Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<div><b>Paul Ricoeur</b> is the John Nuveen Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School, the Department of Philosophy, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books including <i>Oneself as Another</i>, the three-volume <i>Time and Narrative</i>, and <i>The Just</i>, all published by the University of Chicago Press. <b>Kathleen Blamey</b> has taught philosophy at California State University, Hayward, and the American University in Paris. <b>David Pellauer</b> is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University.</div>

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<div>Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's <i>Memory, History, Forgetting</i> examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.<br><br><i>Memory, History, Forgetting</i>, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.<br><br>A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, <i>Memory, History, Forgetting</i> provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's <i>Time and Narrative</i> and <i>Oneself as Another</i> and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.</div>

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Memory, History, Forgetting

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Preface............................................................................................................xvPART I ON MEMORY AND RECOLLECTION.................................................................................1Chapter 1 Memory and Imagination...................................................................................5 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................5 The Greek Heritage................................................................................................7~ Plato: The Present Representation of an Absent Thing.............................................................7? Aristotle: "Memory Is of the Past"...............................................................................15 A Phenomenological Sketch of Memory...............................................................................21 Memories and Images...............................................................................................44Chapter 2 The Exercise of Memory: Uses and Abuses..................................................................56 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................56 The Abuses of Artificial Memory: The Feats of Memorization........................................................58 The Abuses of Natural Memory: Blocked Memory, Manipulated Memory, Abusively Controlled Memory.....................68? The Pathological-Therapeutic Level: Blocked Memory...............................................................69? The Practical Level: Manipulated Memory..........................................................................80? The Ethico-Political Level: Obligated Memory.....................................................................86Chapter 3 Personal Memory, Collective Memory.......................................................................93 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................93 The Tradition of Inwardness.......................................................................................96? Augustine........................................................................................................96? Locke............................................................................................................102? Husserl..........................................................................................................109 The External Gaze: Maurice Halbwachs..............................................................................120 Three Subjects of the Attribution of Memories: Ego, Collectives, Close Relations..................................124PART II HISTORY, EPISTEMOLOGY.....................................................................................133Prelude History: Remedy or Poison?.................................................................................141Chapter 1 The Documentary Phase: Archived Memory...................................................................146 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................146 Inhabited Space...................................................................................................147 Historical Time...................................................................................................153 Testimony.........................................................................................................161 The Archive.......................................................................................................166 Documentary Proof.................................................................................................176Chapter 2 Explanation/Understanding................................................................................182 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................182 Promoting the History of Mentalities..............................................................................188 Some Advocates of Rigor: Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Norbert Elias........................................200 Variations in Scale...............................................................................................209 From the Idea of Mentality to That of Representation..............................................................216? The Scale of Efficacy or of Coerciveness.........................................................................218? The Scale of Degrees of Legitimation.............................................................................221? The Scale of Nonquantitative Aspects of Social Times.............................................................223 The Dialectic of Representation...................................................................................227Chapter 3 The Historian's Representation...........................................................................234 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................234 Representation and Narration......................................................................................238 Representation and Rhetoric.......................................................................................248 The Historian's Representation and the Prestige of the Image......................................................261 Standing For......................................................................................................274PART III THE HISTORICAL CONDITION.................................................................................281Prelude The Burden of History and the Nonhistorical...............................................................287Chapter 1 The Critical Philosophy of History.......................................................................293 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................293 "Die Geschichte Selber," "History Itself".........................................................................296 "Our" Modernity...................................................................................................305 The Historian and the Judge.......................................................................................314 Interpretation in History.........................................................................................333Chapter 2 History and Time.........................................................................................343 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................343 Temporality.......................................................................................................352? Being-toward-Death...............................................................................................352? Death in History.................................................................................................361 Historicity.......................................................................................................369? The Trajectory of the Term Geschichtlichkeit.....................................................................370? Historicity and...