Interpretation and the Politics of Memory
![handle is hein.journals/actj1998 and id is 326 raw text is: Interpretation and the politics of memory*
JOHANNNES SNYMAN**
Rand Afrikaans University
'[T]he struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forget-
ting... The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the
past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are
retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.'1
I INTRODUCTION
My paper is about strategies of memory in order to cope with the
effects of profound social traumas. The politics of memory is about ways
and means societies invent to maintain the effects of their interpreted
histories for the sake of what they hold to be their good. Societies devise
various such ways and means. In this paper I shall assess the effects of one
such strategy, viz the politics of memory of war memorials, and I shall
attend obliquely to another strategy, viz constitution-making.
II THE NEED FOR A POLITICS OF MEMORY
What do war memorials and constitution-making imply as politics
of memory? How can one connect them as strategies of the politics of
memory?
One way to make this connection, is the following. Apart from atoning
for the guilt of the survivor arid from being a form of institutionalised
remembrance of lost ones, one can say that war memorials vow in an
ineffable language: on behalf of the dead and on behalf of the visitor it
says, 'Never again!' Sometimes war memorials are adequate strategies of
memory, but sometimes they lose 'the struggle of memory against forget-
ting', to invoke Kundera's expression. An explanation of this sad fact may
be that in the case of war memorials the vow never to let these things
happen again, is not as unequivocal as it may sound. It is sometimes
understood in a very restricted sense, ie the memorial intimates that this
may never happen to us and ours again. Or the memorial's injunction may
be understood in a more extended sense: this may never happen to us and
ours again, and we ourselves may never be party to anything similar happening
to others. I propose to call the first understanding the historico-ethnic
* Earlier versions of parts of this paper are J Snyman 'Suffering in high and low relief. war
memorials and the moral imperative'm L Zuidervaart & H Luttikhuizen (eds) Pledges ofJubilee (1995)
179-209;J Snyman 'Suffering and the politics of memory' Filozofski Vestnik (1996) XVII 181-202;J
Snyman 'Suffering and the politics of memory' in C W du Toit (ed) New Modes of Thinking on the Eve
of a New Century (1996) 103-45.
** D Litt et Phil (RAU); Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philiosophy, Rand Afrikaans
University
1 Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1982) 1,22.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/actj1998&div=26&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Interpretation and the Politics of Memory
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