Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film by Max Silverman (review)

The central premise of this brilliant study — that ‘the poetics of palimpsestic memory can be the basis of a new politics of memory’ (p. 28) — is convincingly articulated and argued through sophisticated and detailed analysis of a range of theories of cultural memory, as well as through close readings of a range of literary and cinematic texts. Max Silverman locates his model of memory in relation to existing theories, most crucially Michael Rothberg’s compelling account of non-essentialist and dynamic memory in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), whilst offering an original and nuanced take on this through the central trope of the palimpsest. Memory here is defined in terms of the palimpsest because it is non-linear (one memory does not lead back to, or even screen, an earlier memory); instead, it is structured through transformation, substitution, and overlapping intersections that work temporally (disrupting chronology) and spatially (creating unstable and shifting points of connection and of difference between individual and collective, between the ‘“objective” (universal) history’ and the ‘“personal” (relative) memory’ (p. 28), without resolving the tensions that it raises). The first chapter of Silverman’s book outlines its theoretical foundations, while the second is devoted to ‘Concentrationary Memory’, which, as Silverman argues through discussion of Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (1955), should be differentiated from Holocaust memory: this film does not simply recall one specific historical episode (the genocide of the Jews), but self-consciously foregrounds the ways in which this history is inextricably bound up in (haunted by) subsequent inscriptions of violence and guilt. The images of devastation in Paris in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) are shown to be reminiscent of images of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb, while Resnais’s Muriel (1963) overlays images of the Second World War with images of colonial violence in Algeria. From here, Silverman goes on to explore other case studies of literary and cinematic texts that inscribe traces of connections between the Holocaust, colonial and postcolonial violence, and other historical atrocities in palimpsestic form. The texts intricately and convincingly analysed here are impressively varied in genre, form, and subject matter, and include works by Didier Daeninckx, Charlotte Delbo, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Rodolphe Hammadi, as well as philosophy (Gillian Rose, Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt, among other thinkers). The final chapter develops the political dimensions and possibilities of palimpsestic memory, which — like Marianne Hirsch’s notion of post-memory — shows up the discontinuity between memory and direct personal experience and raises risks of blurring the division between lived and vicarious memory, and even of appropriating others’ traumatic experiences. Silverman’s argument works through these risks by highlighting the imperative to move away from polarized binary oppositions between memory and history — or the particular and the universal — in order to understand how they both differ and overlap. This in turn might enable us to imagine alternative democratic relations through the notion of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ that would make visible traces of other times and spaces. There is undoubtedly more to say about the politics of cosmopolitan memory, but this is a genuinely groundbreaking study that paves the way for further exploration of the poetics and politics of (palimpsestic) memory.