Reflection

Ann Rigney’s Remembering Hope is, at its core, a provocation. She challenges the dominance of what she calls the “traumatic paradigm” within memory studies — the gravitational pull toward violence, loss, and grievance that has shaped much of the field.

I find her argument compelling — particularly her insistence that we need better tools to understand how memory transmits attachment, value, and commitment. The idea that hope can be carried across generations not as naïve optimism, but as a refusal to concede defeat, is powerful. Her reading of the Paris Commune as a “counter-narrativist memory” — one that privileges the beginning over the massacre that ended it — demonstrates how memory can detach promise from outcome.

The Commune, though crushed, survives as possibility.

And yet.

While I appreciate Rigney’s call to move beyond an exclusive fixation on trauma, I am cautious about framing the “traumatic paradigm” as simply a limitation. There is ethical weight in memorialising the difficult. Mourning, recognition, and the preservation of painful histories are not signs of paralysis; they are acts of respect. In contexts of violence — particularly state violence — difficult memory can function as accountability. It can resist erasure. It can insist that harm is neither incidental nor forgettable.

Rigney herself notes that the future is often imagined “in terms of the absence of something bad – Nunca más, nie wieder, never again.”

That formulation may appear negative, but it is also profoundly moral. The refusal of repetition is not small. It is a political horizon.