Mortality and Violence: Ricoeur on Murder and Mourning

Marian University, Thanatology Program.

bchspirit@roadrunner.com; rbdeford06@marianuniversity.edu 

       As a thanatologist, I am interested in the effects of the deaths of our loved ones and our mourning those losses upon us and our thinking.  As with all of us, much of Ricoeur’s personal life was appropriately private to him.  However, over the last ten years of his life, the personal and the professional aspects of Ricoeur’s life took on an extraordinary and revealing conjunction.  According to Catherine Goldstein in Living Up to Death, he began a meditation on death in the summer of 1995.  His beloved wife, Simone, began her own turning toward death in 1996; she died in January, 1998.  Afterward, while mourning her, Ricoeur returned to writing and by 2000 was doing the final edit of the French edition of Memory, History, Forgetting. (LUtD, 92,93)

The marks of this time in his life can be found throughout that book, and not merely in his dedication of it to the memory of Simone.  Ricoeur not only joins the work of memory to the work of mourning, but he also picks up themes from his earlier life and work, most notably Oneself as Another.  He then puts them in juxtaposition with those related to his most recent personal experiences.  In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur gives the appearance of integrating his life: the experience of “the camps” is compared with personal death—and losses.  As I hope to show, the private history of Ricoeur the personal is not entirely separable from the public thinking of Ricoeur the philosopher.

Ricoeur’s Vow

The first and perhaps primary intersection between Living Up to Death and Memory, History, Forgetting is Ricoeur’s personal vow.  Made during the time of Simone’s dying, made with Catherine as his witness (and perhaps others, initially), it becomes public and provides a keystone to his reflection on dying in MHF (357) in the course of his discussion of Heidegger and Plato and the “obsession with metaphysics with the problem of death.”  What this “obsession” misses, in Ricoeur’s opinion, is “the joy of the spark of life.”[1]  Against “the banalization of dying,” Ricoeur intends to follow Spinoza’s focus on life rather than death.  He appeals to his vow “to remains alive until…,” and the “jubilation” it produces.  In other words, Ricoeur’s aim is to remain on the side of life, even while contemplating death—including his own dying. 

This vow is more than a philosophical point of emphasis.  It is for Ricoeur a kind of determination.  That is, “living up to death,” for him means not merely staying alive.  It means activity, indeed the particular actions of thinking and writing philosophy.  We can glimpse this determination in his working on The Course of Recognition after being blinded in one eye by a spike in his blood pressure (LUtD, 94).  Ms. Goldstein says that in September, 2004, when he began (in medical terms) “actively dying,” it was a “difficult period for him” (95).  Among other things, he was not “acting” as he had known “acting” to be. 

So as I read “Up to Death: Mourning and Cheerfulness” in Living Up to Death, I try to see in it what Ricoeur himself did.  That is, I see it as a personal meditation on living in the light of mortality, begun during Simone’s decline in 1996, “at her side, in solidarity with her,” yet set aside in 1997 so that he could be available[2] for Simone.  In this way I can sense the mourning which perfuses these reflections, and which consequently finds its way into Memory, History, Forgetting.[3] 

The Vow as Backdrop

After affirming the “jubilation” expressed in his vow to live up to death in Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur writes: “Against the backdrop of these perplexing questions, I propose to explore two paths,” as a “dialogue between the philosopher and the historian on the subject of death.”  The first is the road I will try not to travel here, the path of “personal” or “ordinary” death.  This leads Ricoeur through reflections on the body as “flesh,” and the tension between “wanting to live and having to die” (MHF, 358).[4] 

Instead I want to take as my point of departure Ricoeur’s “[redeployment] of the triad of self, close relations, and others” as the “[opening of] the problematic of death in history.”  However, this latter path is not completely discreet from the former one.  It has several points of intersection with personal, ordinary death, more than one might imagine.  For instance, Ricoeur starts here:

There is, in fact, one form of death that is never encountered in a pure form, if one may call it so, except in the sphere of public existence: violent death, murder. (MHF, 360)

For all that sets violent death apart in its political and historical dimensions, Ricoeur maintains its relevance to ordinary death:

Violent death… signifies something essential concerning death in general and, in the final analysis, concerning our own death. (MHF, 360)

