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Memory, History, Forgetting by Paul Ricoeur, ISBN-13: 978-0226713427

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Memory, History, Forgetting by Paul Ricoeur, ISBN-13: 978-0226713427

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  • Publisher: ‎ University of Chicago Press (August 15, 2006)
  • Language: ‎ English
  • 624 pages
  • ISBN-10: ‎ 0226713423
  • ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0226713427

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.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Part I – On Memory and Recollection

Chapter 1. Memory and Imagination

Reading Guidelines

The Greek Heritage

Plato: The Present Representation of an Absent Thing

Aristotle: “Memory Is of the Past”

A Phenomenological Sketch of Memory

Memories and Images

Chapter 2. The Exercise of Memory: Uses and Abuses

Reading Guidelines

The Abuses of Artificial Memory: The Feats of Memorization

The Abuses of Natural Memory: Blocked Memory, Manipulated Memory, Abusively Controlled Memory

The Pathological-Therapeutic Level: Blocked Memory

The Practical Level: Manipulated Memory

The Ethico-Political Level: Obligated Memory

Chapter 3. Personal Memory, Collective Memory

Reading Guidelines

The Tradition of Inwardness

Augustine

Locke

Husserl

The External Gaze: Maurice Halbwachs

Three Subjects of the Attribution of Memories: Ego, Collectives, Close Relations

Part II – History, Epistemology

Prelude History: Remedy or Poison?

Chapter 1. The Documentary Phase: Archived Memory

Reading Guidelines

Inhabited Space

Historical Time

Testimony

The Archive

Documentary Proof

Chapter 2. Explanation/Understanding

Reading Guidelines

Promoting the History of Mentalities

Some Advocates of Rigor: Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Norbert Elias

Variations in Scale

From the Idea of Mentality to That of Representation

The Scale of Efficacy or of Coerciveness

The Scale of Degrees of Legitimation

The Scale of Nonquantitative Aspects of Social Times

The Dialectic of Representation

Chapter 3. The Historian’s Representation

Reading Guidelines

Representation and Narration

Representation and Rhetoric

The Historian’s Representation and the Prestige of the Image

Standing For

Part III – The Historical Condition

Prelude: The Burden of History and the Nonhistorical

Chapter 1. The Critical Philosophy of History

Reading Guidelines

“Die Geschichte Selber,” “History Itself”

“Our” Modernity

The Historian and the Judge

Interpretation in History

Chapter 2. History and Time

Reading Guidelines

Temporality

Being-toward-Death

Death in History

Historicity

The Trajectory of the Term Geschichtlichkeit

Historicity and Historiography

Within-Timeness: Being-“in”-Time

Along the Path of the Inauthentic

Within-Timeness and the Dialectic of Memory and History

Memory, Just a Province of History?

Memory, in Charge of History?

The Uncanniness of History

Maurice Halbwachs: Memory Fractured by History

Yerushalmi: “Historiography and Its Discontents”

Pierre Nora: Strange Places of Memory

Chapter 3. Forgetting

Reading Guidelines

Forgetting and the Effacing of Traces

Forgetting and the Persistence of Traces

The Forgetting of Recollection: Uses and Abuses

Forgetting and Blocked Memory

Forgetting and Manipulated Memory

Commanded Forgetting: Amnesty

Epilogue: Difficult Forgiveness

The Forgiveness Equation

Depth: The Fault

Height: Forgiveness

The Odyssey of the Spirit of Forgiveness: The Passage through Institutions

Criminal Guilt and the Imprescriptible

Political Guilt

Moral Guilt

The Odyssey of the Spirit of Forgiveness: The Stage of Exchange

The Economy of the Gift

Gift and Forgiveness

The Return to the Self

Forgiving and Promising

Unbinding the Agent from the Act

Looking Back over an Itinerary: Recapitulation

Happy Memory

Unhappy History?

Forgiveness and Forgetting

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) was the John Nuveen Professor in the Divinity School, the Department of Philosophy, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He was the author of many books, including Memory, History, Forgetting, Oneself as Another, and the three-volume Time and Narrative, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

David Pellauer is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University.

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