Remembrance In The Iliad

Arendt suggests that memory, as elaborated by poets should always be an exercise in education. For ‘the very fact that so great of an enterprise as the Trojan War could have been forgotten without a poet to immortalize it several hundred years later offered only too good an example of what could happen to human greatness if it had nothing but poets to rely on for its permanence’ (Arendt, 1958: 197). In The Republic, Plato, in his Socratic dialogue called Homer ‘the educator of Hellas’, for immortalizing the events of the Trojan War (Arendt, 1958: 198). Although Socrates remained highly skeptical of the legacy of his work. Homer’s memorialization of the Trojan War in The Illiad was not to memorialize the good deeds of actors, but to educate
However, I will argue that organized remembrance does hold the possibility to improve the human frailties – yet its limitations stem from the aberration of mourning not private nor public, which separates the individual from the public, and public from the individual. For, only when given the opportunity for these narratives to manifest the space of organized remembrance manifest can we improve the frailty of human affairs. Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem was a poem that was not written, but committed to memory. Discussing Akhmatova’s struggle within Stalin’s regime, I will offer Akhmatova’s poetry as an example of inaugurated mourning I will suggest that Rose’s poetics of law can help the individual to understand reflection as a social activity. Weaving spaces of organised remembrance with reflection will help rediscover politics within the city, not as a realm of domination but of
For without constant engagement with the purpose of their reification, we risk memory becoming a singular, totalising entity, and thereby diverting our attention from ‘hard work of the middle, [and] the actualities and possibilities of concrete existence’ (Lloyd, 2008: 205). Thus, the process of remembrance can highlight the difficulty of ‘working through’ trauma. ‘Working through’ trauma is central to reconciling the what Rose calls ‘the broken middle’. Reconciling the brokenness of theory and actuality which ‘comes to know the contours of loss and suffering that emerge under the domination of formal law, but it does not remain frozen in it’ (Schick: 2012). The project cannot be realised in a narrative which is transfixed in abberated mourning, unless civilians can confront their memories in private spaces, to work through the difficulties and impossibilities through the exercise of disclosure in the realm of the polis.

Ethical life, for Rose should be difficult: it is too easy to deny the traumatic experiences of suffering. Rose explains the omission of memory as the denial of the difficult process of ‘working through’ in relation to her Grandmother’s experience of the Holocaust: ‘When Cousin Gutta came and told my parents that she […] was the only one left – that fifty members of Grandma’s family were killed. Nowadays my mother denies this – she denies that it happened and she denies