Memory as Part of an Event, and Events as Signification of Memories: Focusing on Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report

This paper attempts to reconceptualize memory as an event from a theological perspective, drawing on the recent dialog between memory studies and Critical Event Studies. To this end, it analyzes the narrative and themes of the 2007 novel Brodeck’s Report by Philippe Claudel, classified as a third-generation Holocaust (narrative) writer in France, within the framework of event studies. The novel has been praised for successfully depicting the tragedy as a universal event transcending spatial–temporal specificity by utilizing the genre of allegory while minimizing references to the historical and geographical specificity of the Holocaust. Extending this evaluation, this paper particularly focuses from a theological perspective on how the protagonist and narrator, Brodeck, simply names the subject of his report—a past event that happened to an unidentified other (Autre) called the ‘Anderer’—as ‘Ereignis’ (event). This is noteworthy because Ereignis is not only the most famous concept representing late Heideggerian philosophy but also holds significant importance in post-Heideggerian modern philosophy as the speculative source of the ‘evental turn’, which, along with the ‘material turn’, constitutes one axis of the ‘ontological turn’ in contemporary humanities and social sciences. In this regard, this work, which narrativizes the universality of the Holocaust, provides interesting implications for the possibility of a disjunctive synthesis between memory studies in the humanities and social sciences and theological event studies. Above all, it stimulates a reconsideration of the conventional dichotomy between memory and event—namely, the commonplace premise of “events that occurred in the past” and “present memories of past events”—as revealed in the definition of memory studies as “naming pasts, transforming futures”. Thus, this paper explores the possibility of reconceptualizing the moment of memory as part of the ongoing event itself from past to present, and the event as a process of symbolic construction of meaning through memory.