In a rather startling way, Ricoeur makes this connection through suicide[5]:

In the same way, suicide, as murder turned against oneself, when it touches us, repeats the hard lesson.  What lesson?  That, perhaps, every death is a sort of murder.  This is the intuition explored by Emmanuel Levinas in some strong pages of Totality and Infinity.  What murder—raised to the level of a founding paradigm by the murder of Abel by his brother Cain—lays bare and what the simple disappearance, the departure, the cessation of existing in the death of close relations does not express, is the mark of nothingness, made by the intention to annihilate.  Alone, the ‘passion for murder’ exhibits this mark. (MHF, 360)

I want to underscore two concepts Ricoeur takes from Levinas.[6]  The first is the phrase “passion for murder.”  Ricoeur will seize on this aspect of the human condition.  A second phrase from Levinas is in the background.  Levinas says: “Death… is thought with the alternative of being and nothingness” (T&I, 232).  This almost Sartrian tension between “being and nothingness” was existential for Ricoeur.[7]  In a way that reflects his own experience, he confirms its significance to ordinary death:

But, in addition to this great lesson that inaugurates the entrance into ethics, murder, which is fundamentally death inflicted on others, is reflected in my relation to my own death.  The feeling of imminence, which precedes all knowledge about death, is given to understanding as the imminence of a threat coming from an unknown point in the future. (MHF, 360)

That is, for this reason, living for Ricoeur, is “against” death.[8]  Along with a kind of resistance in our living, along with the certain recognition that “I too must die,” Ricoeur makes the affirmation of life as a “time of privileges” (MHF, 361). 

The Entrance into Ethics: Violence and Evil—and Shame

Since murder brings us to the threshold of ethics, I must remind us of Ricoeur’s theme in Oneself as Another: the “ethical intention” is “aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions” (OaA, 169f.).[9]  This ethical aim becomes the context within which Ricoeur discusses evil and violence.

In order to be a brief as I must be, I will not take the time to review what Ricoeur has written in Oneself as Another on violence and evil.  I will content myself with pulling out from his argument there a few principle points that will have to suffice as summary. 

Ricoeur defines evil as “perversion:” “Evil is, in the literal sense of the word, perversion, that is, a reversal of the order that requires respect for the law to be placed above inclination” (OaA, 216).  While Ricoeur makes the effort to remain within a construct of the Golden Rule that follows Kant, and is constrained by what he calls a mutual “reciprocity” and “solicitude,” that assumption is challenged, to say the least, by what he calls “the evil of violence” (OaA, 220).  He says, “the itinerary from solicitude to the prohibition of murder repeats that of violence by way of the figures of nonreciprocity in interaction.”  And he adds: “The occasion of violence, not to mention the turn toward violence, resides in the power exerted over one will by another will” (OaA, 220).  The result of violence that interests me is specifically the effect of violence as humiliation, a theme he will elaborate on in Memory, History, Forgetting.[10]  Ricoeur wrote earlier (OaA, 215):

Anticipating what we shall say later concerning the place of evil in our deontological conception of morality, we can state that what is ‘knocked down’ and ‘humiliated’ is the variant of self-esteem that Kant calls Selbstliebe and that constitutes the always possible and, in fact, most ordinary perversion of self-esteem.

On this basis, Ricoeur concludes: “What is called humiliation—a horrible caricature of humility—is nothing else than the destruction of self-respect, beyond the destruction of the power-to-act.  Here seems to be the depth of evil” (OaA, 220).[11]

In sum violence enacts evil.  It does this by destroying the self-esteem of its victim.  It thus brings about a humiliation which is the event of evil.

The evil enacted by violence (be it by act or word) is not only “political,” that is, an act of “power over”…,  but it is also personal: it is physical, body-to-body, even in that way, intimate.[12]  The intimacy of violence thus not only entails the infliction of pain but also the destruction of reciprocity—the respect of one for another. 

Moreover, the one inflicting violence also suffers a loss of self-respect because when one acts in violent ways upon or toward another, the mutuality of reciprocity is lost.  The inverse of Ricoeur’s dictum, ‘Act solely in accordance with the maxim by which you can wish at the same time that what ought not to be, namely evil, will indeed, not exist. (218),’ takes its meaning, from this loss of reciprocity in the violent act.[13]  Ironically, the mutuality remains, which is to say, the nonreciprocity that results from the violent act is mutual, shared, experienced on both sides, in both parties.

