A story of memory, from Antiquity to the present day

Political agenda obliges, the themes of identity and memory are more than ever in the fires of the news, placing at the heart of the debates the question of the supposed “ roots »From our civilization. A recently translated work, Cultural memory. Scripture, memory and political imagination in ancient civilizationsinvites us to question ourselves more generally about the social construction of the past. The work of its author, Jan Assmann, long holder of the Chair of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg, have already benefited from numerous translations in French, but the work from which it is question must retain our attention more particularly because, presenting what Jan Assmann calls a “ History of memory “, He associates an exposure of his theoretical foundations with the study of ancient cases deemed emblematic. Its recent translation should not abuse us: the first German publication dates from 1992, and this book constitutes in a way the program of the work developed since that date by Jan Assmann, that of a cultural history not studying the past for him -Mame, but the way in which the political imagination of each of the civilizations he examines is part of a historical continuity by building memories and giving meaning to such or such an event passed.

A MENEMOHISTORY TEST

Any society necessarily shares rules, values, symbols, and gives itself a common history made of transmissions and oversights. It is this relationship to the past that is the subject of the book: he proposes to examine “ how societies remember, and what image they are made by themselves by engaging in memory (P. 16). It is a question of continuing the research initiated by Maurice Halbwachs, by favoring the social frameworks of memory, but by insisting more on the contributions of writing (in the continuity of the work of J. Goody), and by refusing an approach Who would be pure abstraction: if memory and identity are indeed social and cultural phenomena, they only engage in us by individuals.

In order to analyze the different methods of apprehension of the past, the author offers in a first part a series of definitions. He first distinguishes the communication memory of cultural memory. The first, not very formalized, concerns the recent past, not going back beyond a century, and is generally shared by all the members of the group. Cultural memory concerns, it, the older past, which it retains above all symbolic figures, crystallization points which are similar to myth. Holidays and rites play an essential role in the transmission of this second form of memory, whose responsibility is entrusted to specialists – shamans, bards, scribes, scholars – ; Their role is precisely to perpetuate the memory.

Each company, each era is offered two options: one, “ cold », Freezes the past by favoring the memories which inscribe it in a permanence ; the other, “ hot », Solles changes and gives itself myths establishing founding ruptures. We recognize here the opposition developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss between “ Cold Societies ” And “ hot companies “, But Jan Assmann modifies it significantly to make it more operational: it is not two types of companies that are thus opposed, but two ways of remembering, two possible strategies of memory policy, which can be activated at any time.

Continuing his work of definition, the author distinguishes two particular methods of historical continuity:

– Ritual continuity, characterizing above all oral cultures, ensuring transmission (rites, sacred texts) by favoring fixed, repetition without variation, the rite itself being the commemoration of a sense ;

– Textual continuity, open to innovations, marked by the new possibilities offered by writing, more turned towards hermeneutics, the interpretation of the texts.

The passage from one to the other takes place by the development of “ cannons », From traditions to binding content, to the intangible form (p. 93). If this concept of “ cannon »Implies the absence of variations, the faithful transmission of a form and models designed as so many standards, and is in this sense of ritual continuity, the” cannon Can also be accompanied by interpretations and thus give birth, especially in the Jewish and Greek worlds, to the cultures of exegesis.

Figures-souvenirs of the ancient Mediterranean Orient

In a second part, these conceptual distinctions find their application in the study of ancient cultures illustrating different types of relationships to the past. In ancient Egypt, myths and “ world visions Private, under the authority of the State, the factors of union and integration, and the images are the main vectors of cultural memory. Temples, hieroglyphs, statues, monuments are the marks of a frozen time, inscribed in ritual continuity and repetition, where the comment has no place.

The case of Israel testifies to a construction radically different from the past: the account of the exodus, the exit of Egypt under the authority of Moses Hebrew, plays the role of figure-souvenir of identity of the people and their God, and institutes an ideology of distinction and exclusion ; It is now by their religion that the people of Israel stand out and oppose all that is foreign to them. Over the vicissitudes of the history of the Jewish people, the past has this originality of being built as a “ counterfeit “: The present of each community dispersed around the world is experienced as the exact opposite of what was the past of the people of the Alliance. Continuing his analysis of the Pentateuque, and in particular of Deuteronoma, Jan Assmann widens his field of investigation and notes that the Near East as a whole gives a preponderant place to the concept of justice, human and divine, based on oaths, pacts, laws. The fault is therefore the event that chants the past and inexorably provokes divine punishment, the intervention of the gods in the course of history. History and law are from this point of view inseparably linked.

Greece, on the other hand, offers the example of a culture without sacred texts and whose tradition is anchored in orality. Writing does not appear there as an instrument of domination, but on the contrary, “ as a free space in which neither a sovereign nor a God make their instructions heard (P. 238). The Iliad plays the role of central-souvenir-souvenir, celebrating aristocratic values ​​and the unity of a people against their oriental enemies, whose tradition is transmitted by rhapsodes during panhelllenic festivals, then by librarians and scholarly compilers When rhapsodic recitation gives way to a culture of book and reading. During this new stage, the texts transmitted by the oral tradition are delivered to critical comments, to the most diverse interpretations. Jan Assmann introduces here, to designate this new type of cultural continuity, the concept of “ hypoleepse “, Which he defines as” the reference to texts from the past, in the form of a controlled variation »(P. 249): Launched in the incessant quest for truth, these are now texts that respond to other texts, and dialogue between them. European cultures are of course an extension of the memory constructions developed by Israel and Greece, whose founding texts have taken up.

Of Cultural memory has Moses the Egyptian

Cultural memory is a dense and demanding work, developing and illustrating many concepts, combining subtle arguments with sometimes lapidary but effective formulations. Reading is undoubtedly stimulating, as the interpretative framework proposed by the author seems ambitious and nuanced. To complete this presentation and illustrate the proposed approach, we propose to judge the tree at its fruits and to evoke here Moses the Egyptian, published for the first time in English in 1997, then in French in 2001, and which is without Doubt the most famous work of Jan Assmann.

As we have seen, what interests our author is not so much the past itself as the way in which this past is apprehended, transmitted and updated over the centuries. It is therefore not Moses or the birth of a monotheistic religion that are studied as such in Moses the Egyptianbut the memory story of what Jan Assmann calls the “ Mosaic distinction “, Defined as the founding moment of distinction of true and false in religion, prohibiting any translation from one religious system to another (which allowed, on the contrary, ancient polytheisms), denying everything that is prior to it and outside. The exodus is the symbolic story of this separation between true and false, Egypt becoming the representative par excellence of paganism and idolatry, the symbol of what is excluded because religiously false. But also exists, from Strabo to Freud via John Spencer, a “ counter-history Where the same Moses, presented as Egyptian, plays on the contrary the role of mediator of these oppositions and thus rehabilitates the cultural role of ancient Egypt. The gaze on Egypt, the antagonism between polytheism and monotheism have therefore found in Moses a souvenir figure being the subject of constantly renewed readings because allowing to think and overcome internal oppositions to European and Mediterranean cultures. In the end, which is at stake in this “ mnemohistory This is the way in which these cultures have historically built the religious figure of the other. By analyzing the different methods of construction of the past specific to each of the ancient societies to which the West grants a special place, as well as their modern extensions, it is therefore our news that Jan Assmann speaks to us.