memory

In his monumental history of ruins, Alain Schnapp gives an account of the multiple ways to resist oblivion, both material and immaterial. Ruins are not so much objects as processes implemented by societies in order to contemplate their place in history.

Russia has seen a huge increase in commemorations of the Soviet victory. Some of these parades are organized by civilians, while others are more official. But all of them reveal a rise in a nationalism that Putin would like to epitomise.

Ancient philosophy offered consolation for loss, separation, and death. Modern philosophy no longer does so, considering that it should limit its role to the quest for truth. This renunciation has, according to Michaël Fœssel, deep consequences for our current politics and their lack of any broader perspective.

In a multidisciplinary book, Catherine Coquio shows that behind the contemporary cult for memory and truth lies a crisis that is preventing us from moving forward.

Poet Jean-Christophe Bailly argues that contemporary urban spaces, whether sites of historic importance and cultural heritage or serving a purely functional purpose, no longer lend themselves to wandering and strolling. He compares the memories imposed in museums and on the construction sites of new cities with those of passers-by as they wander through the cityscape, the latter pensive memories he believes are the sole source of utopia.

Historical episodes of collective violence in the 20^th century have given rise to a series of debates which can be seen as “crises of memory”, according to Susan Rubin Suleiman. As these crises of memory unravel, they have an impact not only on collective memory but also on literature and the public sphere.

The American historian Hasia Diner sets out to dispel a “myth:” it is mistaken, she argues, to claim that American Jews showed little interest in the Holocaust before the 1970s. This so-called silence, which a number of authors have denounced in recent years, ignores the wide variety of memorial practices that American Jews followed in the postwar years.

The large-scale massacres of Jews on what was then Soviet Territory are not as well recorded as the industrialised mass murder perpetrated in the extermination camps. Since 1945, several initiatives have sought to bring to light the traces of a pre-war Jewish presence and the accounts of the killings, this more urgently so over recent years. Flash back on the work of those memory rescuers.