Daniel Rejchrt
Paul Ricoeur: La Mémoire, L’Histoire, L’Oubli
I. De la mémoire et de la réminiscence
2. La mémoire exercée: us et abus
II. Les abus de la mémoire naturelle: mémoire empechée, memoire manipulée, memoire 
 abusivement commandée

  This part of the book interests itself in executed natural memory in short sense of term, namely in its use and abuse. As it is, the natural memory, opposed to the artificial memory, which consist in very large scale of artificial training of memory and memorization, and in the various imaginative instruments supporting the successful remembrance with no importance of the regard to the “reality” (past actuality) of the things remembered; the execution of the natural memory, consists in the simple actual presentation of the things and events that happened in past, as it falls within the Aristotelian concept of the memory, that it is concerned in the things, that happened; Sorabji: “Memory is of the past.” (tou genomenou), Parva naturalia 449 b 15. The notions of use and abuse are shaped in the traces of the Nietzsche’s “Second a-temporal consideration”, “On utility and inutility of history for life”. It is not the intention of this chapter to repeat the Nietzsche’s polemics targeting the position of the philosophy of history within the culture, but the consideration enables some parallel inquiry concerning the task of collective memory and namely executed collective memory [collective memory as executed memory], as it is only root level of the historiography.
  To avoid the massive and rather indistinctive use of the notion of the abuse of memory, the chapter divides itself into three parts according to three different approaches: the pathological, based on clinic and therapeutic notions rooted mainly in the psychoanalysis; the practical intended on the manipulation or instrumentalization of the memory including the critics of ideologies and the most durable abuses of memory and of the oblivion; and last so to say normative or ethico-political based on the inquiry of the due of the memory. The each respective approach has its own particular figure of the use and abuse of the memory, namely the displaced or constraint memory, the manipulated memory and finally the obliged memory.

