Grievable Lives

The Ethics of Memory in a Digital Age, 2014

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from 'what we know' to 'how we remember it'; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is 'memory' under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdiscipli-nary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014

This chapter considers the definitional and disciplinary politics surrounding the study of memory, exploring the various sites of memory study that have emerged within the field of communication. Specifically, this chapter reviews sites of memory and commemoration, ranging from places such as museums, monuments, and memorials, to textual forms, including journalism and consumer culture. Within each context, this chapter examines the ways in which these sites have interpreted and reinterpreted traumatic pasts bearing great consequence for national identity. It concludes with a discussion of the challenges set forth by new media for scholars engaging in studies of the politics of memory and identifies areas worthy of future research.

The Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Right, 2021

THE GUARDIANS OF MEMORY AND THE RETURN OF THE XENOPHOBIC RIGHT Translated by Alastair McEwen Copyright © Bompiani, 2019 USA Edition copyright © 2020 CPL EDITIONS All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-941046-32-6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface For a Memory Culture Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. By Michael Rothberg. 9 Introduction What Went Wrong? 19 By Valentina Pisanty Chapter I, The Duty of Memory. 31 Chapter II, The Discourse of History 75 Chapter III, Collective Memories 109 Chapter IV, New Cinema of the Shoah 153 Chapter V, The Spectacle of Evil 201 Chapter VI, Denial and Punishment 229 Appendix 263 End notes 285 Bibliography 307 Filmography 329 Index 335

Although this book is a history written by a philosopher, it is an important work for anyone with an interest in psychotherapies based on the retrieval of repressed memory. Backing's book emerges in the context of a growing battle in the United States between feminist and other groups wishing to expose the widespread incidence of child sexual abuse, and an opposing camp, organised around the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which has mobilised legal action against psychotherapists for destroying families by producing false memories of incest and sexual abuse. The aim of this book is not to support one of these positions and attack the other, or even to evaluate their competing arguments, but something rather more subtle and interesting: to try and uncover how ways of thinking about memory and the self developed historically to our current situation where this conflict could occur at all.

Memory …, 2012

2017

Aim of the series The nascent fi eld of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from 'what we know' to 'how we remember it'; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensifi cation of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is 'memory' under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination? More information about this series at

2020

Is memory an example of successful adaptation among homo sapiens? – this hypothesis permeates the 40 chapters of the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies. This volume edited by Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen approaches the field of memory studies from multiple perspectives, from sociology and philosophy to psychology and biology even. The book is divided into six parts, complemented with index, illustrations, all carefully edited. Part One presents a number of theories and perspectives. Here, main concepts of memory studies are discussed with the hindsight of several decades that have passed since they first stormed social sciences. Collective, communicative and cultural memory as well as their relation to history all receive attention there. Patrick H. Hutton's thorough analysis of Pierre Nora's 'sites of memory thirty years after' deserves special praise for its careful reconstruction of the process in which this concept arose, as well as for a succi...

The paper grapples with the cultural implications brought about by "the right to be forgotten" ruled by the European Court of Justice in May 2014. The main argument developed at length in this paper is that we are witnessing a momentous shift in the order of social memory, from an old-age paradigm of anamnesis characterized by a will to memory against the background set by a default of forgetting towards a paradigm of public amnesia characterized by a quest for privacy against an everexpanding digital memory.

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.

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 2009

Understanding the processes by which individuals and groups remember or forget the past has been a concern for centuries. However, over the past three decades, the study of memory has become an increasingly popular topic for scholarly inquiry. This surge in memory research has greatly contributed to the way in which we consider a broad range of issues from the most basic biological and cellular encoding and retrieval systems to the ways in which political and cultural systems facilitate the remembering or silencing of historical events. As a result, the concept of “memory” is now studied and taught across a wide range of academic disciplines from the natural and social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. In addition, the past three decades have witnessed an increase in the number of texts, scholarly journals, conferences, students, and practitioners interested in the understanding and function of memory. Of particular interest are burgeoning attempts among memory scholars seeking t ...