Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past

by Michael S. Roth

In these essays, Michael S. Roth uses psychoanalysis to build a richer understanding of history, and then takes a more expansive conception of history to decode the cultural construction of memory. He first examines the development in nineteenth-century France of medical criteria for diagnosing memory disorders, which signal fundamental changes in the understanding of present and past. He next explores links between historical consciousness and issues relating to the psyche, including trauma and repression and hypnosis and therapy. Roth turns to the work of postmodern theorists in connection with the philosophy of history and then examines photography's capacity to capture traces of the past. He considers how we strive to be faithful to the past even when we don't care about getting it right or using it productively. Roth concludes with essays defending pragmatic and reflexive liberal education. Drawing on his experiences as a teacher and academic leader, he speaks of living with the past without being dominated by it.

Genres: Nonfiction

293 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

"One has to say it, nostalgia is a disease that is tending to disappear and that is observed less frequently each day: the establishment of rapid communications, the inundation of a ceaselessly invasive civilization, erases one by one the moral colors that so often created the disease in other times. General cosmopolitanism results in one being attached to anything...everywhere materialist egoism is substituted for the noble instincts of the heart, everywhere the positive kills the imagination and its divine creations...the further we move away from a state of simplicity, the less we cling to the tombs of our ancestors and to the soil on which we were born."

Delmais-Eugène Pilet wrote this in his Thèse de médicine (entitled "De la nostalgie: considérée chez l'homme de guerre") in 1844. Our world has not changed much. This book looks into the origins of history, memory and forgetting, from a more or less Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. And yet there is something pre-Freudian in an analysis such as this (again from Pilet): "Joy is not the remedy for pain, nor love for hatred. In order to calm strong passions, one must first appear to share them: in sharing them one weakens them, and in weakening them one can succeed in extinguishing them".

I did buy this book because of the cover, and the title. The cover is a photograph by David Maisel (analysed in part 4 of the book on 'Photography and Piety') of human remains in Salem, OR, and like Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz, there is a trauma of history even in terms of the bodies buried (or not) in one's own town (my parents live in Salem, OR). As Agamben writes, "Everyone dies and lives in place of another, without reason or meaning; the camp is the place in which no one can truly die or survive in his own place. Auschwitz also means this much: that man, dying, cannot find any other sense in his death than this flush, this shame."

As an analysis of memory, history and trauma, as well as the sublime ("The sublime, like the traumatic, reminds us that the unrepresentable is always lurking if we dare pay attention to it"), this books succeeds as an incredible analysis of the risks and limits of our current liberal education and systems. Even in his analysis of photography, and the photo on the cover, we can see how Pilet in 1844 got it right, and that we haven't progressed much since then.

[EvaLovesYA · Rating 3 out of 5]

En rigtig god kilde ifb. med et semesterfag på engelskstudiet.

- Brugt på universitetet (engelsk)