In
one lecture Borges says that our ego is the least important thing for
us, and that no difference can be made between him feeling himself to
be Borges and me feeling myself to be A, B or C, because an ego, a self,
is common to us all, it is present in all living creatures. For this reason,
says Borges, immortality is necessary, not personal immortality but the
sort that resides in the memory of others and in the works we leave behind,
even if they, our works, are forgotten. I have, for instance, forgotten
Christ, but if by some chance I feel that I love my enemy, there is in
me, that very moment, Christ’s immortality. This can be more simply stated:
here, now, I am remembering these thoughts of Borges, and so I am at this
point in time exactly the one in whom Borges’s immortality is being created.
However, I am remembering Borges because I wish to say something about
the crimes that happened amongst us recently. Does that imply that the
culprits and their acts also become immortal in me as well as in everybody
else who thinks about them? May I, therefore, say “the immortal Borges”
and equally “the immortal Jack the Ripper”, or “the immortal Greta Garbo”,
or “the immortal ex-president”?
Recently one of the top members of the former nomenclature in Yugoslavia has compared the Hague Tribunal with a Nazi death camp, and the Hague Sheveningen prison with the gas chambers for the elimination of the Serbian people. This is, of course, an extravagant (to say the very least) opinion of a person whose personal interests are threatened and who was always inclined to strange comparisons anyway. But, although excessively strong, the words are carefully chosen. They fit precisely into the several-year-long official strategy of nationalistic manipulation that created the framework for any sort of violence. And the strategy was founded on one perverted theory of immortality, and on the suggestion of permanent imperiledness of the nation. I do not think the officials of the former regime had read Aristotle, but I do think that Aristotle's distinction between mortality and immortality may serve as a model better than Borges' for an understanding of the policy that we are talking about.
For Aristotle men are "the mortals, the only mortal things in existence, because unlike animals they do not exist only as members of a species whose immortal life is guaranteed through procreation. The mortality of men lies in the fact that individual life, with recognizable life-story from birth to death, rises out of biological life. This individual life is distinguished from all other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts through the circular movement of biological life. This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclicar order."
The dictator had intended, for his people, the sort of immortality that Aristotle sees in belonging to a species whose immortal life is guaranteed through procreation. Which, paradoxically, left only him and his political gangsters as mortals. Only they had their own recognizable life-story, their power, their money, and their crimes. All the rest of us were supposed to be immortal and exist only as members of the ethnos, the people -- someone a frightened observer, someone else as an unsuccessful member of opposition, someone as an accomplice. To many, this sort of immortality was more than enough. Perhaps this is why it all lasted so long. Today, also, many like this sort immortality, although it is not called nationalistic euphoria anymore, but moderate nationalism. Perhaps that is why even today nothing can be resolved properly.
But, as Borges would say, let us return to ourselves. How shall we become immortal, we who committed no crimes and have no intention of committing any in the future? Do we have to go along with moderate nationalism even though we have no inclination toward it? Well, this is where Borges helps. Here I am, for instance, watching a painting by Picasso. Immortal Picasso? No, no. I recognize myself, in the painting, and the woman also looks familiar. That is our immortality.
A fragment from Dusan Velickovic, "Mortal Men, Immortal Crimes", The Danish Center fo Holocaust and Genocide Violence, Copenhagen, 17 Nov. 2001)
