De l’identité-monument à l’identité-événement : un passage impossible ?

Résumé 0

Based on the commentary of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Koselleck, the author thinks about the space “crystallizing” the identitary memories of post-communist societies. The monument and the event are the two metaphors underlying these reflections.The monument is not a mere building. It is understood both as organizing space and as a relationship to the space instituted by a hierarchical power. The monument conjures up a sense of unity and homogeneity whereby the individual and the community alike are assured and reassured in times of identity crisis. It is grounded in a pre-modern logic that affords the individual neither autonomy, nor the ability to provide himself with his own law of thought and action.The event is grounded in a modern, if not post-modern, logic. An event occurs in a heterogenous space, shaped by thousands of concurrent powers busy creating the multiple spaces where daily practices eventualize identity in diversity, i. e. bringing the unitary image of the city-monument down to echo on the level of the ordinary individual.Because it is conflictingly affected by a sense of nationalism generating caricatural monumentality, and by an eagerness to consume, which produces thousands of minor monuments, the Romanian city of Cluj, in Romania, shall serve as the background to this reflection.