Public Commemoration as Citizen Formation.

From the perspective of the modern nation-state, public commemoration provides a socially unifying force capable of transcending the inherent multiplicity of democratic society. Affirming the significance of an individuated human being (citizen) as a member of the community (nation), practices of memorialization redeem death as singularity through a universalization of its meaning: the institutionalization of memory absorbs the meaning of life into that of the state in order to preserve a collective identity surviving beyond death. The following paper explores this phenomenon by examining the fifth century Athenian funeral oration as it is represented in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and Plato's Menexenus. Posing either a series of communal requirements or familial duties for how to properly account for the dead, these texts cast the political significance of commemoration in terms of ethical imperatives not far removed from those of modern democratic societies. Idealizing democratic life through a model of civic relations, these injunctions bind the individual to the material wellbeing of the community for the sake of legitimizing the prevailing social, economic, and political order. Rather than accept this politically disaffecting condition, this paper attempts to recover the importance of memory for politics by insisting on the role of public commemoration as a site of democratic practice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]