Abstract

This essay stages an encounter between several texts by Jacques Derrida which delineate the contours of what could be called a ‘memorial agonistics’. Through readings of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, Derrida shows that memory and commemorations always involve struggles in nomination and classification, jealous movements of appropriation and expropriation of the departed, wars in and for the name converging towards the imposition of some countersignature. These violent plays of preservation and substitution seem always to take place around the enigmatic figure of the mother – a monumental corpse instantiated in the essay through the name ‘Notre-Dame de la Garde’.