Drawing upon a range of theorists (Derrida, Lacan, Barthes), photographers (Adams, Weston, Lange) and literary texts (Baudelaire, Proust, Breton, Camus, Barnes, Kundera), this article explores the role of memory in grounding identity. If the subject is constituted in language, it is argued, identity can be achieved only in the realm of the imaginary, through fixation in an imago of the self. It is memory above all that gives this being-in-denial its imagined solidity; but that solidity is an effect of language’s ability to create verisimilitude in an eternal present of signification, and not of memory’s relation to a real past. Identity therefore always remains precarious, because the signifiers that furnish the points de capiton of what we remember always also defer elsewhere.
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn.London: Verso .
2.
Barnes, Julian (1998) England, England. London: Jonathan Cape .
3.
Barthes, Roland (1977) Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang .
4.
Barthes, Roland (2000) Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang .
5.
Baudelaire, Charles (1986) My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings. London: Soho Book Company .
6.
Berman, Marshall (1982) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster .
7.
Blanchot, Maurice (1999) The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha . Barrytown, NY: Station Hill .
8.
Breton, André (1960) Nadja. New York: Grove Press .
9.
Breton, André (1997) Anthology of Black Humor. San Francisco, CA: City Lights .
10.
Butler, Judith P. (1990) Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge .
11.
Camus, Albert (1991) The Fall. New York: Vintage .
12.
Carroll, Lewis (1993) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. New York: Knopf .
13.
DeLillo, Don (2001) The Body Artist. New York: Simon and Schuster .
14.
Derrida, Jacques (1982) Positions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press .
15.
Derrida, Jacques (1986) Margins of Philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press .
16.
Derrida, Jacques (1998) Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press .
17.
Durkheim, Emile (1973) ‘The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions’, in R.N. Bellah (ed.) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press .
18.
Durkheim, Emile (1974) ‘Determination of Moral Facts’, in Sociology and Philosophy. New York: Free Press .
19.
Foucault, Michel (1994) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage .
20.
Geertz, Clifford (1996) After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
21.
Klíma, Ivan (1993) Love and Garbage. New York: Vintage .
22.
Koetzle, Hans-Michael (2002) Photo Icons: The Story Behind the Pictures, vol. 2. Köln: Taschen .
23.
Kracauer, Siegfried (1980) ‘Photography’, in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.) Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books .
24.
Kundera, Milan (1984) ‘A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out’ , Granta11: 93–122 .
25.
Kundera, Milan (1986) The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. London: Penguin .
26.
Kundera, Milan (1988) The Art of the Novel. New York: Grove Press .
27.
Kundera, Milan (1991) The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York: HarperCollins .
28.
Kundera, Milan (1995) Testaments Betrayed. New York: HarperCollins .
29.
Kundera, Milan (1999) ‘The Hitchhiking Game’, in Laughable Loves. New York: HarperCollins .
30.
Lacan, Jacques (1998) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton .
31.
Lacan, Jacques (2001) Ecrits: A Selection. London and New York: Routledge .
32.
Nejedlý, Zdeněk (1958) ‘Preface’ to the exhibition catalogueCelostátní výstava archivních dokumentu°: od hrdinně minulosti k vítěvstvi socialismu. Prague: Ministerstvo vnitra .
33.
Nora, Pierre et al. (1996) Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press .
34.
Orwell, George (1983) Nineteen Eighty-four, in The Penguin Complete Novels of George Orwell. London: Penguin .
35.
Proust, Marcel (2002) The Way by Swann’s, vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time. London: Allen Lane .
36.
Sayer, Derek (1998a) The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
37.
Sayer, Derek (1998b) ‘A Quintessential Czechness’ , Common Knowledge7(2): 136–164 .
38.
Sayer, Derek (2004) Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers .
39.
Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography. New York: Picador .
40.
Weston, Edward (1980) ‘Seeing Photographically’, in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.) Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books .
41.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1971) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul .
