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The Monument as a paradox

A study of the monument through the difference between fragment and section in memory.

A monument while being built is related to something that happened. The reason for the monument is that this significant “something” actually happened. Here is a paradox: what “happened” wasn’t made up, the monument is made. Regardless of the way it was experienced, recorded or remembered, “what happened” has a unique existence. The monument cannot be built as a “rebuilt” since it is related to something that wasn’t built. The monument is something made: fictional, what happen was real, factual.
In the monument, the only thing that can be recreated is the structure of what happened. The recreation of the totality in a symbolic manner is a reduction of the reality to its image, a souvenir a sacrifice of the individual in name of the universal. The recreation of the experience in a referential way, as if suffering for the other (while helping identification) is perverse, since it not only takes away the meaning of the other’s suffering but offers the occasion to dramatize innocuous suffering, to monumentalize to the scale of pain what has become trivial discomfort….