Abstract
To the ordered mind, memory does not exist in any easy or natural relation to the future. These are concepts, or activities of the mind, with manifestly different orientations, that point in opposite directions along the line of time: one points towards the past, and is concerned with the recovery of what has been; the other points forwards, concerned with what is to come. Their opposition draws upon the asymmetry of time, which confers fixity and actuality on past events and regards the future as open, virtual and susceptible to our efforts of will. This means that our sense of the contradiction between memory and futurity is connected to other tensions in our conceptual system, between certainty and uncertainty, necessity and contingency, or fixity and freedom.
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Notes
Daniel L. Schacter et al. ‘The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imaging, and the Brain’, Neuron 76 November 21 (2012), 680.
Ray Kurtzweil, The Singularity Is Near (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2008), Loc. 483. First published in 2005.
Jean-Paul Martinon, On Futurity: Malabou, Nancy and Derrida (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), xi.
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (London: Vintage Books, 1999), 145.
Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 58.
Henry Bergson, Key Writings (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 147.
Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 509.
Martin Hagglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 18.
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© 2016 Mark Currie
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Currie, M. (2016). The Trace of the Future. In: Groes, S. (eds) Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_23
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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