In her text "Presence and Memory: Derrida, Freud, Plato, Descartes" Véronique M. Fóti focuses on the relationship between memory and its historical, as she calls them, silent partners "so as to situate the problematic with respect to the philosophical tradition, and to unfold more of its complexity." The task of the present text is to take up the issue of memory as an issue immersed in forgetting (lethe) which is as silent as any of memory's partners. I seek, that is, to complement Fóti's text by focusing on the lethic difference constitutive of Plato's "memory" (mneme), which Fóti has described as "The living memory of the origin," "a memory or mindfulness in exile from the origin," a memory mortals try to attain through recollection (anamnesis) (Fóti, 70). I shall begin by introducing Plato's notions of mneme and anamnesis as they are laid out in the Theaetetus, the Meno, and the Phaedo, and continue, in the second part, by offering a close reading of the Phaedrus.
If Fóti has characterized recollection in Plato as attempting to overcome forgetfulness and as submerged in "the domain of aisthesis, or perception and feeling" (Fóti, 71), I shall dwell on the point implicit in what she says: that forgetting arises in the attempt to overcome forgetfulness, that an act of recollection itself maintains what Fóti calls a "mnemic distance" from the origin. I will thus try to extend her succinct discussion which, analogously to Derrida's engagement with Freud that she follows, "seeks to transgress and subvert the metaphysical ideal of presence conceived as involving the mastery of absence and difference, and manifest... the construal of consciousness as self-consciousness" (Fóti, 67), shifting at the same time the focus of inquiry to the construal of memory as involving both the mastery and the forgetting of forgetting.
Revisiting Plato, I also intend to point to the fact that the background for Aristotle's framing of memorial inquiry (On Memory and Reminiscence) –mneme and anamnesis do not (only) mark the presence of the past (in the present as absent) as memory does in Aristotle, but (also) an irreducible alterity that evades, escapes, and undermines presence. The question of forgetting addressed here is, then, one of the pastness of a past that was never present as such, and is only through a recalling of what has never been in the senses or in the mind. At the same time, this is also a question of a certain faithfulness of memory.
This is not merely to say that remembering involves forgetting, or that there is always something in feelings, perceptions, and experiences that remains un-felt, un-perceived, un-experienced, but, more importantly, that forgetting marks that which is otherwise (in desire, memory, experience, existence, being). In this vein, my point is about the closeness of mnemic distances to lethic distances in the sense that, as Maurice Blanchot notes, forgetfulness (l'oubli) would not be emptiness, but neither negative nor positive: the passive demand [l'exigence passive] that neither welcomes nor withdraws the past, but, designating there what has never taken place [désignant ce qui n'a jamais eu lieu] (just as it indicates in the yet to come that which will never be able to find its place in any present), refers us to nonhistorical forms of time, to the other of all tenses, to their eternal or eternally provisional indecision, bereft of destiny, without presence. (W, 85/134-5.)
In short, this text is preoccupied with a forgetting of memory in memory, with an event that has happened but has "never taken place" (Blanchot), and, thereby, with a future in the past, with a past in the future.
Part I:
Doves and Pigeons: Theaetetus, 197a-201b
To Know
After the wax model of memory has shown its inadequacies, Socrates notes that Theaetetus and he have been using the word "knowledge" (eirekamen to "gignoskomen" kai "ou gignoskomen," kai "epistematha" kai "ouk episuametha") without knowing what it is (agnooumen) (T, 196e, 903). Socrates, then, suggests that they start with the definition of what knowing is commonly said to be. But, Theaetetus "does not remember at the moment" (ou mnemoneuo) what that definition is (T, 197a, 903), to which Socrates replies that knowing is "having knowledge" (epistemes heksin). Comparing "having knowledge" with "possessing knowledge" (epistemes ktesin) (T, 197b, 903), he, then, gives an example. A man who has bought a coat owns it, he says, even when he is not wearing it. A man thus possesses a coat even when he does not have the coat about him (T, 197c, 903). "Now" Socrates continues, introducing another model for memory, the aviary:
consider whether knowledge is a thing you can possess in that way without having it about you, like a man who has caught some wild birds - pigeons or what not - and keeps them in an aviary he has made for them at home. In a sense, of course, we might say he 'has' them all the time inasmuch as he possesses them, mightn't we? (T, 197c-d, 904)
When we "possess knowledge," we have knowledge at our disposal, can retrieve it, and are able to answer a question concerning that which we know. Once a particular piece of knowledge is hunted down, it is stored, so to speak, close to hand, and is available within the limited space of this cage. Knowledge is thus possessed in an enclosure that is like an aviary full of caught birds that remain at one's disposal. What Socrates describes here is a kind of latent knowledge, one's capacity to know, different from the state in which we are when we are babies with an empty (kenon) receptacle (aggeion) (T, 197e). But, Socrates now adds that when one has got control over the pieces of knowledge one has none of them:
Socrates: ...In a sense, of course, we might say he 'has' them [birds in the aviary] all the time inasmuch as he possesses them, mightn't we?
Theaetetus: Yes.