It is here that the factors of shame enter in, for shame is precisely this exposure of what Ricoeur calls “the malice of the human heart” (221).  What genocide and all efforts at extermination manifest is the failure of “just institutions.”  Not merely individuals but institutions themselves have become corrupted by an evil that humiliates and perpetuates “nonreciprocity.” 

Opposed to these overwhelming social and political forces[14] Ricoeur appeals to the possibility of what one might call “the righteous remnant.”  Ricoeur’s refers to Vaclav Havel, using the language of Hegel, to open this possibility (OaA, 256):

When the spirit of a people is perverted to the point of feeding a deadly Sittlichkeit, it is finally in the moral consciousness of a small number of individuals, inaccessible to fear and to corruption, that the spirit takes refuge, once it has fled the now-criminal institutions.

What remains from this glance into Ricoeur’s past is to pay attention to other elements of violence.  Humiliation comes about through torture, and through horror.  Ricoeur mused about these in LUtD.  But before we turn there, I want to turn to Levinas again, because he reminds us of the role of fear.  Levinas concludes: “Thus the fear for my being which is my relation with death is not the fear of nothingness, but the fear of violence—and thus it extends into the fear of the Other, of the absolutely unforeseeable” (T&I, 235).

Horror and Extermination

Every reading of LUtD requires a contextualizing.  It is not a “pure” text.  It is at best a record of Ricoeur talking to himself—and one that he likely did not intend for publication.  His reflections in LUtD are by no means systematic nor well worked-through.  Therefore sometimes the terminology differs from what eventually appeared in MHF.  One can still appreciate its raw character.  “Every death exterminates,” Ricoeur writes (LUtD,28), and we hear echoes of “every death is a sort of murder” (MHF, 360).

In other words, “Up to Death: Mourning & Cheerfulness” is by no means Memory, History, Forgetting.  However there are some striking parallels, including Ricoeur’s focus on “happiness” in the latter.  But here, the focus will be on the raw language in LUtD that becomes somewhat diluted as the concepts are expanded in MHF.

For instance, Ricoeur writes: “Extermination, death inflicted en masse by the Evil one.”  With this, as in OaA, Ricoeur is thinking in terms of “absolute Evil,” as did Kant.[15]   But here, in LUtD, Ricoeur is examining less the politico-social side of extermination than the effects of having been through such an experience have had on the survivors.  His interlocutor in this is Jorge Semprún, whose Literature of Life[16] Ricoeur has recently read.  As Ricoeur says, “It is with these phantoms [generated by absolute Evil] that J. Semprún, surviving the death camps, struggles: they are what engender the alternative live and forget or write (recount) and not be able any longer to live” (LUtD, 29).

In the back of his mind Ricoeur has Jasper’s notion of “limit experience.”  On the one hand he writes, “The camps reveal the true nature of the horror of death on the basis of a limit situation overlooked by Karl Jaspers: extermination, the work not of death, but of Evil” (LUtD, 29)  On the other hand, Ricoeur persists in bringing that which has occurred outside, in the larger world, inside, close and personal.  “My problem is born from this,” he writes, “in what condition is ordinary death itself contaminated by death at the limit, horrible death?” (LUtD, 29-30)

Yet the horrible, personal death is different from the horror of death in the camps because horror of extermination renders them unspeakable.  This is Ricoeur’s interest in Semprún: “J.S. grafts to the theme of the survivor that of the unsayable.”  “Unsay-able” because unimaginable.  As Ricoeur puts it: “Because it is not a question of an experience but of the imagination, always after the fact, always imminent” (LUtD, 30).

Yet how to remember if not to tell?  Or even whether to remember—and to choose to try to forget?  Yet the event of horrible death, be it genocide or suicide, presents one with the dilemma: One might prefer to forget, but how?  The unsayable or the unspeakable becomes the unforgettable.  But the work of mourning in its narrativity is the work of remembering; that is, the work of mourning entails doing a recounting in such a way that one has shaped one’s story in a way one can live with. 

