Siobhan Kattago’s monograph on memory and narrative is an imaginative, fresh reading of how we might go about building alternative political futures from the social wreckage of the contemporary moment. Whilst the book was written before the pandemic, it nonetheless resonates radically with what we have been experiencing globally for the past 18 months. The book is anchored in the broad realm of memory and trauma studies coupled with the critical theory of Arendt, Derrida and Heidegger (and others), a cross-disciplinary space of study that engages with the complexities of concepts such as social and collective memory and trauma. Kattago’s work parses such concepts with intellectual force and a novel, stimulating array of contextual examples. With her we traverse the world of ghosts through diverse temporalities and histories. It is this diversity of approach that makes this book such a joy and inspiration to read.
The opening chapter situates us in a reflection on modernity, postmodernity and indeed, acceleration, but Kattago is clear that old questions still haunt us even in this age of acceleration and rupture, this time of the Anthropocene. In fact, these questions may even have more profundity in contemporary times. Such questions as ‘What is the good life? Am I my brother’s keeper? Do I bear responsibility for the deeds of previous generations?’ are all too likely to be ones we all recognise with acuity. For Kattago, these questions track through the book in different and provocative forms shaping many aspects of her central thesis. These are questions that speak to haunting, to history, to reconciliation and reparation, to responsibility, to the reimagining of life in this heavy moment-all modalities of bearing witness, of being witness to the fraughtness of unresolved temporalities-past, present and future. Kattago does this in the company of many well-known theorists, weaving their voices with her concerns in a compelling and persuasive manner. We learn of Derrida’s hauntology, Benjamin’s secret between generations, Burke’s primeval contract, Hegel’s philosophy of history, Arendt’s and Koselleck’s thinking on history, experience and narration/storytelling. This impressive constellation of scholarly thinking coupled with Kattago’s rich analysis allow us to think carefully and deliberately through (what are urgent) questions of how we are connected to the past, of how we represent the past (without ever having experienced it), of how we narrate it and what this ultimately means for who we are now and indeed, who we will be in the future. These are complex issues, ones with profound application in the everyday, but Kattago with scholarly attentiveness, maps out, in ways both imaginative and insightful, the many intellectual intersections embedded in how we think about time, history, experience and narrative. This rich cartography of thinking on temporality, memory and trauma frames the book and equips the reader to walk through Kattago’s analysis of commemoration, nostalgia, silence and ghosts through the lens of the world altering events of World War II, the Holocaust and the fall of communism in Europe. This is no small task but Kattago embraces it with intellectual curiosity and scholarly acuity. The book is divided into a number of core sections Part I Gaps, glitches and ghosts, Part II Looking back after 1945, Part III Looking back after 1989. Each section offers up important insights into very distinct (albeit entwined) events and acts of remembering and narrating. There are many books within this book, but with a central thesis, a golden thread, that keeps the reader attentive to the challenges of working with and between the nebula of time, memory and trauma. The book is conceptually and philosophically rich throughout but it also acts, importantly, in documentary mode as a history of the different ways in which we have come to think about temporality.
Part I Gaps, glitches and ghosts, a section poetically titled but bold in the intellectual stakes it assumes brings the reader into dialogue with the durative present and the ways in which the yet to come future shapes experiences of the present. The idea of the ‘glitch’ holds together much of the central focus in this section. Time being out of joint is seen as a kind of fulcrum point wherein certain kinds of ‘events’ are experienced as glitchy, hovering between and across different kinds of temporalities. For Kattago, Derrida’s idea of spectrality is herein a kind of settling idea, one that fills the spaces of understanding between how past and future inflect the present, time being nothing if not porous. What follows in this section is a very sophisticated unpicking of notions of historical time/s, experience and the future. Kattago’s discussion of the future is a fundamental one, important not alone for the subject matter of the book but resonating well beyond into current concerns with how we think through climate crisis and the pandemic. In short, what Kattago’s contribution emphasises is the role of thinking with the future when things fall apart.
Part II Looking back after 1945 opens with a reflection on the relationship between language and time, with a particular focus on the politics of silence as it sits into the complexity of temporality. Herein, Kattago reflects on the limitations of the word and the different iterations of silence as a mode of resistance, politicisation and refusal. The work of Steiner, Heidegger, Blanchot, and Arendt figure large herein as does their engagement and articulations of Holocaust representations/silences-which diverge quite significantly. These diverse propositions about the limits of language, the limits of representation and the role of silence and Kattago’s articulate sense-making through them make a significant contribution to the burgeoning literature on silence, particularly in the context of trauma and memory studies. Silence sits into the in-betweenness of memory and forgetting and therein engenders many different kinds of complexities in terms of how we engage, represent and relate to different temporalities.
Part 111 Looking back after 1989 deals with our desire to seize time, to frame it in particular ways, to memorialise and commemorate. Whether through the lens of the selfie or a Holocaust memorial, our urge to commemorate crosses history, time and genre in manifold ways. The place (and politicisation) of the dead within this is also addressed in this section through an analysis of Lenin’s Mausoleum. The past is remade through such acts of commemoration, tethered to its political use value. The book comes to its resting point through an analysis of nostalgia, a fitting way to tie together (through some contemporary empirical examples) some of the key conceptual threads on memory, temporality and experience. For it is in this space of nostalgia that we flounder in our relationship to self, place, history and memory.
Memory and the writing of catastrophe makes a valuable theoretical contribution to philosophical and social scientific understandings of memory, time and experience at a key moment in the world’s unfolding. Its successful relocation of memory and temporality is critical to social, cultural and critical studies of memory and trauma studies in a multiplicity of contexts. This is an accomplished book with a sustained argument running through it thus offering substantive and always eloquent interpretations of memory and temporality thereby creating a text which has broad-ranging value to the academy and indeed, beyond.