Personal Memory, Collective Memory
In the contemporary discussion, the question of the actual subject of the operations of memory tends to occupy the forefront. This precipitation is encouraged by a preoccupation peculiar to our field of investigation: it matters to historians to know the nature of their vis-à-vis, whether it is the memory of the protagonists of an action taken one by one or that of the collectivities taken as a body? Despite this twofold urgency, I have resisted the temptation to begin my investigation with this sometimes unwieldy debate. I thought that the venom might be sucked out of it if this issue were demoted from the first rank, where the pedagogy of the discourse presented here would also suggest it be placed, to the third rank, where the coherence of my enterprise requires it to be situated. If one does not know what is meant by the experience of memory in the living presence of an image of things past, nor what is meant by seeking out a memory, lost or rediscovered, how can one legitimately ask oneself to whom this experience or this search is to be attributed? Postponed in this way, the discussion has some chance of being directed to a less abrupt question than the one ordinarily posed in the form of a paralyzing dilemma: is memory primordially personal or collective? This question is the following: to whom is it legitimate to attribute the pathos corresponding to the reception of memories and the praxis in which the search for memories consists? The response to the question posed in these terms has a chance of escaping the alternatives of either/or. Why should memory be attributed only to me, to you, to her or to him, in the singular of the three grammatical persons capable of referring to themselves, of addressing another as you (in the singular), or of recounting the deeds of a third party in a narrative in the third person singular? And why could the attribution not be made directly to us, to you in the plural, to them? The discussion opened by the alternative summed up in the title of this chapter is not, of course, resolved by this mere displacement of the problem, but at least by first opening up the space of attribution to all of the grammatical persons (and even to nonpersons: one, whoever, each) an appropriate framework is offered for a confrontation between positions that have been made commensurable.
This is my first working hypothesis. The second is the following: the alternatives from which we begin are the relatively late fruit of a double movement that acquired shape and substance long after the development of the two major problematics of the experience of and the search for memory, a development whose origin goes back, as we have seen, to the time of Plato and Aristotle. On one side, it is the emergence of a problematic of a frankly egological mode of subjectivity, on the other, the irruption of sociology in the field of the social sciences and, with it, the appearance of an unprecedented concept of collective consciousness. Neither Plato nor Aristotle, nor any of the Ancients, had held the question to be prior of knowing who remembered. They asked themselves what it meant to have or to search for a memory. The attribution to someone capable of saying I or we remained implicit in conjugating the verbs of memory and forgetting in the grammatical persons and in the different verbal tenses. They did not ask themselves this question because they were asking another concerning the practical relation between the individual and the city. They resolved it well or poorly, as is attested by the quarrel initiated by Aristotle in book 2 of the Politics against the reform of the city proposed by Plato in the Republic, books 2 and 3. At least this problem was safe from any ruinous alternative. In any event, individuals (“each,” tis, “man”—at least the free men defined by their participation in the government of the city) cultivated on the level of their personal relations the virtue of friendship that rendered their exchanges equal and reciprocal.
It was the emergence of a problematic of subjectivity and, more and more pointedly, of an egological problematic, that gave rise both to problematizing consciousness and to the movement by which consciousness turned back upon itself, to the point of a speculative solipsism. A school of inwardness, to borrow Charles Taylor’s expression,1 was thus gradually established. I shall propose three characteristic examples of this. The price to pay for this subjectivist radicalization is high: any attribution to a collective subject becomes unthinkable, derivative, or even frankly metaphorical. However, an antithetical position arose with the birth of the human sciences—from linguistics to psychology, sociology, and history. Adopting the type of objectivity belonging to the natural sciences as their epistemological model, these sciences put in place models of intelligibility for which social phenomena are indubitable realities. More precisely, to methodological individualism, the Durkheimian school opposed a methodological holism, to which Maurice Halbwachs would adhere. For sociology at the turn of the twentieth century, collective consciousness is thus one of those realities whose ontological status is not in question. Instead, individual memory, as a purportedly original agency, becomes problematic; emerging phenomenology struggled to avoid being dismissed under the more or less infamous label of psychologism, which phenomenology claimed to reject. Private consciousness, stripped of any claim to scientific credibility, no longer lends itself to description and explanation, except along the path of internalization, which has as its final stage the famous introspection lampooned by August Comte. At best it becomes what is to be explained, the explicandum, without any privilege of primordiality—the very word “primordiality” possessing, moreover, no meaning within the horizon of the total objectification of human reality.
In this intensely polemical situation, which opposes a younger tradition of objectivity to the ancient tradition of reflexivity, individual memory and collective memory are placed in a position of rivalry. However, they do not oppose one another on the same plane, but occupy universes of discourse that have become estranged from each other.
Having said this, the task of a philosophy concerned with understanding how historiography articulates its discourse in terms of that of the phenomenology of memory is, first, to discern the reasons for this radical misunderstanding through an examination of the internal functioning of the discourses proffered on either side; the task is, then, to throw some lines between the two discourses, in the hope of providing some credibility to the hypothesis of a distinct, yet reciprocal and interconnected, constitution of individual memory and of collective memory. It is at this stage of the discussion that I will propose invoking the concept of attribution as an operative concept capable of establishing a certain commensurability between the theses in opposition. Then will follow an examination of some of the modes of exchange between the self-attribution of mnemonic phenomena and their attribution to others, strangers or neighbors.
The problem of the relations between individual memory and collective memory will not thereby be put to rest. Historiography will again take up this problem. And it will arise once more when history, presenting itself in turn as its own subject, will be tempted to abolish the status of the womb of history commonly accorded to memory, and to consider memory as one of the objects of historical knowledge. It will then be the task of the philosophy of history, with which the third part of this work will open, to cast a final look at both the external relations between memory and history and the internal relations between individual memory and collective memory.
§
The plea for the originary and primordial character of individual memory has ties to the usages of ordinary language and to the popular psychology that sanctions these usages. In no other area of experience, whether it be the cognitive field, the practical field, or the affective field, is there such total adherence of the subject’s act of self-designation to the object-oriented intention of experience. In this regard, the use in French and in other languages of the reflexive pronoun “soi” (self) does not seem to be accidental. In remembering something (se souvenant de quelque chose), one remembers oneself (on se souvient de soi).
Three features are apt to be underscored in favor of the fundamentally private character of memory. First, memory does seem to be radically singular: my memories are not yours. The memories of one person cannot be transferred into the memory of another. As mine, memory is a model of mineness, of private possession, for all the experiences of the subject. Next, it is in memory that the original tie of consciousness to the past appears to reside. We said this with Aristotle, we will say it again more forcefully with Augustine: memory is of the past, and this past is that of my impressions; in this sense, this past is my past. Through this feature, memory assures the temporal continuity of the person and, by this means, assures that identity whose difficulties and snares we confronted above. This continuity allows me to move back without interruption from the living present to the most distant events of my childhood. On the one hand, memories are divided and organized into levels of meaning, into archipelagos, sometimes separated by gulfs; on the other, memory remains that capacity to traverse, to move back through time, without anything, in principle, preventing the pursuit of this movement, without any end to its continuity. It is primarily in narrative that memories in the plural and memory in the singular are articulated, and differentiation joined to continuity. It is in this way that I am carried back to my childhood, with the feeling that those things occurred in another epoch. It is this otherness that, in turn, will serve to anchor the differentiation of the lapses of time made by history on the basis of chronological time. It remains, however, that this factor, which distinguishes between the moments of the remembered past, destroys none of the major characteristics of the relation between the recollected past and the present, namely, the temporal continuity and the mineness of memories. Third and final feature: it is to memory that the sense of orientation in the passage of time is linked; orientation in two senses, from the past to the future, by a push from behind, so to speak, following the arrow of the time of change, but also from the future toward the past, following the inverse movement of transit from expectation toward memory, across the living present. It is on basis of these features collected by common experience and ordinary language that the tradition of inwardness was constructed. It is a tradition whose titles of nobility extend back to late antiquity with a Christian coloration. Augustine is at once the expression of this tradition and its initiator. He can be said to have invented inwardness against the background of the Christian experience of conversion. The novelty of this discovery-creation is heightened by the contrast with the Greek, then Latin, problematic of the individual and the polis that initially occupied the space that will be gradually divided between political philosophy and the dialectic of split memory considered here. But if Augustine knows the inner man, he does not know the equating of identity, self, and memory. This is the invention of John Locke at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He is also unaware of the transcendental sense of the word “subject,” inaugurated by Kant and bestowed to his post-Kantian and neo-Kantian successors, up to Husserl’s transcendental philosophy, which will attempt to distinguish itself from neo-Kantianism and from the psychologizing of the transcendental subject. It is not, however, with Kant that I will linger, inasmuch as the problematic of the “internal sense” presents an extremely arduous reading, taking into account the shattering of the problematic of the subject into the transcendental, the noumenal, and the empirical. What is more, neither his theory nor his practice leaves room for a meaningful examination of memory. It is, therefore, directly toward Husserl that we will turn. In his extensive unpublished work, the problematic of memory links up with that of the subject who remembers, with interiority and reflexivity. With Husserl, the school of inwardness reaches its apex. At the same time, the entire tradition of inwardness is constructed as an impasse in the direction of collective memory.
It is not yet consciousness and the self, nor even the subject, that Augustine describes and honors, but rather already the inner man remembering himself. Augustine’s strength is to have tied the analysis of memory to that of time in books 10 and 11 of the Confessions. This double analysis is, in fact, inseparable from an absolutely singular context. To begin with, the literary genre of confession is strongly associated with the moment of penitence, which earlier dominated the common usage of the term, and even more so with the initial avowal of the submission of the self to the creative word that has always preceded private language, a properly reflexive moment that directly ties memory and self-presence in the pain of the aporia. In Time and Narrative I quoted, following Jean Guitton,2 this magnificent “confession”: “O Lord, I am working hard in this field, and the field of my labours is my own self. I have become a problem to myself, like the land which a farmer works only with difficulty and at the cost of much sweat. For I am not now investigating the tracts of heaven, or measuring the distance of the stars, or trying to discover how the earth hangs in space. I am investigating myself, my memory, my mind” (Ego sum qui memini, ego animus).3 So, no phenomenology of memory apart from the painful quest of interiority. Let us recall a few stages in this quest.
