Diogenes articles from March 2004

Diogenes archives from March 2004

Paradoxes of memory: foreword.
March 22, 2004... In times when history is at its most tense, we understandably turn back to interrogate memory, to blame it for opportunities lost in time, to demand convincing answers, to look for plausible ways forward. We do not always notice that history is...

History and memory: construction, deconstruction and reconstruction.
March 22, 2004... For once our societies are in agreement with the social and human sciences, that is, the sciences that have made these societies their subject of study and claim to provide them with a knowledge of themselves that the societies treat with a...

The construction of collective memory: from Franco to democracy.
March 22, 2004... Theoretical introduction A community's collective memory of a period or a concrete event largely consists of the representations shared by most of those, individuals or groups, who create that story. These representations are organized...

Migrant memories and temporality.
March 22, 2004... Social memory does not exist only as a collection of remembrances that a group recognizes as theirs. Much more than simple forms of expression of memory, the more or less ritualized situations it is involved in serve to express its continuity....

Afro-Brazilian identity and memory.
March 22, 2004... The problem of the construction of memory that faces the Afro-Brazilian population presents itself as more than a simple need for an identity connected to an original past, but in addition as essential, because for historical reasons their...

Female memory in narrative.
March 22, 2004... It is with a woman's memory and body that I am happy to serve literature. In the entrails of past ages I try to search, among so many memories, for women's memory in particular. I am trying to find out how this memory is made up, from what...

The Eros of memory.
March 22, 2004... ... Let us situate ourselves vis-a-vis the judge that affects each of our hours and that we call 'memory'. Memory is a law-court in permanent session but it is arbitrary: it hands down gratuitous reward and generous punishment. Whole years of...

Imagination and memory in Stendhal.
March 22, 2004... Stendhal said of one of his most significant works, De l'amour, published in 1822, that it was 'ideological'. 'Ideology' in a pre-Marxist sense, the meaning used by Comte Destutt de Tracy, a contemporary of Napoleon, to whom we owe the term's...

The social construction of memory and forgetting.
March 22, 2004... The state and civil society's memory Francais, vous avez la memoire courte (You French have short memories) was the title of a film showing in a cinema opposite Saint-Sulpice church. It was the early 1960s; scarcely 15 years had passed...

Trace and forgetting: between the threat of erasure and the persistence of the unerasable.
March 22, 2004... I need my memories, they are my documents... Memory is no good if you call on it, you have to wait for it to jump on you. Louise Bourgeois, New York artist In search of a preliminary understanding of the "trace': three...

Memory and distance: learning from a gilded silver vase (Antwerp, c. 1530).
March 22, 2004... 1. In 1929, a few months before his death, Aby Warburg wrote an introduction to his last intellectual project: the 'Picture Atlas' (Bilderatlas) which he dedicated to Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, whose name was inscribed on the front...

Memory as a freeze-frame: extracts from 'looking at war'.
March 22, 2004... The war America waged in Vietnam, the first to be witnessed day after day by television cameras, introduced the home front to a new intimacy with death and destruction. Ever since, battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine...

Memory and its Expressions. On Two Recent Books by Emmanuel Anati.
March 22, 2004... To philosophers, Emmanuel Anati's work is interesting for two reasons. On the one hand it has assembled an iconography of the origins of human history that covers the whole of primitive art, developing methods of deciphering that have...