"Damnatio Memoriae and the Power of Remembrance. Reflections on Memory and History" (original) (raw)
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Re-visiones, 2018
In this era of global neoliberal necro-capitalism, we are increasingly faced with a political and social amnesia that yields results without the past producing more and more processes of dehistorization and depoliticization. In these processes is fundamental the logic of repetition (neoliberal), which produces at least two different procedures of (de) historicization. On the one hand, we have the logic of the Western neoliberal world, which functions as a mere transhistorical machine; On the other hand, in the eastern and southern regions of Europe we detect forced techniques to accept historicization as totalization. In both cases, the result is a suspension of the history whose primary intention is to discard any alternative it contains. Gržinic's idea is to offer some examples and, even more, try to define these processes on a much broader scale, in order to see their political, social and cultural consequences.
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Philosopher Jeffrey Barash seeks to clarify the concept of collective memory, which has taken on wide-ranging meanings in contemporary scholarship. Returning to the original insight of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs during the 1920s, he grounds the concept in the living social memory of the present, whose sphere is widened by its capacity to draw upon a past beyond its ken through the symbolization of its remembrance. He offers two preliminary propositions: first, there is a history to the way philosophers have contextualized collective memory through the ages; second, there is a politics in the transmission of collective memory, highly visible in the uses of memory by mass media in the contemporary age. He builds his argument around four interrelated interpretations concerning: the ever more circumscribed role attributed to collective memory in the passage from antiquity into modernity; the dependence of collective memory upon living memory; the rising power of media to mold collective memory to present purposes; and historical understanding vis-àvis evocation of collective memory as oppositional ways of accessing the past. I close with commentary that places Barash's philosophical interpretation within the context of contemporary historiographical practice, with particular attention to the scholarship of French historian Pierre Nora on the French national memory, and that of German scholars Jan and Aleida Assmann on the preservation and transmission of memorable cultural legacies.
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Efforts to recover and preserve the historical memory of past violence and injustice are today increasingly widespread in countries wrestling with, or emerging from, violent conflict. This reflects the rise of memory studies as a distinct field of inquiry as well as the growing recognition of the importance of centrally including the voices of victims in the elaboration of narratives of past suffering and evil. However, as an “essentially contested concept,” historical memory faces numerous challenges that have to be navigated when conducting applied historical memory work in violence-inflected settings. Among the pitfalls, historical memory work faces the unresolved tension between history and memory, which gives substance to claims that forgetting should trump remembering. Furthermore, owing to it being anchored in the subjective domain of memory, applied historical memory work risks deepening prevailing patterns of hatred, enmity and exclusion, in addition to being instrumentalis...
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Teksty Drugie, 2016
Cognizing the other, us vs others or our own vs someone else's within a divided group, along with processes of diffusional intercultural permeation, hybridizing and fusing the heterogeneous (thus conditioning not only the imitative and dependent, but also the original and specific)-undoubtedly, these were the most fundamental problems for the humanities and culture of the previous century. It is not without reason that they have given rise to a wide range of studies, commentaries, philosophical and theoretical conceptualizations. It has long been obvious that debate over these matters has not been restricted to academia, but first and foremost in the cultural arena with all its conflicting historical, political and social issues. One could say that they constitute one of the few domains in which the humanities, broadly understood, can carry out research which is not only cognitively and substantially valuable, but also potentially good and socially useful, depending on the effects of implementing programmes which are (socially) corrective, formational and educational in nature.
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Researchers have raised questions about recovering traumatic situations such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam war or the fratricidal massacres in Yugoslavia. Although some classic studies have identified important aspects relating to history and memory, there are several ways of dealing with the past, all of which involve interests, power and exclusion. The politics of just memory with regard to crimes committed in the past, a debate in which various academic areas as well as society in general have been involved, depends on processes of selection and also on elements which extend beyond the scope of human reason. It is necessary to find a balance between an obsession with the past and attempts to impose forgetting. Our aim, therefore, is to extend our understanding of history, memory and forgetting, emphasizing their limits as well as their ethical and moral implications.
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This article presents an account of collective memory which explains its relationship to individual memory on the one hand and to history on the other. It argues that the role of memory, both individual and collective, is not merely cognitive; it is also normative. That is, memory does not simply transmit information from the past to the present; it also transmits responsibilities. Insofar as collective memory has a cognitive aspect, it makes claims about the past. These may be confirmed or disconfirmed by historical research. This does not mean that collective memory is just bad history. It is more like history written in the first person, and its role is to inform the present generation of its responsibilities to the past.
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This paper discusses the issue of the relationship of history and memory. Memory becomes a topic in historical discourses as it deals with identity, especially when we speak of collective memory. The paper presents the history of the relationship of history and memory and suggests a thesis according to which the close interaction between these two concepts can solve the crisis of identity that has been most urgent in our days.