Is photography a threat to memory? Marina Warner on how images can dissolve rather than preserve the past.

Marina Warner writes from The Italian Academy at Edward Said’s own Columbia University, New York about a great public intellectual and a rare, true friend.

From pre-historic bog-people to ‘big hair’; virgin martyrs to dresses spun from lost souls, to the hairy Devil himself, the author of ‘The Beast to the Blonde’ takes us on a final grand tour of openDemocracy’s virtual museum.

The theme of ‘apology’ is in the air: governments are saying it to former colonial subjects, or to political prisoners in post-dictatorships; former terrorists to their targets; banks and businesses to looted or polluted clients; churches and cults to victims of abuse. Why are they doing it? In her approach to today’s latest ‘political enthusiasm’, we accompany Marina Warner – novelist, critic, and subversive anatomist of myth and the collective subconscious – on a sparkling tour of the literature of apology over twenty-five centuries.

In which the archetypal figure of human heroic suffering meets the persecuted eternal feminine. Before history invented public apology, was there any solace?

In which, in the moment of confession, two figures emerge: the apologist and human self-portraiture. From the very beginning self-scrutiny is a danger zone.

In which forgiveness, and human recognition work their magic. But how well, and for how long? Maybe, nothing short of revolution will do?

Again, we skip on several centuries – from Augustine writing in what is present day Algeria, to Lorenzo Da Ponte and Mozart in Vienna in 1786, and The Marriage of Figaro.

In which many kinds of truth…and reconciliation, are investigated. Sometimes only a deep pychic process can effect healing. Where does the personal end and the political begin?

In which apology comes to play a necessary part in our modern world, contributing to the revisioning of national history and the shaping of group identities. But do we fully understand what we have done?