1. Memory and Imagination r
21
“seeking.” One must first have “learned” and then painfully “seek.” Because
of Socrates, Aristotle was unable to, nor did he want to, “forget” Plato’s
anamn¯esis.
A PHENOMENOLOGICAL SKETCH OF MEMORY
Allow me to open the following sketch by making two remarks.
The first is in the guise of a warning against the tendency of many authors
to approach memory on the basis of its deficiencies, even its dysfunctions,
tendencies whose legitimate place we will indicate later.27
It is important, in
my opinion, to approach the description of mnemonic phenomena from the
standpoint of the capacities, of which they are the “happy” realization.28
In
order to do this, I shall present in the least scholarly manner possible the phenomena
that, in the ordinary language of everyday life, are placed under the
heading of memory. What, in the final analysis, will justify taking this position
in favor of “good” memory is my conviction, which the remainder of this
study will seek to establish, that we have no other resource, concerning our
reference to the past, except memory itself. To memory is tied an ambition,
a claim—that of being faithful to the past. In this respect, the deficiencies
stemming from forgetting, which we shall discuss in good time, should not
be treated straight away as pathological forms, as dysfunctions, but as the
shadowy underside of the bright region of memory, which binds us to what
has passed before we remember it. If we can reproach memory with being
unreliable, it is precisely because it is our one and only resource for signifying
the past-character of what we declare we remember. No one would
dream of addressing the same reproach to imagination, inasmuch as it has as
its paradigm the unreal, the fictional, the possible, and other nonpositional
features. The truthful ambition of memory has its own merits, which deserve
to be recognized before any consideration is given to the pathological deficiencies
and the nonpathological weaknesses of memory, some of which will
be examined in the next section of this study, even before the confrontation
with the deficiencies examined in the following study under the heading,
abuses of memory. To put it bluntly, we have nothing better than memory
to signify that something has taken place, has occurred, has happened before
we declare that we remember it. False testimonies, which we shall discuss
in the second part, can be unmasked only by a critical agency that can do
nothing better than to oppose those accounts reputed to be more reliable to
the testimony under suspicion. For, as will be shown, testimony constitutes
the fundamental transitional structure between memory and history.
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I. On Memory and Recollection
Second remark. Contrary to the polysemy, which, at first sight, seems sufficient
to discourage even the most modest attempt at ordering the semantic
field encompassed by the term “memory,” it is possible to sketch a splintered,
but not radically dispersed, phenomenology in which the relation to time remains
the ultimate and sole guideline. But this guideline can be held with
a firm hand only if we succeed in showing that the relation to time of the
various mnemonic modes encountered by our description is itself susceptible
to a relatively well-ordered typology that is not exhausted, for example, by
the case of the memory of a one-time event that occurred in the past. This
second wager of our undertaking builds upon the minimal coherence of the
assertion borrowed from Aristotle at the beginning of this study, according
to which memory “is of the past.” But the being of the past can be said in
many ways (in keeping with the famous passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics
that “being is said in many ways”).
The first expression of the splintered nature of this phenomenology stems
from the object-oriented character of memory: we remember something.
In this sense a distinction must be made in language between memory (la
m´emoire) as intention and memory (le souvenir) as the thing intended. We
say memory (la m´emoire) and memories (les souvenirs). Fundamentally, what
is at issue here is a phenomenology of memories. In this regard, Latin and
Greek use the preterite forms (genomenou, praeterita). It is in this sense
that I speak of past “things.” Indeed once the past has been distinguished
from the present in the memory of memories, then it is easy for reflection to
distinguish at the heart of remembering the question “What?” from “How?”
and from “Who?” following the rhythm of our three phenomenological
chapters. In Husserlian terminology this is the distinction between the noesis
of remembering and the noema of memories.
The first feature characterizing the domain of memories is their multiplicity
and their varying degrees of distinctness. Memory in the singular is
a capacity, an effectuation; memories are in the plural: we have memories
(it is even said, unkindly, that the old have more memories than the young
but less memory!). Later we shall evoke Augustine’s brilliant description of
memories that spill over the threshold of memory, presenting themselves
one by one or in bunches according to the complex relations of their themes
or circumstances, or in sequences more or less amenable to being put into
narrative form. In this regard, memories can be treated as discrete forms
with more or less discernible borders, set off against what could be called a
memorial backdrop, which can be a source of pleasant occupation in states
of anamn¯esis.
1. Memory and Imagination r
23
The most important feature, however, is the following: it has to do with
the privilege spontaneously accorded to events among all the “things” we
remember. In terms of the analysis we shall later borrow from Bergson, the
“thing” remembered is plainly identified with a singular, unrepeatable event,
for example a given reading of a memorized text. Is this always the case? To be
sure, as we shall say in conclusion, the memory-event is in a way paradigmatic,
to the extent that it is the phenomenal equivalent of a physical event. The
event is simply what happens. It takes place. It passes and occurs (se passe). It
happens, it comes about. It constitutes what is at stake in the third cosmological
antinomy of the Kantian dialectic: either it results from something prior
in accord with necessary causation or else it proceeds from freedom, in accord
with spontaneous causation. On the phenomenological level, on which we
have situated ourselves here, we say that we remember what we have done,
experienced, or learned in a particular instance. But a range of typical cases
unfolds between the two extremes of singular events and generalities, which
can be termed “states of affairs.” Still closely resembling a unique event, we
find discrete appearances (a certain sunset one particular summer evening),
the singular faces of our loved ones, words heard according to their manner
of utterance each time new, more or less memorable meetings (which we
shall divide up again below following other criteria of variation). Things and
people do not simply appear, they reappear as being the same, and it is in
accordance with this sameness of reappearing that we remember them. In the
same way, we recall names, addresses, and telephone numbers. Memorable
meetings offer themselves to be remembered due less to their unrepeatable
singularity than to their typical resemblance, even their emblematic character:
a composite image of waking up in the morning in the house in Combray
permeates the opening pages of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Next
comes the case of “things” we have learned and so acquired. In this way,
we say that we still remember the table of Greek and Latin declensions and
conjugations, or German and English irregular verbs. Not to have forgotten
them is to be able to recite them without learning them all over again.
These examples link up with the opposite pole, that of “states of affairs,”
which, in the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition to which Augustine still
belongs, constitute the paradigmatic examples of Reminiscence. The canonical
text for this tradition remains Plato’s Meno and the famous episode of the
young slave’s rediscovery of certain noteworthy geometrical propositions. At
this level, remembering and knowing completely coincide with one another.
But states of affairs do not consist only in abstract generalities, in notions.
Made the target of critique, as we shall say later, the events considered by
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I. On Memory and Recollection
documentary history display a propositional form that gives them the status
of fact. It is then a matter of the “fact that . . . ” things happened this way
and not some other way. These facts can be said to be acquired; even, in the
design of Thucydides, elevated to the rank of an “everlasting possession.” In
this way, within the framework of historical knowledge, events tend to link
up with “states of affairs.”
Given this diversity of past “things,” by what features are these “things”—
these praeterita—recognized as being “of the past”? A new series of modes
of dispersion characterize this “being of the past” common to all our memories.
