Abstract

This dissertation offers a critical assessment of the traditional understanding of memory and, on the basis of this analysis, it interrogates memory's role in the construction of a narrative and of collective identity. ;The dissertation is also an attempt to "work through" the interminability and the alterity of the inherited past. The first step of my argument is to acknowledge the forgotten as "forgotten" . Second, I interrogate the nature of memory, pointing to the shift from the epistemological to the "ontological" , and from the ontological to the "ethical" significance memory bears. Third, I analyze the creation of memory places: history, tradition, and self-identity; and I compare the structure of "the writing of the disaster" to the structure of trauma. Fourth, I focus on the ethico-political implications of witnessing to and representing the offensive event. Fifth, after Nancy and Derrida, I suggest that the context within which we should try to understand trauma and to ask the question of memory and forgetting is the relation with alterity--i.e., community. ;The introduction is devoted to an analysis of the place of forgetting in some of the most significant philosophical theories of memory , and in some contemporary novels . This serves as a foray into an understanding of a forgetting which is neither an omission nor the result of negligence, but a condition for the possibility of signification and of practice. The first chapter treats Plato's anamnesis and the second chapter explores Nietzsche's "active forgetting" in the context of his notion of Eternal Return. The third chapter is devoted to Duras's Hiroshima mon amour, Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller, and Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars. I focus here on the relationship between narrative, representation and memory, and offer a critique of nationalism in the light of my analysis of memory. ;I conclude by foregrounding the possibility for a non-totalizing understanding of memory and community