记忆与历史的暗恐遭遇（英文）

Memory vs. History: An Uncanny Encounter

在欧洲现代性的框架下,记忆最早被来自法兰西国家内外的法国革命的受害者大规模地用作对抗胜利者历史的策略。那些感到有必要恢复早被尘封的生活面貌的人们无不遭受过由于意想不到的暴力原因而与自己熟悉的过去隔离所导致的伤痛:法国贵族是被迫流亡;而德国人的历史创伤则是因为帝国灭亡和新君主政体的建立以及由此而产生的灾难感、眩晕感和麻木感。为了治疗受到创伤的自我,德国早期的浪漫主义作家诺瓦利斯曾经说过一句名言:'我们不能把生活视为我们被迫接受的小说,而应该当作我们自己创造的小说。'同样,浪漫主义作家们没有把自我当做被迫接受的实体,而是将它转化为一件恒变的艺术品。本文简要梳理了这类弹性自我被概念化的欧洲传统的谱系,重点对本雅明的《1900年前后的柏林童年》进行了分析。这部结构松散的集子充满了关于德国纳粹主义兴起时期德国犹太人的创伤记忆,作者在书中一厢情愿地追溯的童年,吸收了当下的重大事件、过滤了当前创伤的影响、消解了创伤的伤害。这一童年想象作为本雅明表达愿景的不竭源泉,没有消除他的非家幻觉,反而放纵了他的巡游性。

In the frame of European modernity,memory is for the first time massively engaged as a counter-project to the victorious history by the victims of French Revolution,both within and outside the French national body.Nobody would feel the need to restore his or her neglected life itineraries without having been previously hurt by an unexpected and violent severance from his or her familiar past.French aristocracy was forced into exile.As regards the Germans,their historical trauma was induced by the destruction of the Empire,the institution of new monarchies,and the ensuing feelings of a catastrophe,dizziness,and senselessness.Remedying his wounded self,the early German Romanticist Novalis famously stated:'We should not take life to be a novel given to us,but one made by us.'Rather than taking the self as a firm given,the Romanticists turn it into a work of art on-the-permanent-move.After offering a short genealogy of this European tradition of conceptualizing such flexible self,the paper focuses on Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900,a loose collection of memories engendered by the traumatic situation of a German Jew faced with the rising Nazism.He engages childhood,in a wishful and retroactive projection,as a screen that absorbs the present shock,filters the impact of the present trauma and diminishes its harm.Operating as an inexhaustible source of his longing,such imaginary childhood does not abolish his unhomeliness but unleashes its itinerancy.