Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
How we remember also affirms how we live our lives today and tomorrow: defensively or joyfully. Memory is dynamic and its movement is largely ungraspable. It can open new linguistic, economic, historical, and energetic combinations that either normalize or reinvent how the social field organizes itself. Yet the movement of memory cannot be clearly situated within space and time. Memory, unlike remembrance itself, is not in space and time, although it can be said to produce space-times. Memory does not happen to a body, it subsists throughout it. A body doesn't remember a defined slice of time, for memory is in excess of the chronological compartmentalizing of discrete temporal units. So, where do we start when we begin to think about memorial culture? How do we collectively grapple with trauma as it gnaws its way through the social field? Perhaps with a mixture of aggression, tears, outrage, overwhelming sorrow, and silence. How does culture answer to the memories that linger on in the wake of a trauma collectively experienced and the feeling that a community has been pushed to what seems like the end of the world? Questions such as these underpin a now commonly quoted statement Theodor W. Adorno made in 1949 that after the holocaust to write poetry is simply barbaric. This challenge has been met by the blossoming industry of memorialization – holocaust museums and memorials, holocaust remembrance day and so on.
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- Information
- Deleuze and Memorial CultureDesire Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008