Memory

Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar

John Scanlan

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780231785
• eBook ISBN: 9781780232249
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

When we think of getting older, we know we will slowly lose more and more of our memory—and with it, our sense of where we belong and how we connect to others. We might relax a little if we considered the improvements in computer data storage, which may lead us into a future when the limits of our memory become less constricting. In this book, John Scanlan explores the nature of memory and how we have come to live both with and within it, as well as what might come from memory becoming a process as simple as retrieving and reading data. Probing the ways philosophers look at memory, Scanlan reveals that some argue that being human means having the ability to remember, to see oneself as a being in time, with a past and future. At the same time, he shows, our memories can undo our present sense of time and place by presenting us with our past lives. And in a digital age, we are immersed in a vast archive of data that not only colors our everyday experiences, but also supplies us with information on anything we might otherwise have forgotten—breaking down the distinction between the memories of the individual and the collective. Drawing on history, philosophy, and technology, Memory offers an engaging investigation of how we comprehend recollection and how memory, as a phenomenon, continually remakes everyday life.

REFERENCES

Introduction

1 Clive Thompson, ‘Clive Thompson on Memory Engineering’, Wired (27 September 2011).

2 Carolyn Kellogg, ‘Scientists Write First Book in DNA’, Los Angeles Times (20 August 2012).

3 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. I: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revd D. J. Enright (London, 1996), p. 6.

4 Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany, NY, 1995), p. 135.

5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. Hollingdale (London, 2003), §20, p. 50.

6 Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago, 2006), p. 5.

7 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 416.

8 Ibid., p. 471.

9 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks, trans. Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort (New York, 2006), p. 435.

10 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ, 1991), vol. I, 100a, 4–9.

11 See Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley, CA, 2006), pp. 15–16.

12 Ibid., pp. 15–16.

13 Jan Goldstein, ‘Mutations of the Self’, in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago, 2000), p. 94.

14 Quoted in Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Death and Rebirth of Character in the Eighteenth Century’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London, 1997), p. 91.

15 Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 191–2.

16 Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, NJ, 2003), p. 44.

17 Ibid.

18 See the story of ‘EP’ in Joshua Foer, ‘Remember This: In the Archives of the Brain’, National Geographic (November 2007), pp. 32–57.

19 Aristotle, On Memory, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ, 1991), vol. I, 449b24–449b30.

20 Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 199–201.

21 Matthew Rampley, Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity (Cambridge, 2000), p. 140.

22 Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks, p. 122.

23 Ibid.

24 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, 2004), p. 284.

25 Matt K. Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (New York and London, 1996), p. vi.

26 Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, 69, Special Issue: ‘Grounds for Remembering’ (2006), p. 129.

I Pasts

1 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago, 2003), p. xi.

2 Ibid.

3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford, 1962), §329, p. 377.

4 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, IN, 2001), p. 6; Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany, NY, 1997), p. 135.

5 Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell and A. F. Capuzzi (New York, 1984), p. 108.

6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. Hollingdale (London, 2003), §20, p. 50.

7 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York, 1994), p. 84.

8 The quotation is from Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, p. 108.

9 The recollection of divine memory is anamnesis which, according to Angus Nicholls and Martin Leibscher, Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-century German Thought (Cambridge, 2010), may be thought of as an early variant of ‘the unconscious’, see p. 4.

10 In myth, memory is anamnesis – this is what pre-dates philosophy. See also Eric Voeglin, Order and History (Columbia, MI, 2001).

11 Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (London, 2008), p. 164.

12 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu and D.C.H. Rieu (London, 1991), p. 72, Book 5, ll. 80ff.

13 See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London, 1997); J. M. ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• I Pasts
• II Presences
• III Ecologies
• CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX