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77 Ind. L.J. 307 (2002)
When Memory Speaks: Rememberance and Revenge in Unforgiven

handle is hein.journals/indana77 and id is 317 raw text is: When Memory Speaks: Remembrance and Revenge in Unforgivent AUSTIN SARAT* But he also wondered about himself, that he cannot learn to forget but always remains attached to the past: however far and fast he runs, the chain runs with him. It is astonishing: the moment, here in a wink, gone in a wink, nothing before and nothing after, returns nevertheless as a specter to disturb the calm of a later moment. Again and again a page loosens in the scroll of time, drops out, and flutters away-and suddenly flutters back again into a man's lap. Then man says I remember and envies the animal which immediately forgets and sees each moment really die, sink back into deep night extinguished for ever. To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was. It means to seize hold of memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. ... Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.2 INTRODUCTION What is the role of memory in vengeance and the violence it entails? What are the relationships among past, present, and future that vengeance creates? How are narrative connections made between those who are injured and those who use violence to reply to injuries? Do certain kinds of memories sustain vengeance while others diminish it? In the typical revenge story the answers to these questions seem straightforward: injury demands redress and when redress is not forthcoming injuries should not be forgotten? Victims seek both to remember but also to obliterate memory, to attend to the past and yet to make a different recollection. Memory is for victims a source of pain; the past constitutes the true victimization. They seek to rectify the past, to t Copyright 2002 by Austin Sarat. * William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College. An earlier version ofthis Article was presented at the Symposium on Law, Morality, and Popular Culture in the Public Sphere at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, April 6, 2001 and at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in Budapest, Hungary. I am grateful to the participants in those events as well as to DediFelman, Susan Sage Heinzelman, Ian Malcolm, Richard Sherwin, and Martha Umphrey for their generous and helpful comments. 1. FREEDRICHN[ET7SCHE,THEUSEANDABUSEOFHISTORY 8-9 (Adrian Collins trans., 2d rev. ed. 1957). 2. WALTER BENIAMIN, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in ILLUMINATIONS 255 (Hannah Arendt ed., Harry Zohn trans., 1968). 3. See JOHNKERRIGAN, REVENGETRAGEDYFROM AESCHYLUS TO ARMAGEDDON (1996). 4. Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire, 26 REPRESENTATIONS 16 (1989). In the last analysis, it is upon the individual and upon the individual alone that the constraint of memory weighs insistently as well as imperceptibly. The

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