History, Memory, and Post‐migrant Experience

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 영남대학교 인문과학연구소
· 수록지 정보 : 인문연구 / 64호 / 189 ~ 212페이지
· 저자명 : Eli Park Sorensen

초록

In recent academic scholarship, one finds a growing interest in collective as well as individual forms of memory. At the same time, the notion of history has become more problematic. In this article, I want to discuss the relationship between history and memory in contemporary discourse.


* This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government. (NRF‐2011-332-A00192)** Assistant professor at Seoul National University Implied here is the argument that the increasing popularity of — and interest in — memory discourse at the same time signifies a troubled relationship to history, or rather History, with a capital letter. Rather than follow the by now standard argument about memory-as-opposed-to-history, I want to read the recent focus on memory as a symptom which in a larger sense articulates an experience of historical loss. In the course of my argument, I discuss Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which operates with the Hegelian idea of a post-historical age, one that is — in Fukuyama’s discourse — haunted by an ironic, Nietzschean sentiment. The latter, I argue, is a melancholic experience of uncertainty — the uncertainty about the legitimacy and meaning of the past. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, memory and history are intimately connected: historical development constitutes a dialectics of negation and preservation. Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis — which essentially constitutes an attempt to translate the Hegelian trajectory into a notion that corresponds with globalization — signifies the breakdown of this dialectics. The result is, I argue, a dichotomy between history and memory, with a pronounced emphasis on the latter. At this point, I develop a notion that I call “post-migrant experience,” which can be compared to the kind of detective work that we find in Ishiguro’s novel When We Were Orphans: it signifies the attempt to work through — by way of returning to — the historical event itself, both in order to authenticate the post-historical memory, but also to re-establish the link between history and memory.

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