Haunted by Uncertain Refrains

Abstract

The question of intergenerational transmission is very often focused on trauma. ***Lamarckian preservation of an initial trauma ‘in’ the unconscious, passed down automatically from one generation to the next*** However, there is an equally, or maybe even more, important set of issues around the perpetuation of social identities over time that is connected to this. How do people hold onto these identities, even in the context of dispersal and significant social change? For Freud, especially in Moses and Monotheism, the link was around a kind of Lamarckian preservation of an initial trauma ‘in’ the unconscious, passed down automatically from one generation to the next, a point taken up by Yerushalmi in his Freud’s Moses as a way of **conceptualising the perpetuation of Jewish identity**, which in turn was reread *critically by **Derrida. ***Is there something fixed and ‘certain’ that is communicated by each generation to its successor as a cultural framework for identity, or is this a nostalgic and ‘melancholic’ way of defending identities against change? *** This issue is discussed both in terms of the psychoanalytic idea of primal fantasies and in relation to Stuart Hall’s argument that cultural identities—specifically, diasporic identities—are processes of ‘becoming’, always in fact open to change. ***As such, they can be seen to be haunted by notions of past events—but not necessarily by the events themselves.*** ***QUESTION **DISCUSS** USING LEON*