ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief analytical account of how we have arrived at the double bind of Memory that every artist, filmmaker or novelist who presents a new text on the Holocaust is faced with. On the one hand, the duty of memory, according to which the Holocaust must be constantly remembered, recounted, elevated to a paradigm of universal significance. On the other, the irrepresentability of the great trauma, according to which the Holocaust cannot be represented, least of all through images, since the experience of those who “were there” goes beyond the limits of human imagination. Curiously, the dogma of irrepresentability catalyzed a proliferation of discourses in which, by dint of imitations, the tropes of memory (including the profession of unspeakability) were stylized to the point of becoming perfectly replicable. How have these contradictions affected the current dynamics of Memory Culture?
