Remembering and Responsibility: Commentary on Paper by Gillian Straker.

This discussion relates Gillian Straker's work on the South African apartheid archives to Rawlsian social ethics, and to Margalit's ethics of memory, with special emphasis on her “bystander/beneficiary” formulation. From a psychoanalytic point of view, it questions whether Brombergian dissociation adequately accounts for the pre-dissociative self-loss described by some of the archive participants. Returning to ethics, it invokes Margalit's concept of the moral witness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]