1
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
Paul Ricoeur
To reflect upon the ethics of memory is, at first sight, a puzzling task. This is so because memory is not in the first instance an action, but a kind of knowledge like perception, imagination and understanding. Memory constitutes a knowledge of past events, or of the pastness of past events. In that sense it is committed to truth, even if it is not a truthful relationship to the past; that is, precisely because it has a truth-claim, memory can be accused of being unfaithful to this claim.
So how is it possible to speak of an ethics of memory? It is possible because memory has two kinds of relation to the past, the first of which, as I have already mentioned, is a relation of knowledge, while the second is a relation of action. This is so because remembering is a way of doing things, not only with words, but with our minds; in remembering or recollecting we are exercising our memory, which is a kind of action. It is because memory is an exercise that we can talk of the use of memory, which in turn permits us to speak of the abuses of memory. The ethical problems will arise once we begin to reflect on this connection between use and abuse of memory.
This approach to memory as a kind of doing things with the mind, or as an exercise, has a long trajectory in the history of philosophy. In the Sophist, for example, Plato speaks of ‘the art’ of imitating (mimetike techne). In this context, he makes a distinction between phantastike techne, which is unreliable, and eikastike techne, deriving from the Greek eikon or image, which may be true. There are, therefore, these two possibilities of imitating or of evoking: phantastike techne, which is fallible and unreliable, and eikastike techne, which could be reliable.
Beyond this we have the long history of the ars memoria, the art of memory, which is a kind of education of the act of memorising the past. And at the end of this tradition of treating memory as an art stands Nietzsche in the second of the famous Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemasse Betrachtung), entitled ‘On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life’. This is interesting because the title itself is about ‘use’, not the use of memory itself, but of the philosophy of history in the Hegelian sense of treating the practice of history as a science. In this meditation, Nietzsche speaks precisely of the abuses and burdens of historical consciousness, after which he makes a plea for being unhistorical. There is in this context, therefore, a kind of suspiciousness of memory, or an approach to memory or history treated as a disease.
So it is through this approach to memory as a kind of action that we can best broach the problem of the ethics of memory. Before doing that, however, I wish to construe a framework of thought which will permit me to place ethics within a broader context. I will consider three levels in this practical approach: first, the pathological-therapeutic level; second, the pragmatic level; and finally, the properly ethical-political approach to the act of memory.
I
The first level demands close attention, because it is here that abuses are rooted in something that we could call the wounds and scars of memory. We have a good example in the present state of Europe: in some places we could say that there is too much memory, but in other places not enough. Likewise, there is sometimes not enough forgetting, and at other times too much forgetting. How is it possible to graft these misuses upon the capacity to memorise?
To support my claim concerning this pathological-therapeutic level, I shall evoke two short essays by Freud from 1914, belonging to the collection Metapsychology. The first essay is entitled ‘Remembering, Repetition, and Working Through [Durcharbeiten]’. The starting-point of this essay is an incident or an accident in the progression of the psychoanalytic cure, when the patient keeps repeating the symptoms and is barred from any progress towards recollection, or towards a reconstruction of an acceptable and understandable past. This first stage is linked, thus, to the problems of resistance and repression in psychoanalysis. It is interesting that at the beginning of the essay Freud says that the patient repeats instead of remembering. Repetition, therefore, is an obstacle to remembering. At that same stage in the essay, Freud says that both the doctor and the patient must have patience; that is, they must be patient concerning the symptoms, which in turn allows them to be reconciled with the impossibility of going directly to the truth—if there is any truth concerning the past. But also the patient has to accept his illness in order to anticipate a time when he could be reconciled with his own past. The way towards reconciliation with oneself is precisely what, in the title, is called ‘working through’ (Durcharbeiten). It is also on this occasion that Freud introduces the important term ‘memory as work’ (Erinnerungarbite). So memory for Freud is work, what we might call a travail. Let us keep in mind, therefore, this concept of the ‘work of memory’, or memory as work.
The second essay, which I will try to put side by side with the first one, concerns ‘mourning’—the title is ‘Mourning and Melancholia’—and contains the well-known account of Freud’s struggle to distinguish mourning from melancholia. It is here that he speaks also of the ‘work’ of mourning. I will attempt, therefore, to bring together these two expressions: ‘the work of memory’ and ‘the work of mourning’, because it is quite possible that the work of memory is a kind of mourning, and also that mourning is a painful exercise in memory.
But what is mourning? Mourning is a reconciliation. With what? With the loss of some objects of love; objects of love may be persons of course, but also, as Freud says, abstractions like fatherland, freedom—ideals of all kinds. What is preserved in mourning and lost in melancholia is self-esteem, or the sense of one’s self. This is so because in melancholia there is a despair and a longing to be reconciled with the loved object which is lost without the hope of reconciliation. In the commentary concerning mourning, Freud says that the task of the ‘patient’ is to renounce all the ties which linked him with the object of love, or to break off all the ties that connect the conscious and the unconscious to this lost object. At this point, mourning protects me from the trend towards melancholia when there is what he calls ‘the interiorisation of the object of love’, which becomes a part of the soul. But the price to pay is very high because the patient has to realise, step by step, degree by degree, the orders dictated by reality. It is the principle of reality against the principle of pleasure. So melancholia, in a sense, would be the permanent claim of the pleasure principle. This essay allows us, therefore, to bring together the two expressions: work of memory and work of mourning, work of memory versus repetition, work of mourning versus melancholia.
