... terms, as solid objects made not from stone but from paper. This material existence of the book was put to good use in the memorial culture that developed in the war’s wake: commemorative books, like statues and gravestones, became tools for memory, standing in the place of the war dead and picked up...

...This chapter discusses memorial culture from the vantage point of libidinal energy. It outlines two very different investments of social remembrance: a schizoid investment of desire that occurs when memorial culture registers the social force of collective trauma; and a fascistic investment...

...This book presents a detailed study of contemporary forms of public remembrance. It considers the different character traumatic memory takes throughout the sphere of cultural production and argues that contemporary memorial culture has the power to put traumatic memory to work in a positive way...

...This introductory chapter explains the theme of this book, which is about contemporary forms of public remembrance or memorial culture based on Gilles Deleuze's concept of desire. The book presents a series of case studies concentrating on certain contemporary traumatic events and the cultural...

...This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on contemporary forms of public remembrance or memorial culture, and explains that memory can be used by the social field in a distinctively non-Oedipal way so that the past is not a blueprint for the future. It argues that in so far...