Temps, mémoire et identité

Abstract

In the human species, what primarily defines an individual is his or her personality and history, i.e. the awareness of the individuation process that governs the history of the self. We will begin by asking how self-consciousness and individual identity are constructed, and how time, memory and identity are correlated in the history of the self. Then, we’ll look at the history of the self when it goes through an identity crisis. We’ll take the example of the individual identity crisis associated with the experience of the extermination camps, and we’ll see that another articulation of time, memory and identity emerges to constitute, through poetic experience, the safeguard of a collective memory. Our hypothesis is that poetry is a total social fact, unifying the group and assigning it a rhythm and an identity through the collective memory that builds the history of the group through the cult of heroines and heroes. To test this hypothesis, we will highlight poetry’s original function of constructing the “moral person” or collective self of the group in the extreme experiences of the Nazi extermination camps, through the texts of Robert Antelme and Charlotte Delbo. When human beings are confronted with an extreme experience such as that of having to survive in a Nazi extermination camp, in order to hold on, they have to reconnect with poetry's primitive function of expressing a personality or a collective memory.

Keywords

• time
•  memory
•  identity
•  human species
•  poetry