To guide our passage through the polysemic field of memory, I propose
a series of oppositional pairs, constituting something like a rule-governed
typology. This will obey an organizing principle capable of justification apart
from its implementation, as is the case with Max Weber’s ideal types. If I
were to seek terms of comparison, I would first think of analogy in Aristotle,
halfway between simple homonymy, relegated to the dispersion of meaning,
and polysemy, structured by a semantic core that would be identified by
a genuine semiotic reduction. I would also think of Wittgenstein’s “family
resemblance.” The reason for the relative indeterminacy of the epistemological
status of the classification proposed has to do with the interconnection
between preverbal experience—what I call lived experience, translating
the Erlebnis of Husserlian phenomenology—and the work of language that
ineluctably places phenomenology on the path of interpretation, hence of
hermeneutics. Now the “working” concepts that prime the interpretation
and direct the ordering of the “thematic” concepts proposed here, escape
the mastery of meaning that a total reflection would want to command. More
than others, the phenomena of memory, so closely connected to what we are,
oppose the most obstinate of resistances to the hubris of total reflection.29
The first pair of oppositions is formed by habit and memory. It is illustrated
in contemporary philosophy by the famous distinction between m´emoirehabitude
(memory as habit) and m´emoire-souvenir (memory as distinct recollection)
proposed by Bergson. We shall temporarily bracket the reasons why
Bergson presents this opposition as a dichotomy. We shall instead follow the
counsel of the experience least charged with metaphysical presupposition, for
which habit and memory form two poles of a continuous range of mnemonic
phenomena. What forms the unity of this spectrum is the common feature
of the relation to time. In each of the opposing cases an experience acquired
earlier is presupposed; however, in the case of habit what is acquired is incorporated
into the living present, unmarked, unremarked as past. In the
1. Memory and Imagination r
25
other case, a reference is made to the anteriority of the prior acquisition. In
both cases, then, it remains true that memory “is of the past,” but according
to two distinct modes—unmarked and marked—of reference to the place in
time of the initial experience.
If I place the pair habit/memory at the start of my phenomenological
sketch, this is because it provides the first opportunity to apply to the problem
of memory what, since the introduction, I have called the conquest of
temporal distance, a conquest relying on a criterion that can be described as a
gradient of distantiation. The descriptive operation then consists in arranging
experiences relative to temporal depth, beginning with those in which the
past adheres, so to speak, to the present and continuing on to those in which
the past is recognized in its pastness as over and done with. Let me refer,
as so many others have done, to the famous pages in chapter 2 of Matter
and Memory devoted to the distinction between “two forms of memory.”30
Like Augustine and the ancient rhetoricians, Bergson places himself in the
situation of reciting a lesson learned by heart. Habit-memory is then the one
we employ when we recite the lesson without evoking one by one each of the
successive readings of the period of learning. In this case, the lesson learned
“is part of my present, exactly like my habit of walking or of writing; it is lived
and acted, rather than represented” (91). On the other hand, the memory
of a particular reading, of a given phase of memorization, presents “none of
the marks of a habit”: “It is like an event in my life; its essence is to bear
a date, and consequently to be unable to occur again” (90). “The image,
regarded in itself, was necessarily at the outset what it always will be” (90).
And again: “Spontaneous recollection is perfect from the outset; time can
add nothing to its image without disfiguring it; it retains its memory in place
and date” (95). In short: “The memory of a given reading is a representation,
and only a representation” (91); whereas the lesson learned is, as just said,
“acted” rather than represented, it is the privilege of representation-memory
to allow us “in the search for a particular image [to] remount the slope of
our past” (92). To memory that repeats is opposed memory that imagines:
“To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw
ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value
the useless, we must have the will to dream. Man alone is capable of such an
effort” (94).
This is a text of great richness. In its crystalline sobriety, it posits the
more extensive problem of the relation between action and representation,
of which the exercise of memorization is only one aspect, as I will state in
the next chapter. In doing this, Bergson underscores the kinship between
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I. On Memory and Recollection
the lesson learned by heart and “my habit of walking or of writing.” What
is stressed in this way is the set to which recitation belongs, that of knowinghow,
which includes in an array of different modes the common feature of
being ready to . . . , without having to repeat the effort of learning again,
of re-learning; as such, these modes are able to be mobilized in a range
of different occasions, just as they are open to a degree of variability. It is
to these instances of knowing-how that, among the vast panoply of uses
of the word “memory,” we apply one of its accepted senses. In this way,
the phenomenologist will be able to distinguish “remembering how . . . ”
and “remembering that . . . ” (an expression that will lend itself to further
distinctions). This vast empire covers forms of know-how on very different
levels: we encounter first corporeal capacities and all the modalities of “I can”
which are considered in my own phenomenology of the “capable human
being”: being able to speak, being able to intervene in the course of affairs,
being able to recount, being able to ascribe an action to oneself by making
oneself its actual author. To this must be added social customs, mores, all
the habitus of life in common, part of which is involved in the social rituals
belonging to phenomena of commemoration, which we will later contrast to
the phenomena of rememoration, assigned to private memory alone. Several
polarities intersect in this way. We will encounter others equally significant
in the framework of the present consideration, where the accent falls on the
application of the criterion of temporal distantiation.
The fact that, on the phenomenological plane, we are considering a polarity
and not a dichotomy is confirmed by the eminent role held by phenomena
situated between the two poles that Bergson opposes following his customary
method of division.
The second set of opposites is constituted by the pair evocation/search. By
evocation let us understand the unexpected appearance of a memory. Aristotle
reserved for this the term mn¯em¯e, reserving anamn¯esis for what we shall
later call search or recall. And he defined mn¯em¯e as a pathos, as an affection:
it happens that we remember this or that, on such and such an occasion;
we then experience a memory. Evocation is an affection, therefore, in contrast
to the search. In other words, abstracting from this polarity, evocation
as such bears the weight of the enigma that set in motion the investigations
of Plato and Aristotle, namely, the presence now of the absent that
was earlier perceived, experienced, learned. This enigma must be provisionally
disassociated from the question raised by the perseverance of the first
affection, illustrated by the famous metaphor of the imprint of the seal and,
1. Memory and Imagination r
27
consequently, from the question of whether the faithfulness of a memory
consists in the resemblance of the eik¯on to the first imprint. Neuroscience
has taken up this problem under the title of mnestic traces. This problem
must not monopolize our attention: phenomenologically speaking, we know
nothing of the corporeal, and more precisely cortical, substratum of evocation,
nor are we clear about the epistemological status of the correlation
between the formation, conservation, and activation of these mnestic traces
and the phenomena that fall under the phenomenological gaze. This problem
belonging to the category of material causation should be bracketed as
long as possible. I shall wait until the third part of this work before confronting
it. However, what must be brought to the fore, following Aristotle,
is the reference to the anteriority of the “thing” remembered in relation to
its present evocation. The cognitive dimension of memory, its character of
knowing, lies in this reference. It is by virtue of this feature that memory can
be held to be trustworthy or not and that properly cognitive deficiencies are
to be accounted for, without our rushing to construe them according to a
pathological model, under the heading of this or that form of amnesia.
Let us move to the other pole of the pair evocation/search. This is what
was designated by the Greek term anamn¯esis. Plato had turned it into myth
by tying it to a prenatal knowledge from which we are said to have been separated
by a forgetting that occurs when the life of the soul is infused into a
body—described, moreover, as a tomb (soma-s¯ema)—a forgetting from birth,
which is held to make the search a relearning of what has been forgotten.
In the second chapter of the treatise analyzed above, Aristotle naturalizes
anamn¯esis, so to speak, bringing it closer to what in everyday experience
we term recollection. Along with all the Socratics, I designate recollection
by means of the enigmatic term of searching (z¯et¯esis). The break with Platonic
anamn¯esis is nevertheless not complete, to the extent that the ana
of anamn¯esis signifies returning to, retaking, recovering what had earlier
been seen, experienced, or learned, hence signifies, in a sense, repetition.
