History, memory, identity

The present paper examines certain salient features of the his tory-memory-identity relation. The common feature underpinning most contemporary manifestations of the memory craze seems to be an insecurity about identity, an insecurity that generates an excessive pre occupation with 'memory'. In the face of memory's valorization, what should be the attitude of the historian? At the present moment there is a pathetic and sometimes tragic conflict between what 'memory' expresses and confirms, namely, the demands made by subjectivities, and the demand, essential to any scientific discipline, for proof. The paper explores this conflict and argues that neither term can be reduced to the other. It suggests that one needs to conceptualize the field of history as involving inevitable limits to historical knowledge, such that both history and memory are seen as inadequate. In this way one avoids both the arrogance of a would-be definitive history and the 'arrogance of authenticity' that all too often accompanies claims for memory.

[1]  N. Spaños.  Multiple Identities and False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective , 1996 .

[2]  M. Kenny.  Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture , 1998 .

[3]  A. Nandy.  History's forgotten doubles , 1995 .

[4]  Elizabeth F. Loftus,et al.  The myth of repressed memory : false memories and allegations of sexual abuse , 1994 .

[5]  R. Ekins.  Male Femaling: A grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing , 1998 .

[6]  R. Weisberg,et al.  Probing the limits of representation : Nazism and the "Final Solution" , 1994 .

[7]  M. Bieber.  Multiple Identities and False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective , 1998 .

[8]  Lewis A. Coser,et al.  Collective Memory , 2022, Progress in Brain Research.

[9]  Michael Hughes.  The unmasterable past, history, holocaust and German national identity , 1990 .

[10]  H. White.  The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation , 1988 .

[11]  N. Dirubbo.  Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse , 1992 .

[12]  Richard J. Walter,et al.  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (review) , 2012 .

[13]  E. Cadava,et al.  Who Comes After the Subject , 1991 .

[14]  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,et al.  The Gay Science , 2021, Philosophy after Darwin.

[15]  S. Greenblatt,et al.  Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare , 1981 .

[16]  C. Fox.  Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain , 1991 .

[17]  Alon Confino.  Collective memory and cultural history: Problems of method , 1997 .

[18]  Pierre Lieux de mémoire,et al.  Realms of Memory Rethinking the French Past , 1996 .

[19]  E. Hobsbawm.  The Historian between the Quest for the Universal and the Quest for Identity , 1994 .

[20]  M. Snedeker,et al.  Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse And The Making Of A Modern American Witch Hunt , 1995 .

[21]  F. Dubet,et al.  Penser le sujet : autour d'Alain Touraine , 1995 .

[22]  M. Halbwachs,et al.  La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte : étude de mémoire collective , 1941 .

[23]  Charles Taylor.  Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity , 1990 .

[24]  Judith Lewis Herman,et al.  Trauma and Recovery , 2015 .

[25]  Allen Johnson,et al.  The historian and historical evidence , 1926 .

[26]  V. Milstein,et al.  The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales , 1987 .

[27]  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,et al.  Twilight of the Idols , 1889 .

[28]  A. Teixeira.  The content of the Form: narrative discourse and historical representation , 1997 .

[29]  L. Wurgaft.  Identity in world history: a postmodern perspective , 1995 .

[30]  M. Edmundson.  Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars , 1992 .

[31]  Alon Confino.  The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 , 1997 .

[32]  Siegfried Kracauer.  History, the last things before the last , 1969 .

[33]  J. Lloyd,et al.  The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History , 1990, Greece and Rome.

[34]  Richard Terdiman.  Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis , 1993 .

[35]  B. Anderson,et al.  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism , 1986 .

[36]  S. Knapp.  Collective Memory and the Actual Past , 1989 .

[37]  Jay Prosser.  Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality , 1998 .

[38]  Walker Connor.  When is a nation , 1990 .

[39]  J. Blommaert.  Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. , 1998 .

[40]  O. Sacks,et al.  The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales , 1985 .

[41]  L. Farrand.  THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION. , 1897, Science.

[42]  J. Butler.  Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , 1990 .

[43]  Thomas T. Spencer,et al.  Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution". , 1993 .