Critical Theory and Memory

This special section – with essays by Simone D’Alessandro, Daniel Valente Pedroso de Siqueira, and Bene-detta Pozio – addresses the relationship between memory and critique as one of the key issues of the present, bringing Critical Theory and Memory Studies into dialogue in light of contemporary digital transformations. Building on the Frankfurt School’s insight that memory is a field of struggle, the contributions conceptualize memory not as a passive repository of the past, but as a sociotechnical and normative practice shaping collective judgment and action. Through analyses ranging from platform memory and algorithmic colonization to Habermas’s theory of cultural memory and a Benjaminian reading of Marrano crypto-Judaism, memory emerges as a critical infrastructure, a public good, and a coun-ter-history of absence. The essays converge in arguing that memory, increasingly governed by platforms and market logics, calls for new forms of institutional protection, practices of resistance, and an updated critical vocabulary. From this perspective, memory appears as the contemporary form of critique: a dispositif capable of interrupting historical continuity, preserving gaps and silences, and reopening the possibility of emancipation in the present.