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Trace and Forgetting: Between the Threat of Erasure and the Persistence of the Unerasable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Jean Greisch
Jean Greisch*
Affiliation:
Philosophy Faculty, Institut Catholique, Paris

Extract

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Ancient philosophers believed that three anecdotes are enough to characterize a philosophical temperament. As soon as I accepted the invitation to participate in a research devoted to the triple topic: ‘Trace, print, remains’, three anecdotes at once came to mind. I shall use them to establish a preliminary understanding of the concept of trace, which we shall subsequently approach from a more philosophical perspective.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 51 , Issue 1: Horizons of Memory , February 2004 , pp. 77 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2004

References

Notes

1. On Jean l’Aveugle and the traces he has left in historiography from the late Middle Ages to the late 20th century, I refer readers to the studies assembled in the book: Jean l’Aveugle. Comte de Luxembourg, roi de Bohème (1296–1346), Luxembourg, Publications du Cludem, 1996.

2. This allegation, which seems to have been spread around by Heinrich von Diessenhofen from the Papal Curia in Avignon, has had a long life, since we still find it in H. H. Kortüm’s book, Menschen und Mentalitäten. Einführung in die Vorstellungswelten des Mittelalters, 1996, pp. 75 et seq.

3. Harald Weinrich, Lethe. Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens, Munich, C. H. Beck, 1997; French translation by Diane Meur, Léthé. Art et critique de l’oubli, Paris, Fayard, 1999.

4. Paul Ricœur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris, Seuil, 2000, p. 538 (referred to subsequently as MHO).

5. MHO 539.

6. MHO 374.

7. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricœur, Ce qui nous fait penser. La nature et la règle, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1998.

8. Ibid., p. 69.

9. MHO 37.

10. MHO 553.

11. Confessions X, 6, 8.

12. MHO 37.

13. MHO 555.

14. MHO 561.

15. MHO 563.

16. MHO 570.

17. MHO 554.

18. MHO 337.

19. MHO 106.

20. MHO 229–30.

21. MHO 192.

22. MHO 194.

23. MHO 230.

24. MHO 171.

25. MHO 512.

26. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, New York, 1964, p. 696. The background to this idea is a general conception of language, as is shown by Rosenstock’s articles, which I have translated under the title: Au risque du langage, translated by Jean Greisch, Paris, Editions du Cerf, 1997.

27. MHO 474.

28. MHO 480.

29. MHO 494.

30. Pierre Legendre, L’Inestimable Objet de la transmission. Essai sur le principe généalogique en Occident, Paris, Fayard, 1985.

31. MHO 573.

32. Plato, Republic, 621. On this theme interesting ideas from Heidegger can be found in his lecture Parmenides, Ga 54, pp. 173–80. I would especially quote this sentence, which sounds like an aphorism: ‘ Der Denker im besonderen muβ nach dem rechten Maβ vom Wasser des Flusses “Ohnesorge” getrunken haben’ (p. 180).

33. MHO 574.

34. Paul Ricœur, Temps et Récit III. Le temps raconté, Paris, Seuil, 1983, pp. 153–84. For a more thorough analysis I refer readers to the study: ‘Die Andersheit der Spur und die Spuren der Anderen’, Jean Griesch in Burkhard Liebsch (ed.), Hermeneutik des Selbst – im Zeichen des Anderen. Zur Philosophie Paul Ricoeurs, Freiburg, K. Alber, 1999, pp. 180–201; and Jean Greisch, L’Arbre de vie et l’arbre du savoir. Les racines phénoménologiques de l’herméneutique heideggérienne, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 2000, pp. 168–84.

35. Ricœur, op. cit., p. 171.

36. Ibid.

37. Aristotle, On memory and reminiscence, 449a, 15.

38. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, London/Chicago, Routledge & Kegan Paul and University of Chicago Press, 1966.

39. MHO 80.

40. MHO 40.

41. On Jean Froissart, see: Peter F. Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth and Fiction in the Chroniques, Oxford, OUP, 1990.

42. Guillaume de Machaut, Le Confort d’ami, Ernest Hoepfner (ed.), Paris, 1921, p. 103, ll. 2923–34.

43. ‘Historians’ writing leaves a space for the absence and hides it; it creates these narratives of the past that are equivalent to cemeteries in towns; it exorcizes and admits a presence of death among the living’ (Michel de Certeau, L’Absent de l’histoire, Paris, Mame, 1973, p. 103).

44. MHO 47.

45. Ibid.

46. See Jacques Maas, ‘Johann der Blinde, emblematische Heldengestalt des Luxemburger Nationalbewu[UNKNOWN]tseins im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in Jean L’Aveugle. Comte de Luxembourg, roi de Bohème (1296–1346), Luxembourg, Publications du Cludem, pp. 597–622.

47. MHO 88.

48. MHO 96.

49. For a more detailed analysis I refer readers to chapter 9 of: Jean Greisch, Paul Ricoeur: l’itinérance du sens, Grenoble, Jérôme Milton, 2001.

50. Parmenides, The Poem, French translation by Jean Beaufret (1962), Paris, Éditions Michel Chandeigne, 1986, p. 13.

51. This is the main thesis driving Derrida’s historical analyses in his book: De la grammatologie, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1967. See also: ‘La pharmacie de Platon’, in La Dissémination, Paris, Seuil, 1972, pp. 69–179. This text is reprinted in the Garnier-Flammarion edition of the Phaedrus.

52. Republic 509b.

53. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s ‘Der Ister’, Ga 53, pp. 134–43.

54. On the relationship between ontology and henology, now see: Jean-Marc Narbonne, Ontologie, hénologie, Ereignis, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2001.

55. Umberto Eco, Le Signe, adapted from the Italian by Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, Brussels, Éditions Labor, 1988, pp.11–17.

56. Ibid., pp. 15–16.