Transcript Memory, trauma

Memory, trauma
• “The past is a different country. They do
things differently there.” (L. P. Hartley)
• “You have to begin to lose your memory, if
only in bits and pieces, to realize that
memory is what makes our lives. Life without
memory is no life at all... Our memory is our
coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our
action. Without it, we are nothing. (Luis
Buñuel)
• “Memory is the irruption of other things in us”
(Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
• “Only that which never ceases to hurt will
stay in the memory” (Nietzsche: The
Generalogy of Morals)
“The horror of that moment,” the king went on,
“I shall never, never forget!”
“You will though”, the Queen said, “if you don’t
make a memorandum of it”. (Through the
Looking-Glass)
• Richard Terdiman: memory is the past
made present
• Assmann: The study of memory is
interested not in the past as such, but in
the past as it is remembered. It is
concerned with the paths of handing
down, the diachronic continuities of the
reading of the past” (Moses)
mythology
• Mnemosyne
• Mother of the nine Muses
(memory and art)
Memory and philosophy
• Epistemological problem
• Plato: MNEME
• “what we call learning is really just
recollection” (Phaedo)
• ANAMNESIS: conscious effort to retrieve
Plato’s Theaetetus: two models
• (1) block of wax in the mind
• We hold this wax under the perceptions or
ideas and “imprint them on it as we might
stamp the impression of a seal ring.
Whatever is so imprinted we remember
and know so long as the image remains,
whatever is rubbed out or has not
succeeded in leaving an impression we
have forgotten and do not know”
Plato’s Theaetetus: two models
• (2) aviary stocked with birds
Aristotle
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We think only in images
Time: a linear series of similar presents
Do we recall the thing or its image?
Perception and memory (Benjy in The
Sound and the Fury)
Enlightenment
• Locke, Hume
• storage/retrieval model of memory
• „The power to revive again in our minds
those ideas which, after imprinting, have
disappeared, or have been as it were laid
aside out of sight. ... This is memory,
which is as it were the storehouse of our
ideas”
• memory as the key to identity
Modernity
• Memory becomes a problem for the self
• Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’ – the sheer
difficulty of evoking orf rejoining my past
self
• Romanticism: Memory disturbances (grief,
nostalgia, split minds)
• Revolution
Erinnerung vs Gedächtnis
• Memory as interiorisation, accumulation of
experience
• Memory as a mechanical filing system, an
archive
(José Arcadio Buendía’s ingenious
“memory machine” in One Hundred Years
of Solitude)
• “Theuth came to the king (Tamus) and exhibited
his arts... when it came to writing, Theuth said:
‘This discipline, my King, will make the Egyptians
wiser and will improve their memories: my
invention is a recipe for both memory and wisdom’.
But the king said: ‘...The fact is that this invention
will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who
have learned it because they will not need to
exercise their memories, being able to rely on what
is written, using the stimulus of external marks that
are alien to themselves rather than, from within,
their unaided powers to call things to mind. So it’s
not a remedy for memory, but for reminding, that
you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you’re
equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it,
not with truth. They will be men filled with the
conceit of wisdom, not men of wisdom.” (Plato)
Phenomenology and memory
• Henri Bergson: motoric memory and
image-memory
• Repetition vs representation
• Motor memory becomes HABIT
• Image-memory: intrudes into the present:
• if there is some discontinuity, „immediately
these darkened images come forward into
the full light”
Phenomenology and memory
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• “I am never quite at one with myself” “My hold on
the past and the future is precarious, and my
possession of my own time is always postponed
until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet
this stage can never be reached, since it would
be one more moment, bounded by the horizon
of its future, and requiring in turn further
developments in order to be understood.”
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Activity and passivity of the past
“Time arises from my relation to things”
the present, an „I can”
“Memory is the irruption of other things in us”
the arc of memory, of experience
“It is through the body that we have access to the
past” – earlier moments of bodily experience
become the history of my current being in the
world; time is sedimented on my body (the lived
body is a hollow in being, a hollow where time is
made)
• „A past that has never been present”
Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu
• “It is a labour in vain to attempt to evoke
our past: all the efforts of our intellect must
prove futile. The past is hidden
somewhere outside the realm, beyond the
reach of the intellect, in some material
object (in the sensation which that material
object will give us) of which we have no
inkling. And it depends on chance whether
or not we come upon this object before we
die.”
Proust/2
• „petites madeleines”
• “this old, dead moment which the magnetism
of an identical moment has travelled so far
to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of
the very depths of my being”
• “And suddenly, my memory revealed itself”
• the entire forgotten chapter of his childhood
miraculously reemerges, “taking shape and
solidity, sprang into being, town and gardesn
alike, from my cup of tea”
• the mystique of memory
Jean-Paul Sartre
• there has to be a perspective, a subject for
a past to exist (objects have no past); the
past is produced as the past of this
present
• One cannot ʻhave’ a past in the sense in
which I have a car: the past is me
• “The past is what I have to be”
• Sich erinnern, se souvenir, se recordar
Psychoanalysis and memory
• Hysteria: “patients suffer from
remininscences”
• Symptoms: memory symbols
Erinnerungssymbole
• The past invades the present
• Hypnosis vs. talking cure
Psychoanalysis and memory problems
• (1) Construction of the past –
• (2) archaeological work; alien internal
images (dreams, symptoms)
• (3) remembering is dialogic
• (4) transference: remembering/repetition
• (5) the finding of an object is always a
refinding (emotional template)
• (6) The temporality of trauma –
Nachträglichkeit
Psychoanalysis and memory problems
• (7) reinterpretation of forgetting
• Harald Weinrich: “With Freud, forgetting
lost its innocence”
• Cui prodest?
• screen memory (Deckerinnerung)