplement, 2006): 151.
8. Karen J. Engle, "Putting Mourning to Work: Making Sense of 9/11," Theory, Culture and Society 24, no. 1 (2007 61 88.
9. See, for example, Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946; repr. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984). Another Jewish scholar who made important contributions in this field, especially to the study of adolescence, is Siegfried Bernfeld. See Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Coming of Age in the Thirties: Max Weinreich, Edward Sapir, and Jewish Social Science," in Deborah Dash Moore, ed., YIVO Annual (Detroit: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 1-103.
10. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
11. Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006).
12. The term inconsolable mourning is borrowed from Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J.M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris and Toni Morrison (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2004).
13. Lauren Berlant, "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics," in Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, eds. Sara Ahmed, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil, and Beverly Skeggs (London: Routledge, 2000), 36.
14. See Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); and Andrew Rigby, Justice and Reconciliation: After the Violence, (London: Lynne Rienner, 2001).
15. Martha Minow, Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law and Repair (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Donald Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
16. Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (London: Routledge, 2001).
17. Rob Fisher and Salwa Ghaly, "Introduction," Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness 1, no. 4 (2004): 6-11, http://www.wickedness.net/.
18. See Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, and Ronald Suresh Roberts, Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid's Criminal Governance (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers/Oxford, 1997); and James Gibson, Overcoming Apartheid - Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2004).
19. Stephen Cherry, "Forgiveness and Reconciliation in South Africa," in Forgiveness in Context: Theology and Psychology in Creative Dialogue, eds. Fraser Watts and Liz Guilliford (London: Continuum, 2004): 160-177.
20. Ibid., 164.
21. Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies.
22. See Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning.
23. John de Gruchy, Reconciliation: Restoring Justice (London: SCM Press, 2002).
24. Cherry, "Forgiveness and Reconciliation in South Africa," 175.
25. Although Derrida's analysis is essentially based on what might be called private mourning, or individual mourning - in this case his mourning of close friends and colleagues - some of the points he raises can relate these reflections to public mourning. See Michael Naas, "History's Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event," Research in Phenomenology 33, no. 1 (2003): 75-96.
26. Jacques Derrida, "By Force of Mourning," Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (1996): 172.
27. Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man, 21.
28. 28. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, 159.
29. Naas, "History's Remains."
30. Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man, 32.
31. 31. Ibid., 6.
32. Jacques Derrida, Points...Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), 321.
33. Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man, 35.
34. Deutscher, "Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism, and the Politics of Friendship."
35. Cherry, "Forgiveness and Reconciliation in South Africa."
36. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 13.
37. Roger Starling, "Addressing the Dead: Of Friendship, Community and the Work of Mourning," Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 7, no. 2 (2002 113.
38. Judith Butler, "Explanation or Exoneration, or What We Can Hear," The Grey Room 7, no. 1 (2002): 58.
39. Engle, "Putting Mourning to Work," 72.
40. As Ziarek points out in "Encounters Possible and Impossible," in contrast to Derrida's ethical affirmation of impossible mourning, Butler's interest is in exposing the disavowal of an ethical affirmation.
41. Butler, Precarious Life, 20. This work will be cited as PL in the text for all subsequent references (see n.6 for the full citation).
42. Berlant, "The Subject of True Feeling." See also Lauren Berlant, ed., Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).
43. Katherine Woodward, "Calculating Compassion," in Compassion, ed. Berlant, 59-86.
44. Elizabeth Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 7.
45. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
46. Woodward, "Calculating Compassion."
47. Lauren Berlant, "Trauma and Ineloquence," Cultural Values 5, no. 1 (2001): 41-58.
48. Wendy Brown, States of Inquiry: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995).
49. Forter, "Against Melancholia."
50. Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
51. See Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). My use of surface mourning here parallels Arlie Hochschild's notion of surface acting, that is, the regulation of one's emotional expressions simply to comply with the existing social norms, without really modifying how one feels (that is, without feeling sorrow or grief deep down). See Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
52. Berlant, "The Subject of True Feeling"; see also Butler, Precarious Life.
53. Bernard Meltzer and Gil Musolf, "Resentment and Ressentiment," Sociological Inquiry 72, no. 2 (2002 240 255.
54. Brown, States of Inquiry, 73.
55. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997).
56. Woodward, "Calculating Compassion."
57. Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, 1999).
58. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
59. See also Megan Boler and Michalinos Zembylas, "Discomforting Truths: The Emotional Terrain of Understanding Differences," in Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Justice, ed. Peter Trifonas (New York: Routledge, 2003), 110-136; and Michalinos Zembylas, "Witnessing in the Classroom: The Ethics and Politics of Affect," Educational Theory 56, no. 3 (2006): 305-324.
60. Berlant, "Trauma and Ineloquence," 47.
61. Derrida's response, as Deutscher points out, is to simultaneously put into question the integrity of the self, by theorizing the self as always the other, thus addressing the danger of narcissism. See Deutscher, "Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism, and the Politics of Friendship." Butler's position that common vulnerability constitutes a renewed opening for solidarity is also an attempt to negotiate traumatic ambivalence.
