Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Epilogue • Luisa Passerini
brought about the emergence of the powerful role of collective memory
sharing in this perspective. However, the research implemented for the
Archives of the Memory, together with the training course, brought to light
the need to also go in the opposite direction: from collective memory to
individual experience. As analysis of the interviews showed, the individual
story tends to be subjugated to a collective narrative which tends to assert
itself as the single expression of a national identity that is monolithic, solid
and rooted in cohesion and homogeneity. It therefore became necessary to
give value to the different memories carried by different subjects, memories
that might become the various voices and narratives of a multiple
memory able to impede consolidation of a public, nationalistic discourse.
Very soon, all national identities appeared not to be cohesive at all, but
rather, articulated and fragmentized.
The genesis of this realization can be tracked in the single researches. The
researchers found that individual memories disagreed with collective and
official accounts. As Annie Lafontaine writes, while the IOM intervention
was focusing on the process going from the individual to the collective
experience in order to influence the discursive form that would take the
collectively shared suffering after the war, “we came to realize that the
commonality of the recent past’s experiences was strongly embodied in the
individuals”. It is this realization that brings many contributors to stress
the plurality of voices emerging along the boundaries marked by the individual
experiences. This is also why, I believe, most papers insist on the
transversal components of identity – such as gender, generation and urban
and rural belonging – which combine with the components based on
nation, ethnic group or language in giving rise to new types of subjectivity.
The transversal components can be shared with many other subjects
throughout the world and provide a basis for new forms of solidarity,
different from the traditional ones:
The tensions between the voice of the individual and the dominant discourses
occupying the public sphere, which legitimize declaration and
self position, emerge in every one of the testimonies and might serve as
a powerful weapon with which to enter the critical debate on public
memory and the political use of the past (Capussotti).
One relevant consequence of the first two points is that individual memory
can have different destinies: it can become a weapon within a defensive
collective identity – which in terms of a libidinal economy is a shortcut
– or be subjected to long elaboration, going towards a re-definition of
the two terms, individual and collective. This necessarily brings in another
set of collective and individual subjects, namely the researchers themselves
and what they represent. Therefore we come to a third point of
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