First, to book 10 of the Confessions. To be sure, the privilege of interiority is not everything here, inasmuch as the search for God immediately provides a dimension of loftiness, of verticalness, to the meditation on memory. But it is in memory that God is first sought. The heights and the depths—these are the same things—are hollowed out within interiority.4
The fame this book has enjoyed stems from the well-known metaphor of the “spacious palace” of memory. It provides interiority with a specific kind of spatiality, creating an intimate place. This pivotal metaphor is reinforced by a host of other related figures: the “storehouse” where the variety of memories to be enumerated are “stored away,” “entrusted for safekeeping”: “All these sensations are retained in the great storehouse of the memory, which in some indescribable way secretes them in its folds. They can be brought out and called back again when they are needed” (10.8, 214–15). The study focuses on the marvel of recollection.5 Calling up as I please all the things “brought into my memory” bears witness to the fact that “all this goes on inside [intus] me, in the vast cloisters of my memory” (10.8, 215). Augustine celebrates a happy memory: “The power of the memory is prodigious, my God. It is a vast immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am” (10.8, 216). Doubly admirable is memory. First, by virtue of its scope. Indeed, the “things” collected in memory are not limited to images of sensible impressions that memory saves from dispersion by gathering them together, but also include intellectual notions, which can be said to be learned and, from then on, known. Vast is the treasure that memory is said to “contain”: “The memory also contains the innumerable principles and laws of numbers and dimensions” (10.12, 219). To sensible images and to notions is added the memory of passions of the soul: the memory is, in fact, capable of recalling joy without being joyful, and sadness without being sad. Second marvelous operation: concerning notions, it is not simply the images of things that return to the mind but the intelligible ideas themselves. In this, the memory is equated with the cogito.6 Moreover, the memory of “things” and the memory of myself coincide: in them I also encounter myself, I remember myself, what I have done, when and how I did it and what impression I had at that time. Yes, great is the power of memory, so that I even “remember that I have remembered” (10.13, 220). In short, “the mind and the memory are one and the same” (10.14, 220).
A happy memory, then? Certainly. And yet the danger of forgetting continues to haunt this praise of memory and its power: from the beginning of book 10 the inner man is spoken of as the place where “my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space and where resounds a sound that rapacious time cannot steal [quod non rapit tempus]” (10.6, 212; trans. modified). Later, evoking the “great field” and the “spacious palace” of memory, Augustine speaks of memories stored as things not yet “swallowed up and buried in forgetfulness” (10.8, 214). Here, the storehouse resembles the sepulcher (“forgetfulness obliterates [buries] all that we remember” [10.16, 223]). To be sure, recognizing something remembered is experienced as a victory over forgetfulness: “If I had forgotten the thing itself, I should be utterly unable to recognize what the sound implied” (10.16, 222). We must, therefore, “remember forgetfulness” (10.16, 222) in order to be able to speak of recognition. For what indeed is a lost object—the drachma lost by the woman in the gospel parable—if not something that has somehow been retained in the memory? Here, finding is recovering, and recovering is recognizing, and recognizing is accepting, and so judging that the thing recovered is indeed the same as the thing sought, and thus considered after the fact as the thing forgotten. If, then, something other than the object sought comes to mind, we are capable of saying: “That’s not it.” The object “was only lost to sight, not to the memory” (10.18, 225). Are we completely reassured by this? In truth, only the recognition, in language and after-the-fact, attests that “if we had completely forgotten it, we should not even be able to look for what was lost” (10.19, 226). But is not forgetting something different from what we remember having forgotten because we do remember it and recognize it? To ward off the danger of a more radical forgetfulness, Augustine the rhetorician proposes to add to the memory of memory a memory of forgetting: “If it is true that what we remember we retain in our memory, and if it is also true that unless we remember forgetfulness, we could not possibly recognize the meaning of the word when we heard it, then it is true that forgetfulness is retained in the memory” (10.16, 222). But what can actually be said about true forgetfulness, namely, “absence of memory”? “When it is present, I cannot remember. Then how can it be present in such a way that I can remember it?” On the one hand, we must say that, at the moment the forgotten object is recognized, it is memory that attests to the existence of forgetting; and if this is so, then “forgetfulness is retained in memory” (10.16, 223). On the other hand, how could we speak of the presence of forgetfulness itself when we truly forget? The vice tightens: “What am I to say, when I am quite certain that I can remember forgetfulness? Am I to say that what I remember is not in my memory? Or am I to say that the reason why forgetfulness is in my memory is to prevent me from forgetting? Both suggestions are utterly absurd. There is the third possibility, that I should say that when I remember forgetfulness, it is its image that is retained in my memory, not the thing itself. But how could I say that it is the image of forgetfulness that my memory retains and not forgetfulness itself, when I remember it? How could I say this too?” (10.16, 223; trans. modified). Here, the old eristic pierces through the confession: “Yet, however it may be, and in whatever inexplicable and incomprehensible way it happens, I am certain that I remember forgetfulness, even though forgetfulness obliterates all that we remember” (10.16, 223).
Passing over this enigma, the search for God is pursued in the memory, higher than memory, through the mediation of the quest for the happy life: “I shall go beyond this force that is in me, this force which we call memory, so that I may come to you, my Sweetness and my Light” (10.17, 224). But this movement of surpassing, in turn, is not devoid of the enigmatic: “I must pass beyond memory to find you. . . . But where will the search lead me? Where am I to find you? If I find you beyond my memory, it means that I have no memory of you. How, then, am I to find you, if I have no memory of you?” (10.17, 224). Here we catch a glimpse of a forgetfulness even more fundamental than the destruction of all visible things by time, the forgetting of God.
It is against this backdrop of admiration for memory, an admiration colored with concern about the danger of forgetfulness, that the great declarations of book 11 on time can be placed. However, to the extent that memory is the present of the past, what can be said about time and its relation to interiority can readily be applied to memory.
As I noted in Time and Narrative, Augustine enters into the problematic of interiority through the question of the measurement of time. The initial question of measurement is assigned directly to the place of the mind: “It is in my own mind, then, that I measure time” (11.27, 276). It is only the past and future that we say are long or short, whether, for example, the future shortens or the past lengthens. More fundamentally, time is a passage, a transition witnessed by meditating reflection: “we can be aware of time and measure it only while it is passing” (11.16, 266). And later: “we measure time as it passes” (11.21, 269). In this way, the animus is considered to be the place in which future things and past things are. It is in the internal place of the soul or the mind that the dialectic between distension and intention, which provided the guiding thread for my interpretation of book 11 of the Confessions in Time and Narrative, unfolds. The distentio that dissociates the three intentions of the present—the present of the past or memory, the present of the future or expectation, and the present of the present or attention—is distentio animi. It stands as the dissimilarity of the self to itself.7 Moreover, it is of the highest importance to stress that the choice of the reflexive point of view is tied polemically to a rejection of the Aristotelian explanation of the origin of time on the basis of cosmic motion. With respect to our polemic surrounding the private or public character of memory, it is worth noting that, according to Augustine, the authentic and original experience of inner time is not primarily opposed to public time, to the time of commemoration, but to the time of the world. In Time and Narrative I raised the question whether historical time could be interpreted in terms of a similar antinomy, or whether it was not constructed instead as a third time, at the point of articulation of lived time, of phenomenological time so to speak, and of cosmological time. A more radical question arises here, namely, whether inserting individual memory into the operations of collective memory does not require a similar conciliation between the time of the soul and the time of the world. For the moment, it is enough to have anchored the question “Who?” in that of the animus, the authentic subject of the ego memini.
I do not want to abandon these brief remarks concerning the Augustinian phenomenology of time without mentioning a problem that will accompany us up to the final chapter of this work. It is the problem of knowing whether the theory of the threefold present does not accord a preeminence to the living experience of the present such that the otherness of the past is affected and compromised by it. And this despite the notion of distentio. The question is posed more directly by the role played by the notion of “passing” in the description of distentio animi: “while we are measuring it, where is it coming from [unde], what is it passing through [qua], and where is it going [quo]?” (11.21, 269). The passage (transire) of time, Augustine says, consists in “passing from [ex] the future, passing through [per] the present, and going into [in] the past” (ibid.). Let us forget the inevitable spatial character of the metaphor of the place of transit and focus instead on the diaspora of this passage. Does this passage—from the future toward the past through the present—signify an irreducible diachrony or a subtle synchronic reduction, to evoke Levinas’s terminology in Otherwise than Being? This question anticipates, within phenomenology, the question of the pastness of the past, inseparable from the notion of temporal distance. It is to this question that our final reflections will be devoted.8
The situation of John Locke within the philosophical current of inwardness is utterly singular. The echo of Platonism and Neoplatonism is no longer perceptible, as it was in Augustine and as it continues to resonate forcefully with Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists, whom Locke knew well and upon whose views he had reflected. Moreover, the kinship with the Christian problem of conversion to inwardness has ceased to be discernible. It is with Descartes that we believe him—wrongly, we shall see—most closely associated, precisely on the question of the cogito. However, the critique of innate ideas already served to distance Locke definitively from him, at least on the level of the ideas of perception. It remains that John Locke is the inventor of the following three notions and the sequence that they form together: identity, consciousness, self. Chapter 27 of book 2 of An Essay concerning Human Understanding, titled “Of Identity and Diversity,” occupies a strategic position in the work beginning with the second edition (1694) of the work first published in 1690. As Étienne Balibar, to whom we owe a new translation, replacing that of Pierre Coste (1700), and a substantial commentary, directly underscores, Locke’s invention of consciousness will become the acknowledged or unacknowledged reference for theories of consciousness in Western philosophy from Leibniz and Condillac, passing through Kant and Hegel, to Bergson and Husserl.9 For it is truly an invention with respect to the terms “consciousness” and “self,” an invention that has an impact on the notion of identity that serves to frame them. This assertion may seem surprising if one considers the prestige of the Cartesian cogito and the occurrences, if not of the word “consciousness,” at least of the adjective conscius in the Latin versions of the Meditations and Responses (a significant detail: conscius is commonly rendered in French by other expressions: en être “connaissants”—being aware of, knowing; en avoir “une actuelle connaissance”—having genuine knowledge of; “expérimenter”—experience).10 But the grammatical subject of the Cartesian cogito is not a self, but an exemplary ego whose gesture the reader is invited to repeat. In Descartes, there is no “consciousness” in the sense of self. What is more, if the cogito includes diversity by virtue of the multiple operations of thought enumerated in the Second Meditation, this is not the diversity of the places and moments by means of which the Lockean self maintains its personal identity; it is a diversity of functions. The cogito is not a person defined by his or her memory and the capacity to give an accounting to himself or herself. It bursts forth in the lightning flash of an instant. Always thinking does not imply remembering having thought. Continual creation alone confers duration upon it. The cogito does not possess duration in its own right.
