In our time, memory, in its social and collective dimensions, has become a theme of public discussion, closely linked to violent, or even traumatic, historical events, from the Holocaust to 9/11. Today the possibility of turning memory into a literary device, like Proust, is reduced or even impossible: at this time individual memory, as a psychic mechanism, is confronted with its technological prostheses, e.g. smartphones, computers and the Internet, where all the memory in the world, which used to be represented in libraries and archives, is stored. Since memory and the manifestations of its hegemony (visible in the obsession with heritage, in the ceaseless inauguration of museums, and in the public agenda of celebrations and reflections) mark our time with a whiff of decadence, we devote to it ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra.