Memory, historiography and trauma: the limits of representation

This essay thinks through the gap – and works within the interstices – between “history” and “memory.” Moving deftly across a wide terrain of writing on the subject, it delineates: the limits of “elegiac” accounts of the loss of collective memory in the face of modern historiography; the solipsistic calls for entirely replacing history-writing with memory-work; and the principally valuable emphases that see “cultural memory” as signifying the different ways in which the past is represented and remembered. Instead, the essay attends to the epistemological issues raised by the subject(s) of memory, asking that if memory does not give unmediated access to the past – but is also a form of representation, and thus a linguistic artefact – then what promise or possibility might this concept and process hold? On the one hand, the essay seizes upon epistemologically and ethically fraught representations of the holocaust in history and as memory, in order to ask critical questions concerning the place of violence, pain, and trauma in the narration and imagination of the past. On the other hand, it draws in the political-intellectual challenge posed by movements of the marginalized, and the structuralist and post-structuralist critique of knowledge-forms to suggest how memory – now understood a particular instance of a more global phenomenon – can be a manner of re-presenting the pasts of particular groups. In these ways, the essays calls attention – in intriguing, often implicit, ways – to the important recent emphases in the discussions of the nature of pasts and histories.