| Abstract: | This essay takes as its occasion a series of photographs on the Irish border region by Allan deSouza. The photographs are the motive for a set of interconnecting reflections on the conditions of violence and on its relation to state formation; on violence and the forms of history; and on the place of melancholy as a relation not only to the past, which inevitably it is, but as no less a kind of opening to a future. These concerns link three works by Walter Benjamin: ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920–21); The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1924–25); and the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940). The link runs between the insistence of violence in the historical foundations of the state; the function of historicism in enabling that disavowal through a rarely acknowledged mythic/symbolic aesthetic that is encrypted in it; and the counter-discourse of historical materialism that Benjamin holds in tension with melancholy. Ireland is a state marked by the virtual and the actual violence of partition. Subject to all the injunctions and institutions of modernity, to its emerging forms of state and policing as well as to its techniques and technologies of military reduction, Ireland remains a location in which the failure of projects of modernity is only too easily exemplified. Ireland's is a history in ruins, a history of ruins. Ruins are the signs of a history of incompletion and ‘ruination’ that is normally read by conventional historians as the fatality of a culture resistant to modernity and driven to return time and again to its own atavisms. Benjamin's insight is to read in ruins and in violence not merely the consequences of a past malevolently active in the present, but openings onto an alternative configuration to that suggested by historicism and modernity. |
