ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the proposition that ignoring the role of affectivity in collective processes of commemoration is to ignore what is often a pivotal element in the articulation of the memories they come to perpetuate, as well as those they don’t. It engages Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the percept and the affect to inform both a Deleuze–Guattarian critique of architectural phenomenology – positioned as a dominant approach to affect in architectural discourse – and a reading of the Mémorial des martyrs de la déportation, a commemorative edifice on the Île de la Cité of Paris. The chapter takes the percept and the affect as a double provocation to abandon a unified subjective viewpoint as the sole discursive means for approaching the affects of architecture, and to engage architectural affects in a didactic fashion – that is, to look beyond the opinions of generic subjects experiencing common affections. This leads to an exploration of how different affective orientations inform the historical narrative that the memorial enunciates, and begets an account of how a sincere collective will to commemorate the wanton suffering of approximately 200,000 deportees came to be instrumentalised in an exculpation of those who effected the deportations in the first place.
