Looking back, however vainly, for a ray of light in the gloom of our shattered hopes, we are still to retrace and isolate the last traces of the rare, redemptive moments which, despite getting lost and repressed through liberal-democratic rejection, live on in the memory of great failures of the past. Since the greatest historical accounts of the past attempted revolutionary projects are finally nothing more than reports on some partial successes and ultimate failures (of the German Peasants' War in sixteenth century, of the Jacobins in the French Revolution in eighteenth century, of the Paris Commune in ninteenth century, of the October Revolution in twentieth century, and , who knows, maybe of the Iranian movement in the twenty-first century), it is precisely those redemptive, even if repressed, moments that must not be missed. For the fidelity to those moments and therefore to redeem the emancipatory potential of the narrated failures require the (re)examination without any nostalgic attachment and also the accommodation to new seemingly disenchanted circumstances. Tarrying with the history of these numerous failures faces us with the traumatic core which refers to the repressed memories of great hopes and desires lost in the failed processes of emancipation and blurred by the dominant narratives. Nevertheless it is exactly this traumatic core that is the privileged object of historical narratives.

Traumatic events are the privileged objects of repression. Trauma (or more precisely the traumatic core of every event) is exactly what one is unable to remember and, as Freud has demonstrated, is nevertheless condemned to repeat. That is, one is condemned to repeat the inability to recollect, to make the unrememberable a part of one's symbolic narrative. It could be claimed, therefore, that in relation to trauma one is condemned to repeat one's failure and impossibility of recollecting the core of the trauma, to remember what is lost. Yes, the question is not of remembering things lost, it is the struggle to redeem the potentials and hopes of the past, the lost causes and failures within all the past processes of emancipation.

It is in this way that dreams become important and part and parcel of every emancipatory project – the dream, in its precise Freudian sense, as the "unauthorized emergence of suppressed desires and wishes under false features and name", as "a (disguised) fulfilment of our (repressed) wishes".1 And it should be added that dreams not only give us knowledge of the past but also, in a very particular sense, tell us something vitally important about our future. As Freud writes at the end of his masterpiece on dreams, "by picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past."2

This latter, very decisive point has, in my opinion, a highly significant, albeit ignored and unappreciated, political implication. The truth is that the revolutionaries of all time have been the great dreamers of mankind who picture our hopes and wishes for emancipation as if they were fulfilled, and in this way lead us into the future. They have already pictured this future for us as the present, because they all experienced the so-called utopia as actual, and it is up to us to narrate these actual failures as some virtuality, as the paradoxical past which is still before us, which we have to catch up with. In this way, we may deduce that the true value of the revolutionary dreams of our past (often failed) struggles exists in the present of our process of becoming. It is in this sense that Kierkegaard speaks of the eternal victory of the Good,3 and it is in this sense we should think of the history as the often slow, and always infinite, procedure of making true the dream-fictions which turn the past into memory. This points to the very, forgotten, relationship between the politics (of emancipation) and the art (as one of the truth procedures). This relationship is best articulated by Andrey Tarkovsky: "In a sense art is an image of the completed process, of the culmination: an imitation of the possession of absolute truth (albeit only in the form of an image) obviating the long—perhaps, indeed, endless—path of history".4

The path of history? Which history? In general, there are two grand historical narratives. Both see the world as a story, One as the tale of human progress, and the other of a world besieged by dark forces and destined for destruction. In fact, we live in an era of stories which are unable to provide any meaning to the lives of hopeless and disillusioned people, restless economic crises, increasing inequalities and injustices, and at the same time despair of any radical change in the social spheres. All refer to the essential need for emplotment the confused and scattered moments of the past that resist becoming memory. In other words, the main question is how to narrate a story without a plot, how to read an unwritten story, how to enact a drama whose script has been lost forever. How to be free from the dominant historical narratives that have no place in a story of revolutions but a great number of attempted struggles and catastrophic failures. My thesis is that releasing the desired freedom of this ‘plot making’ is only possible through the process of the traumatization of the memory of our past failures. This process itself requires enacting a new event. For instance, on March 18 1996 three hundred African immigrants occupied St-Ambroise church in Paris in order to appeal for the regularization of their papers. This event perhaps unintentionally revived the memory of another March 18 in the history of redemptive struggles, and forced all the perplexed onlookers to (re)encounter that (mostly, repressed) event.

