Deja Vu

The pitfalls of cultural memory and forgetting, understood through the genealogy of the phenomenon called dj vu Referring to a past that never was, dj vu shares a structure not only with fiction, but also with the ever more sophisticated effects of media technology. Tracing the term from the end of the nineteenth century, when it was first popularized in the pages of the Revue philosophique, Peter Krapp examines the genealogy and history of the singular and unrepeatable experience of dj vu. This provocative book offers a refreshing counterpoint to the clichd celebrations of cultural memory and forces us do a double take on the sanctimonious warnings against forgetting so common in our time. Disturbances of cultural memoryscreen memories, false recognitions, premonitionsdisrupt the comfort zone of memorial culture: strictly speaking, dj vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting. Krapps analysis of such disturbances in literature, art, and mass media introduces, historicizes, and theorizes what it means to speak of an economy of attention or distraction. Reaching from the early psychoanalytic texts of Sigmund Freud to the plays of Heiner Mller, this exploration of the effects of dj vu pivots around the work of Walter Benjamin and includes readings of kitsch and aura in Andy Warhols work, of cinematic violence and certain exaggerated claims about shooting and cutting, of the memorial character of architecture, and of the high expectations raised by the Internet.