Conclusion: ‘Inconsolable Memory’

Museum Management and Curatorship, 1993

Museums exemplify the urge to remember. It is their r&on d'k?ye to remind us how

COMMITTED TO MEMORY - ISBN:978-98875061-9-5, 2020

'A record of some of the great visionaries of their day in pursuit of scholarly excellence, illustrated and observed, 'on the spot'

In what may be their darkest work "Dialectic of Enlightenment" Horkheimer and Adorno compare the world with the Odyssey and the human being with Odysseus. In this sense the Odyssey is the cosmic world of adventures that Odysseus must experience so that he could end up with a stronger "I". As the single individual Odysseus goes through his adventures so does the collective consciousness go through history. At the end of the road Odysseus can look behind and try to recollect his memory, but what is happening with the collective body (social self) and its capability of memory? If the humanity has its collective memory why are then the same errors, evils, and sufferings repeated in its history? In the same century of the biggest technological progress the collective Reason or the collective consciousness has faced regression (20th century and WWII). Hence, the regression of the masses lies in their inability to live with the past which is intermingled with their present; instead they are trying to ignore it, making a path for the blind present (unconscious of the past suffering). So this kind of blindness opened the space for the new reified and alienated man who doesn"t know what to do neither with his own remembering nor with the collective memory. This work aims to question the role of the memory and its part in our reified consciousness by asking a simple question: if forgetting our past means reification can remembering help us to de-reify ourselves?

2016

In this paper, I aim at identifying traces of the trauma in Japanese popular and visual culture of the postwar period. Following the Freudian definition, the recollection of the traumatic event is repressed and thus constitutes an absent presence that resurfaces in compulsive repetitions either in the form of re-enactments or in the form of flashbacks. These resist conscious remembering and take on an agency of their own, that is, they are experienced as independent entities that come back to haunt the traumatized person. I thus maintain that when researching the traces of trauma in postwar Japan it is to monsters and ghosts that we need to turn.Keywords: Godzilla, Japan, postwar, memory, monsters, Freud

New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory

As Bernecker and Michaelian point out in their introduction to the recent Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory (2017), it is hardly surprising, given that memory is one of our most fundamental cognitive capacities and the source of an enormous fraction of our knowledge, that philosophical interest in memory dates back to the dawn of philosophy and has remained strong throughout the history of the discipline. What is surprising is the fact that the philosophy of memory has only recently emerged as a recognized fi eld of research. Whatever the explanation for the delayed emergence of the fi eld, it now most defi nitely has emerged, with the publication of the Handbook being only the most obvious sign of this development. Other signs include the rapid proliferation of workshops, conferences, and special issues on the topic of memory and the establishment, at the Issues in Philosophy of Memory conference held in Cologne in 2017, of the PHilosophy Of Memory Organization (phomo.org). There is, in short, a lot going on in the philosophy of memory today, and, whereas the entries for the Handbook were compiled so as to provide a systematic overview of historical and contemporary philosophical research on memory, the present volume, New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory , offers a snapshot of some of the most active and dynamic areas of current research.

Memory Studies, 2019

As a psychologist, when I think about memory, I think about questions such as the following: How do people-and other species-remember the past? What neurological or cognitive mechanisms are involved? What are its properties? Is there one form of memory or many different forms of memory? If more than one, how does one characterize them? To some extent, the philosophy of memory tackles at least some of the same issues, but it appears on the surface to involve much more. As a cursory examination of the Table of Contents of The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory indicates, there are concerns about the metaphysics and epistemology of memory and the morality of memory. When are you, for instance, morally obligated to remember? But then, when should you feel the obligation to forget? Questions such as these remain largely either unexplored or unrecognized by psychologists and neuroscientists, and one could reasonably argue, rightly so. One could equally argue, however, that psychologists have a great deal to learn about memory from philosophers. This volume is a good place to start. The editors-Sven Bernecker and Kourken Michaelian-have masterfully found articulate and authoritative contributors who address these topics and many more. I particularly welcomed the section on the history of the philosophy of memory. There are separate chapters on Plato (Chapter 30), Aristotle (Chapter 31), Augustine (Chapter 35), Indian Buddhist philosophy (Chapter 33), Hume (Chapter 39), Hegel (Chapter 40), Bergson (Chapter 42), Halbwachs (Chapter 44), and Ricoeur (Chapter 48), to name just of a handful of the 18 separate historical chapters. These will serve as a ready guide for anyone who wants to understand the contributions of different scholars to the study of memory. As I read through the altogether 48 chapters in this volume, I found myself thinking back to my graduate school days. After a year or two studying the psychology and neuroscience of memory, I decided that I needed to know something about the philosophy of memory. At the time, at Cornell, the formidable Wittgensteinian philosopher Norman Malcolm was teaching a course on memory. I distinctly remember being hopelessly confused from the start. At least in the beginning of the course, Malcolm appeared to treat a memory as a memory only if it captured "truthfully" the past. As Bernecker states in his entry on "Memory and Truth" (Chapter 4), "'To remember' is factive in the sense that an utterance of 'S remembers that p' (where 'S' stands for a subject and 'p' stands for a proposition) is true only if p is the case. If not-p, then S may think that she remembers that p, but she doesn't actually remember that p" (p. 52). A large number of chapters in this volume either embrace this notion, or feel that one must take it seriously enough to tackle it at length. To return to Bernecker again, many philosophers find the statement "I remember such-and-such, but suchand-such never happened," if not literally contradictory, paradoxical. For them, it is "not really a 883205M SS0010.1177/1750698019883205Memory Studies book-review2019 Book review symposium

New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory presents newly commissioned work from well-established, leading scholars in the philosophy of memory as well as from young scholars who are currently emerging as important contributors to the field. The commissioned contributions to the volume deal with a broad range of issues in the philosophy of memory, from issues in the metaphysics and the phenomenology of memory, through questions about memory and norms, to issues related to memory and affectivity. While the topic of memory has until recently been somewhat neglected in contemporary philosophical debates, a broader interest in relevant themes is currently developing; indeed, the philosophy of memory is emerging as a growing research area and at present it is attracting a substantial amount of attention. In line with this recent development, the volume provides a timely venue for new and original research in the philosophy of memory.

2011

This thesis investigates my lack of childhood memories and documents how my artwork stands in as a substitute for that lost memory. The first part of the thesis analyzes my early life and influences; the second part analyzes my art making and process. The narrative style of writing is intentionally autobiographical to mimic the narrative style and structure of the thesis installation. My upbringing, interests, creative process, access to materials, and inspiration are fully explored. The impact my early life has on my current work is evident. Real memory is combined with created memory in the thesis multi-media installation. I wish to transport the viewer into the dreamlike space I have constructed with found objects and multi-media materials by offering an immersive experience into my world.