The way is opened by a series of prior operations of reduction. Whereas the philosophy of the Meditations is a philosophy of certainty, in which certainty is a victory over doubt, Locke’s essay is a victory over diversity, over difference. In addition, whereas in the Meditations the certainty of existence is inscribed within a new philosophy of substances, for Locke, the person is identified by consciousness alone, which is the self, to the exclusion of a metaphysics of substance, which, without being radically excluded, is methodologically suspended. This consciousness is also purified in another way, in terms of language and the use of words; this reduction lays bare the mental, the mind—the English version of the Latin mens. Signifying without words—tacitly in this sense—is characteristic of mind, capable of reflecting directly on “what passes within itself” (book 2, chap. 21, “Of Power,” §1). The final purification: it is not innate ideas that consciousness finds within itself; what it perceives are the “Operations of Our Own Minds” (book 2, chap. 1, §4), sometimes passive, as regards the ideas of perception, sometimes active, as regards the powers of the mind, to which chapter 21 of book 2, “Of Power,” is devoted.
Having said this, what about the triad: identity-consciousness-self? As we question the egological character of a philosophy of consciousness and memory, which does not appear to offer a possible transition in the direction of any sort of being-in-common, any dialogical or communal situation, the first remarkable feature we note is the purely reflexive definition of identity with which the discussion (book 2, chap. 27, “Of Identity and Diversity”) begins. It is true that identity is opposed to diversity, to difference, by an act of comparison by the mind, as it forms the ideas of identity and difference. The places and the moments in which something exists are different. But it is indeed this thing, and not some other, which is in these different places and moments. Identity is, to be sure, a relation, but the reference to that other thing is also erased: a thing is “the same with itself, and no other” (chap. 27, §1). This surprising expression “the same with itself” poses the equation: identity equals sameness with self. The movement of folding back upon itself, in which reflection initially consists, takes shape in this self-referential relation. Identity is the fold of this folding back. Difference is named only to be suspended, reduced. The expression “and no other” is the mark of this reduction. Proposing to define in new terms the principle of individuation (principium individuationis), “so much inquired after” (§3), Locke takes as his first example an atom, “a continued body under one immutable superficies,” and reiterates his formula of self-identity: “For being at that instant what it is, and nothing else, it is the same, and so must continue as long as its existence is continued; for so long it will be the same, and no other” (§3).
Difference, excluded as soon as it is posited, returns under the kinds of differentiation belonging to the types of identity: after the identity of particles, which we have just mentioned, comes the identity of plants (the same oak retains the same organization), the identity of animals (a single life continues), the identity of man (“nothing but a participation of the same continued life,” §6), and, finally, personal identity. The important break thus passes between man and self. It is consciousness that constitutes the difference between the idea of the same man and that of a self, also termed person: “which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” (§9). The difference is no longer marked by the repudiated outside of “another thing” but by the displayed inside of times and places. The knowledge of this self-identity, of this “thinking thing” (with a nod to Descartes), is consciousness. The sole negation admitted: “it being impossible for anyone to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive” (§9). This eliminates the classic reduction to substance, whether material or immaterial, one or many, to the source of that consciousness, the same as itself and knowing itself to be such. Has the difference with respect to something other been warded off? Not for a minute: “For . . . consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that that makes everyone to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things” (§9). This identity of the self in consciousness suffices to pose the equation that interests us here between consciousness, self, and memory. In fact, “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done” (§9). Personal identity is a temporal identity. It is here that the objection drawn from forgetting and from sleep, considered as interruptions of consciousness, suggests the invigorated return of the idea of substance: is not the continuity of a substance required to overcome the intermittence of consciousness? Locke replies bravely that, whatever may be the status of the substantial ground, consciousness alone “makes” personal identity (§10). Identity and consciousness form a circle. As Balibar observes, this circle is not a logical fallacy of the theory: it is Locke’s own invention, supported by the reduction of substance: “the same consciousness unit[es] those distant actions into the same person, whatever substances contributed to their production” (§10). And Locke goes to battle on the front of other apparent counterexamples: the little finger cut off and separated from the body is missed not by some corporeal substance but by corporeal consciousness. As for multiple personalities, they are without any assignable link to the same thinking substance, assuming that the same immaterial substance remains unchanged; these are indeed multiple, split consciousnesses, “two distinct persons” (§14). Locke has the courage to maintain his chosen option. The reply to the objection drawn from the alleged preexistence of souls is of the same nature: “The question being what makes the same person; and not whether it be the same identical substance which always thinks in the same person, which, in this case, matters not” (§10). And, further: No one becomes Socrates who has no consciousness “of any of Socrates’ actions or thoughts” (§14). The same reasoning applies in the case of the resurrection of a person in a body different from that of the world here below, “the same consciousness going along with the soul that inhabits it” (§15). It is not the soul that makes the man but the same consciousness.
With regard to our inquiry, the matter has been decided: consciousness and memory are one and the same thing, irrespective of any substantial basis. In short, in the matter of personal identity, sameness equals memory.
Having said this, what otherness could then slip into the folds of this sameness to self?
On what is still a formal level, we can observe that identity continues to be a relation of comparison that has opposite it diversity, difference; the idea of something other continues to haunt the self-reference of the same. The expression, “the same with itself, and no other” contains the antonym that is stated only to be crossed out. More precisely, with respect to the principle of individuation, reinterpreted by Locke, others are excluded as soon as they are cited; the stated incommunicability of two things of the same kind implies that, under the heading of “no other,” it is other consciousnesses that are obliquely intended. To designate “this” consciousness, must one not hold in reserve an “any,” an “everyone,” a secretly distributive term? The identity of this is not that of that person (§9). In the hypothesis of “two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting in the same body, the one constantly by day, the other by night,” one can legitimately wonder “whether the day- and the night-man would not be two as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato” (§23). To form the hypothesis, we must be able to distinguish between two consciousnesses, hence establish the difference between the consciousnesses. More gravely, what is at issue is the logico-grammatical status of the word “self,” at times taken generically: the self, at times in the singular: my self, as permitted by the flexibility of English grammar.11 There is no discussion concerning the status of the nominalized pronoun, which shifts in this way between the deictic and the common noun. Locke had decided to disconnect ideas from names. Yet, “Person, as I take it, is the name for this self” (§26). And the final word of this discussion is left to the name: “For whatever be the composition whereof the complex idea is made, whenever existence makes it one particular thing under any denomination, the same existence continued, preserves it the same individual under the same denomination” (§29).
On a more material plane, difference brings back the two extremes of the palette of meanings attaching to the idea of the identical self. Diversity, formally excluded by the expression, a thing “the same with itself, and no other,” offers itself to memory as the diversity, traversed and retained, of places and moments that memory links together. This diversity touches on an aspect of life underlying memory that is nothing other than the very passing of time. Consciousness is consciousness of what is passing, occurring within it. The passage is that of perceptions and operations and, hence, of all of the contents placed under the heading of the “what” of memory in the two preceding chapters. No bridge has been constructed between consciousness folded back upon itself and its powers, which, nevertheless, formed the object of a separate discussion in the long chapter, “Of Power.” Not having available to him the category of intentionality, Locke does not distinguish between the memory and its memories, memories of perceptions and of operations. Memory is, I venture to say, without memories. The only perceptible tension is between consciousness and life, despite their identification. It is apparent in the expression “continued existence,” made more explicit by the expression “vital union” (§29). The alternation between waking and sleeping, the phases of remembering and forgetting, compels this recourse to the vocabulary of life: continued existence is preserved only so long as there persists “a vital union with that wherein this consciousness then resided” (§25). Were this “vital union” to dissolve, then that part of ourselves could well “become a real part of another person” (§25). Along with the vocabulary of life is thus suggested that of “a part of that same self” (§25). “Continued existence,” with its threat of internal division, then tends to outstrip consciousness: now it is continued existence that, in the final analysis, “makes identity” (§29). A philosophy of life is sketched out beneath the philosophy of consciousness at the point of articulation of the identity of the man with the identity of the self. If we add to the relation to the past the relation to the future, the tension between anticipation and remembering gives rise to the uneasiness that affects the use of the powers of the mind. Consciousness and uneasiness then risk being dissociated from one another.
At the other end of the range of synonyms of the self, the ethical vocabulary suggests significant reworking of the sameness of the self to itself. We noted above the forensic character of judicial language to which the word “person” belongs, even though it is “the name for this self” (§26). Concern, ascription, appropriation belong to the same ethico-juridical field, followed by punishment and reward. The key concept is that of an “account of self” (§25). It responds to the admission of intimate diversity just mentioned. This idea of an account leads even further. First of all, in the direction of the future: it is in the future also that “the same self [is] . . . continued on” (§25). And this continued existence moving forward as well as retrospectively gathered together, makes consciousness responsible: those who can account for their actions to themselves are “accountable.” They can impute these actions to themselves (§26). Other expressions follow suit: being accountable is also being “concerned” (we recognize in this term the Latin cura). The “concern for happiness [is] the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness” (§26). The shift to a judicial vocabulary is not far off. The transitional concept is that of “person,” the other “name for this self” (§26). What makes it a synonym for the self, despite its “forensic” character? The fact that it signifies that the self “reconciles” and “appropriates,” that is to say, assigns, allocates to consciousness the ownership of its acts. The vocabulary is extremely dense here: the verb “to appropriate” plays on the possessive and on the verbs signifying to own and to impute to oneself (§26).
We touch here on a domain that is open to a double reading, depending on whether we start with the self or with others. For who assigns? Who appropriates? And, even, who imputes? Does one not also, and perhaps to begin with, give an accounting to others? And who punishes and rewards? And what agency on that last day will pronounce the sentence, regarding which Locke, taking sides in the theological debate, declares that it “shall be justified by the consciousness all persons shall have” (§26).
