CONTESTED MEMORY:
THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION AND THE RIGHT TO
FICTION
The course will deal with the problem of representation
in recent historiography, political theory, and philosophy,
beginning with Pierre Noraís Realms [Sites] of Memory.
Its theoretical point of departure will be the work of Jean-François
Lyotard and in particular his analysis and critique of the
limits of historical-philosophical representation.
Issues such as the place of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche in
his work, and his relation to contemporaries such as Foucault
and Derrida will also be discussed. The course will
also discuss in Lyotard's work the role played by certain
forms of art and literature as testimonies to "the
forgotten" or as presentations of the un(re)presentable.
I am particularly interested in recent controversies over
representation in which certain modes of memory have been
contested and what I call an author or filmmaker's "right
to fiction" has been simply denied. The second
part of the course will thus examine the following issues:
1) the controversies concerning fictional narratives and
cinematographic representations of the Shoah (Lanzmann,
Friedlander, Hartman, LaCapra, etc.); and 2) the debates
over questions of national or ethnic identity, which are
also disputes over the origin and nature of the representability
or nonrepresentability of collective subjects (Glissant,
Bhabha, Balibar, etc.).