1.	Niveau pathologique-thérapeutique: la mémoire empechée

  Now we will talk about the wounded, it means the ill memory. The notions used are all in general the passive notions and it causes some tough difficulties. In what extent are we authorized to use the psychoanalytical notions bounded with the tight analytical space of therapy in case of the collective memory characterized by the processes of transfer. It takes us to the double sense of this difficulty, first could be solved with reference to the operational largeness of the concept of collective memory and in fact this problematic concept will be later justified through possibility of transposition of strictly psychoanalytical concepts to the level of collective or interpersonal memory. The second is based on the difficult influence of the memory seen as pathologic, as pathos to the execution of memory and that means the question is imposed on the individual and collective alternations of the practical use of memory.
  To render clear this twofold problematic we will follow two notable essays of Sigmund Freud ad then we will pass through them to something the author did not accomplish. The first is essay named: “Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten”, written at year 1914, where the verbs are appropriated to the three different forces of psychical processes. It is shaped upon the reflection on the obstacle of interpretation (Deutungsarbeit) caused by traumatic reminiscences. This obstacle is attributed to the “resistances of emotional repression” (Verdrängungswiderstände) and is characterized through the “compulsion to the repetition” (Wiederholungszwang) that has the tendency to verge in the action, which represents according to Freud the “substitution of the reminiscence”. As the patient “did not reproduce (the forgotten fact) in form of the reminiscence, but in form of the action: he repeats it evidently without knowing about it.” (GW, t. X, 129) The accent is put on the passage to action and the substitution of the resistance followed by the compulsion to the repetition into the place of reminiscence. Freud himself made two therapeutic propositions regarding that case, the analyst is admonished to the large patience to the repetitions survived in form of the transfer, because the transfer is so to say the middle-area between the illness and the real life, it could be seen as some arena, in which the compulsion should manifest itself in a quasi-free manner that enables the occasion to let the pathologic level be seen openly. The patient is admonished to “find the courage to fix his regard on the morbid manifestations in order to be able to stop consider the illness as something despicable and to start to see it as an attention-worthy adversary and as some part of himself, which presence has the good reason in frame of which the very meaningful gifts for the rest of his life could be found.” (GW, t. X., 132). Without it there is not possibility of reconciliation (Versöhnung) between the illness and the repressed facts and reminiscences. This twofold handle with the resistances took a name of the “Durcharbeiten”, the working through, remaniement (in sense of rearrangement) in French. The important there is the notion of the work marking the dynamics of the process and on the other hand the cooperation between the analyst and patient. It is the same notion of work that puts us close to the reminiscence, which should be seen as some kind of work, the work of reminiscence (Erinnerungsarbeit), in this sense opposed to the compulsion: work of reminiscence contra the compulsion to repetition. Notably the admonished patience and courage is in some way the work itself, too.
  The notion of the work takes us close to the second Freud’s essay considered: “Trauer und Melancholie”, from the year 1915, which can give us some more detailed information concerning the other manner of work, namely the mourning, the “work of the sorrow”. It is the inclination of the sorrow to melancholy and the difficulty of the sorrow to divide itself from this neurosis, which will feed our further considerations concerning the pathology of the collective memory and the possible therapeutic perspectives. “The sorrow, to start with it, is always the reaction to the loss of the beloved person or of some abstraction, which substitutes this person, as it is the mother-country, freedom, ideal etc.” The first question of the therapist is why in case of some patients we encounter “under the same conditions [as were the others] melancholy, instead of the mourning, the work of sorrow.” It is precisely this “instead of”, which enables us to grasp the parallel between the two selected essays. On the one hand we have the passage to the action instead of the reminiscing, on the other the melancholy instead of the mourning. It is this bifurcation on the economic level of the affective investment, and in this sense the bifurcation of the different manners of work, in which consists the opposition between the sorrow and melancholy. The first indication given by Freud is the diminution of the “sense of self” [Selbstgefühl] in melancholy, as within the work of sorrow, the mourning “there is not like this… because the image of the reality has demonstrated that the beloved object ceased to exist and the whole libido is gathered to renounce the place of it. It is the event against which there is considerable revolt to be found.” It also takes a lot of time and of the endeavour to let the libido follow the order of reality and it is precisely this “detailed realization of the each one of the orders dictated by reality, which is in fact the work of the sorrow.”
  Why is sorrow not a melancholy and why it at the same time inclines to it? What makes the sorrow normal phenomenon, however the sad one, is that if “the work of the sorrow is once accomplished, the self founds itself newly free and inconstraint.” It takes the notion of sorrow close to that of the reminiscence, as the work of the sorrows is liberating opposition to the melancholy; there is on the other hand the work of the reminiscence that is working in a liberating manner against the compulsion to repetition. Which is the work of the melancholy? It diminishes the sense of self and in the opposition to the mourning, in frame of which it is the universe that is empty and poor, there it is the self, which is in fact seen as a poor and guilty, it falls under its own devaluations, accusations and condamnations. But this all serves to mask the accusations directed toward the loved object. “Their cries are the accusations” [Ihre Klagen sind Anklagen], wrote Freud and this process could reach the extent of the martyrization of the beloved object. The reason is that the accusation is weakening the objectal investment is making easier the retreat in self, as well as the transformation of the conflict with the other through the laceration of the self. The melancholy writes finally some parts of itself into the mourning, the others are lead to regression in case of choice of the object till the narcissism. The above mentioned diminution of the “Selbsgefühl” is also of the great importance, because it is according to Freud as a root of the ability to “recognize ourselves” one of the constitutive features of the Self, along with the sense of reality. Freud himself remained very prudent and refused to answer the last questions concerning the opposition: sorrow/melancholy. But we (Ricoeur himself following the authors of the book Saturn and Melancholy, Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl) do not want to leave the phenomenon of melancholy only in the hands of psychiatrists, as it was projected by E. Kraepelin and Ludwig Binswanger. He wants to return to the Antic and Medieval typologies, where the melancholy was considered as one of the basic human characteristics in general, noting the pseudo-aristotelian quotation regarding the melancholy or mania of some of the most significant philosophers and reminding us on case of the Renaissance thinkers, as were Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa or Pic della Mirandola. He finds the merit of this ambivalent value of melancholy in some of poems of Charles Baudelaire, where it is very tightly connected to the features of memory, self-reflection and the temporal consciousness.
  Returning to the question on possibility of transposition of psychoanalytical notions to the level of collective memory and historical consciousness, Paul Ricoeur admit that psychoanalysis is always concerned in the confrontation with the otherness, which is not to be restricted on the “family novel”, but implicates also the psychosocial et historical otherness in general. There is one important difference between those levels, namely that whether we are able to find the structural analogy between the psychoanalytical arena and the social public space of the human society, there are not the analogical instances to any kind of the therapists to be found. But there is on the other hand a significant parallel between the two levels based on the bipolar constitution of the personal and collective identity, which allowed us to examine the “wounds” of the collective memory. The exemplar processes of the collective reconciliations of the loss of object are to be found f. e. in various public funeral celebrations. However, the final justification of the mentioned transposition consists in fact that the application of the presented pathological categories are not to be restricted on some exceptional cases, but touches the basic structures of the collective existence. The original relation between the history and the violence, which made Thomas Hobbes able to found the origin of the political philosophy in the situation of violent death. Those are the violent origins of every known human society, whose foundations are in each case constituted in frame of the events easily assimilated to the state of war. There is the root of the paradox of historical experience consisting in the cases, in which there is “a lot of memory” on one even and “not enough of memory” on the other. The both cases are to be interpreted in a most convenient way through the difficulties of the process of reminiscence powered by compulsion to repetition. And there are a lot of events in human history, where the violence had served as the “acting out” instead of work of memory and reminiscence! It is important to add that the work of memory is there to be considered as the critical feature.
  Moreover it is possible to say that on the level of collective memory is the tight connection between the process of mourning and of the reminiscence even more important than on the level of individual one, because those are the losses with what the wounded memory refuses to confront itself and the affective investment is restrained until the loss is definitively interiorised. One can add that the acceptance of the facts revealed by sense of reality also includes the work of sorrow and mourning into the realm of the work of memory.

