3. For more about the interdiction of mourning, see Marc Nichanian, “Zabel Essayan: The End of Testimony and the Catastrophic Turnabout,” in Writers of Disaster (London: Gomidas Institute, 2002), a different version of which has been published in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2003). For more on the manipulation of mourning in South Africa, see Marc Nichanian, “Mourning and Reconciliation” in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, ed. Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2013). See also the remarkable essay by Mark Sanders, “Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning. For more about the same manipulation of mourning in Turkish Kurdistan, see His¸yar Özsoy, “Between Gift and Taboo: Death and the Negotiation of National Identity and Sovereignty in the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey” (PhD dissertation, Univ. of Texas at Austin, 2010), and Özsoy’s article in Turkish, “S¸eyh Said’in Kayıp Mezarı: Kürtlerin Egemenlik Mücadelesinde Hafıza-Mekan Diyalektig˘i,” Toplum ve Kuram 9 (2014): 307–38.
4. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004): 286–87.
5. Hayg Toroyan and Zabel Essayan, L’Agonie d’un peuple (The Agony of a People), trans. Marc Nichanian (Paris: Garnier, 2013).
6. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005): 300.
7. Ibid., 302.
8. In Armenian, the word for murder is սպանութիւն (spanut’iun) and the word for suicide is ինքնասպանութիւն (ink’naspanut’iun), the act of killing oneself. Vahakn here formulates the enigma of absolute equivalence, of the quasi simultaneity or the necessary relation of cause and effect between the murder and the suicide, without giving any explanation for that equivalence or necessity.
9. Marc Nichanian, Edebiyat ve Felaket (Literature and Catastrophe), trans. Ays¸egül Sönmezay (Istanbul: Iletis¸im, 2011).
10. The three volumes in the series have been published in French under the general title Entre l’art et le témoignage (Geneva: MétisPresse, 2006 and 2008). Only volumes one and two are available in English translation: Writers of Disaster, The National Revolution (London: Gomidas Institute, 2002), and Mourning Philology, trans. G. M. Goshgarian and Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2014).
11. Setrak Baghdoyan, Երբ դրախտը դարձաւ դժոխք (Yerb drakhdë dardzav dzhokhk’), ed. Marc Nichanian (Los Angeles: Abril, 2007).
12. See Marc Nichanian, “The Death of the Witness,” in History Unlimited: Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, eds. Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, forthcoming). This chapter takes up a debate begun twenty years earlier in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992) and at the conference of the same name. I evoke this debate in the third chapter of my book Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2009). It concerns both the status of testimony and the nature of the catastrophic event. On the subject of the murder of the witness as the primary intent or supreme effect of torture, see Idelber Avilar, The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2004): 47–49.
13. One of the most radical reactions to the forgiveness campaign came from Ayda Erbal. See Ayda Erbal, “Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologies: Revisiting the ‘Apology’ of Turkish Intellectuals,” in Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory: Transnational Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century, ed. Birgit Schwelling (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2012): 51–96. Erbal’s question is precisely the one described in this chapter: What are these few words of apology when they come after a century of denigration and humiliation of the victim?
14. This excerpt is taken from Derrida’s interview on Le Monde des débats in December 1999. See Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001): 58–59.
15. The term “jouissance” encompasses meanings not found in the English words “enjoyment,” “pleasure,” or “bliss.” In this case, jouissance is used in the Lacanian sense and is connected not only to psychoanalysis and transgression, but to domination and sexual pleasure. Here the word is left untranslated and not italicized, as it is found in English translations of Lacan’s work.
