Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while
profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly
behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark
work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering
and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical
narrative.
Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological
approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something
absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature
and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can
truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section
is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and
whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are
careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre
Nora.
A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History,
Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent
reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.