Precarious Memory in the Post-Axial Age: The Structures of Feeling in Human Rights Museums

This paper locates itself in a “post-Axial age,” extending Karl Jaspers’s Axial Age thesis to read our moment of climate collapse, nuclear precarity, geopolitical volatility, and neoliberal governance. Human rights museums are recast not as repositories of artifacts but as laboratories for emergent “structures of feeling” in Raymond Williams’s sense. Centring on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (HPMM), the paper traces a specific museology organized around two entwined tropes: finality and afterlife. Finality names the “zero-hour” of atomic detonation and instantaneous incineration as scenes of irrevocable closure and temporal rupture. Afterlife figures Hiroshima as dialectical testimony in which annihilation at once obliterates and sanctifies survival, transcendence, and hope, crystallized in the hibakusha as bearer of “sacred memory.” Treating memory as impossible, haunting resonance, the HPMM stages vulnerability at the edge of times and activates its spaces as affective arenas of what I call “negative justice museology,” whose “negative aesthetics” force visitors to confront the precarious moral terrain of the present.