Między nieobecnością a obrazem

Abstract

In the 50’s and 60’s France, the memory of the Occupation and the Holocaust was displaced from the official discourse and the social consciousness because of the ambiguous attitude of this country during the Second World War. It comes back in the contemporary French literature and culture since the 70’s, in the particular way within the problem of visuality: films, photographs and literary imagination. In relation to the Michel de Certeau’s and Paul Ricoeur’s thought, the author of the paper claims that memory, which is traditionally connected in the western culture to the image, should be rather considered as a tactical play with the representation of the past in historical discourse. Writers of the French “after‑generations”, who inherited the memory of the Holocaust, use this tactics not to represent the past, which would be its “treason”, as Paul Ricoeur says, but to influence and change the individual and social consciousness.