Is forgetting reprehensible? Holocaust remembrance and the task of oblivion

Journal of Religious Ethics 36 (2):233-267 (2008)
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Abstract

"Forgetting" plays an important role in the lives of individuals and communities. Although a few Holocaust scholars have begun to take forgetting more seriously in relation to the task of remembering—in popular parlance as well as in academic discourse on the Holocaust—forgetting is usually perceived as a negative force. In the decades following 1945, the terms remembering and forgetting have often been used antithetically, with the communities of victims insisting on the duty to remember and a society of perpetrators desiring to forget. Thus, the discourse on Holocaust memory has become entrenched on this issue. This essay counters the swift rejection of forgetting and its labeling as a reprehensible act. It calls attention to two issues: first, it offers a critical argument for different forms of forgetting; second, it concludes with suggestions of how deliberate performative practices of forgetting might benefit communities affected by a genocidal past. Is it possible to conceive of forgetting not as the ugly twin of remembering but as its necessary companion?

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Citations of this work

The Importance of Forgetting.Rima Basu - 2022 - Episteme 19 (4):471-490.
Between Remembering and Forgetting.Mordechai Gordon - 2014 - Studies in Philosophy and Education 34 (5):489-503.
Moral psychology of the fading affect bias.Andrew J. Corsa & W. Richard Walker - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (7):1097-1113.
The moral and political burdens of memory. [REVIEW]Richard B. Miller - 2009 - Journal of Religious Ethics 37 (3):533-564.

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References found in this work

On the Genealogy of Morals.Friedrich Nietzsche - 2006 - Oxford ;: Barnes & Noble Library of Esse. Edited by Horace Barnett Samuel.
The ethics of memory.Avishai Margalit - 2002 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
The atrocity paradigm: a theory of evil.Claudia Card - 2002 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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