Intellectual activity, just as the life process, seems to be governed by the law of the pendulum. When satisfaction quiets the irritation of an organ, it establishes a state of organic apathy until a new irritant intervenes. A classic shibboleth affirms that the history of philosophy oscillates between Plato and Aristotle in a circadian rhythm measured not in hours but in centuries. After a half-century of dire warnings about the consequences of forgetting the past, skeptical and even contrarian discourses have emerged against the historical memory. Increasingly, people clamor against the excesses perpetrated in the name of memory by the identities that misuse it. An example of this reaction can be found in David Rieff's book, Against Remembrance. Written in the wake of the war in the Balkans, this essay popularized the more rigorous criticism of so-called memory studies pioneered by Charles Meier in the 1990s. Meier's intervention was opportune, considering the trivialization of the concept of historical memory and the race for victimhood status that accompanied the rise of memory studies. In the words of a guest speaker at Stanford, trauma affects everyone, since all of us have inherited some history or other. But if everyone inherits a history, or at least a story—and who doesn't?—surviving a genocidal experience or living under a murderous dictatorship ceases to be a requirement for admission to the club of the traumatized. If memory is inextricable from narcissism, a faculty in service to self-esteem, then mine is as good as anyone else's. And who can set limits to self-pity? Thus, it makes perfect sense to complain about the excesses of memory, although to do so by generalizing trauma inevitably trivializes it.

Beyond the exigencies of political correctness, it is important to weigh the consequences of the current memory surfeit to decide when the fatigue is motivated by legitimate concern with misuse and when by concealment of crimes and the hankering after impunity. We should not ask only, whom does memory serve? but also, who benefits from forgetting?