Liban. Mémoires fragmentées d’une guerre obsédante: L’anamnèse dans la production Culturelle francophone (2000–2015) by Carla Calargé (review)

Anamnesis, the first word in the subtitle of Carla Calargé’s study of the Francophone cultural production of the second and third decades of Lebanon’s post-civil war (1975–1990) period, is a keyword that bears further scrutiny for the light that it sheds on Calargé’s approach to her subject matter. From the Greek word for remembrance, anamnesis in Platonic philosophy is the act of recalling – and relearning – that which one once knew, but forgot; it is the retrieval of a past, now-erased knowledge. In Christian thought, anamnesis is the ritualistic act of recalling the memory of Christ, and performing a memory ritual that is central to communal identity-formation and self-understanding. In modern times, anamnesis has been absorbed into the medical lexicon and is used to refer to a patient’s recounting of their own medical history to their physician. All three dimensions of the word converge in this slim volume, a concise analysis of memory work in Lebanese Francophone literature.