When Mark Augé argues that oblivion is the "life force of memory and remembrance its product," his privileging of forgetting over recollection places ethnology along the lines of Pontalis, pushed for a hastened "working through" as central to his memory politics. Fictionalizing life narratives of individuals and collective, if they were to be possible, need precisely this "principle operative" to living in the present. Recent protests in Hong Kong, however, challenges Augé's critique of Clifford Geertz and Paul Ricoeur, beckoning us to go back to questions of ethics and truth that memory offers when deployed consciously to counter dissident truth-procedure against the metanarrative of the Chinese Communist Party.
My ethnological tale of writing and theorizing Hong Kong protest is premised on the legacy bequeathed to us by Antigone. It revisits memorial services and rituals of two prominent young activists, Alex Chou and Chan Yin Lam, both of whom died in enacting their civil disobedience against authoritarian government and police force. Systematically discouraged, denied, and destroyed, the work of griefing and mourning are only possible in sweep, impromptu gatherings in respective areas of Hong Kong where death was traced. The mass' persistence to "publicize" and ritualize candlelight vigils in public spaces invites us to dialogue with Sophocles' Antigone and, in particular, Lacan's psychoanalytic discourse of ethics. Taking the cues from the notion of "até," the crime that Antigone assumes in her attempt to acknowledge the desire to bury Polynieces, my paper argues against the oblivion Augé postulates, insisting that forgetting not only forges a closure on a wound hardly acknowledged, but forecloses the ethics of politics altogether. If Antigone's unwavering desire underscores the desire of the Other, our memory of Alex Chou and Chan Yin Lam must be preserved, in rituals and otherwise, to puncture the closed narrative of totalitarian governance, regardless of how life-threating the act itself is.
My exploration begins with a historical account of the tragedies and the call for memory preservation of protestors. It moves on to converse with Lacan and Badiou's work on ethics and truth, bringing the psychoanalytic discourse to shed light on the neocolonial prohibition of memory. In avoiding a superimposition of theory on the "event" of Hong Kong, in the strict sense that Badiou theorizes it, I maintain the "third death" that protesters risk in memorializing previous civic warriors. My explication of memory is situated in conventions of domestic, minoritarian customs about soul departures, turning the whole discourse into a possible political theodicy. Unlike Antigone, whose assumption of criminality is her "second death," my study names all annihilation of individuals and communities as Hong Kong's "third death," a dying that disavows simple memories.
My wager is that we adhere to the lessons bequeathed to us by Freud: no single memory is accidental or explainable via a Proustian (in)voluntariness. Memories of real-life tragedy in Hong Kong continue to moralize and dialecticize fear and pity that contribute to the cartography and political ethnology of the city.
