the arcades project / walter benjamin

Re the psychoanalytic theory of memory: “Freud’s later researches made it clear that this view [the concept of repression] must be enlarged …. The machinery of repression … is … a special case of the … significant process which occurs when the ego is unequal to meeting certain demands made upon the mental mechanism, The more general process of defense does not cancel the strong impressions; it only lays them aside …. It will be in the interest of clarity for me to state the contrast between memory and reminiscence with deliberate bluntness: the function of memory [the author identifies the sphere of “forgetfulness” with “unconscious memory” (p. 130) is to protect our impressions; reminiscence aims at their dissolution. Essentially memory is conservative; reminiscence, destructive.”

Theodor Reik, Der iiberraschte Psychologe (Leiden, 1935), pp. 130-132.

[WB: K8,1]

… The medium is the memory, and with Baudelaire it was possessed of unusual density. The corresponding sensory data correspond in it; they are teeming with memories, which run so thick that they seem to arisen not from this life but from some spacious vie anteriure. It is this prior existence that is intimated by the “familiar eyes” with which such experience scrutinize the one who has them.

[WB: J79,6]

What fundamentally distinguishes the brooder from the thinker is that the former not only meditates a thing but also meditates his meditation of the thing. The case of the brooder is that of the man who has arrived at the solution of a great problem but then has forgotten it. And now he broods – not so much over the matter itself as over his past reflections on it. The brooder’s thinking, therefore, bears the imprint of memory. Brooder and the allegorist are cut from the same cloth.

[WB: J79a,1]

… Politics attains primacy over history. Indeed, historical “facts” become something that just now happened to us, just now struck us: to establish them is the affair of the memory. And awakening is the great exemplar of memory – that occasion on which we succeed in remembering what is nearest, most obvious (in the “I”). What Proust intends with the experimental rearrangement of furniture, what bother Bloch recognizes as the darkness of the lived moment, is nothing other than what here is secured on the level of the historical, and collectively. There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening.

In this historical and collective process of fixation, collecting plays a certain role. Collecting is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of the penetration of “what has been” (of all the manifestations of “nearness”) it is the most binding. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of political reflection makes for an epoch in the antique business. …

If it is imagination that presents correspondence to the memory, it is thinking that consecrates allegory to it. Memory brings about the convergence of imagination and thinking.

[J66,3]

Between the theory of natural correspondences and the repudiation of nature exists a contradiction. It is resolved insofar as within the memory impressions become detached from individual experiences, so that the long experience stored up in those impressions is released and can be fed into the allegorical fundus.

[J66,5]

On the Passion of the aesthetic man in Kierkegaard and its foundation in memory: “Memory is emphatically the real element of the unhappy man …. If I imagine a man who himself had had no childhood, … but who now … discovered all the beauty that there is in childhood, and who would now remember his own childhood, constantly staring back into that emptiness of the past, hen I would have an excellent illustration of the truly unhappy man.” Soren Kierkegaard, Entweder-Oder (Jena, 1911), vol. 1 pp. 203-204 (“The Unhappiest Man”).

[J63,4]

 Self-photography and the unrolling of the lived life before the dying. Two kinds of memory (Proust). Relationship of this kind of memory with the dream.

“He carried about him as sorrowful trophy … a burden of memories, so that he seemed to live in a continued paranesia …. The poet carries within himself a living duree which odors call forth … and with which they mingle … This city is a duree, an inveterate life-form, a memory …. If he loved in …. A Jeanne Duval some immemorial stretch of night …, this will be only a symbol … of that true duree …

[J14,2]

Delvau[i] on Chodruc-Duclos: … His bones took more time to rot than his name took to erase itself from the memory of men,” Alfred Delvau, Les Lions du jur (paris, 1867), pp. 28-29.

[A5a,2]

“theme … of … the affirmation of a mysterious presence at the back of things, as in the depths of the soul – the presence of Eternity. Hence the obsession with timepieces, and the need to break out of the confine’s of one’s own life through the immense prolongation of ancestral memory and of former lives,” Albert Beguin, L’Ame romantique et le reve (Marseilles, 1937), vol. 2 p. 403.

[J20a,1]

 Regarding “L’Amour du mensonge” . From a letter to Alphonse de Calonne: “The word ‘royal’ will help the reader understand the metaphor, which transforms memory into a crown of towers, like those that weigh down the brows of the goddesses of maturity, of fertility, of wisdom.” Fleurs du mal, ed. Jacques Crepet (Paris, 1931), p. 461.

