Memory and Innovation in Post-Holocaust France

Abstract

This special issue explores different representations of cultural memory in France since the Holocaust, a period overshadowed by historical trauma (wars, decolonization, genocide), in which memory has become an increasingly dominant cultural obsession. Contested representations of cultural memory have given rise to important critical and philosophical debates, which pivot on the relation between memory and history, the individual and the collective. Covering a broad range of spheres including literature, cultural history and theory, psychoanalysis and film, the essays collected here draw on and contribute to these critical debates in analyses that seek to rethink the relation between memory and representation. Where recent critical work on cultural memory has tended to emphasize its failures and frustrations, these essays highlight a different model of memory as innovation and creative representation. Central to all the essays is the idea that memories are constructed and mediated via specific culturally constructed frames, within which individual memory is irrevocably and sometimes troublingly bound up with collective modes of remembering. Yet the representations of memory examined here show how memory can work productively in and through tensions such as the relation between the individual and the collective without trying to overcome them: these tensions remain as crucial elements in the quest to find new forms of representation of memory.