Ricoeur sees this dilemma.  He says, “memory is nothing apart from recounting.  And recounting is nothing without hearing.  J.S.’s problem: ‘How to tell such an unlikely truth, how you foster the imagination of the unimaginable…’” (LUtD, 31).

There is more here than the dilemma so many Holocaust survivors faced.[17]  There is an interface Ricoeur can identify if not quite articulate himself.  On one side is genocide’s survivor, wrestling with the dilemma of continuing to live.  Ricoeur sees this not only in Semprún but also in Primo Levi, especially in his book, Truce (LUtD, 36).  About him Ricoeur says, “Isn’t this the road to suicide?”  Well, yes, in fact, Levi, as did so may Holocaust survivors, committed suicide.  The “write-to-live” did not relieve him of his excruciating memories.  On the other side is the motivation of the suicidal individual.  When in the margins Ricoeur recalls the following: “The definition of no hope [inespoir], to use Gabriel Marcel’s appropriate term.  Suicide: signature on this verdict” (LUtD, 37), he is reaching into the interface between mass murder and the murder of the self, and finding a kind of emptiness against which he has argued his entire life.  He is not arguing against it; he is empathic; he is believing; he is trying to comprehend.  So when in his musings he mentions “the Luck of tragedy according to Martha Nussbaum.  Why my child? why not me?  To survive, like anyone without merit, hence also without fault” (LUtD, 31), it is not reading meaning into Ricoeur’s words to read out of them a kind of confession, an admission of a kind of kinship (as a “survivor of suicide”) at the level of surviving.

What makes these passages in LUtD as striking as they are stark is that Ricoeur mentions Semprún only once in MHF.  A significant interlocutor in LUtD becomes an aside in the larger, later work.

Beyond Amnesty, Forgiveness, and Memory: the Residue of Shame

What I find interesting in how Ricoeur concludes Memory, History, Forgetting, is that, in spite of the fact that he has repeatedly applied the dimensions of violence and murder to the ordinary experiences of death, he does not address the mourning of those who have experienced violence and murder, especially, on a mass scale.  It is not that he does not acknowledge the relationship between the work of mourning and the work of memory; he does.  Yet he chooses to focus instead on amnesty, and the socio-political challenges of “forgiveness.” 

Ricoeur recognizes the difficulty of this at the outset.  He intends to frame forgiveness in “the tension between the avowal and the hymn.”  This will nearly meet its “breaking point, the impossibility of forgiveness replying to the unpardonable nature of moral evil” (MHF, 458).  Ricoeur is not unaware of the problem of introducing forgiveness into the post-genocidal public sphere.  As he says, “the question then raised concerns the place of forgiveness at the margins of the institutions responsible for punishment” (MHF, 458).  Moreover, he recognizes what is at stake, what the intent of forgiveness is: Forgiveness, as an “exchange of speech acts” can occur only “on a plane of equality and reciprocity.”  Even while taking into consideration “the love of one’s enemies… as a mode of reestablishing the exchange [of forgiveness] on a nonmarket level,” he sees that “the problem is to recover, at the heart of the horizontal relation of exchange, the vertical asymmetry inherent in the initial equation of forgiveness” (MHF, 458).

This may be a difficulty too great to surmount, not only in terms of the human relationships involved, but also at the theoretical level of Ricoeur’s interest.  Eventually (MHF, 488) Ricoeur concurs with Hannah Arendt and writes: “There is no politics of forgiveness.”  Indeed, this is the difficulty of amnesty: it does not and cannot bring about the sort of “amnesia” necessary for forgiveness at the socio-political level to be effective.

The reasons for this have less to do with what the perpetrator and the victim do not have in common than in what they do.  Ricoeur touches on it, perhaps without realizing it.  In discussing Jean Nabert’s Essai sur le mal, Ricoeur quotes him: “’these evils, these wounds of inner being, conflicts, sufferings, without any conceivable alleviation’” (MHF, 464).  Yes, the residue of Evil is the inner wounding of the nonreciprocity inherent in genocide, the destruction of reciprocity—on both sides. 

