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RICOEUR, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xvii + 642 pp. Cloth, $ 40.00-The last English translation to appear during the life of the late Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), Memory, History, Forgetting (MHF) is perhaps the capstone work of his distinguished career and a seminal philosophy of history and ethics. The subject of critical acclaim in France in 2000, MHF significantly should interest and impact the debates of Anglo-American philosophers, historians, theologians, psychologists, sociologists, and cultural and literary theorists.
Ricoeur's text divides into three parts corresponding to its title: the phenomenology of memory; the epistemology of history; and the hermeneutics of the human historical condition, its "emblem of vulnerability" being "forgetting" (pp. xvi, 284). That the words "memory" and "history" appear in the title proves unsurprising. But what of the title's final word, "forgetting"? The putative "duty of memory" (pp. 285, 347) to "not forget" (pp. 30, 90, 413, 418) relegates forgetting to a via negativa, the "reverse side of memory" (p. 443). Ricoeur, however, raises the prospect of a "right of forgetting" (p. 92), "a positive meaning" (p. 443) for forgetting that entails the "spirit of forgiveness" (p. 459) and "reconciliation" (p. 495). By reconsidering forgetting, Ricoeur (1) moves toward the praxis of forgiveness beyond epistemological reflections-including the phenomenology of memory (pp. 91, 135, 493) and totalizing, Hegelian philosophies of history (pp. 91, 159, 291)-and utilitarian ethico-politics (pp. 91, 456), and (2) redresses lacunae in Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another (p. xv).
MHF" begins with its "common problematic," the "representation of the past" (p. xvii). The paradox of the past-it "is abolished" yet "no one can make it be that [it] should not have...