Elaborating a precise psychoanalytical notion of Trauma in relation to History

Let's begin with Freud's development of his theory of trauma. Freud changed his position on this subject. He began with a notion of trauma as something that intrudes into our psychic life from the exterior, disrupting its balance, throwing out of joint the symbolic coordinates that organize our experience. Imagine a brutal rape, witnessing or suffering torture or perhaps, in the political field, a military coup or invasion by another country or, in the sphere of natural calamities, a disastrous earthquake and even a failed revolution. From this perspective, the problem is how to symbolize the trauma, how to integrate it into our universe of meaning and cancel its disorienting impact. Freud himself finally gave up this perspective and argued for a more radical treatment of the trauma and the subject's relationship with its symptoms. Thus the trauma can be claimed that is an effect, or the inner limit, of the very process of symboliztion.

In sum, there are, generally speaking, three distinct, and yet interconnected, conceptions of trauma: physical, psychological, and psychoanalytical. The word trauma, derived from the Greek word, originally names a serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident. In medicine, it signifies any bodily injury or wound. In psychological terms, it refers to a powerful shock that may have long lasting effects and, as often used in the discourse of various contemporary media, refers to some human disasters. But in psychoanalysis a trauma is not necessarily something that happens to a person in reality, it might even be said that trauma in the strict sense of word is usually a psychical event. Psychic trauma arises from the confrontation between an external stimulus and the subject's inability to understand and master these excitations (best exemplified in Emma's case).5 And as Lacanian psychoanalysis taught us such confrontations most commonly arise from a subject's premature encounter with sexuality and the inability to comprehend what is happening. It means that an event which would be later recognized as a trauma might not be a traumatic event in itself at all and only be retrospectively traumatized in the wake of some later, perhaps insignificant, event that would bring the initial seemingly commonplace or meaningless event to consciousness. Most importantly, we are dealing here with an event taking place before puberty or maturity which leaves a psychological scar in the subject's unconscious that will resurface in later life. The notion of trauma, according to Freud, is essentially linked to the primal scene, whereby a child has either a real or imaginary experience that it cannot comprehend. That scene as such has no traumatic or disturbing aspect in itself, but when the subject, after the experience of (sexual and of course bodily) maturity and through an encounter which is associated to that event, comes to the question of the meaning of that (somehow forgotten or repressed and, note, not suppressed) scene, he-she retroactively traumatizes the prematurely encountered scene. The question now becomes how to symbolize or narrate or give meaning to the event that by nature cannot be symbolized. Therefore the event functions as the limit of symbolization and thereby sets into motion the process of symbolization itself and structuring of the new sphere of meaning. So the subject encounters an inassimilable forgotten and repressed memory, a paradoxically non-memorized memory, an impenetrable core in the body of memories that resists our struggle to narrate and incorporate it into our world of meaning and challenges our powers and resource for archiving anything that happened and took place in the past.

Again, it is the traces that matter, the Freudian scars in the subject's unconscious, and as far as historical situations and social memories are concerned the notion of trauma cancels out the Cartesian split of mind and body, of memory and desire, because there we deal with some collective cut or wound in the body of a collective entity, therefore it does not make sense here to speak about the distinction between physical and psychological trauma, and more importantly the trauma in its precisely psychoanalytical sense cannot refer to some spectacular natural/historical disasters of which the media incessantly speak but rather to the crucial confrontations between some external stimuli-– in the sense of the unrealizable desires the Spirit of a collective entity finds in its own Body – and the collective subject's inability to understand them. In this sense, we can claim that every revolution has a traumatic core that, only after the gradual coming of age of a society having undergone a radical change in its symbols and institutions (and thus becoming ripe for its past) will traumatize the collective memory of that society, resurrecting the desire for emancipation which had come to being through the experience of revolution but at the time was impossible to realize. So everything would be contingent upon an occurrence that in itself might have no significance (say an alleged widespread fraud in an election) but could bring the memory of desire for emancipation inherent in the revolution to the consciousness of the people. Thus everything is contingent upon abiding with and being true to the memory/desire that waits to be realized and become true.