Forgetting is thus designated obliquely as that against which the operation
of recollecting is directed. The work of anamn¯esis moves against the current
of the river L¯eth¯e. One searches for what one fears having forgotten
temporarily or for good, without being able to decide, on the basis of the
everyday experience of recollection, between two hypotheses concerning the
origin of forgetting. Is it a definitive erasing of the traces of what was learned
earlier, or is it a temporary obstacle—eventually surmountable—preventing
their reawakening? This uncertainty regarding the essential nature of forgetting
gives the search its unsettling character.31
Searching is not necessarily
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I. On Memory and Recollection
finding. The effort to recall can succeed or fail. Successful recollection is one
of the figures of what we term “happy” memory.
With regard to the mechanism of recollection, I mentioned, within the
framework of my commentary on Aristotle’s treatise, the range of procedures
employed, from quasi-mechanical association to the work of reconstruction
which Aristotle compares to sullogismos, to argumentation.
I would like to give a modern echo here to the ancient texts. Once again
I shall refer to Bergson, reserving for later a thorough examination of the
fundamental theory of Matter and Memory, which will encompass the borrowings
made here from Bergson’s analyses. I am thinking in this regard
of the essay titled “Intellectual Effort” in Mind-Energy,32
principally those
pages devoted to “the effort of memory.”
The primary distinction is between laborious recollection and spontaneous
recollection (188–203), where spontaneous recollection can be considered
the zero-degree of searching and laborious recollection its purposeful
form. The major interest of Bergson’s essay lies in the struggle against the reduction
performed by associationism of all the forms of searching to the most
mechanical among these. The distinction between the two forms of recollection
is set within a more extensive inquiry, placed under a single question:
“What is the intellectual characteristic of intellectual effort?” (187). Whence
the title of the essay. The scope and the precision of the question deserve
to be underscored in turn. On the one hand, the recollection of a memory
belongs to a vast family of mental facts: “When we call to mind past deeds,
interpret present actions, understand a discourse, follow someone’s train of
thought, attend to our own thinking, whenever, in fact, our mind is occupied
with a complex system of ideas, we feel we can take up two different attitudes,
one of tension, the other of relaxation, and they are mainly distinguished by
the feeling of effort which is present in the one and absent from the other”
(186). On the other hand, the precise question is this: “Is the play of ideas
the same in each case? Are the intellectual elements of the same kind, and
have they the same relations among themselves?” (186). The question, we
see, cannot fail to interest contemporary cognitive science.
If the question of recollection comes first in the study applied to the
various types of intellectual labor, this is because the gradation “starting with
the easiest, which is reproduction, and ending up with the most difficult,
which is production and invention” (188) is most marked here. What is
more, the essay can use as a basis the distinction made in Matter and Memory
between “a series of different ‘planes of consciousness,’ beginning with the
plane of ‘pure memory’ not yet translated into distinct images, and going
1. Memory and Imagination r
29
down to the plane where the same memory is actualized in nascent sensations
and incipient movements” (188). The voluntary evocation of a memory
consists precisely in this traversal of planes of consciousness. A model is then
proposed for distinguishing the role of automatic, mechanical recall from that
of reflection, of intelligent reconstruction, intimately mingled in ordinary
experience. It is true that the example chosen is recalling a text learned by
heart. It is, therefore, at the time of learning that the split occurs between the
two types of reading; in the analytical reading, there is a hierarchy between
the dominant idea and the subordinate ideas, to which Bergson relates the
famous concept of a dynamic scheme: “I mean by this, that the idea does not
contain the images themselves so much as the indication of what we must
do to reconstruct them” (196). Exemplary in this regard is the chess-player,
who can play several games at once without looking at the board: “What is
present to the mind of the player is a composition of forces, or rather a relation
between allied or hostile forces” (198). Each game is thus memorized as a
whole following its own profile. It is, therefore, in the method of learning
that we must seek the key to the phenomenon of recollection, for example,
that of the troublesome search for a recalcitrant name: “an impression of
strangeness, but not of strangeness in general” (199). The dynamic scheme
acts as a guide “indicating a certain direction of effort” (200). In this example,
as in many others, “the effort of memory appears to have as its essence the
evolving of a scheme, if not simple at least concentrated, into an image with
distinct elements more or less independent of one another” (201). Such is the
manner of traversing the planes of consciousness, “a descent of the scheme
towards the image” (202). We can then say that “the effort of recall consists in
converting a schematic idea, whose elements interpenetrate, into an imaged
idea, the parts of which are juxtaposed” (203). It is in this that the effort of
recall constitutes a case of intellectual effort and is associated with the effort
of intellection examined in chapter 2 of Matter and Memory: “Whether we
are following an argument, reading a book or listening to a discourse” (205),
the “feeling of effort, in intellection, is produced on the passage from the
scheme to the image” (211). What remains to be examined is what makes the
work of memory, intellection, or invention an effort, namely, the difficulty
signaled by the discomfort experienced or the obstacle encountered, finally
the properly temporal aspect of slowing down or of delay. Longstanding
combinations resist the reworking required by the dynamic scheme, as do
the images themselves in which the schema seeks to be inscribed. Habit
resists invention: “In this peculiar kind of hesitation is likely to be found
intellectual effort” (215). And “we may conceive that this indecision of the
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I. On Memory and Recollection
mind is continued in a disquietude of the body” (222). Arduousness thus
has its own affectively experienced temporal mark. There is pathos in z¯et¯esis,
“affection” in “searching.” In this way, the intellectual and the affective
dimensions of the effort to recall intersect with one another, as they do in
every other form of intellectual effort.
At the end of this study of recollection, I would like to make a brief allusion
to the relation between the effort to recall and forgetting (before we have the
opportunity in the third part of this work to engage in a proper discussion of
the problems concerning forgetting, problems we encounter here in random
order).
It is, in fact, the effort to recall that offers the major opportunity to “remember
forgetting,” to anticipate the words of Augustine. Searching for a
memory indeed attests to one of the major finalities of the act of remembering,
namely, struggling against forgetting, wresting a few scraps of memory
from the “rapacity” of time (Augustine dixit), from “sinking” into oblivion
(oubli). It is not only the arduousness of the effort of memory that confers
this unsettling character upon the relation, but the fear of having forgotten,
of continuing to forget, of forgetting tomorrow to fulfill some task or other;
for tomorrow, one must not forget . . . to remember. In the next chapter,
what I will call the duty of memory consists essentially in a duty not to forget.
In this way, a good share of the search for the past is placed under the
sign of the task not to forget. More generally, the obsession of forgetting,
past, present, and future, accompanies the light of happy memory with the
shadow cast by an unhappy memory. For meditating memory—Ged¨achtnis—
forgetting remains both a paradox and an enigma. A paradox, as it is unfolded
by Augustine the rhetorician: how can we speak of forgetting except in terms
of the memory of forgetting, as this is authorized and sanctioned by the
return and the recognition of the “thing” forgotten? Otherwise, we would
not know that we have forgotten. An enigma, because we do not know,
in a phenomenological sense, whether forgetting is only an impediment to
evoking and recovering the “lost time,” or whether it results from the unavoidable
wearing away “by” time of the traces left in us by past events in
the form of original affections. To solve the enigma, we would have not
only to uncover and to free the absolute ground of forgetting against which
the memories “saved from oblivion” stand out, but also to articulate this
non-knowledge concerning the absolute ground of forgetting on the basis
of external knowledge—in particular, that of the neurological and cognitive
sciences—of mnestic traces. We shall not fail to return, at the appropriate
1. Memory and Imagination r
31
time, to this difficult correlation between phenomenological knowledge and
scientific knowledge.33
A separate and prominent place must be given to the distinction introduced
by Husserl in The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time between
retention or primary memory and reproduction or secondary memory.34
We
read of this distinction in the second section of the 1905 “Lectures on the
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time,” which form the
first part of the work, supplemented by additions and complements from
the years 1905–10. I have separated out those analyses that concern the
object-side of memory, as the translation of Erinnerung by “memory” (souvenir)
confirms, and, in the remainder of the present chapter, added to them
Husserl’s reflections on the relation between memory and image. By separating
this section out from the main context of the 1905 lectures, I remove it
from the province of the subjective idealism that is grafted onto the reflexive
side of memory (which I will examine later in the concluding chapter of this
phenomenology of memory). I confess that this liberation cuts against the
grain of the overall dynamic of the 1905 lectures, which, from the first to
the third section, traverse a series of “levels of constitution” (Husserl, §34),
gradually erasing the objective character of the constitution to the benefit of
the self-constitution of the flow of consciousness. The “temporal objects”—
in other words, the things that endure—then appear as “constituted unities”
(Husserl, §37) in the pure reflexivity of the consciousness of internal time.
