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