Introduction to Special Section: Critical Theory and Memory (II)* Memory as a Medium of Critique

Abstract

This second part of the special section Critical Theory and Memory, with essays by Luca Corchia and Clau dia Hassan, Teresa Grande and Giuseppe Mercuri, Luca Corchia, Vera Kopsaj, and Angelo Falzarano, completes the project launched in issue no. 3/2025 of Trauma and Memory and bridged by Paolo Jedlowski’s essay on past futures. This Introduction argues that memory is not merely an object of critique but one of its media. Collective remembrance performs five functions: a cognitive function, which reconstructs the experiences concealed by dominant narratives; a normative function, which preserves unfulfilled claims to justice; a political function, which sustains the democratic public sphere and historical accountability; an emancipatory function, which enables learning processes through the confrontation with histories of domination and suffering; and a utopian function, which preserves unrealized futures. Reconstructing the dialogue among the contributions – from Habermas’s distinction between consciousness-raising critique and rescuing critique to Benjamin’s Eingedenken, from the question of German guilt to algorithmic oblivion and the synthetic memo ries of the hyperfast society – the text shows how Critical Theory and Memory Studies correct one another. The former offers the latter normative criteria for judging the direction of remembrance; the latter restores to the former an awareness of the selectivity, mediation, and social temporality of all memory. What emerges is the outline of a critical theory of public memory, whose future tasks are sketched in conclusion.