Rothberg, Michael. “Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject. On Sebald and Kentridge”

Memory scholar Michael Rothberg revisits the concept of multidirectional memory developed in his eponymous book to introduce a new category of relatability to a historical event, that of the ‘implicated subject’, and analyses the links between both. In his book Multidirectional Memory (2009), he explored how a multidirectional articulation of collective memory opened possibilities of non-competitive modes of remembrance, particularly from the perspective of victims. In the current article, he discusses how implication is a term that encompasses “various modes of historical relation that do not necessarily fall under the more direct forms of participation… such as victimisation and perpetration… [but] encompass bystanders, beneficiaries, latecomers of the postmemory generation and others connected ‘prosthetically’” (40) to an event and how those positions produce memory. The examples he presents are the novel Austerlitz (2001), by W.G. Sebald, and William Kentridge’s short animated film Mine, part of the series called Drawings for Projection (1989-2003).

Regarding Austerlitz, he states that the act of remembrance of the protagonist—an infant refugee of the Holocaust—connects time and place through displacement. This is an example of how narratives about loss can perform and create networks of association that, in turn, relate to the implicated position of the author—here a second-generation non-Jewish German that must deal with the responsibility of his own problematic position (46). To this process he gives the name of ‘multidirectional sublime’. As for Kentridge, Rothberg identifies in his work what he calls an ‘art of transition’, in this case related to South Africa’s transition to democracy (48). This is emphasized, first, by the position of the artist, descendant of a Lithuanian and German-Jewish family that migrated to the country and opposed the Apartheid; and second, from the topic of the film. By portraying the oppressive dynamics of African mines, and the aesthetic he chose to do so, Kentridge makes a perhaps unintentional but clear connection to Nazi camps, highlighting the relation between capitalism, colonialism and genocide (56).

Rothberg, thus, shows how art can generate new knots and networks of memory through multidirectionality and multivalent implication (56).

Author of this entry: Claudia Vasquez-Caicedo Rainero

Rothberg, Michael. “Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject: On Sebald and Kentridge.” In Performing memory in art and popular culture, edited by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik, 39-58. New York: Routledge, 2013.