[J44,2]

Happiness of the collector, happiness of the solitary: tete-a-tete with things. Is not this the felicity that suffuses our memories – that in them we are alone with particular things, which range abut us in their silence, and that even the people who haunt our thoughts then partake in this steadfast, confederate silence of things. The collector “stills” his fate. And that means he disappears in the world of memory.

      [By Lisa Fiitko, reconstructed from memory, a journey with Walter Benjamin]

      Sure, sure. “But Mr. Benjamin, do you realize that I am not a competent guide in this region? I don’t really know that road, I have never been up that way myself. I have a piece of paper on which the mayor penciled a map of the route from his memory, and then he described to me some details of turns to be taken, a hut on the left, a plateau with seven pine trees which has to remain to our right or we will end up too far north; the vineyard that leads to the ridge at the right point. You want to take the risk?”

      “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “The real risk would be not to go.”

           

Google Books.

 'To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

illuminations: essays and reflections / walter benjamin

Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about – not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of cities … memories of rooms where these books had been housed …

There is nothing that commends a story more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be hos inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later.

The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself.

Memory is the epic faculty par excellence. Only by virtue of a comprehensive memory can writing absorb the course of events on the one hand and, with the power of death on the other.

[Of Georg Lukas] “Time,” he says in his Theory of the Novel, “can become constitutive only when connection with the transcendental home has been lost. Only in the novel are meaning and life, and thus the essential and the temporal, separated; one can almost say that the whole inner action of a novel is nothing else but a struggle against the power of time … And from this … arise the genuinely epic experience of time: hope and memory … Only in the novel … does there occur a creative memory which transfixes the object and transforms it  … The duality of inwardness and outside world can there be overcome for the subject ‘only’ when he sees the … unity of his entire life … out of the past life-stream which is compressed in memory … The insight which grasps this unity … becomes the divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life.”

Towering above this literature is Bergson’s early monumental work, Matiere et memoire. More than the others, it preserves links with empirical research. It is oriented towards biology. The title suggests that it regards the structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience. Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data. It is, however, not at all Bergson’s intention to attach any specific historical label to memory. On the contrary, he rejects any historical determination of memory.

… it was indeed a poet who put Bergson’s theory of experience to the test … Proust’s work A la Recherche du temps perdu may be regarded as an attempt to produce experience synthetically, as Bergson imagines it, under today’s conditions, for there is less and less hope that it will come into being naturally … Bergson emphasizes the antagonism between the vita active and the specific vita contemplative which arise from memory. But he leads us to believe that turning to the contemplative actualization of the stream of life is a matter of free choice. From the start Proust indicates his divergent view terminologically, To him, the memoire pure of Bergson’s theory becomes a memoire involontaire. Proust immediately confronts this involuntary memory with a voluntary memory, one that is at the service of the intellect. .. One afternoon the taste of a kind of pastry called madeleine transports him back to the past, whereas before then he had been limited to the promptings of a memory which obeyed the call of attentiveness. This he calls the memoire volontaire, and it is characteristic that the information which it gives about the past retains no trace of it.

Amazon Books.

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history.

Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

a lover's discourse / roland barthes

Therefore, these reminders of reading, of listening, have been left in the frequently uncertain, incompleted state suitable to a discourse whose occasion is indeed the memory of the sites (books, encounters) where such and such a thing has been read, spoken, heard.

The lover who doesn’t forget sometimes dies of excess, exhaustion, and tension of memory (like Werther).

I waken out of this forgetfulness very quickly. In great haste, I reconstitute a memory, a confusion.

… the weather, the season, the light, the boulevard, the Parisians out walking, shopping, all held within what already has its vocation as memory: a scene, in short, the hieroglyph of kindliness … the good humor of desire.

… nothing in the image can be forgotten; an exhausting memory forbids voluntarily escaping love; in short, forbids inhabiting it discreetly, reasonably.

What constitutes the voice is what, within it, lacerates me by dint of having to die, as if it were at once and never could be anything but a memory.

.. but it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

It is already, (again, always) a memory (the nature of the photograph is not to represent but to memorialize …

… starting from a negligible trifle, a whole discourse of memory and death rises up and sweeps me away: this is the kingdom of memory, weapon of reverberation – of what Nietzsche called ressentiment.

… it is a fragrance without a support, a texture of memory;

The imperfect is the tense of fascination: … simply the exhausting lure of memory From the start, greedy to play a role, scenes take their position in memory.

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A Lover’s Discourse, at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe’s Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover’s Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.

