58 Lust for innocence.
Walter Benjamin dedicated “A Berlin Chronicle” to his son, Stefan. In this essay (which I re-read every year on Benjamin’s birthday), the father passes down a certain way of inhabiting and seeing the world, a way of being conscious of the sidewalks. Thus does the chronicle become an inheritance. “For childhood, knowing no preconceived opinions, has none about life,” Benjamin writes. “It is dearly attached (thought with just as strong reservations) to the realm of the dead, where it juts into that of the living, as to life itself.”
The possibility of childhood being “dearly attached…to the realm of the dead” gestures towards the creative possibilities of reflexive nostalgia as an intertextual mode that thrives in referential forms which develop from a texture of being known, being situated, being eternally sited. Maybe this is why nostalgia maps so smoothly onto childhood: it insists on memorializing or acknowledging certain conversations and gestures.
“All the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance,” Jacques Derrida wrote in the middle of his spectral book on Marx and hauntology.
A part of me craves a notion of purity. Of innocence. There is something resolutely human about needing to believe something like innocence exists outside our construction of it. But there is no innocence that isn’t constructed or reconstructed. In a sense, children inherit the worst of our innocence. Children are born guilty of the things their family has done before them. The sins of the father is a scriptural curse that requires one to inherit the things that others have done before him. None is born innocent. Not a single person on this planet can breathe innocently of the crimes of their ancestors. This means that guilt exists to some degree in the king or the queen or the worker whose grandfather was a professor because he was prominent. According to the scriptural curse, all the children who are born of rape are guilty of what their fathers have done. No one can breathe. No one is free. Not even systems absolve us of the inherited guilt hidden inside inherited trauma.
“But I’m not responsible for what my sister does!” my daughter says. “I didn’t do it! She did.”
Elsewhere: “I didn’t do it! I was minding my own business. They’re the ones who did it.”
The problem with guilt is that it applies to all of us at some point. And maybe we focus on trauma because it is easier than parsing the things we owe one another.
The problem with innocence is it applies to no one. That is why expiation remains one of the most profitable secular goods of late capitalism. To “free ourselves from the past” involves pretending our reading of the past is the relevant one. Justice pretends it can arrive at an accurate reading, a definition rather than an illumination.