Foucault's encounter with an Iranian Revolution and traumatizing the Western idea of Revolution

In the last years of 1970s – nearly ten years after the obscure events of May 1968 and at the depth of the despair and disillusionment of Western intellectuals in respect to the possibility of revolution under the conditions of late capitalism – when the working class was entirely integrated into the body of the system and had no desire or passion for the radical change – Michel Foucault engaged in the somewhat pre-post-modern insurrection in a Middle Eastern country. I believe Foucault’s risky encounter as a radical intellectual with a non-Western and non-archivable revolution (of a non-Communist, nor Leninist or Maoist stripe) aimed to account for and record the events within the existing coordinates of the historical archive of revolutions which necessarily traumatizes the very idea of revolution in the West. This is why the most of intellectual circles for a long time preferred to ignore or consider as unimportant Foucault's writings on the Iranian Revolution. The question was and continues to be whether Foucault was right in engaging in a process which led to the establishment of a theocratic, repressive, and allegedly totalitarian regime; whether he was right to detect an emancipatory potential of some new form of political spirituality distinct from familiar forms of revolutionary struggle; and finally whether this was not another case of Western radical intellectuals projecting their own fantasies onto an "exotic foreign zone of turbulence", allowing them to satisfy simultaneously their emancipatory desires and their tacit masochistic longing for harsh discipline and oppression? Slavoj Zizek claims that Foucault "did the right thing for the wrong reason".6 In his opinion, Foucault based his analysis on the Kantian opposition between the revolutionary Event (the sublime enthusiasm of the united people who became indifferent to their differences in that magic moment of suspension) and the pragmatic politics of interests and strategic power calculations. In fact Foucault sought for a lost moment of a utopian opening in the revolutionary struggles of a people who were historically not ripe for the revolution, or to put it differently, in the process of becoming-people of a forcefully modernized nation that strived to commit a revolution in an era of the impossibility of revolution.

As Janet Afary and Kevin B. Andrson point out, many scholars of Foucault view his later writings and provocative statements on the Iranian Revolution as either aberrant or as the product of a political mistake. Contrariwise, they argue that his writings on Iran were in fact closely related to his general theoretical writings on the discourse of Power and the hazards of modernity, and that his experience in Iran "left a lasting impact on his subsequent oeuvre".7 On the other hand, radical thinkers such as Zizek suggest that his Iranian engagement, his seduction by an obscure Event, was not only an appropriate gesture but might be also "the best thing he ever did", albeit "a commitment in the wrong direction". Furthermore, one can argue in a Kantian manner that the true significance of every great socio-political event, including the Islamic Revolution of 1979, does not reside in what actually went on where the event took place, but in the enthusiastic response, the thoughtful reaction, that the event generates in the eyes of sympathetic but enlightened observers – despite whatever terrifying and even disastrous things may accompany it. And in the contemporary global situation, when we are "moving through a very bleak period in human history",8 in the age of Post-modernist cynicism and the lack of any commitment (except to opportunism), it is up to the Western intellectuals to appreciate the enthusiastic response that the events in Iran generated in the eyes of a sympathetic observer such as Foucault. For he was, above all, an external observer struggling to revive his hopes in the possibility of a new form of "spiritualized political collectivity" in some place other than the disillusioned West. But this other place, be it Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, or Iran of 1979 or 2009, inevitably implies a traumatic encounter, with an everlasting impact on every historiographical attempt at archiving a non-Western revolution.

