Memory and the Unconscious in Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib and Nabile Fares. What is remembered and who remembers in a nation? These two questions establish a relationship between a political entity -the nation- and the existence of a collectivity animated by a common mode of being -remembering-. They will frame my presentation. In, Le Trauma colonial, Karima Lazari asserts that, while the colonial question is the historical matrix of the Algerian history, it remains largely unconscious for the Algerian citizens who are still not able to work through the devastating psychic effects of the war of Liberation. After a critical examination of this thesis, I propose to analyze a body of literary works in which the theme of the war is prevalent. By doing so, I will articulate literary texts to historiography and psychoanalysis. I will demonstrate that, contrary to Lazari’s assertion, these creative works are not only a subjective way of shedding light on a confiscated history, but that they point towards a new temporal dimension : an opening up towards the future when it emanates from the past. This temporal dimension, I will argue, stands opposed to the ideology of nationalism. I will examine the relationship between the war and the configuration of the unconscious in three different novels by Kateb Yacine, (Nedjma), Mohamed Dib (Qui se souvient de la mer) and Nabile Farès (Mémoires de l’absent). Farès describes his novel as “an attempt to restitute through language the mental… breaking down of a world going through a radical destruction.” He maintains however, an opening towards the future, since his novel is part of a trilogy entitled “La découverte du nouveau Monde”—Discovery of a new world. Similarly, Nedjma and Qui se souvient de la mer can be both characterized as attempts to render the destruction of an old world, but through the prefiguration of its renewal. It is this seemingly antagonistic movement of destruction and recreation of the world that I will conceptualize by using the Freudian concept of the death drive and by showing its intimate connection to Eros. I will argue that a common relationship to memory is articulated in these three works. By anchoring it in the unconscious, they produce a singular conception of memory which is at the same time an opening towards the past, but more importantly an opening up towards a future to come.