Chapter 1, Part 2: “A Phenomenological Sketch of Memory” and “Memories and Images”

All through the process of reading this section of the text, I found it vital to keep quite in mind what Ricoeur’s declared purpose is in this first chapter: to think about the what of memory, on the way toward the task of thinking about the how of memory. The real “meaning” of this passage from the what to the how is made clear only in the last paragraph of the chapter. There Ricoeur draws to a point all that he has accomplished in this first chapter: “This is the question of the reliability of memory and, in this sense, of its truth.” (p. 54) Thus, “At the end of our investigation, and in spite of the traps that imagination lays for memory, it can be affirmed that a specific search for truth is implied in the intending of the past ‘thing,’ of what was formerly seen, heard, experienced, learned.” (pp. 54-5) To walk the same trecherous road I wandered down last week (that of lumping the thought of different thinkers together… perhaps a bit too facilely), I might point out the remarkable extent to which Ricoeur here sounds like Badiou. Inasmuch, that is, as the “what” to which Ricoeur refers can be connected with the thematized “event” in Badiou. Indeed, Badiouian subjectivity might be read into Ricoeur’s “More precisely, in the moment of recognition, in which the effort of recollection is completed, this search for truth declares itself”; and Ricoeur almost employs Badiou’s technical language in this: “Let us call this search for truth, faithfulness.” But let me not get too carried away here.