Remembering Things Present: The Matter of Memory

Abstract

The argument behind our introductory essay, as well as behind our special issue of the Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, is that the human can emerge as part of the texture of the world only by being reminded of and by objects, that is, only by engaging in a dialogue with them, by recognising both their strangeness and their familiarity, by conferring upon them the distinction of containing the traces and archives of individual and collective history. We examine the turn towards things enacted by recent critical and artistic trends as a complex amalgam of de-anthropocentrising modes recalibrating experience under the pressure of imminent extinction (of humans, animals, inanimate objects) which produces a new imperative of togetherness by excavating the memory of our shared materiality.