At this point, Ricoeur comments: “Over and beyond the will to make others suffer and to eliminate them indeed stands the will to humiliate, to deliver over to the neglect of abandonment, of self-loathing” (MHF, 464; emphasis supplied).  Here Ricoeur has in effect returned to the topic that most interests me, for this is shame at its most evident, its most shared.  “Here we reach an intimate impediment, a radical powerlessness to coincide with any model of human dignity…,” Ricoeur rightly concludes.  “It is therefore the extreme evil done to others, rupturing the human bond” (MHF, 464) that needs to be considered.  And while “no theme outside of death and love had given rise to as many symbolic constructions as evil” (MHF, 465), Ricoeur’s appeal to the “hymn of forgiveness” at the socio-political level in the name of love seems more rhetorical than real.

This is because what the survivors of genocide faced in the mutuality of nonreciprocity with the perpetrators of extermination is their own “the will to humiliate,” one that is the driving force of revenge.  Disinclined to “forgive,” but inclined to do unto others what has been done to them—and more—survivors of genocide find themselves wanting to perpetuate a cycle of shame.  Here, what Ricoeur has said in OaA (218) about how to behave with an awareness of evil takes on increased significance:

Because there is evil, the aim of ‘the good life’ has to be submitted to the test of moral obligation, which might be described in the following terms: ‘Act solely in accordance with the maxim by which you can wish at the same time that what ought not to be, namely evil, will indeed not exist.’

This is the ethical dilemma of the genocide survivor.

It is also at the heart of what Ricoeur calls the “enigma of forgiveness” (MHF, 492).  He articulates its affirmation poignantly: “Under the sign of forgiveness, the guilty person is to be considered capable of something other than his offenses and his faults.  …  The formula for this liberating word, reduced to the bareness of its utterance, would be: you are better than your actions” (MHF,493).  Clearly this is more appropriate at the level of ordinary, personal relationships than at the post-genocidal, socio-political one.

In fact, it is at this point, and in most of what follows, that Ricoeur has returned to the level of the interpersonal, without adequately addressing the enigma of forgiveness at the socio-political level.  In a way, Ricoeur’s own categories betray him.  At the personal level the goal of the work of mourning, and thus the work of memory, could be taken to be “happy memory.”  Ricoeur claims this for his entire book: “I can say after the fact that the lodestar of the entire phenomenology of memory has been the idea of happy memory” (MHF, 494).  While one might take issue with Ricoeur’s choice of words in “happy,” one would not oppose the notion that the work of mourning at the personal level is to come to some kind of inner peace and contentment. 

When Ricoeur opposes this “happy memory” with “unhappy history,” his intention is to shift from the interpersonal to the socio-political.  As he said, his dialogue is with the historian.  As such, when he says that “the small miracle of recognition has no equivalent in history” (MHF, 497), he is in effect confirming my point that the dynamics of forgiveness do not obtain at the level of the socio-political.  “History is not only vaster than memory,” he says, but “its time is layered differently.”  “History can expand, complete, correct, even refute the testimony of memory regarding the past; it cannot abolish it.”  Why?  Because “something did actually happen…” (MHF, 498).

In this regard, events like the Holocaust and the great crimes of the twentieth century, situated at the limits of representation, stand in the name of all the events that have left their traumatic imprint on the hearts and bodies: they protest that they were and as such they demand to be said, recounted, understood. (MHF, 498)

Here, perhaps in an odd and unexpected way, in the tension between the public and the private, between the personal work of mourning and the socio-political work of memory, Ricoeur has staked a position beyond forgiveness, on the one hand, and beyond amnesty, on the other.  That is, the violence of mass murder intends to silence.  And those who have been the target of that intent and its victims often find, as Ricoeur rightly has said, that they face the challenge of speaking about the unspeakable, of talking about the unsayable, of appealing to us to imagine the unimaginable.  They bear the burden of this, one which has often led them to suicide or its brink.  This is their understandable inability to come to any sort of “happy memory” through the work of mourning.

At the other side, though, is the historian, whose insistence on the facticity of events recounts an “unhappy history,” yet, in that, does the inestimable service of reminding and not letting what has occurred be forgotten. 

