ABSTRACT
The question of memory, the presence of a past-its reality and possibility-cannot be posed outside of tradition. And yet far from giving the question a fixity, such a location, while accurate, only serves to compound the question’s problematic nature. Tradition lacks a specific determination. Tradition can be incorporated within history-it may even be ‘history’—none the less neither tradition nor history is thereby finally determined and allocated a semantic and heuristic structure. There are further difficulties since memory, tradition, history do not simply encounter the problem of time, they have a specific temporal dimension at work within them and hence proper to them. Each is unthinkable without time. (This will be true even in the weak sense that their being thought will always contain within it, either implicitly or explicitly, a temporal dimension.) Rather than attempting to give greater specificity to these complex interrelationships in advance, they will be allowed to emerge within a consideration of the interpretive problems posed by Anselm Kiefer’s work Iconoclastic Controversy.1
