Tzvetan Todorov just gave a terrific lecture to the UCLA Humanities Consortium, under the title “Memories: Past Identities, Future Projects.” He criticized the use of what he called “victim” and “hero” narratives to form national identity, and argued for a critical encounter with the past and the recognition of tragedy as historical reality. The talk, an extract from a forthcoming book to be called Memory and Hope, was learned, serious, wise, and witty.
Todorov told the stories of two concentration-camp survivors (both of them members of the Resistance we are now being told was “largely mythical”) who turned their experience into valuable public action: David Rousset, who broke with many of his comrades (and suffered abuse from the likes of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) by bringing public attention to the camp system in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and Germaine Tillon, who refused to take sides in the Algerian conflict but who spoke out against systematic torture.
Criticizing Santayana’s aphorism about the costs of studying history on the grounds that it implies that those who do study history are assured of not having to repeat it, Todorov said, “To avoid repeating the past, it is not sufficient to recite it.”