To cast a new light on the Foucault case, one can invoke the Deleuzian notion of intercessors, those whose voices have not been heard, or, if heard, not really listened to: Spinoza in philosophy, Kafka in literature, and the subaltern in history. By invoking them, Deleuze tried to open thought to movements and rhythms outside its traditional purview. Intercessors, in his view, "break open the walls of the theatre of philosophy and allow thought to move in 'lines of flight' beyond its traditions, beyond its history, beyond its identity".9 Are not Foucault's Iranians the same as Deleuze's intercessors? And, as we'll see in the following, I believe, Ranciere's French workers of 1830s have the same status in relation to the official history and archive of the working-class movements. To a Western gaze as eager as Foucault's, the chief quality of the Iranian revolutionaries (as with the Deleuzian intercessors) appears to be fluidity. They served to free up a tradition of Western philosophy and historiography that has been "grid-locked" for centuries within a strict and somewhat rigid hierarchy of concepts and categories. But the more important point is that these intercessors have a real history by which they are constrained, and which precludes the longing gaze of French philosophers —"who are already free, who already have their passports, money, and access to world communication systems"10—who use non-Western peoples light-heartedly as some intercessory metaphors. However, the issue of Foucauldian encounter is more complicated. He did commit himself to interpret the events in Iran as a singular artwork which requires new criteria of reading and critique, as a new story that was written in an unfamiliar language and followed the rules of narration that differed from the dominant. It is exactly his attempt to narrate this obscure story in Western terms that, in a certain way, traumatizes the idea of revolution, for now it is the Western gaze that has been affected so deeply by the object of its gaze.

Indeed, foucault wanted to read and interpret a strange text written in a foreign, unfamiliar language and, if possible, include it into the body of historical archives of worldly acclaimed revolutions. This surprising text was itself written as the process of translating a non-existent Western text, one as not-yet written, perhaps a lost story book, an attempted love story, an incredible fiction, who knows… Foucault, in the light of this approach, had to analyze a translated text that had no original which it could be compared, measured or judged against. After all, he himself was a foreigner in the language of Iranian (mostly religious) revolutionaries; he was a foreigner par excellence, not only in another language but also in his own language, for in the terms of then recognized revolutions in the history, he chose the one to analyze, and even to elevate as an example for some new form of insurrection and revolt, that could not be easily and non-problematically accepted as a liberating event (in particular, from the point of view of the posterity and in the terms of the Iranian revolution's own objective and actual consequences). However, as Proust said, "fine books have to be written in a sort of foreign language". Both the Islamic Revolution and Foucault's essays on it can be considered as such. And this is exactly what makes Foucault's encounter and engagement such a traumatic moment in the history of confrontations between pre- and post- modern worlds: Iranians broke through their way into (Western, modern) history via so many pre-modern and even anti-modern reactionary contents, and emphasized in this way the (im)possibility of the Revolution and in the process traumatizing the idea of revolution in the West.

