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Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knv269

1468-2931

Max Silverman,

African history and culture studies

The proliferation of studies of cultural memory in recent years, especially related to traumatic events such as the Holocaust or colonialism, can induce ‘memory fatigue’. This book, however, stands out from the crowd. Debarati Sanyal is a nineteenth and twentieth century specialist and a major theorist of the protean nature of memory. Her approach in this book, which she sets out in a wonderful Introduction, is to challenge the notion that memories are specific, singular, and separate and reveal, instead, the mutability of memory as it circulates between different sites and times. Yet Sanyal is careful to counter the claim that the blurring of lines between different memories results in a confusion of events and, consequently, a distortion of history. Her definition of complicity is one that acknowledges connections between Holocaust remembrance and memories of extreme violence elsewhere, specifically the Algerian War of Independence, but refuses to conflate one with another. For Sanyal, dangerous intersections are always to the fore. We are implicated in global patterns of violence and are contaminated by guilt and shame, but we must not lose sight of the differences between perpetrators and victims, witnesses and spectators. Hence, Sanyal rejects viewing history either as trauma (we are all victims) or as the continuous unfolding of the paradigm of the camp (we are all perpetrators). Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman are taken to task for the former, Giorgio Agamben for the latter. Sanyal prefers to talk, instead, of an ironic complicity, reflecting not a universal condition but an ethics of ambivalence. According to this model, the limited national framing of Pierre Nora's ‘lieu de mémoire’ is replaced by the multiple intersections of the ‘nœud de mémoire’ (p. 60). The figure of allegory becomes Sanyal's trope of choice for tracing the shifting contours and unexpected legacies of Holocaust memory in works by Albert Camus, Alain Resnais, Ousmane Sembène, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, and Boualem Sansal. In Benjaminian fashion, she reads the figural landscape of these works — the plague in Camus's La Peste and Resnais's Nuit et brouillard, the fall in Camus's La Chute, crabs in Sartre's Les Séquestrés d'Altona, the city of Strasbourg in Djebar's Les Nuits de Strasbourg, and so on — as multilayered sites in which different moments of terror are in dialectical tension. These readings through the prism of allegorical, ironic complicity are remarkable for their nuanced analysis, the complex model of history they propose, the erudition of the author's insight, and the lucidity of her prose. In the Afterword, Sanyal cites Hannah Arendt's famous condemnation of Adolf Eichmann's role in the Holocaust as a failure of imagination and the ability to think from the standpoint of someone else. Complicity (not identification) between one and another holds out the prospect, instead, of replacing the bureaucratic mind with an ethical approach to the Other. Ultimately, the power of Sanyal's reflection on the poetics and politics of cultural memory today is the ethical lesson we might draw from conceiving different pasts in complicity.