The theme of this publication leads me to approach the reflections that follow by explaining the irritation I feel each time I am asked the question of “forgiveness” or of what would be, so to speak, its opposite: “ressentiment”. It is indeed a keen irritation because, concerning the crimes against humanity perpetrated against my own people, there is obviously — in my eyes at least — no forgiveness to be granted, neither to the executioners, nor to their accomplices, nor to those who let them act. But there is no more ressentiment to be nursed toward them either, for all ressentiment attests to a dependence, indeed to a passional bond with the criminals or their descendants, whereas what is at stake above all is to free oneself from any hold that these assaults on the human might still exert over the heirs of those who were its victims. What third position, then, would remain capable of effecting a liberation outside the field of alienation of these crimes — crimes whose power of destruction must necessarily, in order to survive them, be invalidated in the aftermath of their traumatic transmission, for want of having been able to do so at the time of their perpetration?
The search for this liberating middle position is, moreover, akin to the search for a third instance to be met or created, equally capable of thwarting the impact of denialism — for no denial can be combated head-on, but rather in debate with a third term issuing from a sociopolitical displacement of the initial data of the collective murders. To disinvest the weight of a traumatic destiny over several generations without forgetting or repressing anything — neither the wrong suffered nor the tacit assent of the world from which the genocidal enterprise benefited — one must create third parties to be called upon, and thus effect a displacement in order to encounter respondents, since, in the peremptory formulation of Jean-François Lyotard:
“To the loss caused by the damage is added the impossibility of bringing it to the knowledge of others, and in particular to the knowledge of a tribunal.”1
I would therefore advance the hypothesis that what provokes the implosion of the hold of violence or of its negation is the disinvestment of any address to a pseudo-other — whether in “forgiveness” or in “ressentiment” — or the deliverance of proof through the elaboration of unforeseen situations of interlocution.
Political experience here presents a point of junction with the analytic experience of a given individual who seeks to extricate himself from the hold exerted upon him by the denial of his existence, of his autonomy, or of his history. Just as, on the scene of transference, this extrication beyond the reach of a possible psychic murder gives place, in the analysand, to an instance of enunciation hitherto nonexistent within him, so too one sees, in the light of the works of Jacques Rancière, how, on the scene of democratic mésentente (disagreement), “political litigation differs from any conflict of interests between constituted parties since it is not a discussion between partners but an interlocution that puts into play the very situation of interlocution”.2
The temporality required thus to “put into play the very situation of interlocution” by creating an unprecedented one whose emergence dismantles, in the field of the History of the world, the dual relations executioner/victim, witnesses/deniers, has its counterpart, in the history of the survivors, in the temporality necessary among their heirs for the work of subjectivizing the events lived by their forebears. The pain of the losses and the revolt indeed change psychically in place and in nature, either through the passage from one generation to the next and from their respective political determinations, or through the course of an analytic work or that of a writing.
If neither forgiveness nor ressentiment brings about in an individual a real disinvestment of the murderous instance, only the appropriation, in the position of subject, of the data of one’s history renders obsolete the alternative “ressentiment or forgiveness” — an appropriation that can be effected in one’s psychic life only by way of a displacement and the recourse to the plurality of one’s belongings. The inflicted wound remaining intact in the intimacy of the subject, this new configuration brings about in him a saving splitting that frees a space of dialogue with new partners and artificially contrives a separation from the history of his forebears so that his own may be constructed.
Destruction of the power of enunciation
Although this exposition does not pertain to the historical or sociopolitical sciences and treats of the necessity and the conditions of a displacement allowing the heir of mass murders to acquire the power to insert his history into the discourse of the world, let us note that, in every contemporary configuration of survivors transplanted from the places of their life and their culture, every historian shows how the diplomatic agreements presiding over their collective history exposed the absence of any third mediator capable of forbidding the absolute power of the criminals to whom they were abandoned. And, in fact, their respective “host countries”, in conformity with the opportunism of a given Realpolitik, were often implicated — either directly or through a laissez-faire promising politico-economic benefits — in those very murderous events that expatriated them and made of them persons banned from residence, left at the mercy of the welcome of their “host” countries.
