Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory

Peter Krapp9780816643349, 0-8166-4334-2, 0-8166-4335-0

Referring to a past that never was, dГ©jГ  vu shares a structure not only with fiction, but also with the ever more sophisticated effects of media technology. Tracing the term from the end of the nineteenth century, when it was first popularized in the pages of the Revue philosophique, Peter Krapp examines the genealogy and history of the singular and unrepeatable experience of dГ©jГ  vu. This provocative book offers a refreshing counterpoint to the clichГ©d celebrations of cultural memory and forces us do a double take on the sanctimonious warnings against forgetting so common in our time.
Disturbances of cultural memory—screen memories, false recognitions, premonitions—disrupt the comfort zone of memorial culture: strictly speaking, déjà vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting. Krapp’s analysis of such disturbances in literature, art, and mass media introduces, historicizes, and theorizes what it means to speak of an economy of attention or distraction. Reaching from the early psychoanalytic texts of Sigmund Freud to the plays of Heiner Müller, this exploration of the effects of déjà vu pivots around the work of Walter Benjamin and includes readings of kitsch and aura in Andy Warhol’s work, of cinematic violence and certain exaggerated claims about shooting and cutting, of the memorial character of architecture, and of the high expectations raised by the Internet.

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Table of contents :
Contents……Page 6
Acknowledgments……Page 8
Been There, Done That……Page 10
1. Secret Agents: Sigmund Freud in Reserve……Page 30
2. Future Interior: Walter Benjamin’s Envelope……Page 60
3. Posthistoire in Ruins: Heiner Müller’s Hydrapoetics……Page 82
4. Andy’s Wedding: Reading Warhol……Page 100
5. Unforgiven: Toward an Ethics of Forgetting……Page 126
6. Screen Memories: Hypertext……Page 148
7. Wrapping It Up: Mummy Effects……Page 172
Notes……Page 184
D……Page 244
I……Page 245
R……Page 246
Z……Page 247