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erasure, silence, absence. Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care constructs and oers a
counter-archive of works by artists, activists, historians, and social scientists that hesitate,
interrupt, and thus politicize anew temporality, sense, and memory. Mihai’s archival
selections include artworks that speak to the double erasure, de-heroify nationalist ver-
sions of history, and create hermeneutical space in response to violence, for the sake of
community.
In this eort, Mihai builds on Alia Al-Saji’s concept of aective hesitation to
theorize the capacity for revising memory in hegemonic common sense. Mihai fore-
grounds how this imaginative capacity can be accessed by the work of art; “artworks
can play a transformative role to the extent that they trigger aective but also cogni-
tive, emotional, and moral hesitations” (52). Hesitation can interrupt and politicize the
individual’s practical sense and habits of perceiving, remembering, and imagining as
the subject faces “epistemic friction,” a process Mihai elaborates from the work of José
Medina. Epistemic friction can develop in the hesitation opened up by the artwork,
and friction enables the imagination to “prosthetically include previously disconsonant
instances—of victimhood, complicity, or resistance, within our repertoire of herme-
neutical resources, which we actualize practically in time” (53). Accordingly, the work of
art for Mihai is in the operations of prosthesis and also in “seductive sabotage” or the
pleasure that is part of the art experience—which might sabotage habits and habitus.
Mihai argues that her archive of artworks—lms and novels produced in the
wake, and in reection, of systemic violence—complicate the complicity/resistance
dyad, reframe heroic action beyond the terms that serve national doxa, carve out tempo-
ralities, experiences, vulnerabilities, and rationales that remain unaccounted for in nation
narratives, and oer alternative visions of the past. This archive might be understood as
a counter-archive to nationalized public memory. Mihai’s knowledge production and
reection might be understood as practice in community. In constructing this archive,
Mihai works as “curator” in the original sense of the word: care-taker.
The rest of the book takes care, curates, and, in eect, archives lms and novels
that “pluralize a community’s space of meaning” (57). Mihai oers a care ethics that
always-already integrates interdependency and relationality, which opposes liberal philo-
sophical models that privilege the subject in accounts of sociality. Care ethics necessitate
the framing of violence through relationality. In relationality, the memorialization of
resistance (and complicity) no longer makes sense. Caring therefore is relational practice
and practice in relationship: “we begin to care in the act of caring” (59). As practice, caring
works against instituted and systemic suering, oppression, exclusion, and assimilation.
Thus care ethics oppose “socialized misremembering,” which accepts ocial memory,
and the nation narratives that regulate common sense, and instead oers hermeneutical
space in which seeing, thinking, and feeling otherwise become possible.
The nal three chapters of the book tackle three global sites reckoning with the
temporality of ocial memory’s double erasures: France, Romania, and South Africa.
Mihai takes care to expose the double erasures, summarizes the memorialized ocial
story, and presents an archive that counters the story to restore what has been erased
across the three sites. She looks to ction and lm by Louis Malle, Jacques Laurent,
Patrick Modiano, Brigitte Friang, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Resnais in post-war