When populations are exterminated, it is always, on the scene of History, a perverse three-pole scenario in which a murderous State confiscates the laws and the discourse, while the third-party spectators3 — indeed those directly responsible — absent themselves, fall silent and, by their silence, condone its crimes against humanity, of which they thus make themselves accomplices in order to safeguard their politico-economic interests. This scenario is in no way particular to the history of one or another genocide (Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian, Rwandan, the massacres of the former Yugoslavia, of Algeria, etc.). One can each time recognize in it the diplomatic processes in which the liquidation of some and the benefit of others are combined and arranged without any contradiction. This scene of murder configures a significant and emblematic structure for all the heirs of refugees, whose suffering is obviously discordant with and inadequate to the problems that agitate their host countries.
Thereupon, those who, denied any place as an other in the country of which they are nonetheless the citizens — or, failing that, the refugees — are inhabited by the impossibility of a confrontation, must, from one generation to the next and through the play of democratic debate, conquer there a place as subject in order to inscribe their own history within it. To escape the temptation of an enclosing and sterile ressentiment, they must acquire a specific situation in the language of the country and the culture of parental survival — that is, become actors there by enunciating the scandal of their history.
From the passivity of ressentiment to the subversive activity of a tra-duction
To be able one day to speak as a subject, every survivor of this originary shattering must first “constitute” himself by learning to speak to others, that is, to speak the language of the country of his survival, to identify himself with the institutional and political forms of its culture. This learning of the language of the “land of welcome”, which will paradoxically contain, by displacement, within its word-representations, the annihilating yet nourishing, essential affects transmitted by parental anguish, will require, it goes without saying, several generations. The descendant will thus convert himself, for a time or forever, to “borrowed” means of expression, that is, will consent, by a vital convention, to a language of “damages”, a language coming to signify, in the terms of Lyotard in Le Différend (The Differend),4 that of the “wrong” suffered nothing can be said.
To escape any relation of dependence and powerlessness driving one to ressentiment, there must therefore be hollowed out, between the terror of the murder and the emancipation beyond its hold — through the language of the other, and most of the time in the following generations — the interstice of a symbolizing function: the capacity to name this “event”, as it befalls them, to de-port the traumatic collapse of history into the field of representation, into the register of words. Linguistic performance, psychic competence, historico-political effects pertain to one and the same emergence.
It is in this precisely that the analysand who, by definition, de-ports his affects into the transferential field of the other becomes eventually capable of effecting this double movement that alone renders transmission possible: integrating the history of his forebears in order to separate himself from it and construct his own.
The catastrophes of mass murders that destroy entire populations together with their culture annihilate, in those who survive them, any posture of enunciation capable of relating to the other, in the initial language of the deceased “subject”, his history and his losses — the very nature of such a traumatic collapse being precisely that it can neither be symbolized, nor spoken, and still less kept silent. The survivor cannot escape the dismantling of a speech audible to himself and to others, since it is henceforth impossible for him to maintain himself as subject of his history and his language without reliving the anguish of death he has passed through. He must then carry out in reverse, if he can, the de-portation of what he has encountered outside the world of exchangeable speech. Every heir of this lineage is, in fact, only “in becoming”. A suit in abeyance, he is enjoined to constitute himself as subject on the basis of the identifying points of a “foreign” culture where, since speech is instituted only out of listening, he will be able to set off in quest of a third-other, capable of hearing, of gathering and of recognizing, in another existential syntax, his History which, thus “translated”, will induce, in the echo of such a displacement of enunciation, the possible going-beyond of its utterance.
If, according to Lacan, “what constitutes me as subject is my question”,5 the holder of such a patrimony reduced to silence must therefore learn to pose it in the language of the “non-exterminables” of the moment.
After having survived the rupture of the social and psychic bonds of their living environment, the survivors find themselves miraculously transplanted from one part of the exterminating world to that other part which, having closed its eyes on the elimination of their own, offers them, in the ambiguity of an after-the-fact, a place where it becomes paradoxically possible for them to remain democratically alive. To undermine somewhat the hold of crimes of state, the translation of their engulfed universe must therefore make this part of the world heard by the other, from the outside to the inside; it must hold a heterodox discourse that exceeds the consensual frame of implicit disavowals.
