Deja vu : Aberrations of Cultural Memory
ISBN: 9780816695867
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / University of Minnesota Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Philosophy;

Referring to a past that never was, d(r)ja 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 d(r)ja vu. This provocative book offers a refreshing counterpoint to the clich(r)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 memoryOCoscreen memories, false recognitions, premonitionsOCodisrupt the comfort zone of memorial culture: strictly speaking, d(r)ja vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting. KrappOCOs 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 Mller, this exploration of the effects of d(r)ja vu pivots around the work of Walter Benjamin and includes readings of kitsch and aura in Andy WarholOCOs 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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