My argument here is that the famous epoch´e with which the work opens and
that results in bracketing objective time—the time that cosmology, psychology,
and the other human sciences take as a reality, formal to be sure, yet of a
piece with the realist status of the phenomena it frames—does not begin by
laying bare a pure flow, but rather a temporal experience (Erfahrung) that
has an object-oriented side in memory. The constitution at the first level is
that of a thing that endures, however minimal this objectivity may be, first
following the model of a sound that continues to resonate, then of a melody
that one remembers after the fact. However, in each case, “something” endures.
The epoch´e, to be sure, does expose pure experiences, “experiences of
time” (Husserl, §2, 10). But in these experiences, “data ‘in objective time’ are
meant” (ibid.). They are termed “objectivity” (ibid.) and contain “a priori
truths that pertain to the different constitutive moments of the objectivity”
(ibid.). If from the start of our reading, the reference to this “objective”
aspect appears provisional, this is because a radical question is raised, that of
the “origin of time” (11), which is intended to be kept out of the realm of
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I. On Memory and Recollection
psychology, without thereby slipping into the orbit of Kantian transcendentalism.
The question posed by the experience of a sound that continues and
of a melody that returns concerns the sort of persistence by which “what we
perceive remains present to us for a time, but not without undergoing modification”
(Husserl, §3, 11). The question is: what is it for something that
endures to remain? What is temporal duration? This question is no different
than those posed by William James and Henri Bergson in similar terms:
endure, persist, remain. What modification is this? Is it a sort of association
(Brentano)? Is it a sort of recapitulative comparison with the last sound (W.
Stern)? These solutions can be discarded but not the problem, namely, “the
apprehension of transcendent temporal objects that are extended over a duration”
(§7, 23). Let us call these objects “temporal objects” (Zeitobjekten)
on the basis of which the question of the constitution of time will later be
posed, when it will be considered to be a duration undifferentiated by the
objects that endure. The analysis will then shift from the perception of the
duration of something to a study of the duration of perception as such. It
will then no longer be the sound, the melody that will be thematized but
rather their unobjectifiable duration. Just before this change of emphasis,
the noteworthy distinction between immediate memory or retention and
secondary memory (recollection) or reproduction will become meaningful.
The experience described has a pivotal point, the present, the present of
the sound that resonates now: “When it begins to sound, I hear it as now;
but while it continues to sound it has an ever new now, and the now that
immediately precedes it changes into a past” (§7, 25). It is this modification
that constitutes the theme of the description. There is an “ever new” now.
The situation described is in this regard no different from that considered by
Augustine in book 11 of the Confessions: the modification is of the present.
Of course, Augustine is unaware of the bracketing of every transcendent thesis
and the reduction of the sound to a pure “hyletic datum” (§8, 25). But
the idea that something begins and ceases, begins and “recedes” after it ends
into the most distant past, is common. What is then proposed is the idea of
“retention”: “In this sinking back, I still ‘hold onto it,’ have it in a ‘retention.’
And as long as the retention lasts, the tone has its own temporality”
(25). At this stage of the analysis the two propositions coincide: the sound
is the same, its duration is the same. Later, the second one will assimilate the
first one. We will then pass from the phenomenology of memory to that of
the consciousness of internal time. The transition is prepared by the remark
that “I can direct my attention to the way in which it is given” (25). Then
the “modes” and their continuity, in a “continual flow,” will move to the
1. Memory and Imagination r
33
forefront. This, however, will not eliminate the reference to the now that,
at the start of the analysis with which we are concerned here, is the phase
of a sound, that phase termed “consciousness of the commencing tone”
(ibid.): “The tone is given; that is, I am conscious of it as now” (25–26).
At a later stage of the analysis, this stubborn reference to the present will
attest to the reign of what Heidegger and those influenced by him denounce
as a “metaphysics of presence.”35
On the level to which I am confining the
analysis here, the reference to the present links up with the everyday experience
that we have of things that begin, continue, and cease to appear.
Beginning constitutes an undeniable experience. Without it, we could not
understand the meaning of continuing, enduring, remaining, stopping. And
always, there is something that begins and ceases. Moreover, the present
is not to be identified with presence—in any metaphysical sense. The phenomenology
of perception does not even have any exclusive right regarding
the description of the present. The present is also the present of enjoyment
and suffering and, more significantly for an investigation of historical knowledge,
the present of initiative. The reproach that can legitimately be made
to Husserl, at this preliminary stage of his analysis, is to have enclosed the
phenomenology of the present within perceived objectivity at the expense of
affective and practical objectivity. Within these limits, his thesis is simply that
perception is not instantaneous, that retention is not a form of imagination,
but consists in a modification of perception. The perception of something
has a duration. The distance “from the actually present now-point” (§9, 27)
is still a phenomenon of perception and not of imagination. It is with regard
to something that we say it endures: “The ‘consciousness,’ the ‘experience,’
is related to its object by means of an appearance in which precisely the ‘object
in its way of appearing’ stands before us” (§9, 28). The phenomenology
of memory is initially that of memories, if by this is understood “the object
in its way of appearing.” What is called present, past, are its “running-off
characters” (§10, 29), eminently immanent phenomena (in the sense of a
transcendence reduced to its hyletic status).
If a tension is observable in the analysis, before the appearance of the
distinction between retention and remembering, it is between fixing on
the actual now and the indivisibility into fragments of the phenomenon
of running-off. But Husserl should not be reproached for this tension, as
though it were the inconsequential result of a metaphysical complacency:
it is constitutive of the phenomena described. We can indeed pass without
stopping, like time itself, from one phase to the other of the duration of
the same object, or stop at one phase: the beginning is simply the most
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remarkable of these stopping points; but cessation is just as remarkable. In
this way, we begin doing something and we stop doing it. Acting, in particular,
has its knots and its swells, its fits and its starts; acting is muscular. And in
the smoother succession of perception, the distinction between beginning,
continuing, and stopping is perfectly reasonable. It is as a beginning that the
present makes sense and that duration amounts to a modification: “Since
a new now is always entering on the scene, the now changes into a past;
and as it does so the whole running-off continuity of pasts belonging to the
preceding point moves ‘downwards’ uniformly into the depths of the past”
(§10, 30). Is the term “source-point” used here (§11, 30)? This is within the
framework of the relation beginning-continuing-ceasing. The impression is
primal, in a nonmetaphysicial sense, in the sense of something that simply
begins and by reason of which there is a before and an after. The present is
continually changing, but it is also continually arising: what we call happening.
On this basis, running-off is only “a retention of retention” (§11, 31).
But the distinction beginning/continuing never ceases to signify, so that
“this continuity itself is again an actually present point that is retentionally
adumbrated,” which Husserl likens to the tail of a comet. We then speak of
a duration that “is finished” (31). This end-point can indeed be analyzed
in terms of a continuity of retentions; but as an end, it presents itself as a
“now-apprehension,” as “the head attached to the comet’s tail” (32).36
What then of the eventual end of the attenuation that would be its disappearance?