Socrates: But in another sense he 'has' none of them, though he has got control of them, now that he has made them captive in an enclosure of his own; he can take and have a hold of them whenever he likes by catching any bird he chooses, and let them go again, and it is open to him do to that as often as he pleases. (T, 197d-e, 904 - emphasis added)
Although catching the pieces may be necessary for knowledge, it is in the very handling of the catch that one has lost something of the birds. Moreover, when we have caught the birds we have not got hold of eidos, for eidos may not be apprehendable, may not be a bird in the hand, although certain birds, those of recollection, are always already in us. It is then not at all certain that we know what knowing is when we say with Socrates:
Whenever a person acquires any piece of knowledge and shuts it up in his enclosure, we must say he has learned (memathekevai) or discovered (heurekenai) the thing of which this is the knowledge, and that is what 'knowing' (epistasthai) means. (T, 197e, 904)
Recovering Recognition
The example of arithmetic, involving the one who knows all the numbers but has to count them again for the purpose of a certain calculation, shows that one in fact, needs to reacquire - to get hold of and to have handy in one's mind (T, 198d, 905) - knowledge which one has already stored in the enclosure. The mathematician is in this respect comparable to a literate person who knows all the letters, but needs to 'relearn' them every time he reads something. As R.E. Allen suggests:
You do not understand mathematics by memorizing the multiplication table, and you do not understand virtue by memorizing adages and moral rubrics. In these areas, understanding must come in large measure from within - it must be 'recalled.' Recollection, in this very special sense, does not and cannot tell us the date of the battle of Marathon... the theory does not explain empirical judgments, whose objects are contingent matters of fact, but those judgments whose truth is guaranteed by systematic necessity.
Which is to say that the specific problem at hand (T, 198d, 905, prokheiron) forces a recognition, a reconfirmation, and thus a reestablishment of the principles underlying specific discourses of arithmetic and writing, whose understanding, as Allen concludes, must come from within - not from the same self but from the immemorial which is always already within the 'me' even if it is not available to me.
Having knowledge as having it in the aviary of our mind, is, thus, not a sufficient condition for the correctness of one's judgements. Rather, the possession of knowledge requires relearning that would take place in every particular case. The learning and relearning are not successive events (even the linearity of experience is contested by true knowing). So, true knowledge demands another move of thought beyond possession and presence: a tying down in and by memory whose hold holds without authority, as we see in the many examples of Socrates' failure to recall the source to which a truth belongs. Additionally, true knowledge asks for an "interchange" (T, 199c, 906) and for the "recognition of the things which one knows" (T, 199d, 906). In the example, even the hunting of pigeons occurs more than once; not only in succession, as it is described at 198d (T, 905), but more than once at the same time, for one may, as Socrates suggests, miss a pigeon and catch another one, or even a dove (T, 199a, 905).
The difference between dove and pigeon, and between two pigeons, leads to a still more important aspect of knowledge, to "a still stranger consequence" (T, 199c, 906) regarding knowledge. Namely, that after one has got rid of the contradiction about people not knowing what they do know, not possessing what they possess, and, certainly, not having what they hold in hand, knowing itself can make them fail to know. Socrates thus puts into question the very possibility - heretofore presented as a necessary condition for knowing - of the recovery of knowledge without a loss, without, that is, the recovery of the (mnemic) difference constitutive of knowledge.
Reversal
In another attempt, last in this text, to define knowledge in the Theaetetus Socrates introduces the notion of an independent account - account (logos) as both knowledge and the way to knowledge, a getting to know not only the difference between things but also the difference of the "account" (logos) one gives of those things (T, 209e, 918). The showing of difference saves knowledge from "the most vicious of circles" and from the "direction a blind man might give" : from the doubling that occurs when one gets hold of something one already has (T, 209e, 918). As in lines 209c where Socrates says that he distinguishes between Theaetetus and Theodorus - i.e., between those whom he already knows - because he remembers the distinguishing mark of Theaetetus, his "snubness," the difference that saves comes from memory.
Memory, especially the memory of the difference between things, the memory of eide, is always plagued, if not erased, by one forgetting and opened by another. The knowledge 'in memory of' suggested by Socrates thus directs one not to bring back what one knew at some point but to realize the condition for the possibility of knowledge: that one cannot 'have' birds when one has "got control of them" and "has made them captive"; that the bird in hand obscures what the bird is when it is in the wild. True knowledge is predicated on the fact that wild birds cannot be held in the hand, but need to be, so to speak, both caught and let go with the same philosophical gesture. The re-acquisition of what one had in one's hand - i.e., the turn of knowledge - is the recovery of something different from what one originally caught and put in the aviary.
As Socrates turns toward the way memory holds knowledge, knowing, so to speak, opens the cage, transforming it into what we would call today a virtual space and which is also a space of forgetting. Derrida has called it in "Plato's Pharmacy" the wandering, displaced/displacing space of writing or the espacement between mneme and hypomnesis. The potential to learn is here based on the human capacity to make a mistake or to lose, that is, to forget, things. As knowing shifts from 'knowing something' to 'knowing what knowing is,' the ontological realization offered by the aviary concerns the withdrawal of the true, where that which is close at hand (prokheiron) links thought to what is at the same time the most near and the most far. The caught, the present, that which is, with some violence, held in hand, allows only for a kind of dead knowledge, which is, paradoxically, set free, revived when one realizes the finite, that is, fundamentally fragile, time-bound, and representational character of knowledge.
