commemoration as interpassive ritual

Recently I've read an interesting article on commemoration: Ben Gook: Being there is everything! in: Memory Studies 2011 4:13.

Ben Gook proposes a novel theory of commemoration as interpassive ritual. Drawing on the works of Edward S. Casey, Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek he explored the role of ideology in commemoration and the potential of subjects to escape subjugation through interpassive rituals. He argues that "commemoration is a moment of intensified public memory in which ideology and the unconscious are deeply embedded" (14). Public memory is understood as "an event of intensified remembering with others" (16). Remembering is done by the means of certain rituals, texts or simply the presence of the other co-rememberers. In the commemoration a subject misperceives him/herself as a passive agent, standing in the crowd whereas other do remembering, but in reality it is the presence of each subject that makes the commemoration and remembering possible: "The commemoration does the memory work for us" (17). It means that "subjects are remembering through commemorative vehicles (ritual. texts)" (18). "These paradoxical effects of commemoration - the vacuity, the use of others and the intensified remembering ritual - can be understood as interpassivity" (17). 

Gook stresses the potential of subjects to escape subjugation through commemoration: "the true performative force of commemoration...lies in the subjectivity of those it addresses. Subjects maintain a capacity to give or withhold assent: subjectivity preceded and resists the ideological identities subjects take on" (16). Drawing on Althuser's theory of interpellation and Pfaller's study of ritual Gook contends that interpassivity is opposed to interpellation: "The possibility to avoid subjectivation appears to be the reason for interpassive practice, and the key source of the strange satisfaction experienced by interpassive individuals" (Pfaller, 2003).