In evoking this, Husserl speaks of imperceptibility (32), thereby
suggesting the limited character of the temporal field as a field of visibility.
This remark is also valid for the diagram in §10: “No ending of retention
is foreseen there” (Husserl’s note, 32), which, according to certain authors,
would allow for both an admission that forgetting is unavoidable and that
there is an unconscious persistence of the past.
In summary, to term “primal” the past instant proper to retention is to
deny that this is a figuration in terms of images. It is this distinction that we
will take up anew on the basis of the unpublished texts and in relation to a
different cycle of analyses tied to the positional/nonpositional opposition.
In the 1905 lectures the opposition between impressional and retentional
predominates. This distinction suffices to separate the now of consciousness
from the “just past” that gives a temporal extension to perception. An opposition
to the imaginary is nevertheless already in place: in truth, it existed as
early as the critique of Brentano in the first section. As for the distinction between
impression and retention, the focus of our discussion here, it derives,
according to Husserl, from an eidetic necessity. This is not given de facto: “we
1. Memory and Imagination r
35
teach the a priori necessity that a corresponding perception, or a corresponding
primal impression, precede the retention” (§13, 35). In other words, for
something that endures, continuing presupposes beginning. One might raise
certain “Bergsonian” reservations about the equivalence between the now
and the point, but not about the distinction between beginning and continuing.
This distinction is constitutive of the phenomenology of memory—of
that memory of which it is said, “givenness of the past is memory” (§13, 36).
And this givenness necessarily includes a moment of negativity: the retention
is not the impression; the continuity is not a beginning. In this sense, retention
is “not now”: “‘Past’ and ‘now’ exclude one another” (36). To endure
is in a certain way to go beyond this exclusion. To endure is to remain the
same. This is what is signified by the word “modification.”
It is in relation to this exclusion—to this primordial not-now—of the past
nevertheless retained that a new kind of polarity is suggested within the notnow
of memory itself. This is the polarity of primary memory and secondary
memory, of retention and reproduction.
Reproduction assumes that the primary memory of a temporal object
such as melody has “disappeared” and that it comes back. Retention still
hangs onto the perception of the moment. Secondary memory is no longer
presentation at all; it is re-presentation. It is the same melody but heard
“as it were” (§14, 37). The melody heard earlier “in person” is now remembered,
re-presented. The memory itself can in turn be retained in the
mode of having just been remembered, re-presented, re-produced. All the
distinctions suggested elsewhere between spontaneous and laborious evocation
as well as those concerning degrees of clarity can be applied to this
modality of secondary memory. The essential thing is that the reproduced
temporal object has no longer a foot, so to speak, in perception. It has removed
itself. It is really past. And yet it links up with, it follows after the
present and its comet’s tail. The interval is what we name a lapse of time. At
the time of the 1905 lectures and the 1905–10 supplements, reproduction
is classified among the modes of imagination (Appendix II, 107–9). The
distinction remains to be made between thematizing and de-thematizing
imagination, the sole tie between them being absence, a major bifurcation
recognized by Plato, in terms of mimetic art, in the distinction between
the fantastic and the iconic. Speaking here of the “reproduction” of duration,
Husserl implicitly evokes the differential thetic character of memory.37
The fact that reproduction is also imagination, is Brentano’s limited truth
(§19): in negative terms, to reproduce is not to give in person. To be given
once again is not to have just been given. The difference is no longer
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I. On Memory and Recollection
continuous, but discontinuous. The formidable question is then posed, that
of knowing under what conditions “reproduction” is reproduction of the
past. The difference between imagination and recollection depends on the
answer to this question. It is then the positional dimension of recollection
that makes the difference: “Recollection, on the other hand, posits what is
reproduced and in this positing gives it a position in relation to the actually
present now and to the sphere of the original temporal field to which the
recollection itself belongs” (§23, 53). Husserl refers here to Appendix III:
“The Nexus-Intentions of Perception and Memory—The Modes of TimeConsciousness.”
At this price, the reproduced now can be said to “coincide”
with a past now. This “double intentionality” corresponds to what Bergson
and others have called recognition—the conclusion to a happy quest.
At this point, a meticulous analysis devoted to the distinction between
Erinnerung and Vorstellung, collected in volume 23 of Husserliana, picks up
from that of the second section of The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time. I will return to it in the final section of this chapter in the
context of the confrontation between memories and images.
I would like to complete this review of the polarities by considering one pair
of opposed yet complementary terms, the importance of which will be fully
revealed at the time of the transition from memory to history.
I am speaking of the polarity between reflexivity and worldliness. One does
not simply remember oneself, seeing, experiencing, learning; rather one recalls
the situations in the world in which one has seen, experienced, learned.
These situations imply one’s own body and the bodies of others, lived space,
and, finally, the horizon of the world and worlds, within which something
has occurred. Reflexivity and worldliness are indeed related as opposite poles,
to the extent that reflexivity is an undeniable feature of memory in its declarative
phase: someone says “in his heart” that he formerly saw, experienced,
learned. In this regard, nothing should be stripped from the assertion that
memory belongs to the sphere of interiority—to the cycle of inwardness, to
borrow Charles Taylor’s vocabulary in Sources of the Self.38
Nothing should be
removed except the interpretive surplus of subjectivist idealism that prevents
this moment of reflexivity from entering into a dialectical relation with the
pole of worldliness. To my mind, it is this “presupposition” that burdens the
Husserlian phenomenology of time, despite its ambition to be constituted
without presuppositions, listening only to the teaching of the “things themselves.”
This is a questionable effect of the epoch´e, which, under the guise
of objectification, strikes worldliness. Actually, in defense of Husserl, it must
1. Memory and Imagination r
37
be said that the phenomenology of the Lebenswelt, developed in Husserl’s
last great book, partially eliminates the equivocation by restoring its primordial
character to what we globally term the situation in the world, without,
however, breaking with the transcendental idealism that marks the works of
the middle period, culminating in Ideen I but already foreshadowed in The
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time.
The considerations which follow owe an immense debt to Edward Casey’s
magisterial work, Remembering.39
The sole point of divergence separating
me from Casey concerns the interpretation he draws from the phenomena
he so marvelously describes: he thinks he must step outside the region permeated
by the theme of intentionality and, along with it, by Husserlian
phenomenology, under the sway of the existential ontology inaugurated by
Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. Whence the opposition that guides his description
of mnemonic phenomena, separating them into two great masses signaled
by the titles “Keeping Memory in Mind” and “Pursuing Memory beyond
Mind.” But what does “mind” (an English term so difficult to translate
into French) signify? Does not this term refer to the idealist interpretation of
phenomenology and to its major theme, intentionality? As a matter of fact,
Casey accounts for the complementarity between these two great ensembles
by inserting between them what he calls “mnemonic Modes,” namely, Reminding,
Reminiscing, Recognizing. What is more, he makes no bones about
calling his great work A Phenomenological Study. Allow me to add a word
to confirm my profound agreement with Casey’s undertaking: above all, I
admire the general orientation of the work, aimed at protecting memory itself
from forgetfulness (whence the title of the introduction “Remembering
Forgotten: The Amnesia of Anamnesis”—to which part four, “Remembering
Re-membered,” provides a response). In this regard, the book is a plea
for what I call “happy” memory, in contrast to descriptions motivated by
suspicion or by the excessive primacy accorded to phenomena of deficiency,
even to the pathology of memory.