The caught pieces of knowledge are handled as memory pieces. But, if knowledge is always a memorial process intended to cross a mnemic distance, it is not simply a process of internalization and of storing, but a process in which the irreducible difference between two states, present and absent, one and another, is made manifest. Anamnesis, thus, offers the knowledge that is already within one but not possessed or held in a grip.
We are in some way able to recognize, as John Sallis concludes, "the images as images of the original," and the original, "the equal itself, is somehow manifest in advance." The double move of manifestation in the memorial aviary, however, shows not only that recollection is a manifestation of the concealment of the true and of the original, but also that the equal is never equal to itself and that the mnemic difference constitutive of knowledge is at the same time a lethic difference. The pigeon has flown away - another bird. Always another bird. Or even a dove.
* * *
The aviary-model remarks the displacement in the process of remembering and getting to know in the following three ways: A) the aviary represents the presence-absence relation in terms of the copresence (prokheiron) of the impression and the experience, and thus questions the limits of iconic representation; B) it grounds knowledge and memory on the double move of thought in which thought folds back onto the principles as it encounters a new problem; C) it draws the limits of representation and of grounding in general.
But, the aviary and the wax block model are, as Socrates says, "ridiculous" (T, 200c, 907). That is to say, the two representational models maintain the illusion of presence even as they show the inadequacies of representation. Yet, it is only by staying within the confines of the representational model that Socrates' "destructive critic" can experience and make use of what it means to be "confronted once more with our original difficulty" (T, 200b, 907). The original difficulty Socrates alludes to is the principle question of the dialogue: "What is knowledge?" which is now directly related to the repetition and difference at the heart of knowing. What is most decisive at this point in the dialogue is that the process of representation, once initiated, does not stop at one copy but keeps repeating itself, creating models of models, and necessitating, as the Stranger says in the Statesman, examples of examples (St, 277d-e, 1043). There is always a thought of a thought, and, we may add, a memory of a memory, because of which the inquiry into the nature of knowledge may be "perpetually driven round in a circle and never getting any further" (T, 200c, 907).
But the repetition also makes possible the return to the place of beginning - the place of a place or a hystera in Irigaray's sense (Speculum) - because the question "What is knowledge?" has in the course of its reiteration encountered something that is different in repetition, questioning, remembering, and in getting to know. The dissimulation (through simulation) constitutes, if not the whole of Socratic knowledge, then the maieutic way toward it. Repetition, in fact, interrupts the vicious circle, anamnestic repetition, as was said above, especially. Iterability is thus a fundamental element of any inquiry into the nature of the true and that is why it is impossible to separate the so-called Doctrine of Forms from the Doctrine of Recollection, or to distinguish between the illusion of presence and true presence. To reiterate, in turn, regardless in which form - as writing in the Phaedrus, as eikones, as vicious circle, or as the anamnestic representation that both reveals and conceals the true - implies that a forgetting has already taken place.
Part II:
Phaedrus
Anamnesis and Forgetting in Meno, Phaedo, and Symposium
Before I focus on the Phaedrus, here is a cursory account of memory and forgetting in the Meno, the Phaedo, and the Symposium. The Meno argues, as Sallis has shown, that being aware of forgetting is an intermediary stage between knowledge and ignorance, not knowledge of the wholes yet but neither ignorance of one's ignorance (Sallis, 64-95). During Socrates' attempts to relate knowledge to thinking, that is to true knowledge rather than to an authority figure, Meno's regurgitation of Gorgia's definition of virtue is criticized in favor of recollection. By provoking a boy who was never educated to answer correctly some geometry problems, Socrates demonstrates the difference between the two ways of knowing - namely, learning by heart and recollecting - concluding that recollection means "[t]o recover knowledge oneself [from] within oneself" (M, 85d). So, knowledge is located within one, that is, in memory. But, if the proper location of knowledge is within oneself and in memory, the disclosure of the place of mneme in anamnesis necessarily replays the catastrophe of forgetting which made eide inaccessible directly. The boy's knowledge then depends upon his realization of the responsibility that recollection presumes: that knowledge, although it comes from within, can take place only in relation to something other - other than the self - in interiorization, and even in incorporation.
In the Phaedo, Socrates describes the role of association in the work of memory, introducing his examples with the conclusion that one thing reminds of "something else which is an object of a different sort of knowledge" (Ph, 73c, 56). The examples that follow are:
I a) A belonging of a loved person reminds lovers of their beloved (Ph, 73d).
b) The sight of one lover reminds one of another lover (Ph, 73d).
II A picture of something reminds one of what it represents (Ph, 73e).
These examples lead Socrates to point out the relation between similar and dissimilar objects, the conclusion being that not only similarity serves as a reminder (Ph, 74a). In the subsequent move, Socrates expounds on the difference between equal things and absolute equality and shows that their relation can, in fact, be both of similars and of dissimilars (Ph, 74b-d). And the conclusion is that " [s]o long as the sight of one thing suggests another to you, it must be a cause of recollection, whether the two things are alike or not" (Ph, 74d, 57).
