Mitologie e memoria

Abstract

Whereas memory focus mostly on the elements of continuity, in order to grant people’s survival, history individuates, above all, the breaking lines, thus opposing the “pitiful religion” that, by tracing Auschwitz’s fracture back to the experienced suffering, inscribes it, at the same time, in a continuum of dolourism. But the pedagogy of the “never more”, as well as the hypermnesia concerning the Shoah, did not protect us from the revival of an anti-Semitic discourse, nor the construction of enormous memorials prevented the enduring of genocides and the institutional and political attempts to hide them. The memory of evil is not a synonym for reflection: in our standardized and disrupted societies, from Auschwitz on, we are in need of a critical thought rather than of a duty to remember.