ABSTRACT
In his early lectures, Sigmund Freud provides us with a means of conceptualising the pathological melancholy monuments can encourage us to keep hold of, rather than successfully mourn and move on from. Judith Butler’s work on melancholy gender helps us to think about how monuments perpetuate cultural denials about the losses of the past, leading to disavowal rather than a new relation to reality. Using Derrida’s Archive Fever, the chapter goes on to consider the traumatic inheritance of postmemory via the work of Marianne Hirsch. Analysing Rachel Whiteread’s Memorial to the Austrian Jewish Victims of the Shoah, the chapter explores how this monument shows the symbolically inaccessible archive caused by the Holocaust, and how this unreadable archive becomes a form of encryption. Using Derrida’s theories around the crypt, and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s work on cryptonymy, the chapter considers the placement of death and desire within the Holocaust and how the effacement of the Holocaust wipes away all traces, preventing a haunting of the past in the present. This experience of the threshold of the monument, and its resistance of total knowledge, is put forward as an alternative to the traditional monumental position of mastery.