In an argument that is analogous to the discovery of the place of eide as being within one (Meno), Socrates in the Phaedo points to the external characteristic of the reminder saying in effect that anamnesis requires something that remains outside. Anamnestic interiorization, its pure knowledge, is triggered by the reminder's sensible appearance; as self-knowledge, I might add, anticipating a theme in the Phaedrus, is dependent on the knowledge of the other. Socrates' examples thus situate the reminder within a certain kind of mnemic relation: on the one hand, there is a community of lovers (Ph, 73d, 56); and, on the other hand, there is a community between eide and reminders since what makes an object beautiful is beauty's presence (parousia) in things, or beauty's association, community (koinonia) with things, or, in an alternative interpretation, the koinonia between things that beauty causes (Ph, 100d-e, 81-2).
The purpose of mentioning recollection in the Phaedo is not simply to prove that the soul exists before it is born into a body, nor to show the difference between sense-perception and pure recollection, but, more importantly, Socrates here discusses the conditions and limits of what is knowable in the world below, that is, how death and birth influence knowledge. Knowledge, situated between the supersensible and the sensible, is a matter of association, exchange and interchange and, at least in one of its versions, in one of its turns, a memorial. What one becomes responsible for in knowing is, then, the circulation of memory, the maintenance of its double origin - eide and reminder - and the care of some "former time" (pote, Ph, 75e) when we had knowledge.
In the Phaedo, where forgetting is identified with loss, Socrates says that "what we call 'forgetting' (lethe) [is] simply the loss of knowledge (epistemes apobole)" (Ph, 75d, 58). On the basis of such a definition he concludes that "what we call learning (manthanein) will be the recovery (analambanomen) of our own knowledge (episteme), and surely we should be right in calling this recollection" (Ph, 75e, 59). What kind of disappearance, loss or vanishing is this? How does the forgotten reappear through recollection?
Introducing the notion of anamnestic knowledge as bearing a mark of time's passage, Diotima says in the Symposium:
And still much stranger than all those things [i.e., the ageing of an individual and one's body - P.R.] is what happens to our knowledges: not that some of them arise and some vanish in us and that we are never the same even with regard to our knowledges, but [the point is] that each single knowledge also suffers the same [predicament]. Indeed, what is called studying (meletan) carries the implication that knowledge has gone out (os eksiouses esti tes epistemes); for forgetting (lethe) is the outgoing of knowledge (epistemes eksodos), while study (meletan) replaces the outgoing memory (apiouse mneme) [of something once learned] by producing afresh a new one (palin kainen empoiousa) and thus preserves (sozei) the knowledge so to make it appear the same (huste ten auten dokein einai) (S, 207e-208a).
Forgetting and not remembering points to the temporal dimension of eide and of knowledge, to, that is, a certain espacement of what is recalled through anamnesis, where one should actually speak of temporality in two ways. First, as the difference brought about by ageing. And, second, as a change of change (the time of eide), when time appears timeless.
Diotima's "to make it appear the same" introduces temporalization as the difference (strangeness) that cannot be accounted for by either similarity or dissimilarity as they are described in the Phaedo. This is the (forgotten) difference which "appears the same" while also making the appearance possible. After the "outgoing of knowledge," in effect nothing is the same, i.e., everything differs from itself. Thus, the recovered knowledge is constituted as a "second" learning. The second learning, which is for all practical purposes second to nothing, has a role of preservation. The remembering inherent in this preservation - the Greek sozo means, "to save," "to protect," also "to remember" - does not bring back the forgotten but makes the knowledge (eidenai) appear as the same as the forgotten (eide); where appearance is precisely the limit this kind of knowledge cannot ever definitely sublate.
Here un-forgetting speaks primarily not of the opposition between lethe and mneme, but of their a-topos - strange, and also, dis-placed and dis-placing - relation. On the one hand, the production of fresh and new knowledge - i.e., the learning for the second time - appears as "the same" but is, in effect, subject to change. And on the other hand, the manifestation of the other, out-going knowledge, is presupposed by the change of a change. Un-forgetting, in the sense of preservation, attempts to undo the work of time, but what is preserved in the second learning which un-does the forgetting is, paradoxically, not what was forgotten, nor any particular piece of knowledge, but the possibility (of knowledge) to save. It is quite possible, then, that forgetting does not revolve around an object but is a word remarking the tendency of knowledge to go out or to escape, whereas un-forgetting would not work against the escape but follow its trace, and in that sense remember, trace, the forgotten.
What Diotima says here characterizes the space of being at once as a site of change and as a memorial site - at once a temporal and an a-temporal site of memory (mneme) and forgetting (lethe). Whatever happens in it follows the strange logic of the experience of ageing, and engages, through temporalization, in an even stranger relation with itself. We enter the Phaedrus having in mind that forgetting both forces and reflects the manifestation of irreducible difference - the strange - between the forms and the particulars, between the time of change and the change of time, between memory (mneme) and recollection (anamnesis), and, finally, between the past and history. So we go toward what is in the Phaedo called allothi, an "elsewhere" place of the soul (Ph, 91e-92a).