2.	Niveau éthico-politique: la mémoire obligée

  The pathological interpretations of the use and abuse of the collective, whether valid, are not exhaust the whole theme. There is also a space for the abuses more or less passive, whose are caused by a manipulation in the strict sense of word, by the manipulation acted by the political powers. It is the case of the wounded memory as an instrumentalised memory; it should be based on the opposition made by Jürgen Habermas between Zweckrationalität and Wertrationalität. The theme includes the abuses of the memory in the same way as the abuses of the oblivion.
  These abuses are connected with the importance given to memory in question of the personal identity. The personal identity is fragile in that way that it is always something to be searched, request and claimed. We will discus in next chapter, how John Locke made a memory one of the constitutive elements of this claim on personal identity. The fragility of the personal identity lies in the difficult answers to the question: Who am I?, and in the similar difficulty following the answer: This is, what we are. Which pretends to delimitate what we are, will be and in same what we will be not. The first reason of the fragility is in confusion between two different notions of identity, of sameness – one in the sense of idem, same, gleich and other in the sense of ipse, self, Selbst. The root of the problematic consists in the reduction of identity in sense of the self on the identity in sense of the same, as it could be seen in tension between the identity proclaimed in gave of the promise and the identity in the quasi-typographical sense of the word. Second reason consists in the difficultness of the confrontation with the other, which is experienced as a danger for the own identity. And the third reason lies in the heritage of violence on which our societies are founded. They are always authorised by their ancient character and are dividing the glory to ones and humiliation to the others. It is to be shown, how the abuses of memory and of oblivion are bounded to the fragility of the personal (and collective) identity. This is the question on ideology, the complex process which is to be comprehended, whether as the manipulative mechanism in frame of which the concurrence on the warfield of ideologies is always wrong, or in a sense of Clifford Geertz as the symbolical medium orientating the human in the world of his activities. In this second sense is the omnipresence of the ideology within the human culture obvious, but one can already on the most simple and innocent forms (for Geertz Marocco and Indonesia) explore the inevitable tendency of ideology toward the power.
Max Weber examined those processes from the point of view of pretending to legitimacy. The ideology by Weber adds some special “plus-value” to our spontaneous belief, the effect that is to be found in every system of authority. The authority itself is based on the hierarchic relation between the commanding and answering, as it could be examined on the level of chance that the command will be accepted. It is precisely this crucial point, where the power of ideology has its proper place. This value of ideology in process of legitimacy of the system of authority is the reason of rhetorical persuasiveness, as well as of the quality of the best pages of “The German Ideology” of Karl Marx. The transformative effect of the symbolical frame of the human action – t. m. ideology – is the base of his ontology of praxis and in particular of the “living work”. If we look away from this original context, then every inquiry and critics of ideology will have a form of simple pamphlet against the propaganda. This is precisely the legitimating power of ideology, where the possibility of abuse is founded. It is not the question of mere physical domination; the tyrant himself needs a rhetorician. The speech is made the privileged instrument of power; there are the speeches on origin of society, on legitimacy of government, on glory, on humiliation… There is also the “authorized history”, history proclaimed and history celebrated, which is constitutive element of collective remembered history. There we are touching the protest of Tzvetan Todorov in his book “Les Abus de la mémoire” against the commemorative mania of this age full of rites and myth concerning the founding events. This mania is by Todorov not limited on the totalitarian systems and is characterized by the other only quasi-paradoxical feature – the installation of oneself to the position of the victim. His inquiries led Todorov to some important statements concerning the work of historian – he is never concerned in facts, he has to choose between more and less significant ones and to impose them in mutual relation and he has to do it (by Todorov) oriented not by the service to the truth, but to the good. Paul Ricoeur does not share this opinion, but proposes different source of the orientation of the historiography than the duality truth/good, mainly the justice. It shall be the justice, who extracts from the wounding reminiscences their exemplar character and enables the traumatised memory oriented itself toward the future.

