Messing with Autobiographical Memory: Identity, and Moral Status

The function of memory and remembering plays an important role in philosophical systems, in some cases even more than that – it constitutes a kind of via eminentiae of epistemological endeavours. This is certainly the case of Plato’s conception of true knowledge as remembrance (anamnesis), which has had an extraordinary influence on Western thought; it is the basis of all subsequent metaphysical reasoning and formulations. Therefore, the question of memory appears as a crucial theme in Jacques Derrida’s early writings on the relationship between speech and writing. There he argues that while tradition clearly favours speech (the logos as the vitality of the soul) and writing appears as a “dangerous supplement” (a mere copy of speech), this binary opposition does not work well when it comes to the question of memory. Derrida points out the unusual fact that while memory traditionally appears as the privileged way of accessing truth, at the same time the tools of memory, mnemonics (i.e., the written) function as an undesirable element. This revelation of the discrepancy at the heart of metaphysics offers a new way of thinking about the materiality of memory and the act of remembering as an innovation