Phaedrus
Pointing to differences between the English word "forgetting" and the Greek words for the same phenomenon, Patricia J. Cook notes that the early part of the Phaedrus mentions epilelesmai ("to let a thing escape one"), which will not be used in the second part where lethe ("a forgetting, a forgetfulness, an oblivion") and amnemoneo ("to be forgetful, unmindful, not to register") are employed. Underlying the meaning of these three Greek words are notions of something coming to pass and of a certain absencing concerning present things. Epilelesmai, lethe, and amnemoneo, indeed depend on presence, be it explicitly as it is in "to let a thing escape" and in "to be forgetful" which both have an object (the thing, the I); or implicitly, as in "an oblivion" which does away with the division into subject and object, both of which are, perhaps not fully there in this case.
Although English, as Cook notes, does not have three equivalents to translate Plato's epilelesmai, lethe, and amnemoneo, the way the verb "to forget" is used still allows us to question the whole problematic of memory in a radical way. That is, in a way which would challenge the Aristotelian notion of the relation between memory and time - memory being for Aristotle of the past (On Memory and Reminiscence). In English, one does not say "Now, I forgot," which would be logical if we grant, as Aristotle does, that what is remembered - and consequently what is forgotten - is something past. Instead, in English one says "I forget" as if forgetting takes place instantly and immediately at the very moment when I speak and when things appear to me. While this English phrase does not deny that the object of forgetting may be of - that is, in - the past, the way one expresses one's forgetfulness in English leads to a possibility that forgetting designates something of the past that has not yet taken place: for example, the subject, the subjectivity, who notes his or her forgetting.
The English "to forget" or "to have forgotten" thus mark the memorial presence to which epilelesmai, lethe, and amnemoneo refer, with the present time rather than with the past, placing the speaker on the verge (in Krell's sense) where presence and absence, perfection and imperfection meet. Which coincides with one of the crucial aspects of Plato's notion of the fall that happens precisely when one can say 'now.'
To say that 'forgetting' happens now does not mean that it happens without any past influence or without influencing the future. On the contrary, "I forget now" or "I have forgotten" reveal, if one listens to them carefully, that in every forgetting there is also an oblivion that remains in the past without ever reaching the present. For what "I" is directed toward when it forgets now is not only an object of thinking, but its subject too. There is a forgetfulness intrinsic to "I," to its ability to be now, and to utter that it is now and that it is "I." A forgetfulness which is beyond the forgetting of objects and which in fact holds down another now. The point of bringing up the question of Plato's "forgetting" is then to say that there is a forgetting (and even a forgetting of that forgetting) at the root - in both the historical and the ontological sense - of what we call philosophy, writing, and history. A forgetting to which I am destined, although that forgetting does not belong to me.
In any case, the differences between epilelesmai, lethe, and amnemoneo do not carry ethical weight unless one recognizes that their meaning rests on the notion of absencing, on an oblivion of a certain (memorial) presence which is or is not present, as well as on the becoming of something that was not present, for something is promised to return with every forgetting. Continuing Diotima's logic from the Symposium passage cited above, we could say that when forgetting promises a future it does not ensure that there will be a future; rather, it sets forth the future as a promise that may or may not be fulfilled.
The etymology of the English "forget" yields a similar understanding of being and presence. According to the O.E.D., "forget" comes from the Teutonic getan meaning "to hold or to grasp," and the prefix for meaning "missed or lost." "Forget" is thus a missed grasp of something that is in some way present - in memory, for example. What is (present) in memory may be, as we commonly say, forgotten. We forget, i.e., lose hold of what we had memorized at one point. In such a case one does not lose the whole of memory, i.e., the relation memory provides, but what Plato calls a particular piece. However, since, the hold or grasp does not go one way, but has two directions; since what I hold holds me and what I remember remembers me, "forget" can also be interpreted as a loss of what gives a hold (the true, essence), or of what holds (getan) the soul (i.e., being): thus, to miss or lose hold, precisely when one is holding strongly onto something.
Plato's notion of losing presence, losing a hold of what holds (eide), opens the possibility of a loss that is beyond recollective recuperation. Something that happens, for example, when people die or are gone as Socrates is when Plato writes about him, and his memory threatens to disappear with him. Or, to give an example closer to those in the Phaedrus, a loss that happens when people are born. Recollection hence entails an impossible "catching" of oneself and that which one is not at the moment of oblivion. At the moment of the soul's becoming oblivious to its oblivion, lost for what seeks it (the past?) and for what it seeks (the future?). Not remembering that it is forgetting, that it has forgotten....
Would not the one who remembers everything be compelled to live without a past and without a community? In any case, memory itself pushes one toward the future, or tends to expel one from the past. Or, better to say, the withdrawal of memory - its going out, forgetting, remembering - does not only thrust one onto the verge where what is possible and what is impossible meet, but marks this meeting point as a place to which one can only return - the limit being, with every turn of thought, at once a site of forgetting and a site of memory. And that is so in both English and in Plato's Greek - regardless of how errant the former's notion of "forgetting" is when compared to the latter's - the space between them, what we usually call history, being precisely a question of the return, or of the memorial, double turn of forgetting. Here we could have a glimpse of what the 'in memory of' that frames most if not all of Plato's dialogues might mean for him.