Example of a “translation” that certain conditions rendered possible
I will not hesitate to report here the circumstances in which the need to make the outside speak to the inside took precedence in me over any inclination to ressentiment. To gain knowledge of my father’s Journal de déportation (Deportation Diary), I had recourse in 1978, eight years after his death, to a translation in the usual sense of the term, which proved to have a psychic and political bearing. Entitled “August 10, 1915, Wednesday, all that I endured from the years 1915 to 1919”, it restored, in a language mortgaged within me by a kind of psychic night, the narratives that had peopled my childhood and that of all the Armenians of my age. Their displacement into a language learned at school gave me the means to confront them “in French” and to publish them first in Les Temps Modernes in 1982, then in a collection with a Cornelian title, Ouvrez-moi seulement les chemins d’Arménie (Only Open to Me the Roads of Armenia).6 I must, however, make clear that it was the irruption, into the collective space of the place of parental exile, of a violence frozen until then which, thanks to the protective deferral of an after-the-fact and by favor of this distancing duplication, made the publication of this translation possible for me.
If, as René Kaës explains: “the catastrophic drama remains […] lacking in utterance and first of all in representation, because the psychic and transsubjective places and functions where it might constitute and signify itself have been abolished”,7 it was for me under the effect of an external violence that a substitute for these psychic and transsubjective functions appeared, in the guise of a terrorist act in the Parisian political field — the hostage-taking at the Turkish consulate in September 1981 — which, as an act of resistance, set in motion what was called “publicity terrorism” and broke for the first time a silence of nearly half a century over the Armenian genocide.8 Without the spectacular breaking-open of the silence of public opinion over this first genocide of the twentieth century, it would have been impossible for me to assume the shame of accomplishing this undertaking, and I would certainly have met with no editorial welcome for this Journal.
One may indeed think that only what has been “localized” because translated into the world of the living can be repressed. If localization is impossible, so too is the taking of distance, in the face of what is lived by the heir not in a proximity but in a contamination and an encroachment in the Winnicottian sense,9 an absence of delimitation between the dead and the living.
I will therefore cite a few passages of what I was able to read, translated into a language not “maternal” but acquired only at the so-called “maternal” school — that is, at the school of an adoptive mother, of a mother by displacement. This reading made a certain localization possible for me, and thus a repression of what made itself heard as inaudible in this manuscript that my father had drafted in the Turkish language transcribed in Armenian characters, probably shortly after his arrival in France, in 1921, in order to deposit there the trace of the events he had lived through from his fourteenth to his twentieth year. It led me from the melancholy of a victim position to the responsibility of this testimony to be transmitted, and then to the activity of a writing bearing witness to other Histories. Here is a small excerpt:
“When we arrived at Antarin, we were harassed on one side by hunger, on the other by filth. The dogs tore the dead to pieces; no one buried them. Everything around stank […]. At Haman, we observed that people were eating locusts. The dying, the dead everywhere […]. My father was very ill […]. Soon there were no more locusts, for everyone had eaten them. And the deportation never ended […]. My mother said: ‘Our sick one is very gravely stricken and will go the next time’ […]. ‘You dare to speak?’ said a gendarme, and he struck my father on the head. My mother begged […] that they strike her instead and leave my father. At this, the gendarme struck my mother […]. But what good was it? What becomes of a gravely ill man who is beaten? Six days later, the day of my father’s death, they deported again […]. They were striking our mother. We two brothers were weeping. We could do nothing, for they were like a pack of dogs […]. My mother: ‘We will leave when we have buried the dead one.’ They retorted: ‘No, you will do as the others.’ The others […] abandoned the dead, and at night the jackals devoured them. I saw that things were going badly and that something had to be done. I took a flask of 75 dirhem […], I filled it with rose oil, and I went to see the chief of the gendarmes of the deportation […]. I gave him the flask, which he accepted. We stayed one more day. We dug a grave and we paid five piastres to the priest. Thus we buried my father […]. Fifteen days later the deportation began again […]. They burned everything […]. I hid there, for I knew that farther on they were killing people […]; we were very hungry and thirsty […]. We had no money, which is why we began to eat grasses […]; we saw that we were going to die. We could scarcely take two steps and we would fall to the ground. My mother reflected: ‘As for me, I will die when I die; but you must not!’ And so it was that she gave us, the two of us, to the Arabs.”
