Date Published:
1 Jan, 2012
Abstract:
During the decades following the pioneering work of authors such as Walter Benjamin or Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s and 1930s, it has become increasingly common to refer to memory as a source not only of personal identity or of the identity of small groups but also of large collectivities. In recent years an ever growing number of studies in a variety of disciplines employ the concept of collective memory. Using the example of an episode from Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre tombe, this paper investigates the meaning of this concept in the methodological perspective of philosophy and the role of imagination in collectively remembered, communicable experience. It aims to elucidate the way in which collective memory might be demarcated from constructs of the imagination, above all in the public sphere.
January 2012: Jeffrey Andrew Barash is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amiens, France. His publications have focused on the themes of political philosophy, historicism, and modern German thought. He is the author of three books: Heidegger et son siècle: Temps de l'Être, temps de l'histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (second, paperback edition, New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), and Politiques de l'histoire: L'historicisme comme promesse et comme mythe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). He has edited The Social Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). He is currently completing a book entitled Collective Memory and the Historical Past and is also preparing a work on political mythology in the modern world. |
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