Memory and remembrance, 8 Feb 2020


We call our accounts of things, people and events that have passed ‘memory’, though this is always a present-time activity. However, remembering might more accurately be called forgetting, for most of everything that has happened is not ‘in’ what we call memory at all, and often there are structured patterns in this, as Freud or Ricoeur might remind us. What of remembrance, a term that is sometimes used together with memory and as though synonyms of each other? Remembrance, as Nora might remind us, is structured, specific, orderly, and the emphasis is on memory as it has been captured and given shape in a public form. Remembrance belongs and is often the possession of the state; it is curated, it occupies public space. Remembering/forgetting is much more wayward. But how interesting it is that the emphasis is always on memory, not the greater part that forgetting plays, and not the constraining aspect that comes through remembrance. We have Memory Studies and journals of that ilk, not ‘forgetting studies’, and not ‘remembrance studies’.