I have nothing really new to say here concerning the reflexive pole of the
pair considered here, to the extent that this title encompasses phenomena
that have already appeared in the other pairs of opposites. One would have to
trace them back to the polarity between one’s own memory and the collective
memory of our next study. Moreover, it is with the latter, under the title of
“Commemoration,” that Casey completes his “pursuit” of memory “beyond
mind.” One would then have to collect under the heading of reflexivity
the “right hand” term of each of the preceding pairs. In this way, in the
opposition between habit and memory, the habitual side is less marked with
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I. On Memory and Recollection
regard to reflexivity: one exercises know-how without noticing it, without
paying attention to it, without being mindful of it. When a performance
is flubbed, then one is called to attention: mind your step! As for the pair
evocation/recollection, reflexivity is at its height in the effort to recall; it is
underscored by the feeling of arduousness tied to the effort. Simple evocation
can, in this regard, be considered neutral or unmarked, inasmuch as the
memory is said to arise as the presence of the absent. It can be said to be
marked negatively in the case of spontaneous, involuntary evocation, well
known to the readers of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and even
more so in the case of the obsessional irruptions considered in the next
chapter. Evocation is no longer simply experienced (pathos) but suffered.
“Repetition” in the Freudian sense is then the inverse of remembering, which
can perhaps be compared, as the work of memory, to the effort of recollection
described above.
The three “mnemonic modes” that Casey interposes between the intentional
analysis of memory held captive, as he says, “in Mind” and the pursuit
of memory “beyond Mind” constitute, in fact, transitional phenomena in
memory, between the pole of reflexivity and the pole of worldliness.
What does the word reminding convey? There is no appropriate term in
French, if not one of the uses of the word rappeler: this reminds me (me
rappelle) of that, makes me think of that. Might we say memento, memoryaid,
pense-bˆete, or in the experimental sciences, points of reference, reminders?
Indeed, it stands for clues that guard against forgetting. They are distributed
on either side of the dividing line between the inner and the outer; they
are found, first, on the side of recollection, either in the frozen form of the
more or less mechanical association by which one thing is recalled by means
of another associated with it through a learning process, or as one of the
“living” relays of the work of recollection. They are found a second time in
the form of external points of reference for recall: photographs, postcards,
diaries, receipts, mementos (the famous knot in the handkerchief!). In this
way, these signposts guard against forgetting in the future: by reminding us
what is to be done, they admonish us not to forget to do it (feed the cat!).
As for reminiscing, this is a phenomenon more strongly marked by activity
than reminding; it consists in making the past live again by evoking
it together with others, each helping the other to remember shared events
or knowledge, the memories of one person serving as a reminder for the
memories of the other. This memorial process can, of course, be internalized
in the form of meditative memory, an expression that best translates
the German Ged¨achtnis, with the help of a diary, memoirs or anti-memoirs,
1. Memory and Imagination r
39
autobiographies, in which the support of writing provides materiality to the
traces preserved, reanimated, and further enriched with unpublished materials.
In this way, provisions of memories are stored up for days to come, for
the time devoted to memories . . . The canonical form of reminiscing, however,
is conversation in the province of the spoken word: “Say, do you remember
. . . , when . . . you . . . we . . . ?” The mode of reminiscing thus unfolds
along the same line of discursivity as simple evocation in its declarative
stage.
There remains the third mnemonic mode, which Casey terms one of transition:
recognizing. Recognizing appears at first as an important complement
to recollection, its sanction one might say. We recognize as being the same
the present memory and the first impression intended as other.40
In this way,
we are referred back by the phenomenon of recognition to the enigma of
memory as presence of the absent encountered previously. And the “thing”
recognized is doubly other: as absent (other than presence) and as earlier
(other than the present). And it is as other, emanating from a past as other
that it is recognized as being the same as. This complex otherness itself
presents degrees corresponding to the degrees of differentiation and distantiation
of the past in relation to the present. The otherness is close to zero in
the feeling of familiarity: one finds one’s bearings, one feels at ease, at home
(heimlich) in the enjoyment of the past revived. The otherness is, in contrast,
at its height in the feeling of strangeness (the famous Unheimlichkeit of
Freud’s essay, the “uncanny”). It is maintained at its median degree when the
event recalled is, as Casey says, traced “back there where it was” (125). This
median degree announces, on the plane of the phenomenology of memory,
the critical operation by which historical knowledge restores its object to the
kingdom of the expired past, making of it what Michel de Certeau called
“the absent of history.”
The small miracle of recognition, however, is to coat with presence the
otherness of that which is over and gone. In this, memory is re-presentation,
in the twofold sense of re-: turning back, anew. This small miracle is at
the same time a large snare for phenomenological analysis, to the extent
that this representation threatens to shut reflection up once again within
the invisible enclosure of representation, locking it within our head, in the
mind.
Nor is this all: the fact also remains that the recognized past tends to pass
itself off as a perceived past, whence the strange fate of recognition to be able
to be treated within the framework of the phenomenology of memory and
within the framework of perception. There is no forgetting Kant’s famous
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I. On Memory and Recollection
description of the threefold subjective synthesis: apprehension, reproduction,
recognition. Thus recognition assures the cohesion of the perceived itself.
It is in similar terms that Bergson speaks of the unfolding of the dynamic
scheme in images as a return to perception. We will come back to this in
the third section of this chapter when we consider memories in the form of
images.
Once we have run through the “mnemonic modes” that Casey’s typology
places half-way between the phenomena that the phenomenology of intentionality
(overburdened, in my opinion, by subjective idealism) is held to
situate in Mind and those it seeks beyond Mind, we are faced with a series of
mnemonic phenomena implying the body, space, the horizon of the world
or of a world.
In my opinion, these phenomena do not take us out of the sphere of
intentionality but reveal its nonreflexive dimension. I remember having experienced
pleasure and pain in my body at one time or another in my past
life; I remember having lived for a long time in a certain house in a certain
town, to have traveled in a certain part of the world, and it is from here that I
evoke all those elsewheres. I remember the expanse of a certain seascape that
gave me the feeling of the vastness of the world. And, during a visit to an
archeological site, I evoked the cultural world gone by to which these ruins
sadly referred. Like the witness in a police investigation, I can say of these
places, “I was there.”
Beginning with corporeal memory, let us recognize that it too is capable
of being divided along the first axis of oppositions: from the body-as-habit to
the body-as-event, so to speak. The present polarity of reflexivity/worldliness
partially coincides with the former one. Corporeal memory can be “enacted”
in the same manner as all the other modalities of habit, such as driving a car
when I am at the wheel. It is modulated in accordance with all the variations
of feelings of familiarity or of strangeness. But the ordeals, illnesses, wounds,
and traumas of the past invite corporeal memory to target precise instances
that call in particular upon secondary memory, upon recollection, and invite
a recounting. In this regard, happy memories, especially erotic ones, leave no
less a mark of their singular place in the elapsed past, without forgetting the
promise of repetition that they contain. Corporeal memory is thus peopled
with memories affected with varying degrees of temporal distantiation: the
magnitude of the interval of time elapsed can itself be perceived, felt, in the
mode of regret, of nostalgia. The moment of awakening, so magnificently
described by Proust at the beginning of Remembrance of Things Past, is
1. Memory and Imagination r
41
especially favorable for returning things and beings to the place assigned to
them in space and in time the previous evening. The moment of recollection
is then the moment of recognition. The latter, in its turn, can span all the
degrees from tacit remembering to declarative memory, ready for narration
once again.
