Chapter 2: “The Exercise of Memory: Uses and Abuses”

The curious movement of this chapter intrigues me. Though there is clearly a well-devised order to it, it is riddled with what appear (in the moment, merely?) to be gratuitous strolls down side alleys. Riddled, indeed: the chapter ends up something like a riddle, something I wish Ricoeur would have been a bit more forthcoming about. What follows, as a result, is perhaps little more than a collection of musings—all written, though, with the intent of sorting out what Ricoeur intends to accomplish overall in this chapter.

The most crucial moment of the chapter, it seems to me, is pp. 88-89, where Ricoeur allows the theme of justice at last into the project. Ricoeur sees “the duty of memory considered as the imperative of justice” (p. 88) as being a point of convergence for truth and praxis. This is, of course, the logic that underpins the whole of this first part of Memory, History, Forgetting: Ricoeur proceeds from the what of memory (truth), through the how of memory (praxis), toward the who of memory (a theme to be governed by the imperative of justice). The pathway Ricoeur has chosen is brilliant: in order to avoid the difficulties that would inevitably plague a project beginning with the question of the remembering subject or the remembering ego, Ricoeur has traced his way from the remembered through remembering to arrive at a rememberer that is defined in advance as oriented by the other (victim). An interesting strategy, to say the least.

The chapter as a whole, imposing praxis on the question of truth, thus doubles the first chapter’s sense of memory’s fragility: memory is not only endangered by its intertwining relationship with imagination, but also by its inevitably intersubjective setting. He introduces this intersubjectivity through the didactic situation, interestingly enough: the teacher requires memorization from the student. This opens quite early in the chapter onto the theme of abuse, but Ricoeur pushes it aside in order to take up at some length the history of ars memoriae, a fascinating history to say the least! But, as Yates’ final questions, quoted on page 65, make clear, memorization eventually began/begins (with hermetic science… with science generally?) to fail to disambiguate itself from imagination. The collapse of the boundary so necessary for the maintenance of a strong conception of truth, vital at the conclusion of chapter 1, summons Ricoeur to the task of delimiting the ars memoriae, and so he explains: “There are two ways to follow up on these primary considerations that reintroduce the idea of limit into a project that excludes it. . . . [T]he second is to take into consideration the abuses that are grafted onto its use, once this use becomes a form of manipulation under the guise of artificial memory.” (p. 67) Thus he returns—and at length—to the theme of abuse.

Abuse thus comes into Ricoeur’s argument twice, or rather, through a double move: it first imposes itself through the eminently intersubjective relation of teaching; second, it reemerges as the articulation of a (pragmatic) limit that reinforces the boundary between memory and imagination. This double move nicely parallels the superimposition of chapter 2 onto chapter 1: the intersubjectivity that characterizes the practice of memorization reinforces (perhaps secures) the defining limit of imagination (over against memory). It is evident, then, to me at least, that Ricoeur pragmatic concerns are not entirely a distraction or a disruption of the cognitive themes of chapter 1: they are the only means of maintaining the points gained in the course of the first chapter.

Ricoeur’s work here is thus characterized through and through—is it not?—by the understanding that the good secures the truth. He thus concludes his discussion of ideological manipulation of memory with these words from Todorov: “The work of the historian, like every work on the past, never consists solely in establishing the facts but also in choosing certain among them as being more salient and more significant than others, then placing them in relation to one another; now this work of selecting and combining is necessarily guided by the search, not for truth, but for the good.” (p. 86) I can’t help but wonder, then, whether Ricoeur ends up securing the point gained in his first chapter, or whether he all the more radically betrays it: truth is a function of justice for him, a relationism if not a relativism.

Does he not—at least to this point—thus remain Freudian, all too Freudian? History trumps memory—he argues through Pierre Nora at the end of the chapter—so soon as the subject’s (or community’s?) truth is constituted, a constitution accomplished in the process of analysis, indeed, of critical analysis.

Hmmm.