Review by C. Colt

Some readers may find this book difficult. Barthes never attempts to give us a uniform narrative about love. Instead, as the title implies, he provides us with fragments--some of which come from literature and some from his own philisophical musings--of a lover's point of view. Since childhood, we are taught to think of love as a singualar entity. Whether it is God's love, marriage, passion, or patriotism, we are taught to think of love as a unique, and exclusive prize. But as Barthes' points out, love is built upon fragments, many of which are mundane.

The most compelling part of "Lover's Discourse" is Barthe's dissection of the phrase, "I love you". Drawing upon literary examples and common sense, Barthes asks us what we mean when we state that we love someone. Do we love what they do for us? Do we love how they make us feel? Do we love the idea of them? Are we in love with love itself? This concept is born out by the protagonist Merseault, in Camus' novel, "A Happy Death". The first thing Merseault says to his lover when she wakes up in the morning is, "hello image".

"Lover's Discourse" extracts love from ideology and examines it under a microscope. We may be confused by what we see, and we may not like it, but the view contains more than a glimmer of reality.

society of the spectacle / guy debord

Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in which everything that has happened earlier exists for it solely as a space accessible to its police. A project already formulated by Napoleon, that of “monarchically directing the energy of memories,” has thus been made concrete in a permanent manipulation of the past, and this is not just in respect of the past’s meaning, but even in respect of the facts themselves.

All knowledge, which is in any case limited by the memory of society’s oldest members, was always borne by the living.

Such individual lived experience of a cut-off everyday life remains bereft of language or concept … And is misunderstood and forgotten to the benefit of the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.perpetual present

The spectacle, being the reigning social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time, is in effect a false consciousness of time.

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Review by James Pruett"Religion served the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing what society could not deliver. Power as a separate realm has always been spectacular, but mass allegiance to frozen religious imagery was originally acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary compensation for a poverty of real social activity...the modern spectacle, by contrast, depicts what society can deliver..."

And The Promised Land, as Debord sees it, is TOTAL CONSUMPTION. This is the edict and goal of contemporary consumer society. The fact that it has grown out of and usurped religious feeling makes the SPECTACLE a competitive product to formal religion. Certainly, Islam feels its power and threat. Certainly, the Middle East is reacting to it, through individual and state sponsored terrorism against the West.

Debord is a difficult read, but ultimately worth it. His insights are penetrating, remarkable, and have proven to be more acute with the passing of time. Private and public over consumption has become a disease and the hallmark of an age that has debt financed prosperity for too long.

For me, Debord's has number of chief insights that signify trouble ahead for our current economic system. One of them is the apparent and obvious falling use value for goods in abundance (many of them pseudo goods - things we don't really need). Having long fulfilled our need for food, clothing, and shelter, our current economic growth is contingent upon consistently manufacturing pseudo needs that must feed upon the boundless desires of persons in an unending pursuit of gratification through purchasing new products and services.

The problem occurs when the next disillusionment, Debord tells us, takes place not with religion or politics but within the commodity itself. Product prestige evaporates into vulgarity soon after its purchase...at this point; the actual poverty of production stands revealed - but too late. By this time another product will demand attention...the continuous process of replacement means that fake gratification cannot help but be exposed as new models are released every year but yet remain all to similar. Why upgrade, we ask?

For the sake of Dell, GM, Microsoft, Target, Home Depot and so on, we had certainly better. Herein lies the rub picked off by Debord: "By the time that the society has become contingent upon the economy, the economy has in point of fact become contingent on society...he economy begins to lose its power."

A society/economy built upon an illusion of needs will certainly be a fragile on at best. Such a society/economy, whose growth rests upon expanding the market of pseudo commodities, has apparently developed a penchant for reporting pseudo revenue earnings (eg. Enron, World Comm, etc). This is all very predictable and very much Debordian.

Debord is reminiscent of McLuhan, full of arcane wisdom and prolix, and a prophet of the current society nonetheless. He predicted our growing devotion to quantitative trivia that arise from a juxtaposition of roles and competing spectacles, and a never-ending succession of, what he calls, "paltry contests - from competitive sports to elections." All this, he says, fuels an abnormal need for representation, to compensate for the feeling of being at the margins of existence. This seems to be modern man, slavishly devoted to commodities, celebrities, politicians, sports teams and sports heroes, compensating for the loss felt by the dividing line being the self and the world that Debord calls THE SPECTACLE.

