'A people without history is not redeemed from time': Remorseful Recollection and the Ethics of Tragedy

This paper explores the roles of remorse and recollection as ethical resources apropos tragedy. Firstly, I suggest that tragedy has often been eclipsed in favour of fatalistic or deterministic accounts of catastrophe, with detrimental, 'silencing' effects on ethical reflection. Then, I explore how remorse and recollection might help us to recognize and recollect tragedy historically—i.e., to consider tragedy within its authentic, truthful temporal conditions without being trapped in deterministic evasions. Thus, we might be liberated from a sense of the past as a trap to live truthfully in time by mourning, repenting, and recollecting the past so that the narration of shared, tragic loss might also serve as an ethical resource for articulating and realising an alternative, liberative reality. 

Part One: Aberrated Mourning and the Eclipse of Tragedy

I begin by suggesting how representations or narrations of catastrophe and ruin are not necessarily in themselves 'tragic'. Beyond Hegel's account of tragedy as two opposing systems of right, I draw on Rowan Williams (2016) to suggest that tragedy is neither a purely speechless (and thereby silencing) 'reply' to catastrophe nor simply its happy reversal: it is a way of asking what follows from extreme loss, what endures of our common humanity amidst loss, and what kind of mutual learning may be possible. However, rather than constituting what tragedy is—a form of truth-telling in time—re-narrations or representations of catastrophe as 'tragic' have often been used to silence or abrogate such asking or learning in the public square (cf. Steiner, 1963, on 'absolute' tragedy). For example, the complex legacies of the American Civil War, universities and the slave trade, Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War can all be characterised as 'tragic' while distancing us from their particularities and thereby silencing difficult, contemporary ethical reflection (cf. Tran, 2010; Guth, 2022). Thus, as Richard Miller suggests (2009), we can remember in ways that occlude moral witness and reflection.

Beyond repressing or denying past catastrophes, such appeals to the 'tragic' fall into Gillian Rose's (1993) category of 'aberrated mourning', which portrays history as 'essentially' tragic or catastrophic, leading to an abnegation of moral language apropos catastrophe and thereby silencing lament and ethical reflection (cf. Lorde, 1984). Such aberrated mourning represents what Williams (2000) calls 'strategies of invulnerability' that refuse historical thinking since acknowledging the past—which one cannot directly alter, and in which one is always already enmeshed with others—is always a risky exposure of our vulnerability. Yet, while acknowledging the past unsettles the present, it might also make our existence 'both truthful and bearable, our stories more than sad' (Tran, 2010). Otherwise, failing to reckon truthfully with our (truly) tragic entanglements in time binds us to a (seemingly) immutable past since 'a people without history/Is not redeemed from time' (Eliot). 

Part Two: Remorseful Recollection

In this section, I explore how remorse and recollection might invite an attentiveness to tragedy that makes our existence more truthful and bearable, and which invites moral witness and reflection. Unlike aberrated mourning, 'inaugurated' mourning originates in the knowledge that the particular catastrophe one grieves might have been otherwise (Rose, 1993). Such mourning refuses facile determinisms of 'tragic necessity' and reckons with our particular history in time by truthfully recalling and facing our failed and sinful engagements in the world, grieving our own involvement in present catastrophes and tainted legacies (cf. MacKinnon, 1975; Guth, 2022). 

Yet, the remorseful recollection of this also affirms that the present situation is not immutable or inevitable: it has a context, a continuity—it is created and can be changed. Thus, although unsettling to realise that what was and is might have been otherwise, mournful recollection also serves to ground our hope for a future beyond present catastrophes: instead of merely repeating the tragic past or seeking to return to an 'innocent' past, remorseful recollection seeks to recover and integrate it towards a different, liberated future (cf. Augustine, conf. 10-11; Metz, 1980; Williams, 2000). To elucidate this further, against Stanley Crouch's (1987) critique that Toni Morrison had 'no sense of the tragic', I will demonstrate how 'rememory' in Morrison's Beloved illustrates a type of remorseful recollection apropos tragedy that enriches the tragic as 'more than sad' without effacing its horrors.

Part Three: Remorse, Tragedy, and Ethics

To remorsefully recollect catastrophe does not necessarily impose a false sense of closure nor deny that there are harms which resist analysis: it denies that catastrophe ultimately abnegates or silences personal and public moral reflection, discourse, and witness. Thus, while tragedy might invite silence, following Donald MacKinnon (1969), tragedy does not ultimately silence discourse since even silence itself is a kind of indirect communication. Thus, the silence that tragedy invites is not necessarily speechlessness but the purification of our fantasies and the training of our attention to the realities of catastrophe, as well as our attendant obligations (Williams, 2016; Lash, 2004; cf. Weil, 1952). 

In reflecting on tragedy's ethical significance, mournful recollection 'connects the catastrophe of another with my own fate' and requests 'a new solidarity' (Williams, 2000). Therefore, remorse serves as an ethical resource for personal and social recollection via a 'critical therapy of historical desire' (Miller, 2009). Because personal and social recollection emerges from a liberative desire to shatter the seeming 'omnipresent power of given facts' in the present (Metz, 1980), remorse can critically enrich such recollection by giving voice to many diverse griefs—thereby allowing loss to be mutually recognized across divides.

Moreover, since mutual recognition amid mournful recognition and recollection apropos tragedy sees others and the world as capable of change—even repentance—it serves to enrich ethical responses like protest against the silencing of moral discourse vis-a-vis catastrophic loss or tainted legacies, repentance and reparations for past harms, and the possibility of mercy and even forgiveness instead of vengeance (cf. Guth, 2022). Such responses vis-a-vis tragedy need not enforce 'closure' but might emerge from a willingness to enter another's chaos amidst mournful recollection and mutual recognition, still grieving horrors yet also risking a new beginning (cf. Flores, 2020; Potts, 2022).