Haunting Memory: The Extension of Kinship Beyond the Nation

Abstract

There is for all of us a twilight zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of a continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being . . . (Conor Cruise O'Brien in Tóibín 2012) The memory evoked in the passage quoted above is what I propose calling 'haunting memory.' This is what we are induced to remember as our own memory even though it is the story of our intimate forebears extending and haunting our recollection. In what follows, I develop this concept and, in doing so, offer a critique of discussions of cultural memory which seem premised on a fundamental opposition between intimate (usually family) relations and larger social formations. In particular, I shall challenge the distinction between milieux de mémoire and lieux de mémoire advanced by Pierre Nora, and his claim that in the last two hundred years we have witnessed the emergence of a new kind of society in which collective memory is ceasing to exist, having been replaced by a state-driven cultivation of a network of memory sites.I want to stress instead the co-existence, within contemporary society, of different if not incompatible collective memories that often involve linkages of transnational sites of memory. In the current condition of people-states, a coercive and persuasive politics elicits the idea of a 'people' through mediated mobilizations of communities of descent (ethnicity and race), tradition (including regional), language and faith, even though each and any of them extends spatially in ways that do not coincide with the others. I want to point out that there is another kind of memory, focusing on families and the intimate sphere, that transgresses or extends across national borders.These intimate transmissions become part of the memory of the bearer even when they were not part of personal experiences (other than those of their telling). I shall remark on how some of them are recorded in personal archives, as well as how these archives relate to more public archives. Most of what is remembered personally is not transmitted and most of what is transmitted to children disappears. But my main contention is that some of what is transmitted through kinship and the most intimate relations of adulthood can be pinned down and reinforced Brought to you by | University of Michigan Authenticated Download Date | 7/2/15 3:37 PM 272 | Stephan Feuchtwang in personal archives, rituals and other kinds of commemoration that are alternative to those of the nation state. Starting again from scratch: the formation of memory by the interpenetration of selvesThis could be the moment to assert against Pierre Nora that religious and familial milieux de mémoire coexist with lieux de mémoire and that history does not, as he argued, condemn them to death. But in one respect I agree with him -that in Europe 'memory' as a philosophical and psychological object emerged at the same ...