Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Inter-Subjectivity

146 Pages·2005·1.07 MB·English

by  Luisa Passerini

INTRODUCTION 1
Memory and Utopia
Critical Histories of Subjectivity and Culture
Editors: Barbara Caine, Monash University, and Glenda Sluga, University of Sydney
This series highlights the relationship between understandings of subjectivity, iden-
tity, culture and broader historical change. It seeks to foster historical studies
which situate subjectivity in social, political and cultural contexts. Some of these
studies interrogate and elucidate broad historical themes and periods, and cul-
tural and social change, by analysing discourses about personal identity and
subjectivity, others focus on lifestories and representations of the self.
The series has no chronological or geographical limitations, although preference
will be given to comparative work and to studies which approach their questions
in a broad transnational framework. As the emphasis on subjectivity suggests,
questions about gender and sexuality, and national or ethnic identity are central
issues in all volumes. Detailed studies also offer a sense of the broad context of
historical change: for example, questions of national identity are discussed within
transnational and imperial frameworks.
The emphasis on “critical” histories is indicative of our interest in studies with a
theoretical and historiographical edge, especially those that open up new histori-
cal approaches and problematize standard ways of dealing with subjectivity and
culture.
Published:
Histories of Sexuality
Antiquity to Sexual Revolution
Stephen Garton
Forthcoming:
Friendship
A History
Edited by Barbara Caine
Remembering Dispossession
Aboriginals, Colonization and History
Maria Nugent
Memory and Utopia
The Primacy of Intersubjectivity
Luisa Passerini
First published 2007 by Equinox, an imprint of Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge
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© Luisa Passerini 2007
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13 978 184553 025 9 (hardback)
978 184553 026 6 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Passerini, Luisa.
[Memoria e utopia. English]
Memory and utopia : the primacy of intersubjectivity / Luisa Passerini.
p. cm. — (Critical histories of subjectivity and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-84553-025-X (hb) — ISBN 1-84553-026-8 (pbk.) 1. Psychohistory.
2. Collective memory. 3. History—Methodology. I. Title. II. Series.
D16.16.P37 2007
126—dc22 2006010151
Typeset by S.J.I. Services, New Delhi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Part I
The Past and Historical Research
1. Memories between Silence and Oblivion 15
2. Becoming a Subject in the Time of the Death of the
Subject 33
3. ‘Utopia’ and Desire 54
Part II
The Present and the Sense of Belonging
4. From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony 77
5. The Last Identification: Why Some of Us Would Like
to Call Ourselves Europeans and What We Mean by
This 96
References 115
Subject Index 129

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An earlier version of the first chapter of this book was included in
Kate Hodgkin and Susanna Radstone (eds.), Contested Pasts: The Poli-
tics of Memory published in 2003 by Routledge, London. Chapter Three
appeared in an earlier version in Thesis Eleven, 68 (February 2002).
Versions of Chapters Four and Five appeared respectively in Anthony
Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union
(Washington, DC; Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and
Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Bo Strath (ed.), Europe and the
Other and Europe as the Other (Brussels; New York: Presses
Interuniversitaires Europeennes/Peter Lang, 2000).
Italian translations of these essays plus additional material were
published in 2003 by Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, as Memoria et Utopia:
Il Primato dell’intersoggettivitá. The present volume includes a transla-
tion of the Introduction from that volume (translated by Imogen
Forster).

INTRODUCTION 1
INTRODUCTION
The past fifteen years have seen important changes in the interna-
tional debate on subjectivity as a conceptual category in the fields of
history and the social sciences. These changes prompted me to review
the development of my own thinking, and to explore shifts that reveal
a correspondence between individual and collective history. In Storia
e soggettività (History and Subjectivity), a collection of my work in
this area from the period between 1976, when I began to do research
based on oral sources, and 1988, when the book was published, my
main concerns were the relationship between orality and writing, the
specific quality of oral memory, the nature of autobiography and the
status of history. That also implies an interest in the relationship be-
tween history and memory, and the use of oral sources in teaching
and research, as well as an appraisal of the individual in his or her
relationship with (and independence from) the collective. My inter-
ests have changed in the time since that book appeared, and have
given rise to new thoughts of a different kind on the ideas of subjectiv-
ity and the subject, which I should like to present here as a kind of
“ego-historical” stocktaking. In this exploratory process I use as a bench-
mark the positions I adopted in 1991, in my contributions to a collec-
tion (Passerini 1991b and 1991c) of seminar papers presented in 1988–
1989 in the social history division of the history department at the
University of Turin, headed at that time by Guido Quazza.
I believe the approach which I offered as a basis for studying the
question of the subject in historical perspective, and which I have
tested in my teaching over the past ten years at a number of universi-
ties in Italy and abroad, is still valid. That approach assumes three