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Ghost of History: Living with Dead Men


Portrait Source: innerself.com


We listen and communicate with dead people. They live in us, in our languages, concepts, history, societies, literature, mythology, and so on. They talk to us in the technology of language, in fact, we talk to them in their language; we carry on our identity and the concept of identity, thanks to their ingenuous gift. In the pursuit of our blaming gesture, history and society blame to each-other. History responds our presence with their glorious misadventure and ridicules our present societies, its mediocrity, baseness, and its all too normal abnormalities. Contemporary societies are always already in transition; visit its past with glorified vision to select a few dots, suitable to current necessity, but rejects many painful stories, tragedies, cruelties. History has been a source of legitimacy of contemporary societies and vice versa; cultural mythology must be the father of civilization. What makes civilization possible in the first place? Against whom this myth making activity is pursued? It seems, only language is the difference between animality and civility. It is humans who have a sense of shame and modesty and a grammar of ethics. Humans struggle for glory and superiority. Thanks to language, we have surrendered our lives to the language and its myth making abilities. Humankind has put everything at stake for language within language. Language is the root of cultural, history, and civilization. Without language what would be with us? All sense of history and society and uninterruptible communication with dead people won't be possible without language. But then, are we able to talk with fellow beings in contemporary scenarios? Language is also the limit of our world, a fine philosopher once remarked in his Magnum opus, which he contradicted in his second but the last work of his life (Ludwig Wittgenstein). Language in the "age of media" is collapsing, it is already on the verge of abuse. It's unimaginable to accuse someone without language. The logocentric existence of discourse won't be possible without it. On the contrary, animality is also a construction of language. Animals haven't defined what nature they have been possessing. They are able to communicate in their own way. Humankind has been "othering" and bothering animals within their discourse and culture. We are carrying on the dead greatness and the greatness of dead people in our languages. The whole archive is the witness of this reality. Animals other than us have no "archive fever" (Jacques Derrida). We have privilege to interpret others, but are we aware if we are also interpreted by "other animals?" We essentialize what it means to be animal after excluding what it means to be human. This dichotomy of civilization and animality is no longer sustainable in the visible present. Othering is a construct of history, a burden of dead men, we often carry on without thinking about their futility. Clash of civilization is no longer a threat to human existence. It is clash of othering animals, using them for food, medicine, and cosmetic products have alienated humans from their own nature. Our journey of egotistic conflicts is navigating on surface of huge gigantic universe.

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