Although it is not for lightweights or the nonchalant, I do highly recommend this book as a guide to understanding some of the psychological complexes at work in the new society/economy.

the poetics of space / gaston bachelard

... by overlaying our memory of the childhood house with daydreams leads us to the ill-defined, vaguely located areas of being where we are seized with astonishment at being.

Thus, on the threshold of our space, before the era of our own time, we hover between awareness of being and loss of being. And the entire reality of memory becomes spectral.

[… fingertip memory. How does the body, not merely the mind, remember the feel of a latch in a long-forsaken childhood home? …]

We live fixations, fixations of happiness. ‘We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed.

 … to de-socialize our important memories, and attain to the plane of the daydreams that we used to have in the places identified with our solitude .

Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.

Memories of dreams, however, which only poetic meditation can help us to recapture, are most confused, less clearly drawn.

In point of fact, we are in the unity of image and memory, in the functional composite of imagination and memory. The positivity of psychological history and geography cannot serve as a touchstone for determining the real being of our childhood, for childhood is certainly greater than reality.

It is our consciousness that crystalizes our remote memories.

To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in the house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.

The phenomenology of the daydream can untangle the complex of memory and imagination; it becomes necessarily sensitive to the differentiations of the symbol.

… real images are engravings, for it is the imagination that engraves them in our memories.

Great images have both a history and a pre-history; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly.

How suddenly our memories assume a living possibility of being!

Our memories are encumbered by facts.

Amazon Books.

The classic book on how we experience intimate spaces.

"A magical book. . . . A prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced—and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." —from the foreword by John R. Stilgoe

the psychoanalysis of fire / gaston bachelard

… fire within is all that is required to make the grieving soul give voice to its memories and sorrows …

How can it be better stated that nostalgia is the memory of the warmth of the nest, the meory of the cherished love for the “caladium innatum’.

Were it not for the memory of man made warm by man, producing as it were a redoubling of natural heat, we could not conceive of lovers speaking of their snug little nest.

… Novalis is the poet “of the little blue flower,” the poet of the forget-me-not tossed as a pledge of imperishable memory over the of the precipice in the very shadow of death.

That which fire has caressed, loved, adored, has gained a store of memories and lost its innocence.

Amazon Books.

We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it. What we consider to be our fundamental ideas concerning the world are often indications of the immaturity of our minds.

**

This little book constitutes, for me, an excellent introductory piece to the thoughts of Gaston Bachelard. Much more clearly than "Poetics of Space", or "The Right to Dream", this book gives insight into Bachelard's transition from scientist to philosopher. If you haven't yet read any of his works, you should consider doing so if only to reevaluate your own methods of analysis of the world around you, both the material and the immaterial. In the "Psychoanalysis of Fire" Bachelard turns his sciento-phenomonologist methods of analysis to the existence of fire, both as a real presence throughout the history of mankind and as a literary, symbolic presence with perhaps even more significance.

**

Writing a preface for The Poetics of Space (1958) in 1963, a year after his friend's death, medievalist Etienne Gilson noted: "We all loved him, admired him and envied him a little, because we felt he was a free mind, unfettered by any conventions either in his choice of the problems he wanted to handle or in his way of handling them."

Gilson goes on to say that this book, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), was Bachelard the free mind's "first warning shot." He records the puzzlement he had upon its publication in these words: "After appointing a man to teach the philosophy of science and seeing him successfully do so for a number of years, we don't like to learn that he has suddenly turned his interest to a psychoanalysis of the most unorthodox sort, since what then was being psychoanalyzed was not even people, but an element."
As one of the truly unusual and original books anyone would hope to come upon, almost every paragraph (nay, sentence) of the book has the power to change the perspective of an engaged reader. Perspective on, yes, fire, but also on many other things. Prometheus and his "clever disobedience," which leads to a startling formulation "The Prometheus complex is the Oedipus complex of the life of the intellect." The psychoanalysis of rubbing (thus, cleaning) and heat producing in what Bachelard calls the "Novalis complex," which leads to a meditation on the nature of love. Alcohol, the eau-de-feu ("water on fire") working as eau-de-vie by setting one's being on fire instantaneously in the "Hoffmann complex." These are just most obvious themes of the book. Attentive readers will discover much, much more to cherish.
After my encounter with Bachelard, I was often awed to find myself responding to things so very differently, be it reading literature/philosophy, or everyday chores such as doing dishes and cooking. You will, for instance, never read Poe in the same way. While his most unforgettable essay on Poe appears in Water and Dreams (1942), this book too has excursions to him here and there.

