Memory and Autobiography: Explorations at the Limits Leonor Arfuch,  Polity Press, 2020,  166 pp., $22.95, paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4218-5

Published online: 8 July 2022

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022

Leonor Arfuch’s Memory and Autobiography: Explorations at the Limits has helped me think through the methodology for the biographical study I am conducting for my doctoral research. Working through the lens of bearing witness, I sought to capture the power of biography and autobiography in illuminating human experience and human suffering. Arfuch’s book, which emphasizes the importance of articulating a critical subjectivity, helped me to develop a framework by examining the following: How are biography/autobiography and memory linked in narratives, particularly those which involve painful lived experience and inherited trauma? How do we rescue memory so that such experience can be articulated? And in a way which honors and is therapeutic for the narrator? How can we provide space for naming phenomena that involves human suffering so that these narratives are not “relegated to the dustbin of history” (p. xvii)? Arfuch addresses these pressing questions that are relevant to all fields that involve the remembering and narrating of human experience, especially that of psychoanalysis. As one of Arfuch’s centralizing ideas, biographical space serves as the critical medium for self-representation. She argues that “biographies, artistic practices, memories from other times and the ill-starred present” allow for “that place where we can share pain and loss, whatever the motive for the suffering” (p. xx).

In her own form of discursive resistance against grand narratives, Arfuch prioritizes memory and testimony while integrating language and political theory, visual arts, as well as literary and cultural criticism. Arfuch focuses on the recent, unmetabolized oppression of genocides and the sequelae of colonial and dictatorial