ABSTRACT
Lieux de mémoire have no referent in reality, writes Pierre Nora. This does not mean that they have no content or phenomenal presence, but rather that they have escaped from the linearity and preformations of history. They are objects and places thrown up out of the sea of history and later returned to it, richer and stranger. They are sites of excess closed in upon themselves, which nevertheless remain open to a range of meanings and signification. Brought into being through the falling away of earlier symbolic systems and histories, born of the dying out of traditions of memory and the transmission of a sense of place and self that memory assured, lieux de mémoire are both the sign of memory’s persistence and of its failure.