Conditions of emergence of this translation from an outside to an inside
If the heirs of survivors of a mass murder must, each according to their means, elaborate psychically and politically the collective trauma of the History that struck the family to which they belong, in order to be able to find their respective place in the world of parental survival into which they were born, it is possible for them to subjectivize this heritage, to appropriate it in order to transmit it to others in their own name and thus inscribe it in the history of humanity, only under certain sociopolitical conditions. Insofar, indeed, as they bear the traces of an extermination that was carried out in the silence of a powerless or complicit world and under the blow of a violence falling short of any conflict, this elaboration can be accomplished in them only with the aid of displacements, of cross-breedings instaurative of thirdness, and thus thanks to the existence of democratic third-party guarantors capable of welcoming the expression of ambivalences and of conflict. Moreover, insofar as for these heirs the other has collapsed both in the History of the world — he was murderer or powerless spectator — and in the early relations of his infantile history — he was unavailable or absent because psychically killed — this absence of an other must in some sense be relayed by a cross-breeding of identifications aiming to contrive, after the fact, a rootedness in the enterprise of parental survival. It goes without saying that the recourse to these investments by displacement is not dependent on the sole intrapsychic work overcoming all ressentiment. This strategy of the detour finds itself favored or hindered by the various cultural third parties that the sociopolitical conditions of their place of life are in a position, or not, to offer them. Inversely, this work of psychic construction will obviously have a political bearing, for it is indeed the obstinacy — imagining itself all-powerful — of wishing to remain without an other that constitutes the fundamentalisms of every stripe.
Now the conditions favoring conflictualization and not paranoid withdrawal are, nonetheless, in our day under threat: given that economico-political interests attack the bonds of the social world by parceling it out to the benefit of globalizing organizations advocating efficiency, one may wonder whether the space of this mercantile world-ness will still contrive — and with what devices of exchange, what fantasmatic constructions of alterity — the processes of identification/disidentification that permit the psychic reception of this traumatic heritage in those who have the charge of translating it to those who believe themselves protected from such collapses. For the activity of this translation to be able to take place by deposing passivity and ressentiment, it must be heard from a heterogeneous, subversive place, and there must be, at the outset, a visibility of the differences in the distribution of places.
If one is to believe a political personality who declared, in December 1989, that France could not take in “all the misery of the world”,10 one may infer from this declaration that there would thus be, on one side of the world, possible recipients of welcome and, on the other, potential welcomers. Now this dichotomy gradually loses its pertinence as, to those who, it is said, encumber France in order to flee the murder that awaits them in their own country, are added the inhabitants of the ghetto-housing estates who, having fled no terrifying native paradise, can scarcely take refuge in the hope of being welcomed by any country whatsoever. On the other hand, in the psychic or political situations of subjection of a subject or a human group rendered politically invisible, it is necessary that, in spite of tendentiously globalist views, there exist all the same discriminating delimitations between an outside and an inside (outside/inside of territorial borders, of consensual and dominant opinions, of instituted powers…), so that the breaking-in of the language and culture of those who imagine themselves to be inside, by the world claimed to be outside, may dismantle the homogeneity of the disavowing alliances against murderous and/or economic violences.
