Publisher's Synopsis
Against Remembrance is a meditation on this theme. Rieff rejects Santayana's famous, and now almost universally accepted, adage that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Instead, he sees historical memory as nothing so much as the arsenal of psychic weaponry needed to keep wars going and peace, if it ever comes, tenuous and cold. In Against Remembrance, wide in its historical and geographical sweep, Rieff focuses on both these dangers and the contradictions of memory. Ranging from peoples steeped in memory like the Jews and the Irish, to the memory of real wars to the academic and political 'wars' over memory in France and Spain, Argentina and South Africa, to the battlefields of southwest Asia today, this book is at once cultural history of political memory and an ethical challenge to our faith in it. 'Forgiveness is not enough,' Rieff writes. 'Without forgetting, we would be wounded monsters, unforgiving and unforgiven . . . and, assuming we have been paying attention, inconsolable.'
