Uses and abuses of memory: the Holocaust case (1978)

Trivialization, denial and sacralization are three interconnected devices that lock together like the cogs of a gear while competing for the management of collective memory. A single semiotic macro-device, held together by a patrimonial conception of history, activates that ideologically sensitive part of the Average Encyclopaedia that a specific community acknowledges as its own identity matrix. In this respect, there is little sense in trying to distinguish collective memory from the complex of uses and abuses that assail its alleged impartiality. Memory is part and parcel of the uses made of it, of the conflicts between different appropriations of the past, or rather of their combined action, of the friction that they generate, the actions that they incite and the meta-reflections that they give rise to.