C’est la première fois que je lis quelque chose d’aussi éclairant sur la mémoire et l’histoire. Bon, je n’ai pas lu beaucoup sur le sujet, vous me direz, mais je trouve tout de même que la distinction qu’il fait entre les deux termes est très interessante. En voici un extrait.
Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. [...] Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things.
Nora, Pierre. «Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire». Representations 26, Spring (1989): 7-25. Page 8.