“I can still see their faces”: An Ethics of Organizational Commemoration

We explore the politics of commemoration at the 10th anniversary of a catastrophic bushfire event to explore how vulnerability to the Other can set the terms for an ethics of commemoration. Through an interpretative analysis of interviews with firefighters and speeches of politicians at the time of the official commemorative event of the Black Saturday fires we respond to calls to better understand our ethical obligation to remember those whose lives are lost during catastrophic events. We draw on Levinas’ idea of an ‘ethics of ethics’ to theorise an embodied and emplaced ethics of commemoration. We argue that there are two aspects to this ethics of commemoration. First, it involves recognising that alterity lies at the centre of commemoration and that the obligation to remember comes from the unwilled address of the Other. Second, this response to the other extends beyond remembering and memorialization to actional justice. For the fire-fighters in our study, actional justice involved a commitment to learn the lessons from past fires and to do things differently in the future.