The transition from corporeal memory to the memory of places is assured
by acts as important as orienting oneself, moving from place to place,
and above all inhabiting. It is on the surface of the habitable earth that
we remember having traveled and visited memorable sites. In this way, the
“things” remembered are intrinsically associated with places. And it is not by
chance that we say of what has occurred that it took place. It is indeed at this
primordial level that the phenomenon of “memory places” is constituted,
before they become a reference for historical knowledge. These memory
places function for the most part after the manner of reminders, offering in
turn a support for failing memory, a struggle in the war against forgetting,
even the silent plea of dead memory. These places “remain” as inscriptions,
monuments, potentially as documents,41
whereas memories transmitted only
along the oral path fly away as do the words themselves. It is also due to this
kinship between memories and places that the sort of ars memoriae that we
will discuss at the beginning of the next study was able to be constructed as
a method of “loci.”
This tie between memory and place results in a difficult problem that
takes shape at the crossroads of memory and history, which is also geography.
This is the problem of the degree of originality of the phenomenon
of dating, in parallel with localization. Dating and localization constitute in
this respect solidary phenomena, testifying to the inseparable tie between
the problematics of time and space. The problem is the following: up to
what point can a phenomenology of dating and localization be constituted
without borrowing from the objective knowledge of geometrical—let us
say, Euclidian and Cartesian—space and from the objective knowledge of
chronological time, itself articulated in terms of physical movement? This
is the question posed by all the attempts to recover an earlier Lebenswelt—
conceptually, if not historically—in the world (re)constructed by the sciences
of nature. Bergson himself, so vigilant regarding the threats of contamination
of the pure experience of duration by spatial categories, did not refrain
from characterizing recollection-memory by the phenomenon of dating in
contrast to habit-memory. Concerning particular readings, whose evocation
interrupts the recitation of a lesson, he says: “It is like an event in my life;
its essence is to bear a date, and consequently to be unable to occur again”
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I. On Memory and Recollection
(Matter and Memory, 90); and a little later, “confronted by two different
memories theoretically independent,” he notes: “The first records, in the
form of memory-images, all the events of our daily life as they occur in time;
it neglects no detail; it leaves to each fact, to each gesture, its place and date”
(92). The date, as a place in time, thus appears to contribute to the first
polarization of mnemonic phenomena divided between habit and memory
properly speaking. It is equally constitutive of the reflective phase, or as we
have called it, the declarative phase of remembering; the effort of memory
is in large part an effort of dating: When? How long ago? How long did
it last? Nor did Husserl escape this question, long before the period of the
Krisis, as early as The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. I
cannot say that a sound begins, continues, stops, without saying how long
it lasts. What is more, to say that B follows A is to recognize a primordial
character in the succession of two distinct phenomena: “The consciousness of
succession is consciousness that gives its object originally: it is ‘perception’ of
this succession” (§18, 44). We are not far from Aristotle, for whom the distinction
of before and after is the distinguishing factor of time in relation to
movement. The consciousness of internal time as original already possesses,
according to Husserl, the a priori that governs its apprehension.
Returning to the memory of places, we can attempt, following Casey,
to recover the sense of spatiality on the basis of the abstract conception of
geometrical space. For the latter, he employs the term “site” and reserves
“place” for lived spatiality. The place, he says, is not indifferent with regard
to the “thing” that occupies it or rather fills it, in the manner in which, according
to Aristotle, the place constitutes what is contained within a specific
volume. Some of these remarkable places are said to be memorable. The act
of inhabiting, mentioned above, constitutes in this respect the strongest human
tie between the date and the place. Places inhabited are memorable par
excellence. Declarative memory enjoys evoking them and recounting them,
so attached to them is memory. As for our movements, the successive places
we have passed through serve as reminders of the episodes that have taken
place there. They appear to us after the fact as hospitable or inhospitable, in
a word, as habitable.
The question will, nevertheless, arise at the beginning of the second part,
at the turning point from memory to history, regarding whether a historical
time, a geographical space can be conceived without the help of the mixed
categories that join lived time and lived space to objective time and geometrical
space, which the epoch´e has methodically bracketed to the benefit of a
“pure” phenomenology.
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43
The question already encountered several times as to whether the Husserlian
epoch´e is ultimately tenable arises again here. Regardless of the ultimate
destiny of the memory of dates and places on the level of historical knowledge,
what primordially legitimizes the disengagement of space and time
from their objectified forms is the tie linking corporeal memory to the memory
of places. In this regard, the body constitutes the primordial place, the
here in relation to which all other places are there. The symmetry is complete
in this respect between spatiality and temporality: “here” and “now” occupy
the same rank, alongside “me,” “you,” “he,” and “she,” among the deictic
forms that punctuate our language. Here and now, in truth, constitute
absolute places and dates. But how long can we maintain this bracketing of
objectified time and space? Can I avoid relating my here to the there delimited
by the body of the other without having recourse to a system of neutral
places? The phenomenology of the memory of places seems to be caught,
from the outset, in an insurmountable dialectical movement of disinvolvement
of lived space with regard to geometrical space and of reinvolvement
of each by the other in every process by which what is one’s own is related
to what is foreign. Could I consider myself as someone’s neighbor without
a topographical sketch? And could the here and the there stand out against
the horizon of a common world, if the chain of concrete neighborhoods was
not set within the grid of a great cadastre in which places are more than sites?
The most memorable places would not seem to be capable of exercising their
memorial function if they were not also notable sites at the intersection point
of landscape and geography. In short, would the places of memory be the
guardians of personal and collective memory if they did not remain “in their
place,” in the twofold sense of place and of site?
The difficulty referred to here becomes especially troublesome when,
following Casey, we place the mnemonic phenomena tied to commemoration
at the end of the path held to lead memory away from its “mentalist” core.
To be sure, it is perfectly legitimate to place commemoration back within the
framework of the reflexivity/worldliness polarity.42
But then the price to pay
for inserting commemoration within the context of worldliness is particularly
high: once the emphasis has been placed on corporeal gestures and on the
spatiality of the rituals that accompany the temporal rhythms of celebration,
then the question of the nature of the space and the time in which these
festive figures of memory unfold cannot be avoided. Could the public space
at the heart of which the celebrants are gathered together and the calendar
of feasts that mark the high points of ecclesiastical liturgies and patriotic
celebrations be said to fulfill their functions of assembling the community
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I. On Memory and Recollection
(religio equivalent to religare?) without the articulation of phenomenological
space and time onto cosmological space and time? More particularly, are not
the founding events and actions, ordinarily situated in a far distant time, tied
to calendar time, to the extent that they sometimes determine the zero point
of the official system of dating?43
An even more radical question: does not
the sort of perennialization resulting from the series of ritual reenactments,
continuing beyond the deaths one by one of the co-celebrants, make our
commemorations the most wildly desperate act to resist forgetfulness in its
most surreptitious form of erasing traces, of grinding into dust? Now this
forgetfulness seems to operate at the point of intersection of time and physical
movement, at the point where, Aristotle notes in Physics 4.12, time “wastes
things away.” It is on this note of hesitation that I interrupt, rather than
complete, this sketch of a phenomenology of memory.
MEMORIES AND IMAGES
Under this title “Memories and Images” we reach the critical point of the
entire phenomenology of memory. It is no longer a question of a polarity
capable of being embraced by a generic concept such as memory, even when
it is split into the simple presence of a memory—Greek mn¯em¯e—and recall,
recollection—Greek anamn¯esis. The troublesome question is the following:
is a memory a sort of image, and if so, what sort? And if it should prove
possible through appropriate eidetic analysis to account for the essential difference
between images and memories, how could their interconnectedness,
even their confusion, be explained not only on the level of language but
on the level of actual experience: Do we not speak of what we remember,
even of memory as an image we have of the past? The problem is not new:
Western philosophy inherited it from the Greeks and from their variations on
the term eik¯on. To be sure, we have stated repeatedly that imagination and
memory have as a common trait the presence of the absent and as a differential
trait, on the one hand, the bracketing of any positing of reality and the
vision of something unreal and, on the other, the positing of an earlier reality.
