Lethe:
Impressions of forgetfulness & concealment

Instructor: Franziska Aigner, Austin Gross Date & Time: February 10th, 17th, 24th, March 2nd 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: Through the works of Kant, Stiegler, Freud, and Lacan, this Seminar will embark on a philosophical trajectory through four discourses that take forgetting and forgetfulness as a theme in a transcendental context.

Session 1: Philosophical modernity and, in particular, the Enlightenment period can and should be read as, above all, a renewed reflection on the meaning and role of forgetting. While ever since ancient Greece, every possible object of thought could be given a place in the mental spaces of the ars memoria, only forgetting could not. The enlightenment period would go on to elevate forgetting to a faculty (Vermögen) in its own right. This can nowhere be seen better than in the writings of Immanuel Kant, who not only instituted forgetting as a faculty but furthermore elevated forgetting to a condition of possibility for autonomous thought and judgment.

“Only by turning away [Abwendung] from memory, as it still prevailed in the pre-existing doctrinal philosophy, could Kant become the ‘great destroyer in the realm of thoughts [der große Zerstörer im Reiche der Gedanken]’ (Heine) and the ‘all-crushing [alles Zermalmende]’ (Mendelssohn).” (Harald Weinrich)

Session 2: By insisting on its technical and external prostheses, Stiegler opened a way to historicizing memory beyond philosophical anthropology. But mnemotechnics are always also lethotechnics, and vice versa. It is, however, the thought of forgetting in its relation to technics, which Stiegler finds in the figure of Epimetheus, that has, even in the work of philosophy’s seminal thinker of forgetting (Heidegger), itself been forgotten. The excavation of the relation between technics and forgetting is the ‘Leitmotif’ of Stiegler’s project.

‘Epimetheus is not simply the forgetful one, the figure of essential witlessness that makes up all experience […]; he is also the one who is forgotten. The forgotten of metaphysics. The forgotten of thought. And the forgotten of forgetting when thought thinks of itself as forgetting. Whenever Prometheus is spoken of, this figure of forgetting is forgotten, which, like the truth of forgetting, always arrives too late: Epimetheus.’ (Bernard Stiegler)

Session 3: From the very beginning, Freudian metapsychology denied that memory-impressions fade or wane but, at the same time, defined the psychical apparatus as a tendency towards the inanimate. Yet, after the First World War, the same principle baffled analysis in the opacity of the traumatic neuroses. Freud was forced to posit a new, silent drive, a drive to dissolve bonds, to erase any trace.

“The manifestations of Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. It might be assumed that the death instinct operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof.” (Sigmund Freud)

Session 4: To ‘leave’ something, let’s say, a mark, doesn’t always mean making a secure deposit. A trace might be something left behind. To leave is, ambivalently, a figure of memory in its positivity and of forgetting in its destitution, like Eros, the child of Poros and Penia. For Lacan, to complete analysis means to be forgotten by the Other and still desire because the Other, the place of language, is not a subject. Joyce’s letter and litter, and Thomas’s sicut palea (‘manure,’ he said, of his own tractates), echo what he had already admired in Sade’s will and testament.

“The grave, once covered, is to be sown with acorns, so that, subsequently – its lot adorned once more, the thicket dense as before – the traces of my tomb will disappear below the surface of the earth, just as I flatter myself that my memory will fade, erased from the minds [esprits] of humans.” (Marquis de Sade’s last will, signed at Charenton-Saint-Maurice on January 30, 1806).

IMAGE: Ronald Reagan at the Presidential Library, 1989

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