This week on the podcast, I made Paul Ricoeur the focus of my ‘Fragment from the Burning Archive’ segment on the podcast this week, and specifically his late work, Memory, History, Forgetting.
Memory, History, Forgetting is long and complex. I had the uncanny feeling that I had read it before at university, but maybe that was Time and Narrative since Memory, History, Forgetting was published after I finished up at university. Or maybe I did, in one of my scholarly binges as a public servant. Maybe even when I was working on the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse?
The book deeply influenced historical truth and reconciliation commissions, especially in South America. I suspect it is not being read widely in Australia today given the tenor of the truth-telling debate. But I don’t know. Let me know if I am wrong.
And, of course, it shares many themes of the Burning Archive – the podcast, the metaphor, the poem published in my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind, and the blog posts metapmorphosed into essays and published in From the Burning Archive. Traces of the past can be lost, and all the past is beyond memory. But what of forgetting and the duties of history where the traces remain?
Towards, the end of Memory, History, and Forgetting, indeed, Ricoeur evoked the famous angel of history from the painting by Paul Klee, described in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. This image also inspired my poems, blog, podcast, YouTube and now Sub-Stack newsletter. It marked a deep, unexpected bond between Ricoeur, Macron and I.
It is hard to choose a brief text from the many profound reflections on history, memory, and forgetting, and on guilt, forgiveness and mutual recognition. Maybe the last paragraph (Memory, History and Forgetting, p. 506) is best, when Ricoeur dissolved history and memory into happy and unhappy forgetting?
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 506Under the sign of this ultimate incognito of forgiveness, an echo can be heard of the word of wisdom uttered in the Song of Songs: “Love is as strong as death.” The reserve of forgetting, I would then say, is as strong as the forgetting through effacement.
Under history, memory and forgetting
Under memory and forgetting, life.
But writing a life is another story.
Incompletion.