62. The traumas of ethnic division between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots - first in the 1960s when the Turkish Cypriots were the main victims, and then in 1974 when Turkey invaded and divided the island, displacing many thousands of Greek Cypriots - came to signify an intractable conflict in the politics of the region. Since 1974, the island has been divided by the Green Line separating the two communities: Greek Cypriots in the south and Turkish Cypriots in the north. The intractability of the conflict and the persistence of the status quo, despite numerous diplomatic efforts, have led to many tensions on either side of the island. A major source of this tension derives from the fact that members of the two communities have been raised apart for a long time, despite the partial lifting of restrictions on movement across the Green Line in 2003. In April 2004, the Greek Cypriots rejected a proposed solution put forth (via referendum) by the United Nations, while the Turkish Cypriots accepted it; a few days later, Cyprus joined the European Union as a divided state, its problem still unresolved. Currently, the situation is marked by political stalemate, and various opinion polls in both communities indicate a high degree of pessimism about the potential for a solution in the near future.
63. Paul Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005).
64. Paul Sant Cassia, "Guarding Each Other's Dead, Mourning One's Own: The Problem of Missing Persons and Missing Pasts in Cyprus," South European Society and Politics 11, no. 1 (2006 117.
65. See, for example, Vamik Volkan and Norman Itzkowitz, eds., Turks and Greeks: Neighbours in Conflict (Huntingdon, UK: Eothen Press, 1994); and Yiannis Papadakis, Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005). In particular, as Volkan and Itzkowitz write, when a group cannot mourn its losses or reverse its feelings of humiliation, subsequent generations are obligated to complete this unfinished process. Transgenerational mourning is certainly a contested idea, if not viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective, yet it suggests a possible direction that ideological socialization takes in conflict-ridden societies.
66. Sant Cassia, "Guarding Each Other's Dead, Mourning One's Own," 120.
67. Ibid., 121.
68. See, for example, Rebecca Bryant, "An Aesthetics of Self: Moral Remaking and Cypriot Education," Comparative Study of Society and History 43, no. 3 (2001): 583-614; Rebecca Bryant, Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004); Niazi Kizilyürek, "National Memory and Turkish-Cypriot Textbooks," Internationale Schulbuchforschung 21, no. 4 (1999): 387-396; and Spyros Spyrou, "Images of 'the Other': The Turk in Greek-Cypriot Children's Imaginations," Race, Ethnicity and Education 5, no. 3 (2002): 255-272.
69. Two examples of such events are the following: The first event - entitled "The Common Suffering: A Catalyst for Peace? Truth and Reconciliation: How to Go About it?" - took place on June 22, 2007, in Limassol and was organized by the Bi-communal Initiative of Relatives of Missing Persons, Victims of Massacres and Other Victims of War and the Inter-communal Forum Against Nationalism and Racism. The second event - entitled "The Common Pain and Future Unite Us" - took place on July 25, 2007, in Nicosia and was supported by fifteen different organizations. It was followed by a common visit to two symbolic places - one in the north and one in the south - where mass graves of Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots respectively were found. Also, a Greek-Cypriot daily newspaper began to publish stories of the Missing and the victims of massacres from both communities; see, for example, Andreas Paraschos, "The Massacre of 106 [Turkish-Cypriot] Women and Children in Maratha, Aloa and Sandalari," Politis, August 19, 2007, 35-38; and Sevgul Uludag, "The Massacre of More than 80 Greek-Cypriot Prisoners of War from Assia Village," Politis, August 19, 2007, 59-62.
70. Gilbert Galuya, "The Aesthetics of Simplicity: Yang's Sadness and the Melancholic Community," Journal of Intercultural Studies 27, nos. 1-2 (2006 98.
71. Ibid.
72. See Daniel Bar-Tal, "Collective Memory of Physical Violence: Its Contribution to the Culture of Violence," in The Role of Memory in Ethnic Conflict, eds. Ed Cairns and Michael Roe (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 77-93.
73. Zelia Gregoriou, "Before the Educational Violence of Commemoration: Derrida and the Philosophical Work of Mourning" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, London, UK, 2005), 11.
74. See Johann Baptist Metz, "The Future in the Memory of Suffering," in New Questions on God, ed. Johann Baptist Metz (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 9-25.
75. See Pieter Duvenage, "The Politics of Memory and Forgetting after Auschwitz and Apartheid," Philosophy and Social Criticism 25, no. 3 (1999): 1-28.
76. See Starling, "Addressing the Dead."
77. Max Pensky, "On the Use and Abuse of Memory," Philosophy and Social Criticism 15, no. 4 (1989 352 378.
78. See Lynn Davies, Education and Conflict: Complexity and Chaos (London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004); Gabriel Salomon and Baruch Nevo, eds., Peace Education: The Concepts, Principles, and Practices Around the World (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002); and Zvi Bekerman and Claire McGlynn, eds., Addressing Ethnic Conflict Through Peace Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
79. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1987).