A post by Catherine Nesci
Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023. xi + 307 pp.
This book offers fascinating insights into the return of ghosts and memorial
passages across generations in contemporary French-speaking narratives about the
Shoah, the Algerian War of Independence, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in
1994, and mass crimes during the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s. Starting with an
expected and yet fresh discussion on haunting and spectrality in Jacques Derrida’s
Specters of Marx, and continuing with a most innovative review of recent texts by
Hélène Cixous, whose writing opens and weaves lines of communication with the
disappeared, Sonja Stojanovic highlights the key notion of double suffering (double
souffrance or double douleur in Cixous), which allows empathy and listening to the
cry of others, without appropriating the latter’s suffering.
