Philosophical Reflections on the Ways of Memory and History (original) (raw)

New Book - New Book - New Book - Collective Memory and the Historical Past

If collective remembrance is as old as human communal existence and the age-old practices that forge its cohesion, theoretical preoccupation with the phenomenon of collective memory is relatively recent. The present book accounts for this paradox through interpretation of the novel function accorded to collective memory which, in a modern context of discontinuity and dislocation, reoccupies the space that has been left vacant by the decline of a series of traditional assumptions concerning human socio-political identity. In this situation, where memory is widely called upon as a source of collective cohesion, this book aims to elaborate a philosophical basis for the concept of collective memory and to delimit its scope in relation to the historical past. Extensive analysis is devoted to the complex spatio-temporal and conceptual modes of symbolic configuration of collective memory in the public sphere. These modes of symbolic configuration have undergone radical transformation over the past century that is both reflected and engendered by the new technologies of mass communication through their capacity to simulate direct experience and remembrance by means of the image. Such transformations make increasingly palpable the limited scope of collective memory, rooted in a rapidly changing context, in the face of an historical past beyond its pale. The growing awareness of these limits, however, and of the opacity of the historical past, need not fuel historical skepticism: as the novels of Walter Scott, Proust and W. J. Sebald serve to illustrate, it may place in evidence subtle nuances of temporal context that are emblematic of historical reality.

Memory and History: An Introduction

Collective Memory and Collective Identity: Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History in Their Context, 2021

Memory and History: An Introduction "Collective memory" is one of the issues that has attracted the attention and discussion of scholars internationally across academic disciplines over the past five decades.1 The origin of its theoretical frameworks derives from pioneering works of great thinkers in the 19th century. Despite the fact that Émile Durkheim never utilized the expression "collective memory," he is regarded as the one who gave the foundation to the idea, specifying the social importance of remembrance in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim characterizes society as an objective reality that maintains "collective consciousness." For him, "collective consciousness" has an impact on individual consciousness.2 "Collective consciousness" is the supreme form of the psychological life, because it is "the consciousness of the consciousnesses."3 Durkheim asserts that being located outside of or above individual and local contingencies, the "collective consciousness" sees things through their perpetual and essential nature, which it shapes into transmittable ideas. On the other hand, Henri Bergson accentuates the subjective facets of time, perception, reality and memory when he writes: Memory actualized in an image differs, then, profoundly from pure memory. The image is a present state, and its sole share in the past is the memory from which it arose. Memory, on the contrary, powerless as long as it remains without utility, is pure from all admixture of sensation, is without attachment to the present, and is, consequently, unextended.4 One generation later, Maurice Halbwachs, who was a student of both Durkheim and Bergson, presented the term "collective memory" in a sociological context, employing it not only to allude to collective portrayals but also to indicate the 1 The literature that discusses "collective memory" is extensive. A few selected monographs should suffice to get a glimpse of the general situation in current scholarship:

History and Collective Memory: The Succeeding Incarnations of an Evolving Relationship

Philobiblon. Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities, 2013

Collective memory, despite its status as patrimonial notion within sociological tradition, recently escaped this rigid disciplinary straitjacket, becoming a cardinal concept in the contemporary discourse of social sciences and humanities. Understanding the nature of collective memory cannot be reached before clarifying the relation between memory and history. This paper analyzes the different configurations under which the relationship between history and collective memory evolved throughout time. The central argument advances the idea that collective memory crystallizes at the area of confluence between history and mythistory, taking historical facts from the former, and organizing them according to the mythical logic of the latter.

Collective Memory and Historical Time

2021

Over the past decades, the phenomenon of collective memory has exercised a growing influence as an intellectual and a public concern. To account for the contemporary preoccupation with this phenomenon, this article centers on the emergence of the discourse of "collective memory" in the years after the First World War. According to its central argument, the discourse of "collective memory" was called forth by the decline of more traditional assumptions concerning the sources of sociopolitical cohesion in the wake of the ever more radical experience, over the course of the 20th century, of dislocation and discontinuity in the conditions of human socio-political existence. This reorientation of the framework of analysis of sociopolitical cohesion calls for the corresponding elaboration of a philosophy of finite group perspectives involving - as illustrated by the writings of Maurice Halbwachs and of Marcel Proust – the careful demarcation of the horizon of collectiv...

From Collective Memory to Commemoration

To have "memory" of an event, humans have to experience it themselves. Learning of an event secondhand, humans acquire knowledge, but not memory. Yet, when sociologists speak of "collective memory," they routinely include as agents of memory those who do not have firsthand experience of a past event. This inclusion has been taken for granted ever since Maurice Halbwachs (1992) formulated his Durkheimian theory of the relationship between collective memory and commemoration in terms of group solidarity and identity: collective memory emerges when those without firsthand experience of an event identify with those who have such experience, defining both sets of actors as sharing membership in the same social group. The creation of this affect-laden, first-person orientation to a past event is at the crux of commemoration-simply put, a ritual that transforms "historical knowledge" into "collective memory" consisting of mnemonic schemas and objects that define meaning of a past event as a locus of collective identity. According to Halbwachs's formulation, commemoration is a vehicle of collective memory.

A Meeting Place between the Individual and the Collective: the Cultural Memory

HyperCultura, 2014

A remembrance can be oral, written or visual and reflects the behavior of memory, which proceeds by associations, in "leaps and bounds", remembering what it wants to remember. If memory becomes a "documented culture" or a culture "organized in a social memory", then individual memory becomes historical and shared, it becomes a strong element of the identity in which it was imprisoned and evokes the memory of all those who lived the same historical period. If individual memory is important in order to live the present, collective memory is just as important, because it strengthens the sense of belonging and reawakens the past. In the current study, the meaning of being the same age and the significance of "generational" remembrance will be explored. Modern technologies provide great ways to remember, because they rekindle old memories and make us appreciate past events of our life. Perhaps the most widespread technology is television, which in ...

The Ubiquitous Presence of the Past? Collective Memory and International History

The International History Review, 2013

This article explores the relationship between international history and memory studies. It argues that collective memory demands to be taken much more seriously than it has been by international historians to date and clarifies what this might involve. It comprises four sections. The first provides an overview of the growth of memory studies, identifying some recent trends and conceptual issues. The second explores how international historians have engaged with it hitherto, revealing that while memory has emerged onto the agenda of the discipline, with the production of some important studies, analysis of it still remains rather patchy and underdeveloped. It also contextualises a putative turn to memory against the ongoing 'cultural turn' in international history. The third lays out a research agenda by identifying some of the core issues to be differentiated in the study of memory within international history, exploring the conceptual issues these entail and pointing to relevant resources from within the memory studies literature that speak to them. A final section anticipates and discusses some potential objections to the argument of the article. It concludes that taking the challenge of memory studies seriously may demand a thoroughgoing reorientation of our practice.