This double reading is not Locke’s. What drew me to his treatise on identity, consciousness, and the self is the intransigence of an uncompromising philosophy that has to be termed a philosophy of “sameness.”12
We find confirmation of the univocity of this philosophy of sameness in comparing the conceptuality and vocabulary of the Essay to the Second Treatise of Government.13 The reader is carried straight to the heart of what Hannah Arendt liked to call human plurality. We are from the outset Adam’s heirs, subjected to rulers who are on earth today, and we ask ourselves about the source of their authority: “he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition, and rebellion . . . must of necessity find out another rise of government” (2). We are thrown in medias res. When there are already men, rulers, war and violence, threats of discord, a question arises concerning the origin of political power. The state of nature evoked first, along with its privilege of perfect equality, is without roots in the philosophy of the self, even if notions of action, possession, and person are presented from the beginning of the text. There appears to be no visible link to the consciousness, closed upon itself, of the Essay concerning Human Understanding. In an unmotivated leap, we pass from personal identity to the state of equality, the “state all men are naturally in” (4). It is indeed a question of power, but it is straightaway “a power over another,” and a strange power at that, since it is the power “only to retribute to him so far as calm reason and conscience dictate what is proportionate to his transgression, which is so much as may serve for reparation and restraint” (7). The state of war is, moreover, mentioned soon after in chapter 3. It assumes enmity and destruction; this state confirms “the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible” (14). Man, not the self. Just as in Hobbes, man fears violent death, this evil done by man to man. The law of nature gives me the right to “kill him, if I can” (16). We always already find ourselves in a world in which the state of nature and the state of war are in conflict. Nothing in the theory of the self allowed us to anticipate this.14 The Second Treatise of Government, thereafter, unfolds on a stage different from that of the self.
Husserl will be our third witness to the tradition of inwardness. He comes after Locke, but by way of Kant and the post-Kantians, especially Fichte, whom he resembles in many respects. Husserl attempts to situate himself in relation to a transcendental philosophy of consciousness, by virtue of a critical return to the Descartes of the cogito. However, he distinguishes himself from Descartes no less than did Locke. It is finally with Augustine, frequently mentioned approvingly, that Husserl can best be compared, at least with regard to the manner of tying together the three problematics of interiority, memory, and time. My approach to Husserl in the present context differs noticeably from that proposed in Time and Narrative, where the constitution of time was the principal issue. In the perspective of a confrontation between the phenomenology of individual memory and the sociology of memory, the focus is shifted in the direction of the “Fifth Cartesian Meditation,” where the problem of the passage from egology to intersubjectivity is tackled directly. I, nevertheless, did not want to confront the difficulty head on. I have preferred the patient path, worthy of the rigor of the eternal “beginner” that Husserl was, passing by way of the problem of memory. It is, in fact, at the center of this problem, as it is treated in the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, that there is a change in direction by reason of which the inner gaze shifts from the constitution of memory in its objective relation to an object spread out in time, an object that endures, to the constitution of the temporal flow itself, excluding any object-oriented intention. This shift of gaze seemed to me so fundamental, so radical, that I have taken the risk of treating the question of memory in two different chapters. In the first chapter, I considered what belonged specifically to a phenomenology of memories, on the one hand, from the viewpoint of its relation to a thing that continues (the examples of the sound that continues to resonate and of the melody that one re-presents to oneself anew) and, on the other hand, from the viewpoint of its difference with respect to the image (Bild, Vorstellung, Phantasie). I ended the analysis of retention and protention at the point where the reference to an object that endures—the reference constitutive of the memory properly speaking—gives way to a constitution without reference to any given object, that of pure temporal flow. The dividing-line between a phenomenology of memories and a phenomenology of temporal flow is relatively easy to draw as long as the memory, in opposition to the image, preserves its distinctive mark as a positional act. It becomes indiscernible when the notions of impression, retention, protention no longer refer to the constitution of a temporal object but to that of pure temporal flow. The three notions just mentioned thus occupy a strategic position, to the point that they can either be assigned to an analysis of objects, or can be mobilized by a reflection that excludes any objective reference. It is this shift, equivalent to a veritable reversal, that is now taken into account. The question that drives me is this: to what extent does this retreat outside of the objective sphere—where Erinnerung means memories (souvenir) rather than memory (mémoire)—pave the way for the egological thesis of the Cartesian Meditations, which blocks the path in the direction of the “foreign” before it determines the means of access?15 The choice of this guiding question explains why I connect in a kind of short-circuit the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time and the “Fifth Cartesian Meditation.” In the first collection, the reign of egology is prepared; in the second text a heroic exit is attempted in the direction of “higher intersubjective communities.”
The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time16 shows its colors in its very title: the consciousness of time is declared to be internal. Moreover, consciousness is not taken here in the sense of consciousness of . . . , following the model of ad extra intentionality. Better put, it is a question, to speak as Gérard Granel does, of time-consciousness—“of the immanent time of the flow of consciousness” (5), as we read in the opening pages of Husserl’s text. No gap, therefore, between consciousness and time. It is noteworthy that this perfect immanence is obtained in a single stroke by bracketing, by “reducing” “objective” time, world-time, which common sense considers to be outside of consciousness. This inaugural gesture recalls the one made by Augustine, who separated the time of the soul from the physical time that Aristotle had tied to change, thereby placing it within the domain of physics. We shall have to recall this when we develop the notion of historical time as the time of the calendar, grafted onto the cosmic order. From the outset, a major obstacle is placed across the path of the transition from this consciousness of internal time to historical time. The consciousness of internal time is closed up upon itself from the start. As concerns the nature of the mind’s “apprehension” of the flow of consciousness and so of the past, it is a question of whether this experienced time is capable of being apprehended and stated without borrowing from objective time, in particular with regard to simultaneity, succession, and the sense of temporal distance—notions already encountered in our first chapter, where it was a matter of distinguishing memory, turned toward elapsed time, from imagination, directed toward the unreal, the fantastic, the fictional. Husserl believes that he avoids these difficulties by assuming for the consciousness of internal time a priori truths inhering in the “apprehensions” (Auffassungen), themselves inhering in this experienced time. It is noteworthy that this problem of the original articulation of the consciousness of time is posed on the level of a “hyletic” in the sense of hulē, of “matter” for the Greeks, in opposition to a morphology related to perceived objects, apprehended in accordance with their unity of meaning. This is the level of radicalness claimed by the consciousness of internal time and its self-constitution.
I shall not discuss again here the two phenomenological discoveries that we owe to Husserl, on the one hand, the difference between “retention” of the phase of flow that has “just” elapsed, and that “still” adheres to the present, and the “remembering” of temporal phases that have ceased to adhere to the living present, and, on the other hand, the difference between the positional character of memories and the non-positional character of images. I ventured to evoke these within the framework of an “objective” phenomenology that aims at distinguishing the past reality of memories from the unreal character of the imaginary. I will concentrate here on the presuppositions of an investigation that claims to be part of a phenomenology of consciousness and, more precisely, of internal consciousness, from the perspective we are adopting in this chapter, namely, the confrontation between private remembering and public commemoration.
The third section of the 1905 lecture links up in the following way with the preceding section in which the analysis of temporality was still based on an “individual object” (§35, 78), on something that endures: a sound or a melody. The identity of this something was constituted in its very duration. From then on, it is the continuity of the flow that takes the place of the temporally constituted identity. Thus §36 carries the title: “The Time-Constituting Flow as Absolute Subjectivity” (79). The effacement of the object, and hence of the individual process and its afferent predicates, does not thereby leave a linguistic void: there remains the pure internal relation to the continuity of appearances between a now and a before, between a current phase and a continuity of pasts. Let us note the difference in usage of the category of the now: it no longer signifies simply the beginning or the ceasing of something that continues, but the pure actuality of the appearing. We continue, of course, to name this flow in accordance with what is constituted “but it is not ‘something in objective time’” (§36, 79). “It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be designated metaphorically as ‘flow’; of something that originates in a point of actuality, in a primal source-point, ‘the now,’ and so on. In the actuality-experience we have the primal source-point and a continuity of moments of reverberation. For all of this, we lack names” (79).