The disavowing hold of these alliances can indeed be shaken only if there is, for the heirs of the excluded — through the extermination or the extreme misery of their own — the possibility of acquiring the language and the culture of the supposedly included, that is, of acquiring, thanks to the irreducible differences resisting the globalizing discourses, the aptitude to put into words, within the very endogenous representations, the irreconcilable transferential movements on either side. It is indeed the particularities of the inegalitarian divisions in the world that generate the demarcations of an alterity for those of the two camps — outside/inside, excluded/included, illiterate/endowed with language, foreigners/natives, exterminable/unthreatened. It is these demarcations, whose former contours risk fallaciously fading away, that induce reciprocal transferential projections, by favor of which there may emerge a psychic and political subjectivation, just as the denials of official collective history and the dangers and impasses of ressentiment may be fissured.
In other words, insofar as the misery of the other survivor or excluded one can scarcely be shared, it is at least necessary that, thanks to the structuring delimitations of symbolic spaces within the social field — spaces reductive, inadequate, but vectors of identifying markers against which one can measure oneself — thanks to the transferential fantasies that these give rise to on either side, the tra-duction of this “misery of the world” be able to break into the political field and the culture of the “host” country. It is, in fact, the existence of watertight barriers — yet nonetheless liable to be shaken — between this world here and the other that renders possible the “mésentente” of political litigation, the misunderstanding in which is given to be heard the inadequacy of the citizens’ representations of the world to those of their refugees or assisted ones. The democratic debate thus generated destabilizes the familiar ordering of social hierarchies:
“Democracy is the name of a singular interruption of this order of the distribution of bodies into community (…). It is the introduction into the field of experience of a visible that modifies the regime of the visible.”11
It would be eminently dangerous for the stops of these delimiting representations — inducers of translatability for the fields on either side of experience — to fade away, and for there to collapse, together with the heterogeneity and the borders of their coexistence, the bridges of passage through which the narrative of the harming or putting-to-death of some breaks in, like the Trojan horse, into the ignorance — symptom of resistance — of others.
Whoever wishes to bear witness to a detonation in the generational continuity of his family or of his historico-political universe through exterminations, political persecutions, economic or colonial oppressions, is summoned, in order to situate himself within his present social body, to reinject — heteroclite, irreducible — into the interior of the psychic heritage of the “welcomers”, this outside of the survivors, the excluded from the “normally living”. To make the trauma of one’s group of belonging speak so as not to cloister oneself in ressentiment, so as to detach oneself from it and thereby acquire one’s own place among others, compels a transgression of the established order and of its apparent rationality. This harming of illusory securities, moreover, also profits the so-called natives or privileged, for
“the cause of the other as a political figure is first of all (…) a disidentification with respect to a certain self (…). A political subjectivation always implies a ‘discourse of the other’ (…); there is politics because there is a cause of the other, a difference of citizenship from itself.”12
Now it is precisely this paradoxical reversal that promotes, in spite of everything, a living-together capable of standing as an obstacle to the violence engendered by ressentiment, to the ghettoizing and autistic fundamentalisms — for, on account of their pretensions to universality, the “welcoming” institutions are supposed to lend themselves, in a democracy, to a verification and to a liberating, and thus salutary, conflictuality. Furthermore, to encounter and discover the history of the other minorities of the dominant culture demystifies the unitary, homogeneous character imaginarily attributed to third parties, while at the same time instituting affiliations with those of similar catastrophes but of different historical contexts, with different murderers and different accomplices. As if the new humanity could be founded only on bonds that subvert the aim of unbinding and effacement separating one category of survivors from that of the others. By which means the pluri-referentiality of these investments contributes, beyond a psychic innovation bearing life, to a fecund political position in the midst of others.
The Third is compromised, but not all its members are
The foreclosure of alterity — that is, its evacuation through the extermination or the persecution of the other — leads, in sum, those who were its witnesses to have recourse, in the aftermath of their survival, to the instances of an other-person at last encountered, an other-person necessarily compromised but authorizing, somewhat, an appeal to the “rights of man and of the citizen” to which the destitute may or may not lay claim. Wishing to interrogate, for themselves who have come from elsewhere, the validity of the rights of the men of here, they become indirectly the analyzers of that disparity brought to light by Hannah Arendt13 between the rights of man and those of the man-citizen. Will globalization contrive a space for this encounter?