The Soul's Journey - 244a-250b & 276e-277a
As is suggested with the opening question of the dialogue – "Where do you come from, Paedrus my friend, and where are you going to?" (P 227a, 476) - the relation to alterity concerns the relation to the place of origin and of destination, where that which has an origin and an end is defined as finite. Engaging the part of the dialogue that begins with Socrates' second palinode, I will try to show the consequences of the fact that what is (ousia) becomes interpretable only via the fall, through a detachment, a departure of what is from itself, effected by forgetting (lethe).
In his second palinode, Socrates enacts the question of "where from" and "where to" by speaking of generation in two ways:
A) In the sense of the infinite journey of the soul which may return to the heavens in whose care it once was.
B) In the sense that the dialectical philosopher hopes to find a soul of the "right type" in which he would sow words founded on knowledge,
words which can defend both themselves and him who planted them, words which instead of remaining barren contain a seed whence new words grow up in new characters, whereby the seed is vouchsafed immortality, and its possessor the fullest measure of blessedness that man can attain unto. (P, 276e-277a, 522)
Both of these two ways of establishing continuity go through a moment of forgetting. In case A, souls forget (lethe) "the holy objects of their vision" (P, 250a, 496). And Socrates comments that after the fall, "[f]ew indeed are left that can still remember much" (P, 250a, 496). In case B, writing is an example of how the growth of the seed can be aborted or be still-born, since writing "implants" forgetfulness (lethen). Moreover, according to Socrates, the fall is caused by a "mischance" that burdens the soul "with a load of forgetfulness (lethes) and wrongdoing" (P, 248c, 495).
But, forgetting is not simply an obstacle to a smooth exchange, nor an antithesis to the thesis of recollection, nor is it entirely sublated through the work of recollection, for it remains to haunt the soul throughout its journey. Forgetting interrupts the work of memory and pushes the soul onto an endless detour of recollection. Without the resistance of forgetting - the exile and removal it entails - there would not be this exposure of thought to what lies outside it and to what cannot be apprehended. In both examples A and B, due to forgetting, knowledge is acquired as it is returning, be it from an immemorial past as in the myth, or from another person in whom Socrates hopes to plant a seed of knowledge he does not possess himself. When the hold of what holds the soul is lost, eide are beheld through an ecstatic gesture toward the beyond of the sense of possession commonly ascribed to the empirical world; through an abandonment of the self - both the fall of the soul and its excitement in the presence of the beloved - which constitutes knowledge in its repetition, only through its return.
Madness - 250b-263d
The most characteristic evocation of the yonder beauty "beyond the heavens none of our earthly poets has yet sung, and none shall sing worthily" (P, 247c, 494) happens when one sees the beloved. When one
beholds a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there comes upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god, and but for fear of being deemed a very madman he would offer sacrifice to his beloved as to a holy image of deity. Next, with the passing of the shudder, a strange sweating and fever seizes him. For by reason of the stream of beauty entering in through his eyes there comes a warmth, whereby his soul's plummeting is fostered, and with that warmth the roots of the wings are melted, which for long had been so hardened and closed up that nothing could grow; then as the nourishment is poured in, the stump of the wing swells and hastens to grow from the root over the whole substance of the soul. . . (P, 251a-c, 497)
Erotic madness thus makes wings grow and lets the soul rise to the heavens once again. Once again, that is, for the first time.
This memorial uncanny moment of the evocation of eide in Plato offers a glimpse into what was never present as such (beauty) and will not be made present, but will "remain" (if we can use that word here) in a continual, enduring state of presencing and of becoming without ever being. As the soul is exposed to the beloved, it gives itself to the other. Not only to the beautiful boy, but also to time passed, to immortal gods, to beauty itself. And to another time, the other of time when change itself changes. This exposure to a strange memory of the immemorial is what the soul's journey consists of. Socrates' second palinode about love, the speech that gains "its own body" (P, 264c, 510) between two moments of unconcealment - the discovery of Lysias' speech and the legend of the invention of writing - signals that the unattainable, the presence (parousia) of eide, is in some way disclosed through both the forgetful excitement of the lover and the forgetting caused by the down-turn of catastrophe.
Recollection is made possible and knowledge (sophia) can be acquired upon beholding (once again for the first time) beauty - that outer limit at which beauty is - which is brought inside through an inspired (forgetful), poetic, movement. Recollection, in the sense of gathering in speaking, as it was defined in one of the earlier passages:
man must needs perceive the meaning (sunienai) of whatever is being spoken, [spoken necessarily] with reference to the intelligible (kat' eidos legomenon), by going [in every case] from many perceptions (ek pollon iont aistheseon) to the unity (eis hen) comprehended in a reasoned account (logismo sunairoumenon); in this consists the recollection (anamnesis) of those [eide] which this soul of ours, in its upward surge towards that which truly is, once beheld while journeying with a god and looking down upon what we now claim has 'being' (einai). (P, 249b-c)
The Fall
That something (an account or evocation) is conditioned by forgetting does not mean that it is created outside of history, but implies a recasting of the very possibility of history and of a narrative in terms of a forgetting that remains outside and that calls for the recognition of the provisional status of whatever is built or made to work. In the most general sense, forgetting marks the sharing and separating between the immortal and mortal worlds.