In truth, names are not absolutely lacking. The metaphorical use of flow, which Husserl shares with William James and Bergson, authorizes that of source: an axis of reference is thereby preserved to express continuity; this axis is that of the primal source-point. Not the beginning of something, but maintaining the surging-forth. We can retain the vocabulary of retention, but without the support of something constituted as enduring. The vocabulary is transferred to the side of appearing as such. Can we still speak of unity? Of a unitary flow? Yes, in the sense that the incessant transformation of “now” into “no longer,” and of “not yet” into “now,” is equivalent to the constitution of a single flow, if the word “constitution” retains a sense when nothing is constituted beyond the flow itself: “Immanent time is constituted as one for all immanent objects and processes. Correlatively, the time-consciousness of what is immanent is an all-inclusive unity” (§38, 81). This all-inclusiveness is nothing other than a “steady continuum of modes of consciousness, of modes of having elapsed” (81). Appearing one after the other or together—all at once—this is what is commonly called succession and coexistence. The necessity, and at the same time the impossibility, of forgoing the reference to things that endure did not leave Husserl unconcerned: “But what does that mean? One can say nothing further here than: ‘look’” (82). Look at what? At the continuous transformation of the immanent now (“a tone-now”) into the modes of consciousness of the immediate past. Which produces a new now that Husserl terms “a form-now” (82). Let us note this recourse to the notion of form underpinning the language of flow: “The consciousness, in its form as primal sensation-consciousness, is identical” (82). However, unlike Kant, for whom the language of form is that of presupposition, of the a priori and, in this sense, of invisibility,17 a certain intuitive character is attached to these forms: now, before, at once, one after the other, constantly (stetig). This intuitive character is related to the situation of the phase. It is conveyed by the persistence of the vocabulary of intentionality, but divided between two uses of the term “retention,” on the one hand to express the duration of something, on the other to express the persistence of the current phase in the unity of the flow: “There is one, unique flow of consciousness in which both the unity of the tone in immanent time and the unity of the flow of consciousness itself become constituted at once” (§39, 84). On this point, Husserl declares his puzzlement: “As shocking (when not initially even absurd) as it may seem to say that the flow of consciousness constitutes its own unity, it is nonetheless the case that it does. And this can be made intelligible on the basis of the flow’s essential constitution” (§39, 84). The solution to this apparent paradox is the following: on the one hand, the unity of what endures is constituted across its phases; on the other hand, the gaze is directed to the flow. There are, then, two intentionalities: one transverse, targeting the thing that endures (one then speaks of retention of the tone); the other, aiming only at the “still” as such of the retention and of the series of retentions of retentions. “Now the flow . . . coincides with itself intentionally, constituting a unity in the flow” (87). And Husserl continues: “If I focus on the ‘horizontal intentionality’ . . . I turn my reflective regard away from the tone” (87), and consider only the relation of retention to the primal appearing, in short the continuing newness of the flow itself. But the two intentionalities remain intertwined. In other words, we can arrive at the absolute constitution of the flow only correlatively (the word was used above) with the constitution of something that endures. By virtue of this correlation between two intentionalities, it is legitimate to write: “The flow of the consciousness that constitutes immanent time not only exists but is so remarkably and yet intelligibly fashioned that a self-appearance of the flow necessarily exists in it, and therefore the flow itself must necessarily be apprehensible in the flowing” (§39, 88). A new difficulty is quickly brushed aside: might it be in a second flow that the self-appearance of the flow would be given? No: there is no danger of an infinite regression; the constitution of the flow is final, because it consists in a self-constitution in which the constituting and the constituted coincide, inasmuch as the constitution of the immanent contents—namely, of experience in the usual sense—is “the achievement of the absolute flow of consciousness” (§40, 88). Does this achievement, nevertheless, possess limits? The question arose earlier with regard to the flow: “These ‘determinate’ retentions and protentions have an obscure horizon; in flowing away, they turn into indeterminate retentions and protentions, related to the past and future course of the stream. It is through the indeterminate retentions and protentions that the actually present content is inserted into the unity of the flow” (§40, 89). The question raised concerning the horizon remains open. Neither the question of birth nor the question of death has a place here, at least outside of the field of a genetic phenomenology. As for the indubitability accorded to the retention of something that endures, it refers back to the self-constitution that partakes of the intuitiveness that Kant denied to the a priori forms of sensibility. Such is the double valence of the “impression” in relation to which the “reproductions”—termed “presentifications”18 in the joint analysis of fantasies and memories—are organized. The present is to the presentification of something (Husserl speaks here of “impressional consciousness”) what the temporal index is to the “objective” content of the memory. Inseparable. The correlation is made in the following manner: “Perceiving is the consciousness of an object. As consciousness, it is also an impression, something immanently present” (§42, 94). “Original consciousness” (94) is the name for this nexus, this center of “objective” presentation and of reflexive present. We can say of this original consciousness what one said of the absolute flow, which requires no other more original flow: “primary consciousness that has no further consciousness behind it in which it would be intended” (94). In this way, it is original in the sense of primary. In relation to this original consciousness, the transverse intentionality, belonging to the consciousness of something, can be considered an “objectivation”: “Immanent time becomes objectivated into a time of the objects constituted in the immanent appearances thanks to the fact that an identical physical reality, which in all of its phases constantly presents itself in multiplicities of adumbrations, appears in the multiplicity of adumbrations of the sensation-contents understood as unities belonging to phenomenological time and, correlatively, in the multiplicity of adumbrations of the apprehensions of those contents in phenomenological time” (§43, 97). The relation is therefore inverted with respect to the analyses of the preceding section, in which the transverse intentionality aiming at something that endures serves as a support for the horizontal intentionality brought to the analysis by reflection. Have all the resistances offered by objective phenomenology to the absolutizing of the presence of the present fallen away? How could this unity of the flow be expressed without the support of some constituted objectivity? Husserl obstinately reverses the relation: in order to have something that endures, there must be a flow that is self-constituting. It is in this self-constitution that the enterprise of pure phenomenology finds its completion.
The primacy accorded in this way to the self-constitution of the temporal flow does not immediately make apparent the obstacles raised by this extreme subjectivism to the idea of the simultaneous constitution of individual memory and of collective memory. It still remains to be discovered that the transcendental consciousness constituted in this flow designates itself as an ego that is itself transcendental, in other words, that the pair cogito/cogitatum unfolds within the triad ego/cogito/cogitatum. This movement of radicalization, begun in Ideen I, is made fully explicit in the “Fourth Cartesian Meditation,” precisely in preface to the problem of intersubjectivity. The transcendental consciousness of the flow designates itself there as the consciousness of a solitary I, resulting in the difficulty of passing from the solitary ego to the other, capable of becoming, in turn, an us.19 What seems to be lacking in the egological approach is the recognition of a primordial absence, the absence of a foreign I, of an other who is always already implied in the solitary consciousness of self.
The question now arises whether this seemingly narrowly targeted lack of knowledge regarding absence does not affect the entire phenomenological enterprise, and whether the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time does not already suffer from an equally intimate absence that would eventually have to be connected to that other absence, the absence of the other in the positing of ego.
It is worth noting that the question of absence in relation to presence, posed at the start of our inquiry by the Platonic theory of the eikōn, seems to have disappeared from the philosophical horizon of phenomenology. This relation of the present image to an absent thing constituted, as early as the period of the Theaetetus, the enigma par excellence of the representation of the past, the mark of anteriority compounding that of absence. We can thus wonder whether the dynamism that leads from one level of constitution to another, going beyond the constitution of the duration of something by means of the self-constitution of the temporal flow, is not equivalent to the progressive reduction of negativity in the very concept of time. A reduction that would find its counterpart in the reduction of the foreign in the constitution of the sphere of ownness.
This reduction of absence commences on the level of the “objective” phenomenology of memories, first with the analysis of the relations between perception, primary memory, and secondary memory, next with the analysis of the relations between memories and the other modalities of presentification. It cannot be said, however, that no hint of negativity is perceptible in one or the other of these eidetic analyses. Secondary memory, we said, is not primary memory, nor is the latter perception. What has just taken place has already begun to fade away, to disappear. To be sure, it is retained, but only what has already disappeared is retained. As for recollection, it no longer has any attachment to perception—it is clearly past; it is no longer, but the “just past” is already cessation; it has ceased appearing. In this sense, we can speak of increasing absence along the length of the memorial chain.
The interpretive hypothesis is then the following: the metacategory that works to obliterate these differences is “modification.” Its major operation is to make retention the key concept of the entire temporal analysis at the expense of recollection. In terms of modification, retention is an extended, enduring perception. It “still” participates in the light of perception; its “no longer” is a “still.” Whereas an Aristotelian phenomenology of recollection accords to the search for past time a place equal to that accorded to the presence to the soul of mnemonic affection, the Husserlian phenomenology of memory has difficulty proposing an equivalent to anamnēsis, to the reappropriation of lost time and hence to recognition as the attestation of identity in difference. We can attribute to the dominance of the metacategory of modification the general tendency of the phenomenology of memories to absorb secondary memory into primary memory, veritable temporal annex to the present. This absorption occurs by means of the idea of the retention of retentions, under which the mediating function of secondary memory is concealed. Secondary memory is finally true memory, if, as I believe, the fundamental temporal experience is that of distance and temporal depth. The result is that every dialectical movement is eliminated from the description, and all the polarities we have used to construct the phenomenology of memory (chapter 1, section 2) are in a sense flattened, dampened under the cloak of the idea of modification.
The second series of phenomenological analyses, concerning the place of memories in the family of presentification, offers greater resistance to the effort to reduce otherness: the entire series Bild, Phantasie, Erinnerung is situated on the side of presentification, hence of nonpresence or, more precisely, of nonpresentation (I am stressing once again here the nuance that protects the analysis of representations from being prematurely swallowed up by a hegemonic theory of the present, in the sense of now). In this instance, the opposition between actuality and inactuality appears primitive, irreducible. We can, with Husserl, interweave Bild, Phantasie, Erinnerung in a number of different ways: the interplay continues between the members of the great family of presentifications or re-presentations. The negative is present from the very start, with the “fantastic,” the “fictional,” and the “remembered.” Husserlian phenomenology offers all the descriptive means to take account of this feature, but its dynamism pushes it to minimize its own discovery, even to cancel it.
This is the case it seems with the third section of the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. By virtue of the shift from the “objective” analysis of memories to the reflexive analysis of memories, negativity is definitively lost from sight, reduced to the character of receptiveness (récipiscence). There is one unmistakable sign of this: the undisputed primacy of the problematic of retention that, by means of reduplication, of iteration, absorbs to its own benefit the problematic of memory, to the point that only the retention of retentions will ever be in question.20 Even more seriously: the problematic of double—transverse and horizontal—intentionality will be tied to retention alone. The problematic of unity can, therefore, be preserved on the level of the flow, despite the dependence of this problematic on the constitution of temporal objects (a tone, one and the same tone). The flow thus benefits from the privilege of self-identity. The residual differences are then relegated to the idea of multiple phases and a “continuity of adumbrations” (§35, 78). The concluding idea of a “continuity of appearance” (§36, 79) thus crowns the initial idea of modification.
The points of resistance to the triumph of presence are to be sought in several places: first, on the ultimate plane of constitution, with the imperious correlation between the horizontal intentionality of the flow in the course of constitution and the transverse intentionality of temporal objects, reflection never ceases to require the support of the “objective” structure of memories. Next, if we climb back up the slope of the Phenomenology, the split into primary memory and secondary memory resists the dictatorship of retention. Finally, there is the whole admirable phenomenology of the family of presentifications: fiction, depiction, memories, all attesting to a fundamental split between representation and presentation.
At the end of this appraisal, I return to my earlier suggestion: if we deny the internal negativity of self-consciousness, is this not secretly denying the primordiality of our relation to what is foreign in the egological constitution of self-consciousness? The question remains open.21
It is on this note of puzzlement that we leave our reading of the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time in order to turn our attention toward the problematic that interests us here, namely, the relation between individual memory and collective memory.22 We now move in one fell swoop to the other side of phenomenology, at the crossroads of the theory of transcendental consciousness and the theory of intersubjectivity. This occurs in the “Fifth Cartesian Meditation,” when Husserl attempts to pass from the solitary ego to the other capable of becoming, in turn, an us.23
The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time did not allow any projection of the path along which temporal experience could become shared experience. Phenomenology at this stage still shared with “psychologism,” which it nonetheless castigated as the objectification of the psychic field, the problematic of a science of solitary consciousness. The question then arises whether the extension of transcendental idealism to intersubjectivity is capable of paving the way for a phenomenology of common memory. The final paragraphs of the famous “Fifth Cartesian Meditation” do indeed propose the theme of the “communalization” of experience at all its levels of meaning, from the foundation of a common ground of physical nature (§55, 120–28) to the celebrated constitution of “higher intersubjective communities” (still called “personalities of a higher order”), a constitution resulting from a process of “social communalization” (§58, 132). We certainly do not encounter the word “common memory” in this broadened context of transcendental phenomenology, but it would be perfectly in harmony with the concept of “worlds of culture,” understood in the sense of “concrete life-worlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate communities live their passive and active lives” (§58, 133).