**

Forget about The Poetics of Space (for now) and immerse yourself in The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Watch Bachelard circle and destroy modern rationality through a proto-rationalistic, Socratic assault on the concept of fire. Bachelard's subject is the 'concept' rather than the real thing, fire itself, the number one immaterial 'substance' prefiguring even light. Read, in amazement, as scientific scrutiny of this primordial phenomenon approaches farce. But pay very, very, very close attention to the section on Novalis, "Psychoanalysis and Prehistory: The Novalis Complex", and you'll find Bachelard's genius swooping in for the kill. "These scientific explanations originate in an arid and cursory rationalism which claims to be profiting by recurring factual evidence; but which is, however, quite unrelated to the psychological conditions of the primitive discoveries." Bachelard is not the prophet of surrationalism for nothing! It is this book (first published in 1938) that locates his critical method at the forefront of philosophical critical idealism. Unlike Ernst Cassirer, Bachelard is more than willing to take the plunge into the abyss of imagination - that Coleridgean imagination that is the mostly unacknowledged source of our collective intelligence.

the absent city / ricardo piglia

The idea of a man in love who walks through the city that belongs to him, but where the  city in which he walked with the woman he loved is lost. Because the city is a memory machine. Of course, that lost or absent city also includes other moments  of life, not just those associated with a woman, This is how Joyce’s Dublin works …

in the novel, he tries to save her [his wife], when she become terminally ill, by placing her memories in a machine … the machine then outlives the man. 

But it’s no use, if you leave, your memories still go with you.

I do not have any photographs of her, only my memories …

She … hid all the words she knew in her memory.

Her memory was a breeze blowing in the white curtains of a room in an empty house.

He hoped the sentences would enter his daughter’s memory

 Like blocks of meaning.

She had drawn up a map in her memory and was completing the diagram as they went along.

“It will be necessary to work on your memory,” Arana said, “there are areas of condensation, white nodes, which can be untied, opened up.”

They were getting closer to the truth, as if they could follow the road of the memories of her life on a map.

This is a place without memories, she said. Everybody pretends to be somebody else. The spies are trained to disown their own identities and use somebody else’s.

… the white nodes were recorded in the body like a collective memory …

He imagined the woman submerged in a false reality, stuck in someone else’s memory ..

You see it there, on the edge of language, like the meory of one’s house from childhood

He had discovered the existence of the verbal nuclei that keep remembrances alive, words they had used that brought back all the pain into his memory ..

He was thinking about the memories that survive after the body has gone, about the white nodes that stay alive even when the flesh disintegrates.

… if I try to remember, and the purity of the memory does not blind me …

I pull events out of live memories …

Amazon Books.

Widely acclaimed throughout Latin America after its 1992 release in Argentina, The Absent City takes the form of a futuristic detective novel. In the end, however, it is a meditation on the nature of totalitarian regimes, on the transition to democracy after the end of such regimes, and on the power of language to create and define reality. Ricardo Piglia combines his trademark avant-garde aesthetics with astute cultural and political insights into Argentina’s history and contemporary condition in this conceptually daring and entertaining work.

The novel follows Junior, a reporter for a daily Buenos Aires newspaper, as he attempts to locate a secret machine that contains the mind and the memory of a woman named Elena. While Elena produces stories that reflect on actual events in Argentina, the police are seeking her destruction because of the revelations of atrocities that she—the machine—is disseminating through texts and taped recordings. The book thus portrays the race to recover the history and memory of a city and a country where history has largely been obliterated by political repression. Its narratives—all part of a detective story, all part of something more—multiply as they intersect with each other, like the streets and avenues of Buenos Aires itself.

The second of Piglia’s novels to be translated by Duke University Press—the first was Artifical Respiration—this book continues the author’s quest to portray the abuses and atrocities that characterize dictatorships as well as the difficulties associated with making the transition to democracy. Translated and with an introduction by Sergio Waisman, it includes a new afterword by the author.

memory, history, forgetting - paul ricoeur

Amazon Books.


Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.

Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.

A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.

