ABSTRACT
Thinking about the memory of past violence, that bind certain collectives of people (collective memory) with the dynamics of the future perfect, allows one to problematise the very idea of collective identity founded on a specific image of the past. Lacanian temporality offers a chance for reconfiguring of the coordinates of collective identity, for undermining an intolerable yet commonly felt impasse, or an impasse experienced in common. To unpack its specificity, let me refer to Lauren Berlant’s idea of affectively charged being in time, characterised with its very specific “historical sensorium” whereby members of a community are forced “to adjust emotionally to the process of living with the political depression produced by brutal relations of ownership, control, security, and their phantasmatic justifications in liberal political economies”. Marguerite Duras was a French writer and experimental filmmaker, born and raised in French Indochina.