We must measure the price to be paid for this extension of phenomenology to the domain of shared life. First the idea of transcendental idealism has to be radicalized to the point where solipsism is assumed as a legitimate objection; the “reduction of transcendental experience to the sphere of ownness” (§44, 92) represents in this respect the extreme point of internalizing experience. Temporal experience, so well described forty years earlier, is virtually assigned to this sphere of ownness. Its character of flow and of an infinitely open horizon is even explicitly underscored as early as the title of §46, “Ownness as the Sphere of the Actualities and Potentialities of the Stream of Subjective Processes” (100). This forced passage by way of the sphere of ownness is essential to the interpretation of what follows: the constitution of the other person as foreign will not be a mark of weakness but of the reinforcement of Husserlian transcendentalism, culminating in an egology. It is indeed “in” the sphere of ownness that the experience of the other as foreign is constituted, at the cost of the paradoxes I have presented elsewhere.24 An intense competition plays out between two readings of the phenomenon that Husserl himself calls by the term Paarung (“pairing,” §51, 112). On the one hand, it is indeed as foreign, that is as not-me, that the other is constituted, but it is “in” me that he is constituted. An unstable equilibrium is proposed between these two readings by the recourse to the concept of “appresentation,” held to be an exceptional mode of analogy.25 In this regard, we can say that the reduction to the sphere of ownness, and the theory of analogical apperception that follows from it, constitute the two obligatory points of anchorage for a subsequent phenomenology of the “communalization” of experience sketched out at the end of the “Fifth Cartesian Meditation.” Sphere of ownness, pairing, and communalization thus form an unbroken conceptual chain, leading to the threshold of what could be called a phenomenological sociology, which I have ventured to link up with the key concepts that Max Weber placed at the start of his great work, Economy and Society, in the form of an interpretive sociology.26
I will spend no more time dwelling on the difficulties of principle that are related to pairing transcendental idealism with the theory of intersubjectivity. Instead, I would like rather to raise what I consider to be a prior question: in order to reach the notion of common experience, must we begin with the idea of ownness, pass through the the experience of the other, and finally proceed to a third operation, said to be the communalization of subjective experience? Is this chain truly irreversible? Is it not the speculative presupposition of transcendental idealism that imposes this irreversibility, rather than any constraint characteristic of phenomenological description? But is a pure—that is, presuppositionless—phenomenology either conceivable or feasible? I remain puzzled by this. I am not forgetting the distinction and—let’s admit it—the leap that Hegel is forced to make when he passes from the theory of the Subjective Spirit to that of the Objective Spirit in the Encyclopedia, and, even earlier, in the heart of the Phenomenology of Spirit, on the threshold of the chapter on Spirit (chap. 6). There is a moment when one has to move from I to we. But is this moment not original, in the manner of a new beginning?
Irrespective of these difficulties, if we remain within the framework of the “Fifth Cartesian Meditation,” the sociological concept of collective consciousness can result only from a second process of objectification on the level of intersubjective exchanges.We then have only to forget the process of constitution that gave birth to these entities in order to treat them, in turn, as subjects in which predicates can inhere, predicates similar to those we ascribe in the first instance to individual consciousness. We can then extend to these products of the objectification of intersubjective exchanges the analogical character that Husserl ascribes to every alter ego in relation to one’s own ego. By reason of this analogical transfer we are authorized to use the first person in the plural form and ascribe to an us—whomever this may be—all the prerogatives of memory: mineness, continuity, the past-future polarity. With this hypothesis, which makes intersubjectivity bear all the weight of the constitution of collective entities, it is important, however, not to forget that it is only by analogy, and in relation to individual consciousness and its memory, that collective memory is held to be a collection of traces left by the events that have affected the course of history of the groups concerned, and that it is accorded the power to place on stage these common memories, on the occasion of holidays, rites, and public celebrations. Once this analogical transfer is recognized, nothing prevents our considering these higher-order intersubjective communities as the subject in which their memories inhere, or our speaking of their temporality or their historicity; in short, our extending the mineness of memories analogically to the idea of our possessing of our collective memories. This is enough to give written history a point of anchorage in the phenomenological existence of groups. For the phenomenologist, the history of “mentalités,” of “cultures,” demands no less, but also no more.
THE EXTERNAL GAZE: MAURICE HALBWACHS
Several decades after the publication of The Collective Memory,27 Maurice Halbwachs has benefited from unexpected public attention.28 This sort of consecration cannot leave us indifferent to the extent that history’s claim to support, correct, critique, even to include memory can only refer to the forms of collective memory. This collective memory constitutes the appropriate counterpart to history.
We owe to Halbwachs the bold intellectual decision to attribute memory directly to a collective entity, which he names a group or society. He had, to be sure, already forged the concept of “the social frameworks of memory” before The Collective Memory.29 Then, it was strictly as a sociologist, in the footsteps of Émile Durkheim, that he employed memory in the third person and endowed it with structures accessible to objective observation. The advance made in The Collective Memory was to draw the reference to collective memory out of the very work of personal memory engaged in recalling its memories. The chapter titled “Individual Memory and Collective Memory” is written from start to finish in the first person singular, in quasi-autobiographical style. This text basically says: to remember, we need others. It adds: not only is the type of memory we possess not derivable in any fashion from experience in the first person singular, in fact the order of derivation is the other way around. The objective of my critical reading is to test this extreme consequence. But it must first be said that it is on the basis of a subtle analysis of the individual experience of belonging to a group, and through the instruction received from others, that individual memory takes possession of itself. This being the strategy selected, it is not surprising that the opening theme is an appeal to the testimony of others. It is essentially along the path of recollection and recognition, the two principal mnemonic phenomena of our typology of memories, that we encounter the memory of others. In this context, such testimony is not considered as it is uttered by someone in order to be collected by someone else, but as it is received by me from someone else as information about the past. In this regard, the earliest memories encountered along this path are shared memories, common memories (what Edward Casey places under the title “Reminiscing”). They allow us to affirm that “in reality, we are never alone”; and in this way the thesis of solipsism is set aside, even as a tentative hypothesis. The most remarkable among these memories are those of places visited together with others. They offer the special opportunity of setting oneself mentally back in this or that group. Starting with the role of the testimony of others in recalling memories, we then move step-by-step to memories that we have as members of a group; they require a shift in our viewpoint, which we are well able to perform. In this way, we gain access to events reconstructed for us by others. It is then by their place in an ensemble that others are defined. A school class is, in this respect, a privileged place for this shift in viewpoint in memory. Generally speaking, every group assigns places. And these are retained or formed in memory. Already, earlier in our discussion, memories of trips served as examples of this change of place.30
The essay enters its critical phase by attacking what could be called the psychologizing thesis, represented at that time by Charles Blondel, according to which individual memory is held to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the recollection and recognition of memories. In the background the shadow of Bergson is cast and, close by, sounds the clash of competition with historians for preeminence in the field of the human sciences, then in a period of full expansion. The battle is therefore engaged on the very terrain of the central mnemonic phenomenon. Negative argument: when we no longer belong to the group in the memory of which a given recollection is preserved, our own memory is weakened for lack of external supports. Positive argument: “a person remembers only by situating himself within the viewpoint of one or several groups and one or several currents of collective thought” (The Collective Memory, 33).31 In other words, one does not remember alone. Here, Halbwachs directly attacks the sensualist thesis that the origin of a memory lies in a sensible intuition preserved as such and recalled as identical. A memory such as this is not only impossible to find, it is inconceivable. Childhood memories are an excellent reference in this regard. They take place in socially marked places: the garden, the house, the basement, and so on, all places that Bachelard will cherish: “The image is still situated within the framework of the family, because it was initially enacted there and has never left it” (37). And again: “For the child the world is never empty of human beings, of good and evil influences” (41). By this we understand that the social framework ceases to be simply an objective notion and becomes a dimension inherent in the work of recollection. In this regard, adult memories do not differ from childhood memories. They make us travel from group to group, from framework to framework, in both a spatial and a temporal sense. Recognizing a friend from a portrait sends us back to the milieu where we have seen him. What proves to be impossible to find and inconceivable is the idea of a unified “internal series” in which some “internal, or subjective, connection” (La Mémoire collective, 82–83) would alone intervene in explaining the reappearance of a memory. In short, it is the connectedness of memory, dear to Dilthey (whom Halbwachs seems not to have known) that has to be abandoned, and so too the idea that “what is held to found the coherence of memories is the internal unity of consciousness” (83). The fact that we think we observe something like this in ourselves is certain; “but we are the victims here of a rather natural illusion” (83). It is explained by the fact that the influence of the social setting has become imperceptible to us. In the chapter on forgetting, we shall have the opportunity to discuss this amnesia characteristic of social action. It is only, Halbwachs notes, when rival influences battle within us that we take notice of them. But even then the originality of the impression or the thoughts that we experience is not explained by our natural spontaneity, but “by the meetings, within us, of currents that have an objective reality outside of us” (83).
The main point of the chapter consists, therefore, in denouncing the illusory attribution of memories to ourselves, when we claim to be their original owners.
But does Halbwachs not cross an invisible line, the line separating the thesis “no one ever remembers alone” from the thesis “we are not an authentic subject of the attribution of memories”? Does not the very act of “placing oneself” in a group and of “displacing” oneself or shifting from group to group presuppose a spontaneity capable of establishing a continuation with itself? If not, society would be without any social actors.32 If, in the final analysis, the idea of spontaneity in the recollections of an individual subject can be denounced as an illusion, it is because “our perceptions of the external world follow one another in accordance with the very order of succession of facts and material phenomena. It is the order of nature, then, that penetrates our mind and governs the course of its states. How could it be otherwise since our representations are only the reflections of things. A reflection is not explained by an earlier reflection but by what it reproduces in that very moment” (85). There are thus only two principles of connection: that of the “facts and material phenomena” and that of collective memory. Now the former principle is reflected in consciousness only in the present: “Sensible intuition is always in the present” (84). On the side of consciousness, it follows that only “the very divisions presented by reality” govern the sensible order without any possibility of invoking some “spontaneous and mutual attraction among the states of consciousness related in this way” (85). In a word, “a reflection is not explained by an earlier reflection but by what it reproduces in that very moment” (85). So we must turn to the side of collective memory to account for the logics of coherence presiding over the perception of the world. Unexpectedly, we find a Kantian argument made on behalf of social structures. And we slip back into the old use of the notion of framework: it is within the frameworks of collective thought that we find the means of evoking the series and the connection of objects. Collective thought is alone capable of this operation.
