Stephen Frosh - Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness

Studies in the Psychosocial seeks to investigate the ways in which psychic and social processes demand to be understood as always implicated in each other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of a single dialectical process. As such it can be understood as an interdisciplinary field in search of transdisciplinary objects of knowledge. Studies in the Psychosocial is also distinguished by its emphasis on affect, the irrational and unconscious processes, often, but not necessarily, understood psychoanalytically. Studies in the Psychosocial aims to foster the development of this field by publishing high quality and innovative monographs and edited collections. The series welcomes submissions from a range of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary orientations, including sociology, social and critical psychology, political science, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, queer studies, management and organization studies, cultural and media studies and psychoanalysis. However, in keeping with the inter- or transdisciplinary character of psychosocial analysis, books in the series will generally pass beyond their points of origin to generate concepts, understandings and forms of investigation that are distinctively psychosocial in character.

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Cover illustration: Photo Stephen Frosh/The Abandoned Room by Karl Biedermann

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Reviewing the manuscript of this book, I realised that I have been working on many of the issues in it for a long time probably at least two decades. This means that I have too many people to thank than I can really remember: so many substantial contributions to my thinking, so many incidental ones that have become significant in retrospect, so many hints and nudges and challenges. At this point, I think all I can do is recognise that there are lots of hauntings in my writing and thank all the people concerned.

That said, in the last stages of the book I have been particularly grateful to several of my colleagues in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. The creative, fertile and sometimes fractious environment of that Department, now (201819) ten years old, has been exceptionally important to me. I am also very aware of how much my PhD students and recent postdoctoral researchers have affected me and how much I enjoy working with them. I hope I have influenced them as much as they have me.

Recent years have seen the emergence of postmemory as a field of study concerned mainly with the transgenerational impact of personal and social trauma . This raises important questions about the mechanisms and ethics of transmission of suffering across generations as well as about the responsibility for acts carried out in our name but not with our agreement or involvement. It has practical implications for how much acknowledgement and reparation should be required of people for things done by their ancestors. It is especially timely in the context of cultural and political movements demanding recognition of historical wrongs and their continuing effects into the present. It also registers the kind of experience that Jonathan Boyarin (1996, p. 143) is reflecting on when he writes, the future has collapsed upon itself, and we are burdened more by what we come after than by what awaits us. The feeling he has and he is referencing here a specifically Jewish , but nevertheless widespread, sensitivity is that we move forward in time carrying (burdened by) what has happened in the past and that this is more concrete than any consideration we might have of future possibilities, hopes and dreads. Or perhaps we should say that the past