“His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review 

 Best book on history so far this century July 17, 2007

By Rev. Cherrycoke

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This, the last book written by the great French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is an amazing achievement. Readers be warned: this is no easy romp through historiography or memory studies. It is a deeply philosophical meditation on the meaning of history and historicism as an act of remembering, an act of inscribing time, a way of participating in Being, and a way of negotiating competing claims for justice and acts of witnessing. Typical of Ricoeur's argumentation, the book sets out competing definitions (representation vs. recollection, explanation vs. understanding, phantasm and eikon, mneme vs. anamnesis, habit vs. memory, evocation vs. search, retention or primary memory vs. reproduction or secondary memory, reflexivity vs. worldliness, etc.). It does not resolve these oppositions, but painstakingly shows the aporias centralized in the opposition of terms and posits a tentative ethical response. Ricoeur is too smart to posit easy solutions to some of the most profound questions of human existence--mainly, what is history and how can it provide any foundations for knowledge and ethical action in the world? The erudition of this text is massive; Ricoeur references hundreds of theorists and philosophers from Plato to Foucault, from ontology to cognitive science. Predictably for those of us who have grown to respect the humanity of Ricoeur's position, the writing is never arrogant, never one-sided, always on the side of humane negotiation, life, human flourishing. In contrast to politicized polemics of academic historicist theory, this book recognizes, articulates, and teaches one about the almost overwhelming complexity of history as an idea, as a form of memory, and as evidence for witnessing and justice. In contrast to easy but hip pronouncements about the end of history, history as just another form of fiction, and history as "always political"--all implying that history is a tainted vehicle of ideological coercion that we can somehow do without--Ricoeur asks what else we *have* to connect our recollections of meaningful events to any kind of social action and collective sense of being.

If you want an education in some of the major positions in historiography, this book will give it to you, but it is no survey. It is a philosophical work, one that attempts to convey both the difficulty of the question and the necessary tenuousness of any real, ethical solution. Graduate students should be made to read this book if only to teach them what intellectual thought should look like--thought that works its way slowly and carefully through ideas instead of zooming through sources in order to construct a macrocosmic but sexy "new idea."

The incredible care with which analysis is conducted in each of this book's sections makes it impossible to summarize it meaningfully. Ricoeur wants to connect memory, history, and social remembrance in such a way that they avoid the easy, and often dangerous, sidetracks of commemoration or historicism as mere explanation. He wants a humanized history based in lived memory that can be used to create common ground between people as well as viable evidence in the negotiation of justice claims. Whether he gets this is debatable, but the attempt is honorable.

playing with memories: essays on guy maddin

Google Books.
Playing with Memories is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of internationally acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. It offers extensive perspectives on his career to date, from the early experimentation of The Dead Father (1986) to the intensely intimate revelations of My Winnipeg(2007). Featuring new and updated essays from American, Canadian, and Australian scholars, collaborators, and critics, as well as an in-depth interview with Maddin, this collection explores the aesthetics and politics behind Maddin's work, firmly situating his films within ongoing cultural debates about postmodernism, genre, and national identity.

Pevere’s selection as forewordsmith is no doubt a nod to his early role in the mythologisation of Maddin’s career (something the filmmaker assuredly no longer needs any help with), a fact that is revealed in the book’s third chapter, written by Pevere. In “Guy Maddin: True to Form”, it emerges that Pevere was party to the Toronto International Film Festival’s acceptance into its program of Maddin’s filmmaking debut The Dead Father (1986), and its rejection of his debut feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), a rejection which ultimately served Maddin’s self-mythologisation and promotion rather well.

In “Thoroughly Modern Maddin”, David L. Pike argues that Maddin is a “garage” (Church, p. 97) or “retro-modernist” (Church, p. 116), his vampiric obsession with cinematic modernism’s glory days – even commencing his analysis with a quote from Maddin that opens “I do feel a bit like Dracula in Winnipeg” (Church, p. 96) – suggesting a unique relationship between Hollywood and Canadian cinema. It also distinguishes Maddin from such varied fellow pasticheurs as Todd Haynes or Quentin Tarantino.

From Senses of Cinema, Cerise Howard, March 18 2012

Playing with Memories

Church’s introduction to Playing with Memories begins with a quote from Maddin’s unfilmed treatment The Child Without Qualities, an ur-text rich in autobiography that is returned to regularly in both books. This isn’t the last we hear from it in this essay either: “Sometimes he intentionally separated himself from his favourite toys,and played with the memories of them. And then played with the memories of the memories. There were inexhaustible powers of renewal within these two homes for the CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES.” (Church, p. 1)(2)

There is an explicit organisational principle expounded in Church’s book. As he explains: “In a nod to the collage-like qualities of Maddin’s movies, both new and previously published essays appear […], sketching various lines of exploration that form a detailed image of his oeuvre and the responses it has garnered” (Church, p. 17).

