Abstract

This article argues that sights of objects in the world and its representations makes time disappear into space. Space as the oblivion of time. The main purpose of the article is to show the dialectic of memory and forgetting within individual consciousness. Forgetting is not the loss of memory but an essential component of memory itself. Forgetfulness, like memory, embodies also its temporality: the three temporal figures of forgetting are the return, the abeyance and the recommencement. Among the diseases of memory we distinguish partial and global amnesias, and hypermnesias. The phenomenon of ‘illusion of memory’ or ‘false memory’ shows the insufficiency of the naturalistic or cognitivistic theory of memory. In this respect we have to evaluate the theory of forgetting as the effacement of traces. The paper defends rather a pragmatic approach by studying the ‘exercise of memory’ in all its forms, especially blocked memory, manipulated memory and commanded memory.