How must we tell the history of the defeated?

On Friday evening, I will be delivering a lecture at SESAM Identity 2.0, organized by EASA Cyprus.
My lecture will be titled “How must we tell the history of the defeated?”

Systematic dialectical thinking shows that the identity of any given thing is inherently paradoxical: it is shaped through difference and contradiction. In narrating the history of a subject (be it a people, a place, or any other determinate identity), one must trace its unfolding contradiction and subsequent resolutions, which ultimately give rise to the formation of the identity. As Hegel famously stated: “the truth is the whole.”

However, such a systematic dialectical history often becomes the story of the victor, because it is recounted from the perspective of the dominant subject – the identity that has established itself after having resolved past contradictions. Walter Benjamin reminds us that if we are to tell the story of the defeated and the marginalized, it must instead be a story of catastrophe. The history of the defeated is a bleak history of destruction, where instead of a chain of events leading to a coherent identity, we witness an accumulating wreckage of devastation, a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage. 

In this lecture, I will examine Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis from Theses on the Philosophy of History and explore its implications for architects in understanding history and identity.