Material Remains: Doris Salcedo Rebecca Comay When I started thinking about Doris Salcedo (the subject of recent retrospectives in Chicago and New York) I had been mucking about in the swamp surrounding memory politics and thinking specifically about the pressures induced by Adorno’s injunctions on art-after-Auschwitz. The challenges have been well- rehearsed: how to commemorate an event which both demands and refuses commemoration; where all available cultural forms threaten to trivialise, sentimentalise, mystify, embellish, instrumentalise, or otherwise betray the memory of the dead; and where every attempt to acknowledge injury seems only to compound it. The perplexity has preoccupied the makers of Holocaust memorials for decades now, and has led to the proliferation of anti-monuments, counter-monuments, ‘nonuments’ that continue to spring up in cities throughout Europe and beyond—self-berating, self-effacing, self- undoing. The stakes mount exponentially with every new intervention. It’s not just that fatigue can set in; that the project sooner or later risks becoming an exercise in ethical and intellectual one-upmanship; that taciturnity can become a prompt for ever more virtuosic displays of reticence; or that the ban on representation, and specifically on the figuration of trauma, can lead to a mysticism of the ineffable and the sacralisation of atrocity as awe-inspiring (or simply inspiring) taboo. It’s also that discretion can compound the cruelties of official oblivion. Violence likes to occult itself—the apparatus of terror requires this obfuscation—and one of the most systematic mechanisms of ‘disappearance’ is that the traces of disappearance are made to disappear. The Oxford Literary Review 39.1 (2017): 42–64 DOI: 10.3366/olr.2017.0209 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/olr