Memory and Alterity: The Case for an Analytic of Difference

The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence … upon the presence of others who have seen and will remember. … Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfillment … the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Research on the relationship between public memory and collective identity is varied and extensive, but one fairly prominent scholarly perspective coalesces around Hannah Arendt's idea that the practices of remembrance are the lifeblood of the polis.¹ The stakes here are high, for it seems that without remembrance, the very possibility of collective identity and historical responsibility literally "disappear."² Scholars as diverse as Maurice Halbwachs (1992), Benedict Anderson (1991), and Peter Novick (1999) (to name a few) have emphasized this connection between public memory and collective identity (see also Kattago 2001; Kammen 1991; Gillis 1994a; and Bodnar 1992). Although these scholars' projects diverge in other ways, they hold in common an interest in public memory's capacity to constitute transnational, national, and local identities. For these scholars, remembrance is not simply a vehicle for tradition; it is also an activity that brings collective identity into being. Collective identity emerges through the other, whose call to remember constitutes collectivity. The ontological space remembrance creates might thus be considered intersubjective, or between subjects.

Mnemonic practices, however, do not simply constitute intersubjective collective identities in a vacuum. More often, as Arendt's remarks underscore, they borrow from and reify the intersubjective values that already exist within a cultural formation. In this way a kind of dialectical relationship emerges in which public memories influence collective identities and collective identities shape public memories. In either case, however, public memory is thought to transcend both individual identity and alterity, both self and other. Put differently, remembrance offers resources for transforming individuals into citizens, and the rhetoric of public memory that constitutes community and citizen is said to be compensatory to the Differences that separate individuals.³ This essay argues that the relationship between public memory and collective identity is not as simple as this dialectical perspective leads us to believe.

Although the rise of an intersubjective theory of identity has yielded massive and often positive changes in our scholarly understanding of memory and identity, it has limitations.⁴ One such limitation emerges with the concept of Difference. I argue that an intersubjective theoretical framework ultimately makes it difficult to attend to the productive qualities of difference and the play of alterity in performances of remembrance. In intersubjective theories of identity, difference is conceptualized as an obstacle to be overcome rather than a valuable component of collective identity while alterity is effaced in the appropriative discourses of memory.⁵ By attending more carefully to difference, scholars could address the play of identity and alterity in the practices of remembrance.

To say public memory scholars need to attend more carefully to difference runs the risk of confusion. Public memory scholars have long been interested in difference, and especially in revealing the mnemonic repression and/or concealment of cultural differences. Confusion arises from the fact that two meanings of difference are competing with one another. The first and most common meaning of difference is found in its opposition to sameness. This is why we often use the term within the constructions "different-from" or "different-than," which pinpoints an identifiable difference between two entities or concepts. We can then speak about these differences in contrast to the similarities of said entities or concepts. Difference, however, has another meaning that emerges in its relation to alterity. This sense of difference is not so much defined by its opposite as it is by what Martin Heidegger called "the opening" and what his student, Hannah Arendt, called "natality," that is, the rise of the absolutely new, the novel, the indeterminate. This sense of difference is closely linked to alterity.⁶

While countless scholars have weighed in on the relationship between memory...