Pierre Nora, on the fundamental opposition of History & Memory:

Memory always fluctuates between remembering & forgetting. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic & incomplete, of what is no longer.

Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.

Memory, insofar as it is affective & magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic -- responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. History, because it is an intellectual & secular production, calls for analysis & criticism.

Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again.

Memory is blind to all but the group it binds -- which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple & yet specific; collective, plural, & yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone & to no one, whence it's claim to universal authority

Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, & objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions & to relations between things.

Memory is absolute, while history an only conceive the relative.


(1989)