The Dilemmas of Memory

It is easy to say nowadays that memory has imprescriptible rights and that one must become a militant of memory. It is necessary to be fully aware that when we hear those calls against forgetting and in favor of memory, it is not, most of the time, an invitation to engage in the work of recovering memory, of establishing and interpreting the facts of the past (nothing and no one, in a democratic country such as the states of Western Europe, prevents anyone from continuing with that work), but rather the defense of the power to select certain facts that ensure their protagonists remain in the role of heroes, victims, or moralizers, as opposed to any other selection that would carry the risk of attributing to them some other, less flattering role. That is why one must avoid "falling into the trap of the duty of memory," in the words of Paul Ricœur, and dedicate oneself preferably to the work of memory. (Document excerpt).