The historian's responsability, reviews and narratives. An approach to the work of Traverso

Abstract

For Traverso "memory is presented as a less arid and more 'human' story ... powerfully amplified by the media, often directed by the public powers. It becomes a memorial obsession ”(2007: 13), what Eric Hobsbawn called“ the invention of tradition ”, the act by which memory becomes the vector of a densely symbolized and ritualized civil religion, which institutes secular values , ethical and political principles, based on foundational events. Walter Benjamin distinguishes two experiences: the transmitted one, which is perpetuated, characteristic of traditional societies, which emanates from the everyday; and the lived one, distinctive of modern, individualistic societies, which stems from traumas such as war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, political or military repression; foundational events. The lived experience ends in memory politics, investing the historian with an ethical role towards the representations of what happened, with a great weight to the witness as a source, displacing the archive and rethinking the nineteenth-century methodological conception.