1989 in Poland marked a profound change of the importance of the parliament. After the peaceful revolution, the parliament became once again the main legislative institution in the political system. However, the perception of the politics of memory in public opinion has been long constituted around the thesis that institutions without democratic legitimacy – research institutions, museums or ministries - are mostly responsible for its creation and implementation.
This idea survived also reflected in the academic discourse, which is dominated by the analyses of memory policies carried out by the aforementioned political actors. To a large extent, the role of parliament in the politics of memory is presented only by its participation in legislative processes, regulating the politics of memory (Nikolai Koposov's idea of memory laws). An example is an Act on Genocide of Poles in Volhynia in 1943-1945, or the Act on Establishing the National Day of Cursed Soldiers.
Recognizing the representative function of the parliament, and in particular, its lower house, we have attempted to analyze the discursive part of the institutional activity of the Polish Parliament, which does not always translate into concrete legal solutions. However, the discourse, as the order of power invariably seeks to create a synthetic, closed politics of memory. Our work aims at revealing the mechanisms of power, in which particular actors (politicians, parties) strive for a "targeted universalization" of historical elements in the form of a dominant, synthetic politics of memory.
The research carried out was mixed in methods, combining qualitative and quantitative perspectives. As part of the quantitative content analysis, we have selected the keywords which are relevant in the context of politics of memory. Then, within the framework of qualitative discourse analysis, we have interpreted statements referring to the politics of memory in the context of biographies of politicians involved in the debates. Within such a theoretical framework, during the speech, we want to present a fragment of research concerning the memory and commemoration of past events of protests and political contestation.
Our research proves that institutional politics memory is burdened with the inalienable heterogeneity of living social memory, which reveals itself on the affective level - the spontaneous expression of unconscious feelings, in the public debate. This fact seems to prove by the juxtaposition of the artefacts of institutional memory (political commemoration) with the biographical facts of those who presented them in a performative form. The method of clashing these two elements explains their choice of vocabulary and the way of interpreting the commemorated events, which indicate the existence of an unconscious discursive 'reverberation'.
Appropriately enhanced echoes of past events can form the basis for a new counter-narration, a rupture point in the process of political memory unification. The decisive factor in this aspect is, in our assessment, the social "phantom pain" - a resonating element in the memory of the tragic protests, a discursive "gateway" to the deep layers of society's subconscious.
