Karen Jallatyan
Have you ever felt that contemporary philosophy is useless? That you
do not have the time to think about the intangible and unimportant
questions that it asks? This is how I used to feel when I was an
undergraduate at UCLA some years ago, studying chemistry and biology,
and striving to attend medical school after graduation. But everything
changed when I started reading Marc Nichanian. His books and essays did
not just restore my faith in the need for philosophy; they made me
think about the ways in which I could negotiate between my diasporic
life and Armenian heritage, creatively and philosophically.
So why are Nichanian’s ideas so forcefully transformative? The
answer is complex. For at least three decades, this French-born
Armenian thinker, who philosophizes in French, Armenian, and English,
has kept pace with the most nuanced and influential philosophical
currents of the world. He has done so in two ways. On the one hand, he
has taken concerns from contemporary philosophical debates and has
raised them in Armenian literary and critical platforms, in relation to
Armenian cultural and political life and production. For instance,
Nichanian has written studies about the works of Zabel Esayan, Yeghishé
Charents, Gurgen Mahari, Daniel Varuzhan, Constant Zarian, and many
others by upholding them to the latest critical standards respected
worldwide. Furthermore, he has taught and given public lectures on
matters concerning the Armenian Genocide – the way we use, appropriate,
and feel responsible for it, pressing questions that most Armenian
intellectuals do not press. On the other hand, Nichanian has kept
raising specific issues stemming from the Armenian experience in
publications and conferences around the world. This way, the concerns
that the Armenian Genocide exposes in our ideas of history, memory, and
time are mentioned in Anglophone and Francophone debates in relation
with other cultures and historical phenomena.
Although the Genocide is the focal point of many of his texts, it is
unfair to characterize Nichanian as a thinker of the Armenian Genocide.
On the contrary, by focusing on the literary, artistic and political
aspects of the Genocide, Nichanian has shown how being concerned only
with its political recognition as a genocide, we lose track of
the crucial dimensions of the Armenian experience. Accordingly, in his
2009 book “The Historiographic Perversion,” Nichanian exposes the
dangerous assumptions of deniers of the Armenian Genocide and warns the
rest of us about the endless traps that responding to the deniers
presents for the memory of the victims.
In this respect, Nichanian argues that there is also a need to
critically interpret the imaginations of Armenian writers and
intellectuals who lived through these catastrophic events. The
imaginations of these thinkers still have a strong influence on the way
we think about Armenian nationhood and history. This is why, according
to Nichanian, it is necessary to carry out a deeper work of
desedimentation (another name for interpretation) to loosen the hold
that habits of thinking and ideals inherited from our brilliant writers
from roughly a century ago still have on our minds. Desedimentation
means exposing the underlying assumptions of these major cultural agents
and their works. At stake for Nichanian is the productive potential of
Armenian language and culture writ large, and hence the political
future of the Armenian people as well.
In his other texts, Nichanian carries out the urgent work of
desedimenting the modern Armenian sense of nationhood by crucially
focusing on the 19th century, which had a colossal influence on the
imagination of Armenian intellectuals. The book that I want to discuss
in greater detail here does precisely the latter. The occasion is the
recent English publication, translated by G.M. Goshgarian and Jeff Fort,
of “Mourning Philology: Art and Religion at the Margins of the Ottoman
Empire” (2014). The original French text was published in 2007 and was
the second of the three-volume series appearing under the general
heading “Entre l’art et le témoignage. Littératures arméniennes au XXe
siècle” (Between Art and Testimony: 20th-Century Armenian Literatures).
In this volume, Nichanian attempts a critical exposition of the
deep-rooted assumptions of the pivotal 19th- and early 20th-century
major Armenian writers – Daniel Varuzhan, Hagop Oshagan, Constant
Zarian, but also Khachatur Abovean, for a particular reason.
Nichanian’s specific focus is on the assumptions informing the relation
between art and religion. This assumption is a crucial moment in
desedimenting our inherited sense of (Armenian) nationhood since for
these intellectuals nationhood is achieved through art, or, in other words, art is the origin of nationhood.
Nichanian demonstrates that in their distinct attempts to bring to
life a sense of Armenian nationhood these writers relied, without the
ability to question, on a specific philosophical formulation of the
relationship between art and religion invented in early 19th-century
Europe. Accordingly, this relationship consists in simultaneously
assuming that religion originates from art and that art mourns the loss
of religion.
In their attempts to bring to life an Armenian nationhood, how could
Varuzhan and his generation of Armenian writers repeat, almost verbatim,
the early 19th-century European assumption of a circular relation
between art and religion?
Nichanian’s answer is two-fold. First, he argues that Armenian
writers, because of their historical period, understood art and religion
in terms of the discipline of philology. Philology is the study of
languages in and of themselves and in relation to other languages.
