The Ethics of Remembering: The Living’s Responsibility toward the Dead

Authoritarian power sustains itself not only by governing the living but also by silencing the dead. To monopolize mourning is to monopolize meaning: the state determines which deaths are grievable and which are erased from collective consciousness. Against this moral asymmetry, the living inherit a responsibility that is both ethical and political—the task of remembering those whose suffering has been rendered unspeakable.

Walter Benjamin (1940) framed this duty as the historian’s “weak Messianic power”: each generation is entrusted with the redemption of the oppressed past. Memory, in this sense, is not nostalgia but justice deferred. To remember the dead is to interrupt the continuum of progress that normalizes violence. The “angel of history,” blown forward by the storm of progress, looks back upon the wreckage of the past; yet it is the gaze of the living that can momentarily resist that storm by naming what was lost.

Levinas (1969) deepens this insight by grounding responsibility in the encounter with the Other. For him, the face of the Other commands before any law or institution. Even when the Other is absent—or dead—the ethical demand persists. The dead continue to address the living through the trace of their suffering. This infinite responsibility transforms mourning from a private emotion into a moral relation that sustains humanity itself.

Paul Ricoeur (2000) situates this responsibility within an “ethics of memory.” To remember justly is to resist both vengeance and oblivion—to give voice to the victims without appropriating their pain. Memory, for Ricoeur, is a moral act: “the duty to remember is the duty to do justice through memory to another as a victim.” The living thus become custodians of truth, not through factual reconstruction alone but through the preservation of emotional fidelity to what has been silenced.

Jenny Edkins (2003) translates this ethics into political praxis. In Trauma and the Memory of Politics, she argues that state-sponsored commemoration often domesticates mourning into ritual obedience. True remembrance, by contrast, exposes the state’s failure to protect its citizens. To mourn the ungrievable is to re-politicize loss—to reclaim the dead from the machinery of national myth. In this sense, the ethics of remembering is also a politics of resistance.

Within China’s affective landscape, this responsibility acquires a particular resonance. From the unacknowledged victims of famine and persecution to those silenced by more recent disasters, the dead inhabit the margins of public discourse. Their absence defines the boundaries of permissible emotion. The living’s act of remembrance—writing names, lighting candles, or circulating forbidden images—constitutes a counter-political gesture. It reclaims feeling from regulation and restores empathy as a form of truth.

The ethics of remembering therefore bridges the political and the existential. It affirms that justice is not exhausted by institutions; it begins in the affective fidelity to those who can no longer speak. To remember the dead is to resist the moral anesthesia that authoritarianism demands. It is to insist that no suffering should vanish without witness, and that the human condition is shared precisely through vulnerability to loss. In this fidelity, the living become, however briefly, the conscience of history.