In risking the hypothesis of a similar rescue of transmission to others and to one’s heirs by way of the detour through the culture of the other, one must nonetheless not delude oneself about the paradoxicality of a strategy that consents to use precisely the language of a culture compromised — deliberately or through powerlessness — in the destruction whose trace it would itself wish, in a subversive return, to transmit. This strategy thus exploits the privileges of a filial posture which, in order to put back into circulation a patrimony annihilated with impunity in such-and-such a part of the world, employs tools of thought, leans on protected institutions that enjoy, for their part, a free exercise in that other part of an apparently non-exterminable world. Yet since, according to what René Kaës explained, the “transsubjective functions” where “the catastrophic drama might constitute and signify itself have been abolished”,14 this transmission is reduced to borrowing, after the violent rupture and in an off-centering of the after-the-fact, the transitional space of mediation of the institutions of the host culture. It can, among the heirs of the second, third generation, only be propped upon an exogamic alliance with identifications to those who, endowed with language, live in a world — perhaps provisionally — unthreatened. As a subject comes into being only if he has been able to gather the voice of his forebears by the very fact that he has distanced himself from the reach of that voice, it is this double movement, remaining blocked in the case of ressentiment, that commonly renders transmission possible. Every bond articulating an heir to his forebears must necessarily mark a differential gap detaching him from them, insofar as a transmission is effected only on the condition of granting its space of freedom and of transformation to the one who receives it.
Notes
J. F. Lyotard, Le Différend, Minuit, 1983, p. 5.↩︎
Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente / Politique et Philosophie, Galilée, 1995, pp. 140–141.↩︎
See Améry’s concrete evocation of such a scenario in Par-delà le crime et le châtiment / Essai pour surmonter l’insurmontable (At the Mind’s Limits), trans. by Françoise Wuilmart, Actes Sud, 1995, p. 157: “The Jew of the catastrophe… must come to terms with an absence of trust in the world. The neighbor greets me amiably, Good day Sir; I tip my hat, Good day Madame. But Madame and Monsieur are separated by interstellar distances, for yesterday a Madame averted her gaze when a Monsieur was being led away, and, through the barred windows of the departing car, a Monsieur contemplated Madame like a stone angel in a clear, hard sky forever closed to the Jews.” Cf. La Survivance / Traduire le trauma collectif (pref- and postfaces P. Fédida, R. Kaës), Dunod, 2000, chapter: “The extermination of men invalidates their language by implosion of the social bond”, p. 121.↩︎
Le Différend, op. cit.↩︎
Lacan, Écrits I, Points, 1970: “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage” (“The Function and Field of Speech and Language”), p. 181.↩︎
Journal de Vahram Altounian: Tout ce que j’ai enduré des années 1915 à 1919 (Vahram Altounian’s Diary: All That I Endured from the Years 1915 to 1919), (translation, notes and postface by Krikor Beledian, Armenian-language writer, senior lecturer at the Institut des langues et civilisations orientales, professor at the theological faculty of Lyon), titled by me “Terrorisme d’un génocide” (“Terrorism of a Genocide”) upon its first publication in Feb. 1982 in Les Temps Modernes, taken up in J. Altounian, Ouvrez-moi seulement les chemins d’Arménie. Un génocide aux déserts de l’inconscient (Only Open to Me the Roads of Armenia. A Genocide in the Deserts of the Unconscious), Belles Lettres, preface René Kaës, 1990, 2003, pp. 84–99. This title, borrowed from Corneille (Nicomède, line 1713), offers, so to speak, a decent tombstone covering over the real of the subtitle, which it displaces in some sense into the poetic universe of a great classic of French literature. My concern had indeed been, at the start, to “clothe” an internal disaster in the saving pleasure of literature that the school had made known to me, or again to place a father’s tragedy under the protection of a civilizing and guaranteeing adoptive Father. See the commentary on this manuscript, which constitutes the matter of the book, in L’intraduisible, Deuil, mémoire, transmission (The Untranslatable: Mourning, Memory, Transmission), Dunod/Psychismes, 2005.↩︎
