Origins, Chapter 1

1 – Facing erasure

In a prologue to this series of texts — “From Eternal Darkness to Histoire… de Raphaël” — I explained why, in these dark times for Lebanon, I decided to turn toward History with a capital “H,” as well as toward small-h history: namely, the story of my son, Raphaël.

To summarize, it is first of all to salvage from oblivion what can still be saved, at a moment when Lebanon as we know it is threatened with disappearance.

Then, because at the global level, we are living in a time that gives full meaning to a quotation from George Orwell, taken from 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

And examples that bear out this quotation are plentiful these days. To cite just a few: Éric Zemmour’s book, La messe n’est pas dite, in which he revisits the History of France in order to defend the highly political idea of a Judeo-Christian identity for that country; the decision by the British Museum to remove the word “Palestine” from one of its exhibitions; and Donald Trump’s own rewriting of the History of American presidents as presented in the White House’s “Presidential Walk of Fame.”

In short, it is safe to say that in the digital age — long thought to be dominated by selfies — the notion of History seems to be making a forceful comeback.

2 – Living between two relationships to History

Personally, I cannot say that this return of History feels unfamiliar to me, since, unlike Europe — which long lived in “The End of History,” at least according to Fukuyama — History never stopped in Lebanon.

And having lived for years in Europe — first France, then Italy — my predicament, passed on to my son and probably shared by many Lebanese emigrants, has always been this: how can a person caught up in grand History adapt to the continent of “The End of History”?

But despite this difference, the time of the South and the time of the North are today touched by a shared problematic, foregrounded by the historian François Hartog: namely, the collapse of belief in historians’ capacity to produce grand narratives capable of uniting people and giving them hope for the future.

Those interested in historiography know that the great moment of the “prophet” historian was the nineteenth century, when — like Michelet in France — History furnished national novels for nascent nations, and when — like philosophers such as Marx and Hegel — it became the narrative of a progressive march toward an ideal.

Why does History no longer occupy the same place in our societies today? The answer is of course vast. But chance recently placed two works in my path — a Lebanese film and a book by François Hartog — that provide some elements of a response.

3 – “Do You Love Me” and History “on repeat”

The Lebanese film in question is Lana Daher’s beautiful Do You Love Me. Composed entirely of archival material — ranging from photographs to film excerpts — the film retraces the History of Lebanon from the civil war of the 1970s to the present day.

If it moved me particularly, it was first of all for a narcissistic reason: excerpts from my own feature film, One of These Days, are among the archives selected. But also, and above all, because I watched it in Beirut at a moment when, outside the cinema, Israeli bombs were falling on Lebanon. Needless to say, watching this film under such circumstances gave the screening the character of a funeral mass, with all the emotion associated with that ritual.

But beyond my own reception of the film, what draws my attention here is that it has the merit — and this is indicated at the film’s outset — of transcribing historical time as it is lived in Lebanon: that of an eternal repetition.

No national novel, then, no progressive march toward an ideal, but rather the feeling, as one watches, of a territory abandoned by any notion of chronological progression and condemned, like Sisyphus, to relive the same gestures, the same emotions and the same events — and in this case, a great many wars.

To convey this relationship to time, the great idea governing the editing was to classify the archival materials not in chronological order but by motifs: the relationship to the sea, to the city, to dance, to ruins, and so on.

And watching the same motifs repeat themselves across time gives the strange impression that everything about to be filmed in the current conflict has already been filmed. In this sense, the film calls to mind the idea put forward by Jacques Derrida, in his reflections on the figure of circumcision, that the archives of our lives may predate our very existence.

And beyond this notion of prior traces, the editing also calls to mind Aby Warburg’s famous Mnemosyne Atlas, in which the history of art is classified not chronologically but by motifs, in order to show how ancient forms can “survive” in ghostly fashion within a more modern iconography.

And more than repetition, it is the permanent “survival” of the past within the present that best defines the Lebanese relationship to historical time — whereas further north, in Europe, the end of faith in History as a generator of grand narratives materializes as the feeling of living in an unending present.

4 – François Hartog and presentism

This is, in any case, the intuition defended by François Hartog in his work on the notion of History, notably in his essay Regimes of Historicity.

A major essay on the notion of History, it describes the way in which a society articulates the relationship between past, present and future. Concerning Europe, Hartog identifies three broad periods.

An ancient regime, that of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, characterized by myths and a cyclical relationship to time, in which the past is erected as a model. A modern regime, beginning in the eighteenth century — with the Enlightenment, among other currents — in which belief in progress makes the future the ultimate horizon. And the contemporary period, which begins roughly in the 1970s — marked by the oil shock, the end of utopias, and the Sex Pistols’ slogan “No Future” — in which the present becomes the ultimate horizon.

Of course, like all theories, the notion of presentism could be qualified in several respects, especially since in this particular case it is in no way a description of the end of all relationship to the past. But what Hartog makes visible is that History as generator of grand narratives has receded behind the notions of memory, heritage, and contested claims, giving the impression that all of the past must be placed in the service of the present.

As for the future: in Lebanon’s time, its complete absence is linked to a state of permanent existential crisis; in the North, between crisis management and political discourse focused on reversing the growth curve, it suffices to say how thoroughly the relationship to the future has been reduced to what Annie Ernaux describes in her beautiful book The Years — planning the All Saints’ holiday and the year-end break from the September back-to-school.

5 – The contamination of the North by the Apocalypse of the South

Here too, this “No Future” relationship to the future must be qualified, since before entering “the world according to Trump,” various discourses on the future — such as the ecological discourse — were beginning to emerge.

But it is nonetheless clear that at present, aside from the discourse on a “radiant future” for machines promoted by the mad scientists of Silicon Valley, there is, on the human side, more of a sense of reliving some of History’s darkest hours.

This produces the strange feeling that the Lebanese relationship to History — as the permanent survival of the past in the present — is beginning to contaminate the rest of the world.

This was, in any case, the intuition of the Lebanese poet Etel Adnan who, in her Arab Apocalypse, written in the midst of the civil war, announced that “History is dead,” and who declared in an interview: “Lebanon is becoming the prototype of the world that awaits us.”

And it is of this survival, on a global scale, that the next article of this series will speak.