Let us at this point return to our examples from the political sphere, which I spoke of in terms of an excess of memory in some places and a lack of memory in others. In a sense, both are on the same side: they are on the side of repetition and melancholia. It is the wounds and scars of history which are repeated in this state of melancholia. Hence, mourning and ‘working through’ are to be brought together in the fight for the acceptability of memories: memories have not only to be understandable, they have to be acceptable, and it is this acceptability which is at stake in the work of memory and mourning. Both are types of reconciliation.
II
From this we can move to a second level where abuses are more conspicuous. I will characterise this level as ‘pragmatic’, because it is here that we have a praxis of memory. Let us ask at this juncture why memory is subject to abuses. I suggest it is because of its links to the problem of identity. In fact, the diseases of memory are basically diseases of identity.This is so because identity, whether personal or collective, is always only presumed, claimed, reclaimed; and because the question which is behind the problematics of identity is ‘who am I?’ We tend to provide responses in terms of what we are. We try, that is, to saturate, or to exhaust, the questions beginning with ‘who’ by answers in the register of ‘what’. It is the fragility of all the answers in terms of ‘what’ to the question in terms of ‘who’ which is the source of the abuses of which I shall speak.
Why are the answers to this question so inappropriate and so fragile? First, we have to face the difficulty of preserving identity through time. This is the approach which I developed in my recent work Time and Narrative, but from the point of view of narration, not of memory. So the first problem I now evoke—how to preserve my identity through time— is a problem raised through both narrative and memory. Why? Because we oscillate always between two models of identity. In Oneself as Another, I tried to introduce two Latin words to support my analysis: idem identity and ipse identity. Idem identity connotes sameness; sameness is a claim not to change in spite of the course of time and in spite of the change of events around me and within me. What I call my ‘character’ is a possible example of this type of identity or this level of sameness. But in the course of personal life, I need a kind of flexibility, or a kind of dual identity, the model of which would be for me the promise, i.e. the capacity to keep one’s own word. This is not the same as remaining inflexible or unchanged through time. On the contrary, it is a way of dealing with change, not denying it. This I call ipse identity. The difficulty of being able to deal with changes through time is one reason why identity is so fragile.
Second, we have to face the problem of the other. Otherness, as I also argue in Oneself as Another, is met, first, as a threat to myself. It is true that people feel threatened by the mere fact that there are other people who live according to standards of life which conflict with their own standards. Humiliations, real or imaginary, are linked to this threat, when this threat is felt as a wound which leaves scars. The tendency to reject, to exclude, is a response to this threat coming from the other.
I would like to add a third component in explication of this difficulty of preserving one’s identity through time, and of preserving one’s selfhood in face of the other, and that is the violence which is a permanent component of human relationships and interactions. Let us recall that most events to do with the founding of any community are acts and events of violence. So we could say that collective identity is rooted in founding events which are violent events. In a sense, collective memory is a kind of storage of such violent blows, wounds and scars.
With this reflection we arrive at the problem of an ethics of memory. It is precisely through narratives that a certain education of memory has tostart. Here we can introduce the connection between memory and forgetting, because the best use of forgetting is precisely in the construction of plots, in the elaboration of narratives concerning personal identity or collective identity; that is, we cannot tell a story without eliminating or dropping some important event according to the kind of plot we intend to build. Narratives, therefore, are at the same time the occasion for manipulation through reading and directing narratives, but also the place where a certain healing of memory may begin. Speaking of ‘abuses’, I would underline the excesses of certain commemorations, and their rituals, their festivals, their myths which attempt to fix the memories in a kind of reverential relationship to the past. Here we may say that the abuse of commemorative festivals is an opportunity for the abuse of memory. There is, however, an ethics of memory precisely in the good use of commemorative acts against the abuses of ritualised commemoration.
Why are narratives helpful in this ethical respect? Because it is always possible to tell in another way. This exercise of memory is here an exercise in telling otherwise, and also in letting others tell their own history, especially the founding events which are the ground of a collective memory. It is very important to remember that what is considered a founding event in our collective memory may be a wound in the memory of the other. There are different ways of dealing with humiliating memories: either we repeat them in Freud’s sense or, as Todorov suggests, we may try to extract the ‘exemplarity’ of the event rather than the factuality (for exemplarity is directed towards the future: it is a lesson to be told to following generations). So whereas the traumatic character of past humiliations brings us back permanently towards the past, the exemplary dimension of the same events is directed towards the future and regulated, ‘towards justice’, to quote Todorov. It is the power of justice to be just regarding victims, just also regarding victors, and just towards new institutions by means of which we may prevent the same events from recurring in the future.
So we have here a work on memory which reverts from past to future, and this revision from past to future is by way of drawing out the exemplary significance of past events.
III
In the final phase of my analysis, I wish to say something about wh...