René Kaës, “Ruptures catastrophiques et travail de la mémoire” (“Catastrophic Ruptures and the Work of Memory”) in Violence d’État et psychanalyse (State Violence and Psychoanalysis), Dunod, 1989, p. 178.↩︎
Ranging from the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which ratified the disappearance of sanctions against the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide of 1915, together with that of Armenia — though recognized and delimited three years earlier by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) — up to around 1975, the year of the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the genocide and of the appearance of the first work on this catastrophe: Jean-Marie Carzou, Arménie 1915. Un génocide exemplaire (Armenia 1915. An Exemplary Genocide), Flammarion, 1975. This genocide perpetrated by the Young Turk government remains still unrecognized by Turkey, which nonetheless benefits, in the concert of Nations anxious to maintain their influences in the Near East, from the credit granted to so-called “democratic” States, and thus from the cautioning implicitly brought to this denial. One could see an illustration of the hold of this denial over the various political orientations of France in the eagerness of one or another political party to support or thwart the parliamentary bill of May 29, 1998: “France publicly recognizes the Armenian genocide of 1915” — up to its definitive adoption (after 2½ years!), on January 18, 2001. (Cf. La Survivance / Traduire le trauma collectif (pref- and postfaces P. Fédida, R. Kaës), Dunod / Inconscient et Culture, 2000, pp. 2–3.) The European Parliament, which, having recognized this genocide since Jan. 1987 and posed as a condition of Turkey’s accession to the European Union the recognition of this genocide, voted, in Oct. 2001, a report that did not contain — and thus erased — this clause, only to reinstate it again in Feb. 2002. The last Copenhagen summit of Dec. 2002 makes no further mention of it. On Dec. 17, 2004, during its decision in favor of the opening of negotiations for Turkey’s accession to the European Union, the latter took absolutely no account of it, nor of the amendments concerning the recognition of the Armenian genocide with which the European Parliament had, on Dec. 15, 2004, qualified its vote in favor of the opening of negotiations. These various orientations recently came to light in the reactions to the bill of October 12, 2006, aiming to penalize the negation of the Armenian genocide. Among the numerous works on the genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, one may refer to the most recent: Yves Ternon, Les Arméniens, histoire d’un génocide (The Armenians, History of a Genocide), Points Histoire, Seuil, 1996; Vahakn Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien (History of the Armenian Genocide), Stock, 1996; Leslie A. Davis, La Province de la mort, Archives américaines concernant le génocide des Arméniens (1915) (The Slaughterhouse Province: American Documents on the Armenian Genocide (1915)), Éd. Complexe, 1994; Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no. 177–178, 2003 (dossier coordinated by G. Bensoussan, C. Mouradian, Y. Ternon): “Ailleurs, hier, autrement: connaissance et reconnaissance du génocide des Arméniens” (“Elsewhere, Yesterday, Otherwise: Knowledge and Recognition of the Genocide of the Armenians”); Raymond Kévorkian, Le génocide des Arméniens (The Armenian Genocide), Odile Jacob/Histoire, 2006.↩︎
Cf. the translator’s postface, Ouvrez-moi seulement les chemins d’Arménie, op. cit., p. 116.↩︎
Citation, taken up from the commentary made on it by Jacques Rancière, “L’inadmissible” (“The Inadmissible”), in Aux bords du politique (On the Shores of Politics), Paris, La fabrique éditions, 1998, pp. 129 and 133. The exact wording of this declaration by Prime Minister Michel Rocard, a guest on December 3, 1989, on the program “7 sur 7” of TF1, was: “We cannot house in France all the misery of the world. (…) France must remain a land of political asylum (…) but no more.” Cf. Le Monde of 05.12.1989.↩︎
La Mésentente, op. cit., p. 139.↩︎
Jacques Rancière, “La cause de l’autre” (“The Cause of the Other”) in Aux bords du politique, op. cit., pp. 160, 159.↩︎
Cf. L’Impérialisme (Les origines du totalitarisme) (Imperialism (The Origins of Totalitarianism)), Fayard/Points, 1997, pp. 266 ff.↩︎
Cf. note 7.↩︎