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 Memory, History, Forgetting examines this
reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how
it affects both the perception of historical experience and the
production of historical narrative.
Memory, History, Forgetting, 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.
A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant
philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the
crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as
Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of
responsibility and representation.
"His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and
forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events
once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response
but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of
both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications
of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in
Ricoeur's own vita but also in contemporary European
philosophy."--Library Journal
"Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy--critical, economical, and
clear."-- New York Times Book Review
