Event date: Wednesday 25 April 2012, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room

“Messengers of Ill-Tidings: Memory, Poetry and the Right to Have Rights” given by Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge (University of East Anglia)

“When survivor and people smuggler Lisa Fittko returned to Gurs concentration camp in South West France some twenty years after she was interned there in 1940, she found it had disappeared — ‘not a trace of it was left. Only the memory.’  Renovation work on the camp began in 1961 — the year of the Eichmann Trial. By 1994 the camp had its own National Memorial. Dani Karavan’s skeletal hut frame with its 180 metre train track leading to nowhere made Gurs’ significance in a history that began with the refugee camp and ended in the death camp eloquently clear. In 2002 students from a local building college created reconstructions of the original huts. Gurs’ transformation into a memory site is now complete.
I begin this paper with Gurs to make a point about the connection between memory and rights. It was there and, a little later, in Montauban that Hannah Arendt, herself stateless, began her thinking about the relationship between statelessness and rights.  Writing before historical memories became a new basis for rights claims, nonetheless Arendt was among the first to identify the ‘diminishing return’ of national sovereignty that Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have recently identified as running in parallel with the growth of memory claims. At the same time, nobody would perhaps be more skittish about the ‘ultimate victimhood devoid of sovereignty’ which has come to take the place of the discredited fiction of the rights of man.
In this paper I ask what Arendt meant by the ‘right to have rights’ in a context where the brute politics of national sovereignty had lacerated the connection between citizenship and rights. Returning to her own period of statelessness — to Gurs in more senses than one — I argue that Arendt’s later commitment to the right to speech as a minimal requirement of dissident democratic politics begins, as she puts it, ‘with the voice of the poets.’ This is not a voice that makes rights claims based on memories of suffering. It is, rather, in the mutual recognitions that need to take place in order for poetry to happen that Arendt forges the precondition for a future right to have rights.”

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of East Anglia, where she is also Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is the author, most recently, of The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (2011). Other publications include: The Writing of Anxiety (2007), The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (1998), British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century, edited with Marina MacKay (2007), and Reading Melanie Klein, edited with John Phillips (1998).  She is currently working on a new project, Refugee Writing: States, Statelessness and Modern Literature.