Mnemosyne and amnesia : social memory and the paradoxes of monumental images

Robert Musil has remarked that nothing is more invisible than monuments, explicitly built to gain a maximum in visibility and eloquence: conceived to preserve a social and collective memory, they rapidly become machines of oblivion. In this perspective, monuments belong to the domain of externalized memories, aids for recollecting (hypomnemata), already described by Plato's Phaedrus as structurally connected to amnesia and forgetfulness. Contemporary practices of counter-monumentality have been exploring since the Sixties sophisticated strategies in order to avoid such paradoxical results. My contribution aims at trying a phenomenological and typological description of the main anti-monumental proposals, and at outlining their not less paradoxical implications.