Agonistic Memory Discourse and the Negotiation of Identity Positions

Taking the point of departure in Cento Bull and Hansen’s article “On Agonistic Memory” (2016) the paper discusses some of the theoretical findings from the Horizon 2020 project Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe (UNREST). The project’s aim is to test the concept of agonism in relation to the memory of social and political conflict in different settings (exhumation of mass graves, war museums and cultural products). The concept of agonism has been given many different interpretations (Hannah Arendt, William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, just to mention a few). But given that the UNREST-project is dedicated to the memory of conflict, it was decided from the start to take the point of departure in Chantal Mouffe’s interpretation of the concept, because the world, according to Mouffe, is conflictive. In her view, society is composed of asymmetric power relations and collective identities are constituted through the political relations between an “us” and a constitutive outside in the form of an “other”. Collective identities are therefore always already inscribed in potentially antagonistic relations. The paper will address the following questions: Relational or intrinsic? Is the agonistic relation purely relational, or is it possible to distinguish some minimum defining traits of agonistic (memory) discourse. Mouffe herself favors the expression that agonism is characterized by a relation of “conflictual consensus” between parties, a relation where the opponent is recognized not as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an adversary. How does this apply to the memory discourses of violent pasts? 2. Agonism and the evolution of identity positions. Agonism is supposed to create collective identities through chains of equivalences that forge solidarity among the marginalized and suppressed, but is it possible to construct a collective “we” that is internally agonistic, hence able to cement a collective identity (albeit contingent) without erasing pluralism? This question could include the evaluation of different kinds of dialogue (Habermasian vs Bakhtinian), and the question of whether agonistic memory discourse is predominantly counter-national, trans- or international, or national?