My point is: the dilemma both is and is not what Ricoeur says it to be, one of “Forgiveness and Forgetting” (MHF, 501).  On the public plane, the horrors of the genocidal outbreak of radical Evil do need to be remembered and not forgotten.  He is right to point out that these are the roles both of the historian and of the politician.  While on the one hand, “a society cannot be continually angry with itself,” on the other hand there are socio-political forces that would dismiss the wounds of loss in the name of amnesty.  As Ricoeur says, “The ruses of forgetting are still easy to unmask on the plane where institutions of forgetting, the paradigm of which is amnesty, provide grist to the abuses of forgetting, counterparts to the abuses of memory” (MHF, 501).

However, on the plane of the personal, where nothing, not even the forgettable, can be forgotten, the work of mourning does not equate the politics of amnesty with personal amnesia, even when amnesia might be its own comfort.  As Ricoeur says, “The question returns with insistence: if it is possible to speak of happy memory, does there exist something like a happy forgetting?” (MHF, 501)—oh, if only that were true.

Ricoeur is on stronger ground when he uses Aeschylus to appeal to the “spiritual stakes of amnesty.”  That is, “this is why the Greek politician is in need of the religious figure to uphold the will to forget the unforgettable…” (MHF, 501).[18]  Recognizing the spiritual in this two-sided process of mourning and remembering takes Ricoeur back to Jaspers—but not the Jaspers of The Question of German Guilt,[19] on whose categories Ricoeur has built significant sections of his Epilogue (MHF, 470f), but the Jaspers of “limit-situations.”  The outbreak of radical Evil is a limit-situation at the level of the socio-political and cultural, as well as the personal.  Framing the enigmas of remembering and forgetting in their impact both upon the personal and the historical in terms of limit-situations permits a phenomenological and hermeneutical exploration that embraces both spheres, both the one and the many. 

Afterword

By way of conclusion, I would offer two additional quick thoughts.  First: Ricoeur would have done well to consider another of Aeschylus’ plays, Prometheus Bound.  There both Power (as male) and Violence (as female) come for Prometheus, but only Power speaks.  The truth of this is not only the political one of “speaking Truth to power,” but also the silencing effect of Violence, one that renders us speechless.  The ways in which the experience of violence results in both the unsayable and the unspeakable, in its horror and horrifying, display the hermeneutical challenges of genocide, mass murder, and extermination.  How is one to interpret that silence?  What sort of imagination to bring?  How not to let violence will not “speak” for itself?

Second: Here we are at the threshold of the hermeneutics of shame, for here the effacement of both perpetrator and victim in the murderous act results in a mutual nonreciprocity, one that is so unbearable, it begs for a restoration of reciprocity-- somehow.  Without that restoration, humanity itself is both lost and at a loss. 

Just as the “will to humiliate” has its counterpart in the experience of being humiliated, the moral vacuum itself requires a counter-action, to bring about restoration or even reconciliation.  Ricoeur suggests love, be it “the agape of the apostle” or “the philia politiké of the philosopher,” as with Hannah Arendt (MHF, 488).  Against the will to humiliate of murder and revenge, a will to uphold dignity must be found. 

I do not think Ricoeur finds that antidote to humiliation at the socio-political level.  The problematic of the “moral man and the immoral society” is not solved by what Ricoeur has said in MHF.  However, what I think we hear in what Ricoeur has written is a response to “suicide is the murder of the self,” a response to the violence at the personal level that would silence in shame both the one who has taken his or her own life and to those who still esteem that person as beloved.

In this respect, I can hear Ricoeur speaking to his son when he says, “Under the sign of forgiveness, [you are] considered to be capable of something other than [your] offenses and [your] faults.  … [You] are better than your actions.” (MHF, 493)  Indeed, this is the reconciling work of mourning within the work of memory, at least at the personal, ordinary level. 

This “separating the agent from the action” (MHF, 490) is less likely at the level of institutions, which must find the means to be both “just” and merciful—a path Ricoeur does not consider.

Partial Bibliography

            Aeschylus. (1975) Prometheus Bound. J. Sculy & C.J.Herington, tr., Oxford University Press.

            Levinas, Emmanuel. (1969) Totality and Infinity. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, PA.

            Ricoeur, Paul. (2009) Living Up to Death. D. Pellauer, tr. The University of Chicago Press.

            -----------. (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting. K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, tr. The University of Chicago Press.

            -----------. (1992) Oneself as Another. K. Blamey, tr., The University of Chicago Press.

[19] K. Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (1947), tr. E.B. Ashton; New York: Dial Press.