Reflecting the richly inter- and extra-textual nature of Maddin’s cinema, many of the pieces in Playing with Memories cite the same sources – certain ones, like The Child Without Qualities, several times over. Notably, they also regularly reference one another, making for a richly dialogical exploration of Maddin’s cinema, if one uniformly originating from a point of admiration. (Maddin certainly has his detractors, some even venomous, and it might have been interesting, if indecorous, to grant some of them a say in this volume.)

Playing with Memories opens with a foreword by Geoff Pevere, who asserts that “These days, on those rare occasions when people talk about ‘the Canadian cinema’, they cannot help but talk about Guy Maddin” (Church, p. xii). He muses over the nature of Maddin’s Canadianness, situating it – in what I consider a stretch – in Maddin’s “sheer beaverishness” (Church, p. xii) – the beaver being a Canadian national emblem. His claim then is that Maddin’s cinema is Canadian by simple dint of his utter bloody-mindedness, in his obstinacy in persisting with what is often a most uncommercial vision.

Pevere’s piece is the oldest in the book – Careful (1992) was Maddin’s newest release at the time – but he already nails a key element of the director’s cinema: “Maddin’s work, if nothing else, is a series of elements locked, much like the clumsy duels he loves, in the form of head-butting, dialectical opposition” (Church, p. 50). Words to this effect also come up time and again in other contributors’ essays.

In his 2002 essay, “Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful”, Will Straw gives prominence to Don Gillmor’s observation that Maddin, in his trajectory from Tales from the Gimli Hospital, via 1990’s Archangel, through to his third feature Careful, has replicated the course of cinema’s early history:

Maddin’s oeuvre, viewed in sequence, is like the first term of a film-history course, beginning in the silent-film era: spare, unsynched dialogue, odd movements, black-and-white stock, claustrophobic sets […]. WithCareful we are moving into the 1930s, using the two-strip Technicolor of Maddin’s childhood, colour that didn’t look real. Everything looked like a movie. (Church, p. 61) (3)

But Straw, indebted to Keir Keightley (4), notes that in recuperating long abandoned genres and aspects of filmic style, Maddin is performing the very sort of archaeological work that film scholars have largely forgone. I think it’s pretty clear, though, that that is simply a happy by-product of Maddin’s filmmaking. Church thinks so too. Back in his introduction, he notes, citing the example of the Bergfilm (the German mountain film), a form adopted in Careful, that Maddin excavates bygone genres “whose place as a container of cultural memory is long past, allowing [him] to obsessively transform [them] into a mnemonic for more personal issues.” (Church, p. 9)

Straw is much less on the money when he claims that “investment in the ponderous rituals of classical cinema is one of the qualities of Maddin’s films which work against the interpretation of them as surrealist” (Church, p. 61, emphasis mine). This is something I’ll take up below.

Balancing that error of judgement, however, Straw astutely observes that family is a cause of perversity, and never a refuge from it, in Maddin’s cinema. This is also true of the concept of “home”, whether that be Maddin’s actual childhood home, extensible to the family hair salon run as an adjunct to the family house, and his father’s home-away-from-home, the Winnipeg Hockey Arena, as well as the greater, increasingly fabled city of Winnipeg.

In his 2001 essay “Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin”, Steven Shaviro reduces Maddin’s cinema to 29 bullet points, some of which present an almost lone voice championing Maddin’s little loved and famously self-loathed Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997). Some of his other bullet points forthrightly rebut one another, as when he avers that “Maddin’s images belong to a cinema of spectacle, or a ‘cinema of attractions’ (in Tom Gunning’s well- known phrase), rather than to any sort of narrative impulse”, only to rejoin it immediately at the head of his next point with “At the same time, Maddin’s films are chock full of narrative, even to excess” (Church, p. 71).

Using Shaviro’s essay as a springboard, Beard contributes “Maddin and Melodrama” to Playing with Memories, an updated article from 2005. Beard’s chief assertion in this essay is that Maddin works with “melodrama” – those are Beard’s scare quotes, not mine, suggestive of the contrariness of Maddin’s adoption of the most heightened of registers to pitch narratives in so deadpan and absurd a fashion that it’s not often easy to grasp what he’s problematising or ironising in the first place. Beard, though, makes an important distinction, positioning the excessiveness of Maddin’s melodrama as “symptomatic not of an ideological sickness but of a cultural one” (Church, p. 88, emphasis in the original), a malaise at odds with society’s tendency to disallow the expression of “fundamental aspirations and primal feelings, in its repression of innocence, pathos and yearning” (Church, pp. 88-89).

