Les empêchements de la mémoire

Abstract

This article begins with a presupposition regarding Ricœur’s approach to memory and forgetting in Memory, History, Forgetting. His reflections on “just memory” occur within a French political landscape that suffers from “commemorative bulimia,” as Pierre Nora put it in Les lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory). The article contrasts the opposition to the import of subjective emotions from a rigorous scientific conception of memory (Nora), with living memory as the transcendental condition of our relationship to the past (Ricœur). This confrontation underscores the ethical dimension of the politics of memory and of the collective practices of forgetting and amnesia. According to Ricœur, Freud’s hypotheses concerning trauma and mourning should serve as the best suited model for a task that aims for a just historical narrative.