(K)nights of Labor: counter-archiving or how to archive the forbidden archives

Peter Watkins's La Commune is one of the most important radical attempts to catch up with a past, realized though failed dream of all the human history to create a different world where every man is to rule and to be ruled, a liberated community in which the old-established and deep-rooted distinction between the political and policing the society could be eventually eradicated, a society based upon the radical fraternity, intellectual equality, and thoughtful liberty, a collective entity organized not around the ideological, holy liberal notion of private property and the consensual conception of men as infinitely engaging consumers of mass media and global market – but in sum, a truly proletarian Polis where the genuinely collective, unified will takes the hold of the situation. Peter Watkins’s film project is an attempt to narrate, interpret, recollect, and properly describe the greatest failure of the Left radical memory, and one of the most precious struggles, in order to create a memory of emancipation out of fiction, or in other words, to fictionalize the fact of a failed process of a unique revolution. Watkins's amazing tour de force is the best example of how, as Andreas Huyssen put it, it isn't easy to draw the line separating the legendary past from the real past: in this aesthetico-political re-enactment of the most passionate moment of all the emancipatory struggles of history, we are dealing with a radical politics of memory, in which one can see how groundless the idea that the memory is at best but another footnote of history. Watkins deconstructs the traditional and conventional opposition between history and memory, challenging the generally accepted approaches according to which history is objective, memory is subjective; history is collective, memory is individual; history is scientific and memory is emotional; and so on and so forth.11 He renders the radical and irreducible opposition of history versus memory a nonsensical ideology, trying to (re)create the memory of the 1871 Commune in the same fashion as Jacques Ranciere writes in relation to Chris Marker's The Last Bolshevik , "memory must be created against the overabundance of information as well as against its absence", or differently put, against the over-democratized archiving of post-Fordist Capitalism as well as the totalitarian, exclusive ways of archiving of ideological non-Western regimes: memory "has to be constructed as the liaison between the accounts of the events and traces of actions",12 for, as Huyssen points out in his Twilight Memories, "the past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory". Watkins's docudrama is an amorous effort to create such a liaison between the past and the present, memory and desire, a sort of counter-archiving in order to give voice to those passionately and enthusiastically engaged in the revolutionary process of becoming, and of breaking through into, history. He does this via extraordinary, impossible interviews with both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries conducted by fictional TV news reporters who attempt to archive the unarchivable moments of a realized utopia, culminating in a wonderful “heterotopias” situated in the borderlines of fiction and documentary, memory and historiography, all with ordinary Parisians, mostly immigrants from North Africa.

Watkins's La Commune can be said to be organized around the two so-called short-circuits between past and present, between memory and desire, or, in other words, between imagination and anachronism. To represent the events of the 1871Paris Commune, he chooses the eleventh arrondissment of Paris, and, through his film's heroine, asks the audiences "to imagine that it is 17 March, 1871". Why Paris eleventh, and why March 17th? Because Watkins thinks of the pressure of the place and the time in the process of making present a particular moment of the past, but the place as the site of an event, and the time as the one that Walter Benjamin qualified as "not homogeneous, empty time, but the time filled by the presence of the now", which in turn requires "the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop" (Benjamin's fourteenth section of "Thesis on the Philosophy of History"). Watkins picks up the eleventh arrondisment of Paris and 17 March, because this is the site of the Saint-Ambroise church which was occupied, on 18 March 1996, by three hundred African immigrants, the well-known sans-papiers (the "paperless" people) who demanded the regularization of their papers. Of course, after four days they were evacuated violently by the police. This seemingly and comparatively small event, in which illegal immigrant workers "publicly declared the existence and valence of what had been without valence, thereby deciding that those who are here [in France] belong here and enjoining people to drop the expression 'illegal immigrant' [clandestin]",13 inevitably invokes the vagrant ghosts of the revolutionary communards of Paris of 1871. Watkins creates, through his unprecedented re-enactment, a universe that archives, a reality so troubling in the eyes of those historians who put the Commune back into the cupboards of History for twenty years, or even into a black hole. Watkins struggles to "open a path to a new approach and debate", and, as he himself writes in response to the question "Why this film, at this time?", "What happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia—which WE now need as dying people need plasma."