Meanwhile, insider knowledge is brought to bear in essays from two of Maddin’s best friends and mentors, Stephen Snyder and George Toles. Toles has been a major collaborator with Maddin across his career as a scenarist of some of the purplest dialogue ever committed to celluloid.

Snyder contributes a piece on how sexuality is tantamount to an affliction in Maddin’s cinema. He argues that, following the inspirational example of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or (1930), the consummation of this desire is most… undesirable.

Toles reflects on the nature of his collaboration with Maddin, asserting that when that unholy alliance began, he found his most fruitful scriptwriting strategy to be pretending to be Maddin when he wrote, because “[t]he ideas and impulses that came to me were so much more deliciously unsavoury, unsightly, and extreme when I saw them swimming merrily up from Guy’s unconscious rather than my own” (p. 145). Toles’ list of Maddin’s firm filmmaking requirements also makes for enlightening and amusing reading: “Keep the dialogue fragrant, like honeyed wine” (Church, p. 146), for example.

Along this line, Donald Masterson contributes “My Brother’s Keeper: Fraternal Relations in the Films of Guy Maddin and George Toles”. He finds something akin to sibling rivalry in Maddin and Toles’ working relationship, uncovering plenty of echoes of the director’s troubled relationships with his older siblings in his films, not least the trauma he experienced in the wake of his elder brother Cameron’s suicide (committed on Cameron’s girlfriend’s grave, no less – Guy has clearly not been the only Maddin with a flair for melodrama!)

Dana Cooley’s “Demented Enchantments: Maddin’s Dis-eased Heart” is a highlight of the book. She argues that “Maddin’s forays into the forgotten realms of film exquisitely perform [Walter] Benjamin’s hopes for the medium, fusing form and content, theory and practice” (Church, p. 175). She goes on to explore the antecedents of Maddin’s ostentatiously tragic cinema in the baroque, allegorical Trauerspiel – “sorrow play” – a form popular in 18th century Germany, astutely arguing that “Maddin often makes the abstract of allegory literal” (Church, p. 177). She gets it right too, I feel, when she claims that “for Maddin, film acts more as a séance [sic] than an exorcism” (Church, p. 183), declaring that she “find[s] the idea of the uncanny [in Maddin’s films] a productive one” (Church, p. 179).

Elsewhere, Carl Matheson suggests that Maddin’s narratives can and should be read as dreams (though he insists he has to rebut his central thesis with the case of My Winnipeg [2007] before even really getting his argument fully underway!) Milan Pribisic analyses Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), positioning it as a “theatre film”, a cross-pollinated product of a dialogue between (at least) two art forms and demonstrative, in a coinage worthy of Toles, of a “palimpsestuous originality” (Church, p. 168). And Saige Walton’s “Hit with a Wrecking Ball, Tickled with a Feather: Gesture, Deixis and the Baroque Cinema of Guy Maddin” considers the phenomenological reception of Cowards Bend the Knee: or, The Blue Hands (2003) and Brand Upon the Brain!(2006), and examines how “Maddin and the baroque partake in highly gestural displays of emotion” (Church, p. 213). In so doing, she charts the course of affect from its origins in the extravagant hand gesturing found on-screen through to the receptive, and affected, viewer.

While Walton’s essay successfully straddles the delicate line between theory which illuminates both cinema and itself, and theory which exploits its subject as proof of a particular concept, Darrell Varga’s “Desire in Bondage: Guy Maddin’s Careful” is far less successful in its examination of the director’s third feature as filtered through Nietzsche’s writings on tragedy. I’m afraid I feel none the wiser about Maddin’s cinema after reading Varga’s contribution and am not convinced it warranted inclusion in the book.

Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson’s “‘I’m Not an American, I’m a Nymphomaniac’: Perverting the Nation in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World” is, to be honest, a bit of a trifle. Born expressly of student responses to screenings of Maddin’s near-crossover-hit from 2004, it does nevertheless impress by highlighting that Maddin’s outré cinema is on the Canadian curriculum! But it is to Easton and Hewson’s credit that their essay engages in a queer reading of a Maddin film, in which respect it is surprisingly singular in this volume. It does, however, seriously overreach in its reading, not least when suggesting that the confederation of Canada in 1867, and the same-year addition of “nymphomania” to The Oxford English Dictionary, might be more than mere coincidence.

Beard’s second contribution to Playing with Memories, and its final chapter, is a very entertaining interview with Maddin himself (one of many undertaken by Beard in preparation for his monograph).