Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Historical Memory and the Limits of Retrospection
- 2 Why Memory? Reflections on a Politics of Mourning
- 3 Memory and Imputation
- 4 Denial and the Ethics of Memory
- 5 Warming Up for the War: The Cultural Transmission of Violence in Spain since the Early Twentieth Century
- 6 Guernica as a Sign of History
- 7 Delenda est Catalonia: The Unwelcome Memory
- 8 Allez, Allez! The 1939 Exodus from Catalonia and Internment in French Concentration Camps
- 9 The Corpse in One's Bed: Mercè Rodoreda and the Concentrationary Universe
- 10 Transatlantic Reversals: Exile and Anti-History
- 11 The Weight of Memory and the Lightness of Oblivion: The Dead of the Spanish Civil War
- 12 Between Testimony and Fiction: Jorge Semprún's Autobiographical Memory
- 13 It Wasn't This: Latency and Epiphenomenon of the Transition
- 14 Window of Opportunity: The Television Documentary as After-Image of the War
- 15 Anachronism and Latency in Spanish Democracy
- 16 Negationism and Freedom of Speech
- 17 Exhaustion of the Transition Pact: Revisionism and Symbolic Violence
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Why Memory? Reflections on a Politics of Mourning
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Historical Memory and the Limits of Retrospection
- 2 Why Memory? Reflections on a Politics of Mourning
- 3 Memory and Imputation
- 4 Denial and the Ethics of Memory
- 5 Warming Up for the War: The Cultural Transmission of Violence in Spain since the Early Twentieth Century
- 6 Guernica as a Sign of History
- 7 Delenda est Catalonia: The Unwelcome Memory
- 8 Allez, Allez! The 1939 Exodus from Catalonia and Internment in French Concentration Camps
- 9 The Corpse in One's Bed: Mercè Rodoreda and the Concentrationary Universe
- 10 Transatlantic Reversals: Exile and Anti-History
- 11 The Weight of Memory and the Lightness of Oblivion: The Dead of the Spanish Civil War
- 12 Between Testimony and Fiction: Jorge Semprún's Autobiographical Memory
- 13 It Wasn't This: Latency and Epiphenomenon of the Transition
- 14 Window of Opportunity: The Television Documentary as After-Image of the War
- 15 Anachronism and Latency in Spanish Democracy
- 16 Negationism and Freedom of Speech
- 17 Exhaustion of the Transition Pact: Revisionism and Symbolic Violence
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We are an experienced and chastened people that, for lack of memory, gets little advantage from its punishments and its experience.
Angel Ganivet, Ideárium EspañolGravestones always also serve as ‘monuments’ warning the living not to forget their dead—and yet people often forget all too easily, for ‘life goes on.’” (Weinrich 24). These words from Harald Weinrich's magisterial book on forgetting are an appropriate point of departure for a reflection on the historical memory, because they express the essence of the problem. People forget, often deliberately, against the logic that says that one cannot forget what one tries to forget. Kant wrote in his notebook a reminder that he should forget his assistant, Martin Lampe, whom he missed after firing him. If people usually write what they wish to remember, Kant, in the matter of his servant, wrote to remind himself to forget (122). But if Kant wished to forget Lampe, most people feel a moral duty to remember their departed ones. To that end they institute private acts of remembrance: keeping mementos, discharging promises and obligations to the deceased, filial or marital acts of piety, and often carrying on an internal form of “presencing” that sets limits to the process of mourning and disengagement. Societies are especially oblivious. Like individuals, they exist in time, and time means fleetingness and loss. But, unlike people, societies have no emotional attachment to their “memories” and turn their links to the past into commemoration.
Societies objectivize “memory” through monuments and diverse technologies of retrieval. One of the most recent is the ascent of the discourse on the historical memory in the wake of the human catastrophes of the twentieth century, in particular the Jewish Holocaust, which a number of scholars identify as the origin of the late twentieth century's preoccupation with memory. Whether or not it is the actual source for the rise of the historical memory, the Holocaust has been at its center. It is largely responsible for the emphasis on victimization and for the moral injunction against forgetting, lest the horrific acts be repeated. Paradoxically, for this discourse it is not memory that keeps the past alive with all its dangers, but forgetting that risks reliving it all over again.
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- The Ghost in the ConstitutionHistorical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society, pp. 22 - 38Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017