Abstract
The topic and theme of memory has occupied an ambiguous position in phenomenological and hermeneutic thinking from the start, at once central and marginalized. Parallel to and partly following upon the general turn toward collective and cultural memory in the human and social sciences over the last decades, the importance of memory in and for phenomenological and hermeneutic theory has begun to emerge more clearly. The article seeks to untangle the reasons for the ambiguous position of this theme. It describes how and why the question of what memory is can provide a unique entrance to thinking the temporality and historicity of human existence, while at the same time it can also block the access to precisely these most fundamental levels of subjectivity. The text argues for a deeper mutual theoretical engagement between phenomenological–hermeneutical thinking and contemporary cultural memory studies, on the basis of an understanding of memory as finite and ec-static temporality, and as the enigma of so-called anamnetic subjectivity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This analysis is found in Part II, Chapter 5, Heidegger 2006. For a more detailed interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of this text by Nietzsche, see Ruin (2006).
For a more sustained reading of historicity, repetition, and memory as a relation to the dead, see Ruin (2015).
For an earlier attempt to elicit the problem of memory from within the existential analytic, see Barash (2008).
Heidegger (1987). To this could be added that in his infamous Black Notebooks Heidegger has a short note from around the time of the Nietzsche essay on the relation between history and memory (Erinnerung), where he explicitly states that it is only Erinnerung and not Historie that maintains that which has been, in the sense of das Gewesene, in GA 95: 206. In other words, for the existential-ontological problem of the past, or of pastness, we should turn first to memory, and not to history or the historical since the latter presumably designates a secondary phenomenon. This remark aligns itself, it seems to me, with the basic premise of the existential analysis of history as based on the intentionality of repetition, response, and retrieval, as always also a projection for and toward the future.
In his analysis of the supposedly original “technicity” of time and memory, Bernard Stiegler has argued in a similar vein that the distinction between a technical and a non-technical or pre-technical memory is ultimately impossible to maintain. In Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, transl. R. Beardsworth & G. Collins, Stanford University Press, Stanford, (1998) (originally published in French in 1994), he argues that the supposedly constitutive primary and secondary memory in Husserl’s analysis relies on a “tertiary memory”, a technical “prosthesis” that is said to have always already opened up the space of memory and temporalization. From this viewpoint, the possibility of a technical or technological memory cannot be based once and for all on a supposedly more fundamental intentionality. His argument pushes the conclusions that were formulated by Derrida in his early analyses of Husserl, but in a direction from which Derrida himself would eventually take a distance, as becomes clear also in their jointly published Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, transl. J. Bajorek, Polity Press, Cambridge (2002).
Augustine (1988), Book 10, Chapter 17.
Husserl (1991, p. 3).
To some extent, the Augustinian reflexive exposition of memory as unfathomable interiority has its philosophical antecedent in the Platonic sense of anamnesis, expounded in several dialogues, notably Meno and Phaedo, and also the Republic, where knowledge is equated with the ability to recollect what was already there in an earlier existence. In contrast to this Platonic-Augustinian line, Aristotle’s discussion of memory in the short dissertation De Memoria (Peri mneme kai anamnesis) gives a densely packed analysis of memory more in the sense of a mental function, that sets the stage for its more scientific exploration up until modern times. His basic distinction is that between the ability to remember and the ability to recall, and he defines memory as a comportment characterized by a perception or conception originating from something “when time has past.”
Husserl (1991): §2, and §19ff.
The question of the role and meaning of memory in German Idealism is a complex topic that I will not try to cover here. It spans the almost complete neglect of this theme in Kant, for whom it is a marginal mental faculty, to Hegel, whose thinking could be described as modeled on the utopia of a total anamnesis. For a recent study on Hegel and the problem memory, that also makes connections to cultural memory studies, see Angelica Nuzzo (2012), Memory, History, Justice in Hegel.
Casey (1987): 17.
Ricoeur (2004, p. xv).
See his preface, ibid., p. xv. The upsurge of memory and memory studies has not lacked its critics in the traditional disciplines of history, see e.g., Klein (2000).
Ricoeur (2004, p. 21).
Ricoeur (2004, p. 506).
Gadamer (1993, p. 15f).
Davey (2006, p. 117).
Ibid. To this he adds that philosophical hermeneutics also follows Heidegger in denying that the latter are merely psychological categories.
Gadamer (1992, p. 88).
In another recent text Jeffrey Sims has suggested that Gadamerian hermeneutics is not just part of a general linguistic turn in modern thought, but more deeply what he calls a “mnemic turn.” The basic idea is again that the mnemic is a turn toward a deeper appreciation of tradition, and of the experience of indebtedness, in other words that the very concept of memory captures this basic ethos of Gadamer’s hermeneutics (Sims 2008).
Risser (2012).
Ibid., p. 20.
Ibid., p. 25.
