War and Peace

This article attends the intersection of personal and collective memory. Drawing on the author's childhood memories, particularly those of his grandmother, the article explores the ways in which one's past is registered and reexperienced as an ongoing relation between intimate recollections and grand historical narratives. The article contrasts Homi Bhabha's (1994) use of the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit to a parallel conception of past-present interaction in the writings of Franz Kafka (1954), Ernst Bloch (1963), and Walter Benjamin (1955). Reflecting on the heavy charge carried from the past into the future, on what Emmanuel Levinas (1995) called in this context “insoluble problems” (p. 88), the article argues for a notion of agency that reaches beyond the subject, toward a consideration of subjectivity as a focal point, and link, between collective tradition and its potential trajectory.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15240657.2011.585919