Disrupting dismemory: the memoir of Jean Said Makdisi

Abstract

"The interdisciplinary field of memory studies has tended in recent years to diverge into two directions: on the one hand, the study of memorials, monuments, rituals and commemorations, adapting theories of space, construed through notions of 'collective memory' and 'affective memory'; and on the other hand, a psychoanalytic model of translation between 'traumatic memory' and 'narrative memory', dominated by an approach to the value of narrative as cure. While these approaches often cross over into each other, generating compelling insights, they tend to be informed by what we could call a presentist approach to memory. This tends to position the present, however embattled, as a potentially stabilising recovery of the past. Having learned and adapted much from both approaches, I nevertheless regard my work with memory as a slight departure. Preoccupied with works of cultural production, mainly film and literature, arising out of the sixteen-year civil war in Lebanon, I am concerned more with a fragmenting force of memory situated as an irresolvable, irreconcilable, productive tension between what comes to be re-covered as present and past, i.e., neither from the vantage point of 'the' present nor from that of »the« past. My current research develops and applies this notion of memory." (author´s abstract)