3.	Niveau pratique: la mémoire manipulée

The question there is posed on the obligation of memory. This is not question of mere phenomenology of memory, nor of the historical epistemology, this is the heart of the theme of hermeneutics of historical condition. There is not possible to abstract from our own historical condition and context. It is the task for living memory of survivors, critical historians, not to speak about the judges. There is mutual danger in the relation of the living memory and history. As this has its sense in making the memory the form of history, the author has to be very severe to not eliminate the work of the history. On the other one cannot resist strong enough against the tendency to make the memory only the simple object of history. In this condition there is the question on obliged memory posed. The question will carry itself also into the chapter on oblivion, because to say: You have to remember.”, means also: “You shall not forget.” We will read this passage after this short presentation, so we pass along for a while noting that the passage concerns the duty of memory, its origin, justification and its relation to the already mentioned idea of justice finally discriminating the measure of the use and abuse of memory.
  At the end of the chapter Paul Ricoeur gives two possible interpretations of use and abuse of memory. The first of Henry Rousso from book “Le Syndrome de Vichy” (1987), where the notions of traumatism, inhibition, the return of inhibited and so on have the interpretative task. There we can find more subtle one tendency to abuse of memory than in case of ideology, this is the claim of the conscience to be a guard of the justice to the victims, and sharply this captivation of the mute voice of victims is the possible entrance to the abuse of memory. The second interpretation of Pierre Nora from book “Lieux de mémoire” is less centred on almost recent events. It concerned in the “commemorative obsession” and is shaped as the dialogue of the author with his inaugural text, with himself. What is strange on case of the places of memory is that they mostly were from very beginning not intended to serve this way, they were founded spontaneously, but commemoration grasped them. And the critical tool, which enabled to watch them from distance, became the tool of commemoration par excellence. The main reason is that the form of memory was subordinated upon the form of history, namely the authority of impersonal national state, which is celebrating the events from its history (foundation etc.). What is there interesting for us is what concerns the transition from the phenomenology of memory to epistemology of historical sciences and it is by Nora that “every constitution of the nation consists in rectification of its tradition of memory (collective memory), and in its enlargement. But this never makes the memory more profound, nevertheless the criticism of the operation of historiography, because its goal is to constitute an identity through filiation. In this sense are the memory and history the one: the history is verified memory.” The commemorization has lost its original sense guard of the tradition and became the obsession, but the whole age became commemorative. As the author wants to escape his age with his triparite conception of the book (phenomenology, historiography, hermeneutics), we have to take the final statement of Pierre Nora that the age of the commemoration is over as encouraging, because there is no contribution to the “tyranny of memory”. The task was to inquiry the use and abuse memory and to place both upon the idea of the justice.