And yet our most difficult analyses will be devoted to reestablishing the lines
of transference from one problematic to the other. After having uncoupled
imagination from memory, what necessity compels us to reassociate them for
a reason other than that which presided over their dissociation? In a word:
what is the eidetic necessity attested by the expression memory-image that
continues to haunt our phenomenology of memory and that will return in
full force on the epistemological level in the historiographical operation that
constitutes the historian’s representation of the past?44
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45
We will take Husserl as our first guide in the investigation of the eidetic
differences between image and memory. Husserl’s contribution to this
discussion is considerable, although his fragmentary analyses scattered over
more than twenty-five years did not result in a finished work. Several of these
analyses, however, have been collected in volume 23 of Husserliana under
the title Phantasie, Bildbewusstein, Erinnerung 1898–1925,45
employing a vocabulary
imposed by the state of the discussion at the end of the nineteenth
century around thinkers as important as Brentano. For my part, I salute in
these analyses, with their combined patience and intellectual honesty, the second
major contribution of descriptive phenomenology to the problematic of
memory, alongside the analyses devoted to retention and recollection in the
first two sections of the 1905 “Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness
of Internal Time.” It is indeed to the correlation between these
two parallel series that I wish to draw the reader’s attention: each of them
has to do with the “objective” side of Erinnerung which is appropriately
designated in French by the substantive souvenir (memory).
These laborious texts explore the specific differences that distinguish by
means of their “objective” (Gegenst¨andlichen) correlates a variety of acts of
consciousness characterized by their specific intentionality. The difficulty of
the description comes not only from the interweaving of these correlates but
from the linguistic burdens of prior usages, some highly traditional ones such
as the use of the term Vorstellung, imperatively but unhappily translated in
French (as in English) by “representation,” some others imposed by the discussions
of that period. Hence the word Vorstellung, unavoidable since Kant,
includes all the correlates of sensory, intuitive acts, distinct from judgment:
a phenomenology of reason, which Husserl continually projected, could not
do without it. But the comparison with perception and all the other intuitive
sensory acts offered a more promising entry. And this is what Husserl obstinately
pursued: it forced him to distinguish among a variety of “the modes
of presentation” of something, perception constituting “presentation pure
and simple,” Gegenw¨artigung, all the other acts being classified under the
heading of presentification, Vergegenw¨artigung (a term also translated by
“re-presentation,” at the risk of confusing re-presentation and representation,
Vorstellung).
The title of Husserl’s volume covers the field of a phenomenology of
intuitive presentifications. We see where the overlap can be made with the
phenomenology of memory: the latter is a sort of intuitive presentification
having to do with time. Husserl often places his program under the aegis
of a “phenomenology of perception, of Bild, of Phantasie, of time, of the
thing [Ding],” a phenomenology that has yet to be realized. The fact that
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I. On Memory and Recollection
perception and its mode of presentation are taken as guidelines should
not prematurely give rise to a suspicion of some sort of “metaphysics of
presence”—it is a matter of the presentation of something with its distinctive
character of intuitivity. All the manuscripts in the volume have to do, therefore,
with objective modes that share in intuitivity but differ from perception
by the non-presentation of their object. This is their common feature. Their
differences come later. As concerns the place of memories on this palette,
it remains incompletely determined as long as its tie with the consciousness
of time has not been established; but this tie can be made on the level of
the analyses of retention and of reproduction that remain within the objective
dimension. We must then compare, as Husserl requests, the manuscripts
collected in Husserliana, vol. 10, “The Consciousness of Internal Time,”
and those of volume 23. In the latter collection, what matters is the kinship
with the other modalities of presentification. The stakes of the analysis at this
stage concern the relation between memory and image, our word “image”
occupying the same ground as Husserl’s Vergegenw¨artigung. But was this
not already the case with the Greek eik¯on and its run-ins with phantasia? We
will return to this with Bild and Phantasie. In fact, memories are involved
in these two modalities, as their enumeration in Husserl’s preferred title reminds
us, and to them should be added expectation (Erwartung), placed on
the same side as memory but at the opposite end of the palette of temporal
presentifications, as we also see in the manuscripts on time.
When Husserl speaks of Bild, he is thinking of presentifications that depict
something in an indirect manner: portraits, paintings, statues, photographs,
and so on. Aristotle had begun this phenomenology by noting that a picture,
a painting could be read as a present image or as an image designating
something unreal or absent.46
Everyday language, quite imprecise, speaks in
this situation of image as well as representation; but it sometimes specifies by
asking what a particular picture represents, of what it is the image. One could
then translate Bild as depiction, based on the model of the verb to depict.
When Husserl speaks of Phantasie, he is thinking of fairies, angels, and
devils in stories: it is indeed a matter of fiction (some texts state Fiktum).
Husserl is, moreover, interested in this by reason of the ties to spontaneity,
which is a feature of belief (a term he uses often in accordance with the usage
of the English-language tradition). The phenomenology of memory is
implied in these distinctions and these ramifications. But the examples proposed
by no means eliminate the need for an essential, eidetic, analysis. And
Husserl’s interminable analyses attest to the difficulty of stabilizing meanings
that continue to tread one upon another.
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It is the distinction between Bild and Phantasie that proved troublesome
for him from the beginning (1898–1906), hence at the time of the Logical
Investigations, in the context of a theory of judgment and of the new theory
of meanings that pushes to the forefront the question of intuition in terms
of Erf¨uhlung, of the “fulfillment” of signifying intentions. Later, during the
period of the Ideen, it is the modality of neutrality specific to Phantasie that
will move to the fore, confronting the positional character of perception.
Intervening as well, though obliquely, will be the question of the individuation
of something, performed by the different types of presentations, as
if periodically it was intuition that reasserted itself at the top of the scale
of knowledge. At other times, it is the extreme distancing of Phantasie in
relation to presentation in the flesh that intrigues him. Phantasia then tends
to occupy the entire place held by the English word “idea” as it is opposed
to “impression” in the British empiricists. It is no longer simply a matter
of devilish intrigues but also of poetic or other fictions. It is non-presenting
intuition that delimits the field. Should we venture to speak tranquilly of fantasy,
of the fantastic in the manner of the Greeks? (The graphism “phantasy”
or “fantasy” then remains open.) What matters to the phenomenology of
memory is that the temporal note of retention can be linked up with fantasy
considered provisionally as a genus common to all non-presentations. However,
the vocabulary of Vorstellung is retained when the emphasis falls on the
intuition common to presentation and to presentification in the field of a
phenomenological logic of meanings. Is it then on Phantasie alone that the
temporal marks of retention and reproduction are to be grafted? Yes, if the
emphasis falls on non-presentation. No, if it falls, in the case of secondary remembering,
on reproduction: then the kinship with Bild is imposed, which,
beyond the examples mentioned above, covers the entire field of the “depicted”
(das Abgebildete), that is to say, of an indirect presentification based
on a thing itself presented. And if the emphasis falls on “the belief of being
attached to the memory” (Seinsglaube an das Erinnerte), then the opposition
between memory and fantasy is complete: the latter lacks the present
“as it were” of the reproduced past. On the other hand, the kinship with the
“depicted” seems more direct, as when one recognizes a loved one in a photograph.
The “remembered” then draws upon the “depicted.” It is with this
play of attractions and repulsions that Husserl continues to struggle.47
The
sole fixed point remains the theme of intuitive presentifications, taking into
account their own entanglement with the conceptual modalities of representation
in general, a theme that covers presentations and non-presentations,
hence the totality of objectifying “apprehensions,” leaving out only