It remains to be explained how the sentiment of the unity of self derives from this collective thought. It occurs through the intermediary of the consciousness we have at every instant of belonging at the same time to different milieus; but this consciousness exists only in the present. The only concession that the author makes is providing every consciousness with the power to place itself within the viewpoint of the group and, in addition, to move from one group to another. But the concession is rapidly withdrawn: this ultimate attribution is still an illusion resulting from our habituation to social pressure, which makes us believe that we are the authors of our beliefs: “Therefore most social influences we obey usually remain unperceived” (The Collective Memory, 45). This defect in apprehension is the main source of illusion. When social influences are in opposition to one another and when this opposition itself is unperceived, we convince ourselves that our act is independent of all these influences because it is exclusively dependent on no one of them: “We do not perceive that our act really results from their action in concert, that our act is governed by the law of causality” (49).
Is this the final word of this study, so remarkable in other ways, rigidifying itself in the end into in a surprising dogmatism? I do not think so. The starting point for the entire analysis cannot be erased by its conclusion: it was in the personal act of recollection that the mark of the social was initially sought and then found. This act of recollection is in each case ours. To believe this, to attest to it, cannot be denounced as a radical illusion. Yet Halbwachs himself believes that he can place himself in the position of the social bond, when he critiques it and contests it. In fact, we find in Halbwachs’s own text the resources for a critique directed against him. This would be the quasi-Leibnizian use of the idea of viewpoint, of perspective: “While The Collective Memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember. . . . I would readily acknowledge that each memory is a viewpoint on The Collective Memory, that this viewpoint changes as my position changes, that this position itself changes as my relationships to other milieus change” (48). It is Halbwachs’s very use of the notions of place and change of place that defeat a quasi-Kantian use of the idea of framework, unilaterally imposed on every consciousness.33
THREE SUBJECTS OF THE ATTRIBUTION OF MEMORIES: EGO, COLLECTIVES, CLOSE RELATIONS
The two preceding series of discussions suggest the same negative conclusion: whether we consider the sociology of collective memory or the phenomenology of individual memory, neither has any greater success than the other in deriving the apparent legitimacy of the adverse positions from the strong position each, respectively, holds: on one side, the cohesion of the states of consciousness of the individual ego; on the other, the capacity of collective entities to preserve and recall common memories. What is more, the attempts at derivation are not even symmetrical; this is why there appear to be no areas of overlap between a phenomenological derivation of collective memory and a sociological derivation of individual memory.
At the end of this inquiry into a major aporia of the problematic of memory, I propose to explore the complementary resources contained within the two antagonistic approaches, resources masked, on the one hand, by the idealist prejudice of Husserlian phenomenology (at least in the published part of his work) and, on the other, the positivist prejudice of sociology in the glory of its youth. I will seek, first of all, to identify the linguistic region where the two discourses may be made to intersect.
Ordinary language, reworked by means of the tools offered by a semantics and a pragmatics of discourse, offers valuable assistance here with the notion of ascribing psychical operations to someone. Among the features we noted at the start of our analyses is the grammatical use of possessive forms such as “my,” “mine,” and all the rest, in both the singular and the plural. In this respect, asserting the possession of memories as one’s own constitutes in linguistic practice a model of mineness for all psychical phenomena. The text of the Confessions is strewn with these indices of appropriation, which the rhetorical mode of confession encouraged. But it was John Locke who, by virtue of the flexibility of the English language, began to theorize the operation by introducing the expression “appropriate” as well as a series of semantic moves with the word “own,” taken in its pronominal or verbal form. Locke noted in this connection that juridical language, by reason of its “forensic” character, introduced a certain distance between the property appropriated and the owner. This expression can be associated with a plurality of possessors (e.g., my own self) and even a nominalized self: the self. In addition, to the expression “appropriate” are joined ones such as “impute,” “accountable” (take upon one’s own account, be accountable, or hold someone else accountable). In fact, a juridical theory of ascription has been constructed on this basis, which contributes to elucidating the concepts of imputation and responsibility.34 However, the use of the term “appropriation” in a juridical context must not limit its semantic scope. In Oneself as Another I tried to restore part of this range to appropriation in the context of the relation between action and its agent.35 Here, I propose to pursue this opening further by extending it to memories, both in the passive form of the presence to mind of a memory and in the active form of the search for memories. These operations, in the broadest sense of the term including pathos and praxis, are the objects of an attribution, of an appropriation, of an imputation, of taking something into account, in short, of an ascription. This extension of the idea of appropriation from a theory of action to a theory of memory is made possible by a general thesis relating to the totality of the psychical field, a thesis inspired by P. F. Strawson’s work, Individuals.36 Among the positions developed by Strawson concerning the general relations between practical predicates in particular and mental predicates in general, there is one that directly interests us: it is a characteristic of these predicates that, whenever they are attributable to oneself, they can be attributed to someone other than oneself. This mobility of attribution implies three distinct propositions: (1) the attribution can be suspended or performed; (2) these predicates retain the same sense in two distinct situations of attribution; (3) this multiple attribution preserves the asymmetry between self-ascribable and other-ascribable.
According to the first presupposition, attribution compensates in a sense for an inverse operation, which consists in suspending the attribution to someone, with the sole aim of providing a stable descriptive status to the mental predicates considered apart from attribution. This is what we in fact did without saying so, when, in the preceding two chapters, we held memories to be a certain sort of image and recollection to be an enterprise of searching, to be crowned—or not—with recognition. Plato, speaking of the eikōn, did not ask to whom the memory “happens.” Aristotle, investigating the operation of recollection, did not inquire about the one who performs the task. Our own phenomenological investigation, concerning the relations between remembering, memorizing, and commemorating, was conducted in line with this abstention from attribution. Memory is, in this regard, both a particular case and a singular case. A particular case, inasmuch as mnemonic phenomena are mental phenomena among others: we speak of them as affections and as actions, and it is as such that they are attributed to anyone, to each one, and that their sense can be understood apart from any explicit attribution. It is under this form that they also enter into the thesaurus of the mental concepts explored by literature, sometimes in the third person of the novel in he or she, sometimes in the first person of autobiography (“I long went to bed early”), or in the second person, invoking or imploring (“Lord, remember us”). The same suspension of attribution constitutes the condition for the attribution of mental phenomena to fictional characters. This aptitude of mental predicates to be understood in themselves in the suspension of all explicit attribution constitutes what can be called the “psychical,” what in English is termed “mind”: the psychical, the mind is the repertoire of mental predicates available in a given culture.37 Having said this, the case of mnemonic phenomena is singular in more than one sense. First, the attribution adheres so closely to the affection constitutive of the presence of a memory and to the action of the mind in finding it that the suspension of the attribution seems particularly abstract. The pronominal form of the verbs of memory attests to this close adherence that makes remembering something (se souvenir de quelque chose) remembering oneself (se souvenir de soi). This is why the tiny distinction, marked by the difference between the verb “se souvenir” (to remember) and the substantive “souvenir” (a memory, memories) can remain invisible to the point of going unnoticed. The adherence of attribution to the identification and the naming of mnemonic phenomena doubtless explains the ease with which the thinkers of the tradition of inwardness were able to assign memory directly to the sphere of the self.38 In this regard, the school of inwardness can be characterized by a denial of distantiation by reason of which we can, to use Husserl’s expression, distinguish the noema, “what” is remembered, from the noesis, the act of remembering, reflected in its “who.” In this way, mineness could be designated as the primary distinctive feature of personal memory. This tenacious adherence of the “who” to the “what” is what makes the transfer of memories from one consciousness to another so difficult.39 Yet it is the suspension of attribution that permits the phenomenon of multiple attribution, which constitutes the second presupposition underscored by Strawson: if a phenomenon is self-ascribable, it must be other-ascribable. This is how we express ourselves in ordinary language and at a higher reflexive level. Ascription to others is therefore found to be not superimposed upon self-ascription but coextensive with it. We cannot do the one without doing the other. What Husserl called Paarung, “pairing,” involved in the perception of others, is the silent operation that, on the pre-predicative level, makes possible what linguistic semantics terms other-ascription, attribution to others. What in other contexts is termed Einfühlung, that sort of affective imagination through which we project ourselves into the lives of others, is not something different from Paarung on the plane of perception, nor from other-ascription on the plane of language.
There remains the third presupposition: the asymmetry between self-ascription and other-ascription, at the very heart of multiple ascription. This asymmetry involves the modalities of the “fulfillment”—or confirmation—of ascription. In the case of the foreign, the confirmation—that is its name—remains conjectural; its rests on the comprehension and interpretation of verbal and nonverbal expressions on the plane of the behavior of others. These indirect operations belong to what Carlo Ginzburg will later call the “evidential method”;40 it is guided by the affective imagination—by the Einfühlung—that carries us in the direction of the lived experience of others, in the mode of what Husserl termed “appresentation,” and that cannot be equivalent to an actual “re-living.” In the case of self-ascription, the “fulfillment”—this is its name—is direct, immediate, certain; it places on my acts the mark of possession, of distantless mineness. A prethematic, prediscursive, antepredicative adherence underlies the judgment of attribution, to the point that it renders imperceptible the distance between the self and its memories, and lends legitimacy to the theses of the school of inwardness. The judgment of attribution becomes explicit only when it replies, on the plane of reflection, to the suspension of the spontaneous self-ascription of mnemonic phenomena. This abstraction is not arbitrary, but is constitutive of the linguistic moment of memory as it is promoted by the practice of ordinary language, as it permits naming and describing distinctly the “mental,” mind, as such. It is, moreover, this subtle distantiation that justifies the use of the very term “fulfillment,” belonging to a general theory of meaning. It is through these features that the “fulfillment” of the meaning “self-ascribable” is distinguished from the “appresentation” characteristic of the meaning “other-ascribable.” It is not conjectural, indirect, but certain, direct. An error can be noticed after the fact in the conjecture concerning others, an illusion in self-ascription. Error and illusion, taken in this sense, stem from corrective procedures themselves just as asymmetrical as the modalities of the judgment of attribution, the expectation of an asymmetrical verification giving in each case a different meaning to attribution: self-ascribable on the one hand, other-ascribable on the other. On this point, Husserl’s considerations in the “Fifth Meditation” concerning the asymmetry in fulfillment and those belonging to a theory of the multiple ascription of mental predicates overlap perfectly.
