Materiegedächtnis und das materielle Unbewusste. Eine neumaterialistische Versuchsanordnung um Karen Barad und Esther Kinsky

Abstract

Thinking with Karen Barad’s agential realism and in dialogue with Esther Kinsky’s literary texts, the essay considers how memory can be conceived as a property of the world. It locates the memory process in the interrelationships of bodies, the inscriptions that are made on and by them, and the re-inscriptions that emerge from their encounters. Looking at memory studies from this New Materialist perspective, raises the question of how bodies, and the traces left by and on them – human and non-human, living and non-living – are accounted for in conventional practices of remembering. Thus, Karen Barad’s agential realism reveals the study of bodies, traces, patterns, and matter (un)accounted for and (un)conscious, as an important dimension of reflection on memories and memory practices.