Between Memory and Forgetting

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Simonides of Ceos (556-468 BC) is said to be the “inventor of memory,” for he stepped out from a dinner party in Thessaly one day and returned to find that while he was outside, the walls of the dining hall had collapsed upon the guests, crushing them beyond recognition. Luckily, Simonides, a poet, had committed the seating arrangement to memory, so when the relatives of the dead came to collect the remains, he was able to point them to the right bones. The story of Simonides marks the start of a certain manner of approaching and sifting through the past. One might imagine him walking around the ruins of his dinner party, dissecting, sorting, and labeling the site of the collapse. It is telling that, according to this ancient anecdote, the invention of memory emerges from loss, but does not predate it. Memory anticipates loss just as buildings and memorials have been said to anticipate their own destruction. “The story of Simonides tells us that the birth of memory preceded the accident, the collapse of the roof, death, disappearance,” Dubravka Ugrešić writes. Memory mobilizes against what Harald Weinrich calls the “menacing catastrophe of forgetting: the sudden death that makes remembering a problem.” The arts of memory and forgetting share a point of origin: Cicero tells us that when, one day, Simonides offers to teach his contemporary Themistocles about the art of memory, Themistocles replies that he would rather learn “how to forget everything he wants to forget.” “According to another version of the anecdote,” Weinrich writes, “Themistocles curtly replied that he was not interested in an art of memory (ars memoriae) but rather was interested in the art of forgetting (ars oblivionis).” Here, and forever more, memory and forgetting have a dialectic relation. “There can be no Aletheia (truth) without a measure of Lethe (oblivion),” the classicist Thomas Cole writes. “The antithetical powers are thus not contradictory but tend toward each other.” This course will investigate the dialectic relation of memory and forgetting in history, law, politics, literature, and philosophy. We will survey the emergence of practices of both memory and forgetting as ways of reckoning with the past and ask whether there can be such a thing as an excess of memory. When have societies deliberately chosen to forget? How is collective forgetting orchestrated, agreed upon, and enforced? What are the political and cultural motivations of these episodes? What are their effects?