Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, by Richard Terdiman,  Cornell University Press, 1993,  389 ps.

Unthinkingly, we accept memory as a faculty of self-awareness and as intrinsic to our identity. Yet those of us who maintain a culturalist position might seek to discover how—in the words of Richard Terdiman—memory is itself “a site and source of cultural disquiet.” Terdiman argues that the displacements in continuity generated by the European Revolution (1789-1815) introduced profound dislocations in identity: memory was now refigured and new tasks were required of it. Indeed, what the author of this compelling and immediately relevant book calls the “memory crisis” becomes the centerfold of modernity.

Memory for Terdiman is not merely what we remember, but includes mnemic structures that comprise the aperture and lens through which remembrance is accomplished. In other words, “the complex of practices and means by which the past invests the present is memory: memory is the present past” (author's italics). Historicizing memory, Terdiman seeks some detachment from it for the purpose of gripping and scrutinizing it. Even Marx and Lukacs contribute to this disquisition: commodity is comprehensible as the story of its own production. The advent in the nineteenth century of the souvenir as the signifier of the past becomes for Terdiman an icon of the memory crisis, of how the opacity of the past is penetrated. By Terdiman's view, even the theories embedded within a culture become the means whereby the culture remembers itself and arranges to persist into the future. That is, theory is itself configured around how memory is constituted in our or any culture.

Increasingly, memory is occulted both socially and personally. For Foucault, it is discourse that orders us. As Terdiman puts it, “We know things without knowing that we know them. The structures organizing us are held in a memory that is effectively locked up.” Following Bakhtin, Terdiman holds that utterance and words are profoundly contingent on context and culture, a contingency that thereby shrouds their truth cl