Il testimone necessario. Memorie della Shoah e costruzioni identitarie

The article discusses three issues, which are strictly interwoven to each other. Firstly, the relationship between the eyewitness memory for past events, their recording in institutionalized archives, and their reconstruction provided by historians is framed within a systematic perspective, in order to make clear in which sense the eyewitness constitutes the basic pillar of any historical work. Secondly, the role played by eyewitness of the Shoah is related to the “politics of memory”. The social function of the latter is important not as a form of monumentalization of the past, rather as an attempt to improve a shared memory for an event –the Shoah− whose cultural and political meaning concerns above all the European heritage and not only the history of the Jewish people. Thirdly, the attempt to read the Shoah as an expression of biopolitics −in the foucauldian sense of the term− provides the frame for a discussion about contemporary forms of social and institutionalized violence, assuming that the compass of the Holocaust Studies and their methodology reach far beyond the phenomena related to the Shoah.