“Ultimately, it is the genealogy of identity-construction as a narrative without closure that constitutes the irreducible heterogeneity of the dead as historical agents who resist all of our attempts to construct their existence as a function of our own and to manipulate the traces of their acts as objects in the construction of our own meanings. But acceptance of the ultimate otherness and agency of the dead also, paradoxically, entails a recognition of the presence of the past and the possibility of potential dialogue with those who struggled to narrativize their lives in other worlds in other times.
Critical reflection on our experience of the tangible presence of the dead as unassimilable existences thus does not sustain the kind of identity politics that would secure us in a stable, certain closed identity, but it also does not leave us in the vertiginous freedom of undecidability in which every choice we make about who we are or want to be is grounded only in the abyss of our absolute freedom. Instead, it places us in an ethical position of being called to respond to the presence of the other, to engage in a relationship across difference in which we recognize the agency of the other as a self-narrativizing subject like us, and as a possible other within ourselves. Historical critique entangles us with the ongoing presence of the dead as our partners and companions, opponents and allies, not in a community of centered collective identity but in a rhizomatic network of expanding entanglements. The condition of connectedness or relation is that nothing is the same. Difference binds us to the dead.”
— John Toews, “Historical Consciousness in the ‘Postmodern Condition’”, 274-5
