Irma Erlingsdttir The Theater as a Site of Resistance: The Politics of Memory and the French Blood Affair in Hlne

Cixouss La Ville parjure ou le rveil des rinyes

Hlne Cixouss play La Ville parjure ou le rveil des rinyes (the Perjured City) is an epic tragedy, combining history, memory, and myth. Using the Blood Affair (L'affaire du sang contamin) in France in the 1990s as is its term of reference, it deals with the abuse of power, state practices of exclusion and popular resistance, and individual and collective guilt. In the paper, I approach the play as a metanarrative from three perspectives: memory studies, transitional justice and political theory. A central concern is Cixouss call for remembrance in connection with extreme violence. Such an act can be seen as an antithesis to apathy, which can lead to criminal complicity and fascism. I argue that Cixous looks at forgetting as something that is not simply conceived of in terms of effacement of traces, but rather in terms of a reserve or as part of memory. Moreover, Cixouss play also raises the question of the timing of the injunction to memory, of when people are ready to confront particular experiences. What Cixous is getting at is that the dual act of forgetting through silence and remembering recreates the past in the present. Memory is, thus, a form of inheritance, which needs to be constantly defined and redefined. I also put much emphasis on Cixouss alternative way of addressing justice: through forgiveness instead of criminal prosecution or other forms of retribution or reconciliation. I argue that the play provides a forum for public catharsis. Cixous is reproducing a trial by theater to allow the victims to gain what Shoshana Felman termed semantic authority. The purpose is not simply to repeat the victims story, but to create it, historically. I discuss the question of how the telling of a story of genocide may be therapeutic to both the victim and to society. I also analyze the meaning, in the play, of the concepts of forgiveness, apology, and pardon, with a special focus on the question of whether forgiveness should be unconditional or conditional. The context is Jacques Derridas proposition of a negotiation between these varieties based on the notion of forgiveness as a double structure, both irreducible to one another and indissociable. My third point is about how the play deals with Blood Scandal as a case of populist politics. As Slavoj iek has stressed, when the immorality of a political order has reached a boiling point, the people often wake up from their apolitical slumber in the guise of a rightist populist revolt. I argue that populist uprisings occur when a serious of particular demandsarticulated in La Ville parjure in the public cry for retribution in the Blood Affair. With her attack on the democratic system, Cixous is finding fault with its core values. Finally, I make the point that the political moral of Cixouss narrative is that those responsible for the betrayal of the democratic order not only make Fascism possible but also make it happen. What produces it is when democracy has turned into a system only concerned with corrupt stabilityeither through conservative apathy or redemptive destruction with the aim of purifying society.