Walter Benjamin said that the belief in historical evolution legitimates the victors, therefore we have to see revolts and revolutions as some cracks in the path of time that are not the work of time itself. This requires an approach that denies the existence of a global temporal process that both creates and destroys forms of life, consciousness and action. It is in such a fashion that Ranciere decides to (re)collect, from the point of view of social sciences and official archives, the little and insignificant or rather repressed dreams and stories of workers "taking an afternoon walk, or straying far from the solid realities of the factory and the organized struggle”.14 Ranciere's nineteenth century workers are, in a certain sense, not real workers: "they are artisans from olden times, dreamers who dabbled in poetry and philosophy, who got together to found ephemeral newspapers and [in the process] became intoxicated by socialist and communist utopias but for the most part avoided doing anything about them". It is so evident that they and their experimentations can be easily included into the sociological, anthropological, and historical analyses, and so they seem to be categorized and archived without any trouble and beyond any doubt in pre-established frameworks. But a radical, eccentric archivist takes the risk of treating them as theoretical and philosophical texts, and therefore (re)record them in a process of counter-archiving: following on these men's seemingly unrealizable dreams is to offer an untimely version of a sort of "fraternal communalism". Ranciere's counter-archive is, in his own terms, a book which is "out of place", not only in classical modernist visions but also in postmodern versions. One is tempted to consider the locksmiths, tailors, cobblers and typesetters of his Nights of Labor as the French "knights of labor"—the Knights of Labor being the largest American labor organization of the nineteenth century, established in 1869. In the1860s, the tailors of Philadelphia attempted to establish a trade union, but the employers of the city forced their employees to choose between their union and their jobs. So the workers decided to dispense with usual and typical open forms of organization and instead take their union underground, using the methods of secret societies.

Ranciere's workers, however, nearly thirty years before the American Knights of Labor, far from establishing a secret militant association or underground organization, only wanted to make poems; seeing themselves in their dreams as writers or even philosophers. They didn't think of any kind of urban riot, social revolt, or political revolution, nor did they organize any struggle in order to improve their conditions of labor or increase their wages. They rather attempted to do another, or the others', work.15 They composed verses—and this was a sort of displacement or "dis-identification", and what Ranciere does with the archives recording the memories of these strange and somewhat vagrant knights of labor, these poet-workers, philosopher-laborers, is to displace their files in the official archives. Treating their writings as literary-theoretical texts, he has undertaken a kind of unprecedented counter-archiving which introduces the possibility of taking account of new possibilities and of a new way to interpret some forgotten, or rather forbidden, dreams, hopes, and wishes. Ranciere tries to revive some fictions hidden behind the veil of the facts of history, retracing the traces of such glorious yet repressed wishes of the French workers of 1830s. In other words, he seeks the forbidden archives within the existing, official Archive in order to (re)create a (lost) promise of emancipation and in this way traumatizes a since then insignificant moment in the path of history.

On the (im)possibility of a necessary fiction

The bourgeois— And you believe in the revolution?

Me—I believe in it. Like you, by the way

Bourgeois— Me? You must be kidding! Is a revolution possible in our time? The armed forces; the wisdom of the proletarians—resolved to legally obtain the improvement of their lot; the will of the republicans—who have already done so much for the workers—to resolutely march on the path of social reforms: isn't all of this guarantee enough for you?

Me— No more for me than for you.

(Bernard Lazare, Necessity of the Revolution, 1896)

To put it frankly, we live in a world designed and arranged as an unbearable drama based on a confused and valueless script, with the repugnant and repulsive self-satisfaction of its writers and directors (the bankers, stock-holders, businessmen, commercial marketers, and so on and so forth), with its ugly and badly organized scenery (the mass media, Hollywood, etc.) and the arrogance of its ham actors: everything attests to the necessity of a radical change—inequalities, injustices, sexual barbarisms, obscurantisms, hedonistic mysticisms…And despite all this, there is no horizon of hope for any kind of global revolution or any sign of any real change in the international relations. The idea of revolution seems to refer to a fiction of the past, an idea based on an old-fashioned view of history that was founded on a myth of an "achievable utopia" which caused the murder of tens of millions of people. On the other hand, there is a pitiful reality, the pitiable fact of the impossibility of revolution, of a world bereft of any hope for creating something else, something new. It is true that a misplaced faith in human ability to improve the world has actually made if far worse, it is more importantly true that one of the signs of "becoming far worse" of our world is the very loss of belief in the revolution, and although the revolutionary actions, in their traditional sense (as a scientifically, historically inevitable necessity) seem nowadays more impossible than ever, we should insist that the kind of revolutionary reactions as the examples considered in this essay, however contingent they might be, are highly necessary. Revolution as that necessary fiction we have lost in the clamour for the free market today may be the very memory Jean Paul once described as "the one beautiful paradise from which we cannot be expelled". However we live in the inferno of a reality the fundamental principle of which is the separation of memory and desire, but the only hope that is left for us is exactly that (wonder)land of indiscernibility of memory and desire, that forbidden zone of faith and fidelity to our lost causes and ideals.

1. Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p.244.↩
2. ibid. p.783. Freud points out that there is no question of the value of dreams in giving us knowledge of the future. Certainly, they give us some knowledge of the past, for "dreams are derived from the past in every sense". However, Freud adds that "the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth". I try to apply this strange truth to viewing the past revolutions as the dreams of liberation and emancipation, and so examine how they could lead us to the future pictured as the present.↩
3. “In the eyes of this double-minded person the Good is one thing, its victory is another, and its victory through him may even be something else. Now it is indeed the case, that eternally the Good has always been victorious. But in time it is otherwise, temporally it make a long time. The victory is slow; its uncertainty is a slow measure of length.” (Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing)↩
4. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1987, p.240.↩
5. Sigmund Freud, "Project for a Scientific Psychology". Emma is the pseudonym of one of Freud's patients, who was subject to a strange compulsion of not being able to go into shops alone. She herself pointed to a memory from when she had been twelve years old (shortly after the onset of puberty), but after a period of analysis, Freud found out that the memory in question was significant only in that it revealed and revived a second memory from when she had been a girl of eight (i.e. before puberty). Freud concludes that "here we have the case of a memory arousing an affect which it did not arouse as an experience, because in the meantime the change [brought about] in puberty had made possible a different understanding of what was remembered." In fact, we find that a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action. And one can claim that exactly the same occurs in the sphere of memory of the revolutionary events: we have some political redemptive events which took place before the (social) puberty or maturity, and are revived-traumatized due to some later event after the maturity of the social institutions.↩
6. Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes, Verso 2008, pp.107—117.↩
7. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, University of Chicago Press, 2005.↩
8. Peter Watkins, the English film and television director whose La Commune (2000) will be discussed in this essay as an exemplary case of retracing the historical traumas via the re-enactment of some moments of rupture in the continuum of History as narrated by the victors, describes our present world in his official website. He radically criticizes the post-modernist cynicism and "the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audio-visualization of the planet". He insists that we live now in a world "where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm—to be taught even to children".↩
9. Dudley Andrew, "The Roots of the Nomadic", in The Brain is the Screen, edited by Gregory Flaxman, University of Minnesota Press 2000, p.217.↩
10. Gayatry Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, p.280.↩
11. This crucial point is articulated very well by Andreas Huyssen, see his interview with the site of barcelonametropolis (January—March 2010): www.barcelonametropolis.cat/en.↩
12. Jacques Ranciere, Film Fables (Talking Images), translated by Emiliano Battista, Berg Publishers, 2006.↩
13. Alain Badiou, "Thinking the Event", in Philosophy in the Present, edited by Peter Englemann, Polity Press 2009, p.37.↩
14. Jacques Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, translated by John Drury, Temple University Press, 1989. Ranciere's book was originally published in France in 1981 under the title Les Nuits des Proletaires. This stunning work reinterprets a very special revolution of 1830 in which some workers rebelled against "the unyielding predetermination of their lives". In Ranciere's account of these workers' writings, they are represented as some proletarian intellectuals, poets, and artists who "were able to articulate their longings" and so did not need any Althusserian intellectual to speak for them. In fact, they fought for "the possibility of living other lives".↩
15. I point here to the triple distinction that Hannah Arendt has made between labor (meeting needs), work (constructing a stable collective world), and action (public activity in the public sphere). In this light, we can say that Ranciere's workers in their splendid nights were striving to work, transcending the world of labor and the mere satisfaction of their needs tied to the conditions of survival.↩