Rothberg, Michael. “Memory and Implication at the Limits of the Human: A Response to Nathan Snaza”

In his response to Snaza’s essay Rothberg emphasizes that, while Snaza productively draws on the notion of multidirectionality to connect different systemic violences, he does so in pedagogical terms, rather than those of memory. As such, Rothberg points to the different implications for memory studies that are raised by the post-humanist tension between centring life and centring the dominant Man, i.e. the privileged enlightened individual. Referring to the works of Arendt and Césaire Rothberg illustrates that the concept of Man has been previously theorised in multidirectional memory by these two thinkers, but that a consideration of anthropocentrism remains lacking. Therefore, Rothberg asks whether multidirectional memory can make such a stretch beyond the human, stating that it can multiply our imagination of other kinds of ‘trans/material attachments.’ Rothberg’s approach to these attachments revolves around the entangled and aware ‘implicated subject,’ for whom memory can play an important pedagogical role. Here, Sarah Ahmed’s question ‘whence does this appear?’ is useful because it is both ontological and epistemological. Ultimately, Rothberg urges us not to stop imagining the human subject and its political responsibility when mobilising knowledge of the past in the present. After all, he maintains, subjects and objects are all transformed by history, and memory remains a space for their exploration.

Author of this entry: Lisanne van Rossum

Michael Rothberg, “Memory and Implication at the Limits of the Human: A Response to Nathan Snaza,” Parallax 23, no. 4 (2017): 512-516.