‘Narrative, Testimony, Fiction: The Challenge of Not Forgetting the Holocaust’, written by Jakob Lothe, explores the individual unconscious and its relationship to collective memory. In his essay, Lothe posits the interrelation between memory and forgetting as emblematic of Holocaust testimonies and fictional narratives, and serves to remind us of the epiphenomenal relationships to be found, and cultivated, across survivor literature.
‘Forces of Solidarity and Logics of Exclusion: The Role of Literary Institutions in Times of Crisis’, written by Gisèle Sapiro, assesses the marginalization of writers from literary institutions under the Vichy regime due to their Jewish origins or political opinions. In her essay, Sapiro gestures more broadly to an understanding of mechanisms of exclusion in times of crisis, thus asserting that a study of the Vichy period has much to teach us in terms of identity construction today, and that attention to ‘the history of representations and of institutions is the only way to explore our collective unconscious.’
‘Vulnerable Times’, written by Marianne Hirsch, is the concluding chapter in both the ‘Memory: Past and Future’ and the volume itself. The essay reconsiders theories of trauma and memory, as well as recent critiques of trauma studies, through the frame of the contemporary. Through her engagement with several writers and artists whose work enacts not only traumatic events but also their transmission, Hirsch asks whether ‘the retrospective glance of trauma can be expanded and redirected to open alternate temporalities that might be more porous and future-oriented.’
‘Adrien and Marcel Proust: Fathering Neurasthenic Memory’, written by Deborah Jenson, offers a reinvestment in Proust and foregrounds ideas of Proust as a memory icon by reading the ‘fictions of the son’ against the ‘theories of the father.’ In refiguring Marcel Proust as a ‘memory patient,’ Jenson argues that the author’s ‘singular attention to … the complex storage and retrieval engineering of memory processes’ was developed through his relationship to his father, a theorist of neurasthenic memory.
‘Risking Who One Is, at the Risk of Thinking: On Writing an Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva’, written by Alice Jardine, discusses the task of writing an intellectual biography and highlights the state of the discipline and the role of the contemporary critic as an arbiter of categories whose task is to define the contemporary and contemporary studies. In his essay, Jardine asks ‘How can one operate critically as an intellectual when one’s corpus, one’s object of critique, has been produced by a living artist, philosopher-critic, or writer with whom one feels deep affinity?’
‘‘Moral Witnessing?’ An Israeli Perspective on Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes’, written by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, offers a cogent critique of Littell’s Goncourt-winning novel. Her essay argues that, despite its success in the popular press, Les Bienveillantes rehearses a banalization of evil as an aesthetic form, rendering readers simultaneously dispassionate and complicit in the crimes of the novel’s perpetrator-protagonist.
‘Alain Badiou and Anti-Semitism’, written by Maurice Samuels, focuses on current French debates over the ‘new anti-Semitism.’ In his essay, Samuels identifies the resurgence of anti-Semitism as one of the defining features of the contemporary moment in France, and through a series of close readings of Badiou’s writings, explores the ways in which Badiou’s positions on Jewish issues produce what he calls an ‘anti-Semitic effect.’
‘Of Sade, Blanchot, and the French Twentieth Century: Thoughts at Columbia’, written by Jeffrey Mehlman, retraces the peregrinations of Maurice Blanchot and considers his relevance today. The essay’s attention to authors’ reading (Blanchot’s readings of Sade and Duras; Marty’s readings, in turn, of Blanchot and Genet) underscores the critical valences of rereading as a contemporary practice.
‘Identities in Flux’, written by Régine Robin, is the first essay in the ‘Contemporary Politics and French Thought’ section and traces the major forces that have impacted post-colonial France: global capitalism, immigration and its resultant multiculturalism, the rise of the political right, and the persistent crises of memory that have occupied the second half of the twentieth century.
‘(After) Conceptualism: Contemporaneity in Choreography’, written by Carrie Noland, is the last essay in the ‘Conceptualizing the Contemporary’ section, and investigates the study of cutting-edge conceptual choreography and dance performance as an index of contemporaneity. Noland provides a consideration of what comes after the contemporary and assesses performance as a test case for a broader inquiry into the notion of being contemporary.