The catastrophic distress, which should be understood now as both plummeting from the heavens and as the turn of thought, as both the fall and the ecstatic identification with the beloved, is not a simple mark that there is an excess in the soul which escapes even divine community. The turn of the downfall, the movement of the soul's coming to be, is a memorial to irreducible alterity, to, that is, a certain death - presupposed in anamnestic knowledge - which makes the return possible. The 'to have been' of the fall, no less then the excitement of the lover, points to the fact that humans are mortal, that their life is finite, and that their mortality remains unknowable, beyond memory, in amnesia.
Knowledge, Blanchot notes,
because it is not of the disaster, but knowledge as disaster and knowledge disastrously - carries us, carries us off, deports us (whom it smites and nonetheless leaves untouched), straight to ignorance, and puts us face to face with ignorance of the unknown so that we forget, endlessly. (W, 3)
To put it differently, eide belong to both soul and body without belonging, in a form of memorial belonging and community (koinonia). But such a belonging - a parousia of eide in the particulars - is not only remembering, nor bringing something out. Rather, "[t]his thought of the arche-trace," as Fóti notes:
continues to obscure itself in announcing itself in the philosophical and psychological problematic of memory like the horizon which, as one walks towards it, continues to open up and thereby to recede. (Fóti, 79)
Which is to say that forgetting is, on the one hand, an interiorizing movement only if the interiorization is also impossible, while, on the other hand, forgetting releases the soul and so opens the possibility of the I saying "I". The contradiction is double as is the catastrophe to which forgetting testifies. To paraphrase Socrates, if I forget the other I have forgotten myself (P, 228a-b, 477). But I cannot know or remember, interiorize, the other, nor can I say "I", except through the forgetting of the other.
Forgetting thus marks something logically prior to the anamnestic knowledge of the true: a displacement of the topos beyond the heavens which was never present. Forcing an exodus, forgetting is a "way out," a "gate" or a "mouth," but also an "end," a "close" (of what lies outside), as Greek dictionaries describe eksodos. As such, forgetting records the finite state of the human, and, on the other hand, points to the possibility that everything can be lost, and one may remain without possession. Recollection most often bears witness to forgetting as to a loss. But this forgetting does not erase anything that was. It is rather a mark of an obliteration or of the state of ecstasy in which the soul at times finds itself. In any case, on the other side of forgetting there is nothing that can be possessed. As was shown above, forgetting releases belonging from the sense of possession, and so it makes possible a certain belonging without belonging - a wandering or perpetual losing of presence.
* * *
"Farewell," says Plato in the Second Letter where he denies that he has ever written anything. "Think this over," he says to Dionysius,
and take care lest some day you rue having unwisely divulged your views. The best safeguard will be to learn by heart instead of writing (to me graphein all'ekmanthanein). For it is impossible for what is written not to be disclosed. That is the reason why I have never written anything about these things,[...] and why there is no written work by Plato, and never will be. What people call his works are the works of a Socrates become young and magnificent once again. Farewell. Do as I say. As soon as you have read and re-read this letter, burn it. (314b-c)
And the letter travels away to Syracuse and beyond. Its wisdom, Plato dreams, on the other side of death, beyond grammata, beyond letters. As a "memory with no sign," says Derrida repeating Plato ("PP," 109), as a memory on fire or as a memory in the heart. The "no sign" of memory, the ash or trace of disappearance, are in fact marked by forgetting - the interminable, impossible forgetting of oneself in and with the other. It is no sign at all, but nevertheless it is a mark of something that lies beneath the possibility for a sign to bestow presence and Being on things.
This forgetting, the other of forgetting, testifies to the strike with which Being is introduced. Yet, this forgetting is not of something. In fact it breaks the memorial genealogy and, perhaps, breaks out of its patrilineal cycle. But what it breaks is not permanently broken, and forgetting remains in memory where it points to the displacement of the said in every saying. That is, forgetting testifies to something which cannot be either remembered or recalled but which returns to haunt language and memory. The French sou-venir lets us hear it as "what comes from under." And one should under-stand it as what comes but is never made present, where the coming back does not refer simply to the repressed which returns but, more importantly - as Lyotard has shown in Heidegger and "the jews" - to "our" return, i.e., certain traumatic compulsion that returns a we as "we" to the history of annihilation and forgetting whenever there is a gathering.
Forgetting marks in Plato's dialogues the moment of one's inscription into the symbolic system of community, into the language the "we" speaks, while also marking a releasement of memory, knowledge, and self from the past presence to which they are experientially and historically tied. Forgetting also allows for an opening of Plato's mneme and anamnesis toward what is to come but not without announcing the impossibility of absolute futurity; the impossibility of, that is, a future that has not in some way already been. It is this thought - Blanchot will characterize it in The Writing of the Disaster as the future's belonging to the disaster - that is Plato's most troubling thought: a thought of being for which the truth is a remembered/forgotten trace, a thought of the disaster and in the disaster. A violent thought, a thought about violence and forgetting at the origin of memory.