It is true that recognizing this asymmetry at the very heart of the ascription of mnemonic phenomena to someone seems to cast us back to sea. Does not the specter of the discordance between individual memory and collective memory reappear at the very moment we think we have found safe harbor? This is not the case if we do not separate the third presupposition from the other two: asymmetry is an additional feature of the capacity of multiple ascription, which presupposes the suspension of ascription allowing the description of mnemonic phenomena just as with every other mental phenomenon apart from the attribution to anyone. The problem of two memories is not abolished. It is framed. What distinguishes self-ascription is appropriation under the sign of mineness, of what is my own. The appropriate linguistic form is self-designation, which, in the case of action, bears the specific form of imputation. But we saw with Locke that we can speak of imputation wherever there is a self and consciousness. Upon this broadened basis, one can consider appropriation as the self-ascribable modality of attribution. And it is this capacity to designate oneself as the possessor of one’s own memories that leads to attributing to others the same mnemonic phenomena as to oneself, whether by the path of Paarung, of Einfühlung, of other-ascription, or something else.
It is against the backdrop of these linked presuppositions concerning the notion of attributing mental phenomena in general, and mnemonic phenomena in particular, to someone that we can attempt a rapprochement between the phenomenological thesis and the sociological thesis.
A phenomenology of memory, one less subject to what I venture to term an idealist prejudice, can draw from the competition presented to it by the sociology of memory an incitement to develop in the direction of a direct phenomenology applied to social reality, which includes the participation of subjects capable of designating themselves as being, to different degrees of reflective consciousness, the authors of their acts. These developments are encouraged by the existence of features characterizing the exercise of memory that contain the mark of the other. In its declarative phase, memory enters into the region of language; memories spoken of, pronounced are already a kind of discourse that the subject engages in with herself. What is pronounced in this discourse occurs in the common language, most often in the mother tongue, which, it must be said, is the language of others. But this elevation of memory to language is not without difficulties. This is the place to recall the traumatic experiences mentioned above in connection with thwarted memory. Overcoming obstacles through remembering, which makes memory itself a work, can be aided by the intervention of a third party, the psychoanalyst among others. The latter can be said to “authorize” the patient to remember, to borrow an expression from Marie Balmary.41 This authorization, which Locke termed “forensic,” is linked to the work of memory performed by the patient—better called the analysand—who attempts to bring symptoms, phantasms, dreams, and so on, to language in an effort to reconstruct a comprehensible mnemonic chain, acceptable to him or to her. Set on the path of orality in this way, remembering is also set on the path of the narrative, whose public structure is obvious. It is along this line of development that we shall encounter, at the start of the second part, the procedures of testimony presented before a third party, received by this party, and eventually deposited in an archive.
The entry of memory into the public sphere is no less remarkable in the phenomena of identification that we have encountered in an arena close to that of thwarted memory, namely, manipulated memory: the comparison with others then appeared to us as a major source of personal insecurity. Even before taking into account the grounds for fragility related to the confrontation with others, we would have to pay the attention it merits to the gesture consisting in giving a name to one who comes into the world. Each of us bears a name that we have not given to ourselves, but have received from another: in our culture, this is a patronym that situates me along a line of filiation, and a given name that distinguishes me from my siblings. This word of the other, placed upon an entire life, at the price of the difficulties and the conflicts we are familiar with, confers a linguistic support, a decidedly self-referential turn, to all the operations of personal appropriation gravitating around the mnemonic nucleus.
However, it is in making itself directly into a phenomenology of social reality that phenomenology was able to penetrate into the closed field of sociology. These developments drew support from Husserl’s last great work, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, in which attention is directed to the prepredicative aspects of the “life-world,” which is not identified in any way with a solitary, even less a solipsistic, condition but includes from the outset a communal form.42 This extension of phenomenology to the social sphere resulted in a remarkable work, that of Alfred Schutz.43 Schutz does not engage in the laborious stages of the perception of others in the manner of the “Fifth Meditation.” For him, the experience of others is a given as primal as the experience of the self. Its immediacy is less that of cognitive evidence than that of practical faith. We believe in the existence of others because we act with them and on them and are affected by their actions. The phenomenology of the social world, in this way, penetrates directly into the order of life in common, of living-together in which acting and suffering subjects are from the outset members of a community or a collectivity. A phenomenology of belonging is then free to provide itself with its own conceptual system without any concern with deriving it from an egological pole. This phenomenology can readily be combined with an interpretive sociology like that of Max Weber, for whom the “orientation toward others” is a basic structure of social action.44 And, at a later stage, with a political philosophy like that of Hannah Arendt, for whom plurality is a basic principle of practical philosophy. One of the developments of this phenomenology of social reality directly concerns the phenomenology of memory on the plane of social reality: it is addressed to the transgenerational phenomenon that is inscribed in the intermediate zone that we will discuss in conclusion.45 Alfred Schutz devotes an important study to the connection formed by the periods of contemporaries, predecessors, and successors.46 The period of contemporaries is the pivot here: it expresses “the simultaneity or quasi-simultaneity of the other self’s consciousness with my own” (143); in the character of its experience, it is marked by the phenomenon of “growing old together” (163), which places two unfolding time-spans in a relation of synergy. One temporal flow accompanies another, as long as they both endure. The shared experience of the world rests upon a community of time as well as space. The originality of this phenomenology of shared memory resides principally in the arrangement of degrees of personalization, and inversely of anonymity, between the poles of an authentic “us” and that of “one,” of “them.” The worlds of predecessors and successors extend in the two directions of the past and the future, of memory and of expectation, those remarkable features of living together, first deciphered in the phenomenon of contemporaneousness.
This extension of phenomenology to the social sphere places it, we have said, alongside sociology. Sociology, in some of its contemporary manifestations, has taken a step in the direction of phenomenology parallel to that taken by phenomenology in the direction of sociology. I will limit myself here to a few brief remarks, inasmuch as it is in the field of historiography that these changes have produced the effects that most matter to me. Three observations can serve as stepping stones. First, it is in the field of action theory that the developments I will echo in the second part of this work have been most noteworthy. With Bernard Lepetit, I emphasize the formation of the social bond within the framework of interactive relations and on the identities constructed on this basis.47 Initiatives and constraints develop their respective dialectics here. Some distance will thus be taken with respect to a phenomenology too closely tied to perceptual and, in general, cognitive phenomena. Phenomena of representation—among these mnemonic phenomena—will be commonly associated with social practices. Second, the problems posed by the sociology of collective memory will be reformulated by historians in connection with the temporal dimension of social phenomena: the layering of long, middle, and short-term time-spans by Braudel and the historians of the Annales school, as well as considerations regarding the relations between structure, conjuncture, and event all belong to this renewed interest on the part of historians in problems faced by sociologists on the level of collective memory. The discussion will thus be resituated on the border between collective memory and history. Finally, my last remark: considerations by historians regarding the “interplay of scales” will provide the opportunity for a redistribution of mnemonic phenomena between the ranks of microhistory and of macrohistory.48 In this regard, history will offer schemata for mediating between the opposite poles of individual memory and collective memory.
I would like to conclude this chapter and part 1 with a suggestion. Does there not exist an intermediate level of reference between the poles of individual memory and collective memory, where concrete exchanges operate between the living memory of individual persons and the public memory of the communities to which we belong? This is the level of our close relations, to whom we have a right to attribute a memory of a distinct kind. These close relations, these people who count for us and for whom we count, are situated along a range of varying distances in the relation between self and others. Varying distances but also variation in the active and passive modes of the interplay of distantiation and closeness that makes proximity a dynamic relationship ceaselessly in motion: drawing near, feeling close. Proximity would then be the counterpart to friendship, that philia celebrated by the ancient Greeks, halfway between the solitary individual and the citizen, defined by his contribution to the politeia, to the life and activity of the polis. In this manner, these close relations occupy the middle-ground between the self and the “they,” from which the relations of contemporaneousness described by Alfred Schutz are derived. Close relations are others as fellow beings, privileged others.
What is the trajectory of memory attribution along which close relations are located? The tie to them cuts crosswise and selectively through filial and conjugal relations as well as through social relations dispersed in accordance with multiple orders of belonging49 or respective orders of standing.50 In what sense do they count for me from the viewpoint of shared memory? To the contemporaneousness of “growing old together,” they add a special note concerning the two “events” that limit a human life, birth and death. The first escapes my memory, the second cuts short my plans. And both of them interest society only in terms of public records and from the demographic point of view of the replacement of generations. But both events were, or will be, of importance to my close relations. Some of them will deplore my death. But before that, some rejoiced at my birth and celebrated on that occasion the miracle of natality,51 and the bestowal of the name by which I will call myself my entire life. In the meantime, my close relations are those who approve of my existence and whose existence I approve of in the reciprocity and equality of esteem. This mutual approbation expresses the shared assertion that each one makes regarding his or her powers and lack of powers, what I termed attestation in Oneself as Another. What I expect from my close relations is that they approve of what I attest: that I am able to speak, act, recount, impute to myself the responsibility for my actions. Here again, Augustine is the master. I read in book 10 of the Confessions: “This is what I wish my true brothers to feel in their hearts [animus . . . fraternus]. I do not speak of strangers or of ‘alien foes who make treacherous promises, and lift their hands in perjury.’ But my true brothers are those who rejoice for me in their hearts when they find good in me [qui cum approbat me], and grieve for me when they find sin. They are my true brothers, because whether they see good in me or evil, they love me still. To such as these, I shall reveal myself [indicabo me]” (Confessions, 10.4, 209). In my turn, I include among my close relations those who disapprove of my actions, but not of my existence.
It is, therefore, not with the single hypothesis of the polarity between individual memory and collective memory that we enter into the field of history, but with the hypothesis of the threefold attribution of memory: to oneself, to one’s close relations, and to others.