Philological studies take into consideration not only textual, but also
cultural, social, religious, and political contexts. They try to
provide a comprehensive account of the historical development of a
language and culture. Second, Nichanian argues that the idea that art
is the origin of religion reached the Armenian writers largely through
the writings of the prominent philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
The discipline of philology reached its peak in the 19th century,
and, as demonstrated in Edward Saïd’s now-classic “Orientalism” (1978),
spread alongside Western European imperialist projects. Generations of
philologists, historians, writers, travelers, politicians, economists,
and entrepreneurs operated under the unquestioned assumptions of
philology. They constructed the cultures and histories of other peoples
outside Western Europe as exotic, inferior, and as having lost touch
with their own past. European philologists then tried “to educate” them
about their past, making them want to resemble Europeans, while casting
them as inferior “natives.”
But what are philology’s unquestioned assumptions? According to
Nichanian, philology merely assumes the loss of gods without knowing
anything about such a loss. More radically, philology “invents” religion
and the myths preceding its development as always already lost. This is
because philology is not a religion – it does not believe in the myths
and gods that it attempts to describe comprehensively. A philological
study, by default, positions itself as coming after the demise
of such belief systems. Lastly, philology assumes itself to be capable
of successfully uncovering such lost phenomena; this is its partial and
blinding work of mourning.
Nichanian then hastens to add that philology thinks and knows very
little about mourning as such, whatever that might mean. In particular,
it does not know anything about catastrophic mourning – mourning for an
event for which there is no witness, as is the case of an event like
the 1915 Genocide. In this book and elsewhere, Nichanian tirelessly
reminds his readers that some events can be survived only at the cost of
a complete transformation. So much so that nobody, including the
survivor, can adequately witness the experience. We tend to refer to
such events as traumatic; Nichanian prefers to describe them as
catastrophic. Any kind of testimony is a mere substitute for the events
which are too traumatic to be communicated through testimony. Moreover,
when we use such testimony solely for the sake of making historical and
political arguments – thus falling into the trap prepared by genocide
deniers – we make it impossible for us to adequately mourn the
catastrophic loss since our testimony subjects the latter to proof and
calculation. Aside from dubiously assuming that art is the origin of
religion, philology does not show any awareness of the problem of
catastrophic mourning when it conceives myths and religion as lost. Nor
does philology explain how art is supposed to be a way of mourning and
the loss of exactly what it is supposed to mourn.
This makes the projects of nationalization contemporary to and
determined by the reign of philology also incapable of mourning.
Nichanian argues that among Armenians, before Varuzhan, only Abovean in
the preface to his “Wounds of Armenia” (1841) intimates this incapacity
to mourn in relation to philology and the rise of the nation. This is
why Nichanian devotes an early chapter to Abovean.
By way of questioning the assumptions of 19th-century philology,
Nichanian criticizes mainstream theories of nationalism as failing to
consider the rise of national movements “as an effect of philological
nationalism” (9). The influence of philological nationalism on the
historical development of the national projects in general, and in the
Armenian case in particular, can hardly be exaggerated for Nichanian.
He writes:
[W]e are entirely dependent on this event [the advent of
philological nationalism], artistic or not, that is now, like modern
philology, two centuries old. It has made us what we are and we have no
means of escaping it. We do not live in a vacuum in which we might
simply have an opinion (good or bad) of nationalism that we could back
up with theories. We have therefore to return to the appropriating
event, the one that has made us what we are, “properly” are, and has,
additionally (but is it merely an addition?), given us our literary
language. We must explore the reasons for it and the forms of its
historical advent. We must prove capable of changing direction and
working our way back through all the historically sedimented layers
between us and the initial event, if it is possible to envisage such a
thing. In sum, we have to prove capable of “replaying” the event of the
nationalization. (9-10)
What theories of nationalization tragically ignore is the
appropriating nature of this event that conventional history has a
difficult time classifying. It is an appropriating event because
whenever a cultural ”us” is being distinguished, a political “us” is
being created with it. As we can see in the passage above, for
Nichanian the proper way of engaging with the legacy of nationalist
projects is by open-minded questioning. Instead of fully endorsing or
absolutely rejecting the historical legacy of nationalist projects, we
should try to desediment their assumptions.
By freely questioning this nationalist heritage, we attempt to become
a more thoughtful, nuanced, and questioning community. Nichanian’s
passage above and his books in general constantly practice and ask for
such a committed attitude of questioning. This is what faith in the
need for philosophy looks like, the idea with which I began my article.
I hope that by reading this latest publication by Nichanian, “Mourning
Philology: Art and Religion at the Margins of the Ottoman Empire,” no
matter how we relate to Armenian identity claims, we will be more aware
of its historical layers and of the responsibilities implied therein.
"Asbarez," August 21, 2014
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