Memory and forgetting

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani addresses memory and forgetting in a 2020 cycle devoted to amnesia and anamnesis. There he argues that memory never comes without forgetting: it is selective, and an inner force refuses to go back up toward what hurts12. He sets the happy amnesia of Rousseau's Reveries against Nietzsche's praise of forgetting. He grants Nietzsche that one cannot live without forgetting, but opposes to him historical reconstruction in the face of the reign of emotion3. He uses the myth of Mnemosyne, the rite reported by Pausanias and Hölderlin's poems to link memory to language, conceived as a pact, as well as to the awareness of death and to hominization14. Proust, Nerval, Baudelaire and Racine provide him with figures of involuntary memory, the matrix memory and anamnesis. He also criticizes nostalgia for a lost substance, which in his view underlies reactionary ideology5. From 2022 onward, he speaks of "induced amnesia" regarding political memory: Ukraine, the Spanish Civil War, the State that expands freedom67.

1. 1#2 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...23 Oct 2020
2. 2#5 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...19 Nov 2020
3. 3#1 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...8 Oct 2020
4. 4#4 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...13 Nov 2020
5. 5#8 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...10 Dec 2020
6. 6#11 UKRAINE : La mathématique unit les hommes, la politique les divise (Aristote)24 Mar 2022
7. 7Guerre, néo-fascisme : le libéralisme-libertaire3 Mar 2023

Introduction produced automatically from the 8 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.