Memory image matter: trauma and acts of unforgetting

Abstract

How might we conceive of the role of memory as a non-representational mode of commemoration that reconstitutes and transforms lived experience? In this paper I will move from psychoanalytical accounts of trauma to applying conceptions of memory outlined in works of philosophers Edward Casey, Henri Bergson and others, in order to consider social and psychological effects of trauma and how aesthetic experience can trigger cathartic resolution or the cure of traumatic symptoms. An understanding of the relationship between images, memory, and matter and of memory as a primarily eidetic and material process may also help to suggest how some people may be able to avoid or overcome trauma. Drawing ..