The most important texts by Halbachs were gathered in a collection in English, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), a standard reference in cultural memory studies.
An important publication that summarizes this new orientation toward cultural memory was Kultur und Gedächtnis, eds. J. Assmann & T. Hölscher (Franfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988).
A. Assmann (2008, p. 103).
A. Assmann (2002, pp. 27–45). An equally important source for the upsurge of memory as a leading term in cultural studies was Pierre Nora and project of a new kind of history of the French nation that he launched in 1984 under the title Lieux de mémoire that also relied partly on Halbwach’s notion. For Ricoeur, this is a primary reference when he discusses the upsurge of interest in memory in his book. I refrain from addressing the work of Nora here, partly for lack of space, but also because of the relatively minor philosophical interest of his use of the term “memory” in contrast to “history.” For his main statement, see Nora (1996), and also his more self-critical reappraisal in Nora (2002).
Erll (2011).
This is exemplified in part by the ambitious Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (New York: de Gruyter, 2008), that carries only a few marginal references to hermeneutics and the work of Gadamer. An exception to the this tendency is a thoughtful piece on Ricoeur’s work on memory by Maureen Junker-Kenny, “Memory and Forgetting in Paul Ricoeur’s Theory of the Capable Self,” pp. 203–211, where she notes the significance of phenomenology for seeing memory and forgetting not as standing in simple contradiction but as mutually enabling and constitutive factors.
References
Aristotle. 2007. On Memory and Recollection (trans. D. Bloch). Leiden: Brill.
Assmann, Jan. 1988. Kultur und Gedächtnis. In Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. J. Assmann, and T. Hölscher. Franfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Assmann, Aleida. 2002. Gedächtnis als Leitbegriff der Kulturwissenschaften. In Kulturwissenschaften: Forschung—Praxis—Positionen, ed. Lutz Musne, and Gotthart Wunberg, 27–45. Wien: Edition Parabasen.
Assmann, Aleida. 2008. Canon and Archive. In Cultural memory studies. An international and interdisciplinary handbook, ed. A. Erll, and A. Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Augustine, S. 1988. Confessions (transl. W. Watts) Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Barash, Jeffrey. 2008. Heidegger and the metaphysics of memory. Studia Phaenomenolgica 8: 401–409.
Casey, Edward. 1987. Remembering. A phenomenological study. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Davey, Nicholas. 2006. Unquiet understanding. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Albany: SUNY Press.
Erll, Astrid. 2011. Travelling memory. Parallax 17(4): 4–18.
Erll, Astrid, and A. Nünning (eds.). 2008. Cultural memory studies. An international and interdisciplinary handbook. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Gadamer, Hans Georg. 1992. Education, poetry, and history. Albany: SUNY Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1993. Truth and Method (trans: J. Weinsheimer & D. Marschall). New York: Continuum.
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On collective memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1987. Nietzsche (trans: D. Farrell Krell). San Fransisco: Harper & Row.
Husserl, Edmund. 1991. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (trans. J. Barnett Brough). Dortrecht: Kluwer.
Klein, Kerwin Lee. 2000. On the emergence of memory in historical discourse. Representations 69: 127–149.
Nora, Pierre (ed.). 1996. Between memory and history. In Realms of Memory. New York: Columbia UP.
Nora, Pierre. 2002. Reasons for the current upsurge in memory. Transit 22:1–9.
Nuzzo, Angelica. 2012. Memory, history, justice in Hegel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, history, forgetting (transl. K. Blamey & D. Pellauer). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Risser, James. 2012. The life of understanding. A contemporary hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional memory: remembering the holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP.
Rothberg, Michael. 2011. From Gaza to Warzaw: mapping multidiretional memory. Criticism 53: 523–548.
Ruin, Hans. 2006. Blinding Wisdom—Nietzsche´s Superhistorical Gaze. In The past´s presence. Essays on the historicity of philosophical thought, ed. Marcia Sá Cavalcante, and Hans Ruin. Stockholm: Södertörn Philosophical Studies.
Ruin, Hans. 2015. Housing spirits: The grave as an exemplary site of memory. In Routledge international handbook of memory studies, ed. A.-M. Tota, and T. Hagen. London: Routledge.
Sims, Jeffrey. 2008. Seeking a mnemonic turn: interior reflections in Gadamer’s post-platonic thought. Human Affairs 2008: 225–242.
Stiegler, Bernhard. 1998. Technics and time, 1: the fault of epimetheus (trans: R. Beardsworth & G. Collins). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, Bernhard. 2002 (with Jacques Derrida), Echographies of television: filmed interviews (trans: J. Bajorek). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Yates, Frances. 1966. The art of memory. Chicago: Chicago UP.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ruin, H. Anamnemic subjectivity: new steps toward a hermeneutics of memory. Cont Philos Rev 48, 197–216 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9323-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9323-7