16. With regard to the “sacrificial system” in the empire, see my essay, “L’Empire du sacrifice,” L’Intranquille 1 (1992): 61–120, and my studies on the work of Hagop Oshagan in Le Roman de la Catastrophe (Geneva: MétisPresse, 2008), in particular chapters three through six, which deal with the sacrificial exploitation of the voice. I have also written about these questions in Armenian: “Երգին գերին” (Yergin gerin), Hask Armenological Review 7–8 (1995–96): 283–308, and “Աղբիւրի ակին, վրէպը վէպին մէջ” (Aghbiuri akin, vrêbë vêbin mej), Յակոբ Օշական։ Գիտաժողովի նիւթեր (Hakob Oshakan: Gitazhoghovi niut’er), ed. Lilit Galstyan (Yerevan: Yerevan State Univ. Press, 2011): 84–126.
Major Works by Zareh Vorpouni
1. Վարձու սենեակ (Room for Rent) was published in 1939, but the book was not released until 1945 because of the turmoil of World War II.
2. The seventh novel in Հալածուածները (The Persecuted) series, Տիգրանուշի եւ Նուարդ (Dikranoushie and Nvart), is unpublished.
Biographical Notes
Zareh Vorpouni, ca. 1978. Courtesy of Hayasdan Monthly, Paris.
Zareh Vorpouni
Zareh Vorpouni (né Euksuzian) was born in May 1902 in the Ottoman town of Ordu along the Black Sea. In 1915, his father was killed during the Armenian genocide and Vorpouni, along with his mother and siblings, found refuge with a Turkish family before escaping to Sebastopol, Crimea. In 1919, the family immigrated to Constantinople and Vorpouni resumed his education at the Berberian School with the few Western Armenian writers who survived the genocide. His first piece of writing—a poem entitled Գառնուկս (My Lamb)—was published during this period in the newspaper Ժողովուրդի ձայն (Voice of the People), which was edited at that time by his teacher, poet Vahan Tekeyan.
In August 1922, Vorpouni fled Constantinople in the months of turmoil before the founding of the Turkish Republic. In the 1920s, he lived in Marseille and Paris, joined the Communist Party, and worked a variety of odd jobs. During this time, Vorpouni edited two Armenian-language journals, Նոր Հաւատք (New Faith) and Երեւան (Yerevan), and he published his short stories and essays in the dozens of French Armenian literary reviews of the era, including Անահիտ (Anahid) and Անի (Ani). It was in Yerevan that a version of his first novel, The Attempt, appeared as a short story in 1927. For exact citations of his works in these journals, see Kevork B. Bardakjian, A Reference Guide to Modern Armenian Literature, 1500–1920 (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2000): 445.
In 1939, Vorpouni was drafted into the French army, captured by the German army, and lived as a prisoner of war in Magdeburg until the armistice in 1945. He returned to literature in 1958 while spending his days working at a restaurant in Paris. Vorpouni’s crowning literary legacy is Հալածուածները (The Persecuted), a series of seven novels in which The Candidate is the second.
Vorpouni died in 1980 in Bagneux, a suburb of Paris.
Contributors
JENNIFER MANOUKIAN is a writer and translator of Western Armenian and French. She earned her master’s degree from the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University and her bachelor’s degree from the Departments of French and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. Her first translation—The Gardens of Silihdar, the memoir of Ottoman Armenian writer Zabel Yessayan—was published in 2014.
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SHKHAN JINBASHIAN is an author, art critic, and translator of literary works. Formerly an editor with Armenian International Magazine and The Armenian Reporter, he is the author of the Armenian-language novel Արխիւ հասնումի (Archive of Arrival). His more than twenty English translations include Aram Sahakian’s Our Cross, Mikayel Shamtanchian’s The Fatal Night, Yeghishe Charents’s The Nayirian Dauphin, Vahan Totovents’s New York, and Sebuh Aguni’s The Crime of the Ages.
MARC NICHANIAN was professor of Armenian Studies at Columbia University until 2007, after which he began to teach regularly as a visiting professor at Sabancı University. His most recent publications are Mourning Philology in English, Patker, patum, patmut’iun (Image, Story, History) in Armenian, and Le Sujet de l’histoire: Vers une phénoménologie du survivant in French. He has also published Armenian translations of three novels by Maurice Blanchot.
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