When the personal becomes necropolitical.
We're pleased to present this adapted excerpt from Chapter 4 of Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness» by Hans Ruin.
In recent years the political fabric of Spain has been torn apart by a struggle over the location of a heap of human bones: the remains of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The current left-wing government had promised that it would move Franco’s remains from the spectacular tomb-church dug hundred meters into a cliff in the mountains north of Madrid in the Valle de los Caídos, the “Valley of the Fallen.” Franco himself arranged this monument as an attempt to unite the nation after a brutal civil war. The bodies of over 30,000 soldiers and civilians from across the political spectrum, including workers on the site, were interred in the same tomb, at the center of which he chose to rest himself. Until very recently he laid there alongside his main ideologues, under an enormous cross coming out of the mountain. But his remains were moved under guard in October of last year. In an attempt to restore him post-mortem to civilian status, his coffin was taken to the family crypt in a cemetery near Madrid. The Franco family was fiercely opposed to this move, as were large parts of Spanish society. However, to the majority in a country where many families still carry painful memories from the war, the persistence of this fascist monument was simply intolerable, a “moral insult,” in the words of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
The commemorated dead need not be political or military heroes in order to have a necropolitical significance.
Spain is a country where such necropolitical struggles continue to dominate public life. The question of how to care for the dead, where to place the dead and how to commemorate them in death, is an issue that simply will not go away. If earlier generations of sociologists believed that this kind of culture of death and mourning belonged to an earlier stage of human political life and civilization, we are continuously reminded of how it persists. The dead will not leave the public space. In my book Being with the Dead» I deploy a broad range of philosophical tools from phenomenology, deconstruction, and cultural memory studies to describe and understand the inner workings of what I there describe as a fundamental trait of human social existence: we live not only with the living but also with the dead.
On the surface this is perhaps obvious, when we look at all the ways that we continue to engage with the dead, to remember them, to worship but also to struggle with them and their legacies. What they have left behind, in the form of books, artworks, cultural artifacts, and constitutions, continue to guide how we live and understand reality and ourselves. The dead are always with us, from the most intimate family archives to the monuments for our nations’ founders and cultural heroes. Being with the dead is ultimately what makes it possible for us to occupy historical time. If it was not for our relation to the dead, history would lose much of its meaning: The past is really a domain of those who have been.
It is not only the bodies of dictators that capture the political imagination. Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Eastern Europe’s liberation from communist dictatorship. One of the events that had prefaced this remarkable transformation was the unearthing and reburial of Imre Nagy’s corpse in Budapest in the summer of 1989. Nagy, the communist reformer who led the revolt in 1956 before being overthrown and later hanged in 1958, had been buried face down with his compatriots, coffin-less in unmarked graves. But on June 16, 1989, a quarter of a million Hungarians watched his remains be unearthed, placed face up in a coffin, and then reburied with full honors, an event that is generally recognized as one of the lightning rods for the ensuing revolution.
The commemorated dead need not be political or military heroes in order to have a necropolitical significance. They can also come from the silent and anonymous crowd, as in the remarkable initiative organized by Sandra J. Arnold, a descendant of enslaved African Americans who has initiated the National Burial Database of Enslaved Americans (NBDEA). The aim is to document the often anonymous, hidden, neglected, and sometimes destroyed and covered-over burial grounds of enslaved African Americans. Enslaved people typically had their own burial grounds, sometimes in the vicinity of but separated from the local official church. Often the descendants could not afford to have engraved stones, so the graves would be marked by naturally shaped stones. Occasionally such graveyards are unearthed only when construction work is being done. In an article in the New York Times from March 4, 2016, Arnold speaks of this “memorialization” as a way of keeping us “connected to what is most significant about those who are no longer with us.1” She speaks of how the memory of slavery in the public eye often “becomes abstract,” whereas graveyards are “visual reminders” that exist because “we desire to memorialize those buried there.” The database under construction is thus both an ambitious historical archive, explicitly in the service of research, visitors, and living memory, and a way of actively paying respect to the dead.
In a condensed way, the project displays history as the name of the ontological domain of being with the dead, or rather as the always contested site of this sharing. It shows how the constitution of a community involves not only the living but also the dead. For a nation that is still struggling to come to terms with the legacy of three centuries of slavery and to forge a shared understanding of its past with which to continue together, the necropolitical initiative touches the existential-ontological core of the work that is simultaneously being done by professional historians and in popular dramatizations of slavery. It directs attention to the remains of dead as the reality of a history of repression and neglect, in this case with the purpose of inviting them back into a shared past by securing the minimal legacy of a nameless memorial.
The politics of the dead is not over. It is not a thing of the past in the sense of what is behind us. Instead, it is a mark and a symptom of how the past itself continues to be constituted in and through the involvement of the living with the dead, and of how the dead shape the space of the living.
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Notes
1) For the article, see “Why Slaves’ Graves Matter,” New York Times, March 4, 2016.
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