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Memory, trauma. “The past is a different country. They do things differently there.” (L. P. Hartley).
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“The past is a different country. They do things differently there.” (L. P. Hartley)
“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing. (Luis Buñuel) “Memory is the irruption of other things in us” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
“Only that which never ceases to hurt will stay in the memory” (Nietzsche: The Generalogy of Morals) “The horror of that moment,” the king went on, “I shall never, never forget!” “You will though”, the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it”. (Through the Looking-Glass)
Richard Terdiman: memory is the past made present Assmann: The study of memory is interested not in the past as such, but in the past as it is remembered. It is concerned with the paths of handing down, the diachronic continuities of the reading of the past” (Moses)
mythology Mnemosyne Mother of the nine Muses (memory and art)
Memory and philosophy Epistemological problem Plato: MNEME “what we call learning is really just recollection” (Phaedo) ANAMNESIS: conscious effort to retrieve
Plato’s Theaetetus: two models (1) block of wax in the mind We hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and “imprint them on it as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring. Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know so long as the image remains, whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression we have forgotten and do not know”
Plato’s Theaetetus: two models (2) aviary stocked with birds
Aristotle We think only in images Time: a linear series of similar presents Do we recall the thing or its image? Perception and memory (Benjy in The Sound and the Fury)
Enlightenment Locke, Hume storage/retrieval model of memory „The power to revive again in our minds those ideas which, after imprinting, have disappeared, or have been as it were laid aside out of sight. ... This is memory, which is as it were the storehouse of our ideas” memory as the key to identity
Modernity Memory becomes a problem for the self Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’ – the sheer difficulty of evoking orf rejoining my past self Romanticism: Memory disturbances (grief, nostalgia, split minds) Revolution
Erinnerung vs Gedächtnis Memory as interiorisation, accumulation of experience Memory as a mechanical filing system, an archive (José Arcadio Buendía’s ingenious “memory machine” in One Hundred Years of Solitude)
“Theuth came to the king (Tamus) and exhibited his arts... when it came to writing, Theuth said: ‘This discipline, my King, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories: my invention is a recipe for both memory and wisdom’. But the king said: ‘...The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, using the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves rather than, from within, their unaided powers to call things to mind. So it’s not a remedy for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you’re equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth. They will be men filled with the conceit of wisdom, not men of wisdom.” (Plato)
Phenomenology and memory Henri Bergson: motoric memory and image-memory Repetition vs representation Motor memory becomes HABIT Image-memory: intrudes into the present: if there is some discontinuity, „immediately these darkened images come forward into the full light”
Phenomenology and memory Maurice Merleau-Ponty “I am never quite at one with myself” “My hold on the past and the future is precarious, and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment, bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in turn further developments in order to be understood.”
Activity and passivity of the past “Time arises from my relation to things” the present, an „I can” “Memory is the irruption of other things in us” the arc of memory, of experience “It is through the body that we have access to the past” – earlier moments of bodily experience become the history of my current being in the world; time is sedimented on my body (the lived body is a hollow in being, a hollow where time is made) „A past that has never been present”
Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu “It is a labour in vain to attempt to evoke our past: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we die.”
Proust/2 „petites madeleines” “this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being” “And suddenly, my memory revealed itself” the entire forgotten chapter of his childhood miraculously reemerges, “taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardesn alike, from my cup of tea” the mystique of memory
Jean-Paul Sartre there has to be a perspective, a subject for a past to exist (objects have no past); the past is produced as the past of this present One cannot ʻhave’ a past in the sense in which I have a car: the past is me “The past is what I have to be” Sich erinnern, se souvenir, se recordar
Psychoanalysis and memory Hysteria: “patients suffer from remininscences” Symptoms: memory symbols Erinnerungssymbole The past invades the present Hypnosis vs. talking cure
Psychoanalysis and memory problems (1) Construction of the past – (2) archaeological work; alien internal images (dreams, symptoms) (3) remembering is dialogic (4) transference: remembering/repetition (5) the finding of an object is always a refinding (emotional template) (6) The temporality of trauma – Nachträglichkeit
Psychoanalysis and memory problems (7) reinterpretation of forgetting Harald Weinrich: “With Freud, forgetting lost its innocence” Cui prodest? screen memory (Deckerinnerung)
