Can We Tell Stories Out of Our Memories? The Contributions of Derrida and Benjamin

Abstract

The author draws from Jacques Derrida’s and Walter Benjamin’s writings on memory in order to argue that as these two thinkers deal with the simultaneity of the diachronic and synchronic dimension of time they open up the possibility of thinking about the relation between memory and narrative in a more complex way. These two theorists affirm the discontinuity and the nonrecognition between past events and present discourses and show the danger of conflating memory and narrative without the awareness of its limits