Politics, and Time: The Overcoming of the Past

Abstract

Foundings have, since the earliest days of political thought, occupied a central and problematic position. They claim a new beginning, a new constellation, and present themselves as ifbroken from and separate from the past. Yet what happens to that past? All humans live in a world with its own past (or pasts) and asserting one's separation from the past willlikely do no more than to reaffirm it. Machiavelli was weIl aware of the difficulty, to the point of noting that were a prince to take over a city in which the memory of the past is strong (he names republics) the most advisable procedure will be to kill off all of those with authority to speak for the past, failing which the memory of that past will surely defeat his every effort. (I shall want to return to the question of violence at the end). Hobbes hoped that clarity of speech and method should constitute a reality not subject to the distortions consequent to the difficulties humans had of knowing what they actually wanted, distortions consequent to what they had been. Rousseau developed a theory of sovereignty that existed legitimately only in its own present and presence, and hence had no temporal dimension. 1 The past is clearly a political matter, calling on occasion for the most ruthless and revolutionary measures. How to deal with the past? For Marx, the past "lay like a nightmare on the brain of the living." For ]ames ]oyce's Stephen Daedalus, the past "was a nightmare" from which he was trying to awake. For Freud, the culmulated weight ofchildhood experiences distorted present agency into neurotic behavior. ] oyce tries to make that past avaHable in the odyssey ofLeopold Bloom and in Molly's ecstatic affirmation. Marx theorized revolution, which he saw as necessarily sundering the integument that held the new world in the ashes of the old. For Freud, the point of psychoanalysis is to re-form the past, so as to keep it from distorting the present.The sense that what drives humans is what they have been, that they have been driven willy-nilly into behavior that they neither intend nor want, is a major concern of philosophical thought after the French Revolution. Indeed, the