Plato
Except where otherwise noted, all citations of Plato's dialogues are from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Eds. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton: Princeton UP). Pagination refers to the 7th printing, 1973.Blanchot
E L'Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).
W The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1986).
Derrida
PP "Plato's Pharmacy," Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981); 61 - 172.
1 Véronique M. Fóti, "Presence and Memory: Derrida, Freud, Plato, Descartes." Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (1986) 11:1 - 67.
2 Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminscentia, trans. Richard Sorabji. In Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (Providence: Brown UP, 1972).
3 David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990).
4 Regarding "Memory" in Aristotle, besides the obove-cited work by Krell, see also Charles Shepherdson, "Vital Signs: The Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis" Research in Phenomenology (1993), 23.
5 R.E. Allen, "Anamnesis in Plato's Meno and Phaedo" Review of Metaphysics, (1959), 13 - 167.
6 The interpretation offered here is based on passages like the one that comes later in the Theaetetus: "all the time you were learning you were doing nothing else but trying to distinguish by sight or hearing each letter by itself, so as not to be confused by any arrangement of them in spoken or written words" (206a, 913-4; see the whole discussion on letters starting at 201d); and the one in the Republic at 510d-e where Socrates says that when mathematicians "use visible figures and make their arguments about them, they are not reasoning about them, but about those things which these visible figures resemble...; they use these [figures] as images, seeking to see those very things which cannot be seen except by the understanding."
7 Given the importance of the image for theories of memory, one might ask: What, indeed, is the direction a blind man might give? What are the eide of/for blind people? Are there any other kind of eide but those that blind? See, for example, Phaedo, 99d-100a - 81.
8 John Sallis, Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1975) - 90.
9 Unlike the wax block model where the presence of an impression denotes the absence of affection.
10 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985).
11 In the Phaedrus there is a parallel situation when Phaedrus is uncritically infatuated with Lysias, the "ablest writer of the day" (228a, 477). Phaedrus prizes the skill of repeating by heart things he has heard, over "coming into a fortune" (228a, 477). See also Protagoras 315c (314) for the association between Hippias and Phaedrus, and Lesser Hippias 368d-370 (206), where the art of memory is briefly discussed.
12 Gregory Vlastos's translation, "Anamnesis in the Meno." Dialogue, (1965), 4 - 153.
13 On Plato's argument in the Meno, see also Aristotle, Prior Analytics (67a), and on the more general argument concerning pre-existent knowledge, see Posterior Analytics (71a).
14 Absolute equality and eide are referred to by Socrates in 73c as "something else" (see above). The Symposium will introduce the notion of strangeness into the relation between 'what one is reminded of' and 'what reminds' (see below).
15 Meno offers a key passage for understanding why both similar and dissimilar things remind. There, Socrates says that everything in nature is linked: "Since all nature is akin (suggenes), and the soul has learnt all things, there is nothing to prevent her, by recollecting one single thing, [from] recovering all the rest" (Meno, 81c-d). Translation and interpolations are R.E. Allen's, ibid -167.
16 Translation is Jacob Klein's from his A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: UP of North Carolina, 1965).
17 Patricia J. Cook, "Forgetting" in Plato's Dialogues (Diss. Emory U, 1992) - 48. To the best of my knowledge this work is the only comprehensive study of Plato's memory available in English.
Aristotle writes: "Memory is not perception or conception, but a state or affection with one of these, when time has elapsed. There is no memory of the present at the present... But perception is of the present, prediction of the future, and memory of the past. And this is why all memory involves time." Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia - 449b24, 48.18 Whereas eide are in some sense always "then."
19 Alexander Luria describes the famous case of S. who remembers literally everything. S.'s inability to develop a "memory without record" (p. VIII) makes him live in a painfully chaotic world bereft of the past, constantly waiting "for something to happen to him, some great thing" (p. X). Alexander Romanovich Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, trans. Lynn Solotarof (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
20 Generation in the Symposium, by means of erotic and philosophical relations, engenders a similar kind of future.
21 See also 248b where the fall and its forgetting are described by Socrates thus: "confusion ensues, and conflict and grievous sweat. Whereupon, with their charioteers powerless, many are lamed, and many have their wings all broken, and for all their toiling they are balked, every one, of the full vision of being, and departing therefrom, they feed upon the food of semblance" (P, 248b, 495).
22 Socrates's, i.e., Thamus's, words (P, 275a, 520).
In the Philebus the "outgoing of memory" is mnemes eksodos (33e), in the Symposium the "outgoing of knowledge" is epistemes eksodos (207e).23 Never does Socrates say that he himself has "the fullest measure of blessedness that man can attain unto."
24 From "kata," down, and "strephein," to turn.
25 Translation and interpolations are J. Klein's, A Commentary on Plato's Meno - 151-2.
26 The translation of this passage is by D.F. Krell, ibid - p. 203.
27 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and "the jews", trans. Mark S. Roberts and Andreas Michel (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1990).