Betegségek, pszichopatológiák és időstruktúrák
Illness, Psychopatologies and Structures of Temporality

Memory and Future after the Great War: The Forgotten Books of Halbwachs and Minkowski

Summary/Abstract: Over the past two decades, humanities and social sciences have been increasingly preoccupied with the question of memory. It has by now become clear that the practices of memory which became wide-spread in the 1970s in connection with the trauma of the Second World War, and especially the Holocaust, are perceivably different from those after the Great War, even though scholarship in this field usually goes only as far back as Maurice Halbwachs’s seminal work published in 1925. Does the concept and practice of memory mean the same today as in the post-First World War period? Can the proliferating research in the field of memory can reconstruct the structures of temporality in this period? Responding to Eugène Minkowski’s 1933 work discussing the phenomenology of time through the psychopathology of soldiers surviving the Great War, the present study adopts Minkowski’s focus on the ‘future’ and argues that, in addition to ‘memory’, the analysis of this period’s structures of temporality must also consider the concept and experience of ‘future’. This fresh approach brings together Halbwachs and Minkowski, two scholars associated with Henri Bergson’s philosophy, both arguing for the primacy of seemingly disparate experiences of time.

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