ABSTRACT
In this chapter I aim to consider how we read the past both ethically and politically, from a standpoint in the present with a view to the future. 1 As a prolific writer on hermeneutics in the modem world, Ricreur has increasingly turned to the ethics and implicit epistemology in the traces of memory. This work can help us gain a critical standpoint on remembering the past. Building upon my earlier chapter, 'Ethics within the Limits ofpost-Ricreurian Kantian Hermeneutics', this chapter will also assume five points developed from my current hermeneutical engagement with Ricreur 's writings. These points are about memory and are as follows: (i) memory is a form ofknowledge; (ii) memory is rendered a form of mimesis by the imagination; (iii) the use and abuse of memory in cognition and imagination make necessary an ethics of memory; (iv) a tum to an ethics of memory, built upon memory's revised epistemological role, gives new possibilities for retrieving traces ofthe past, even if there is no original non-trace; and (v) the hermeneutic retrieval of what remains essentially a spiritual2 dimension can happen through an ethical reassessment of promise keeping and forgiveness. 3
Memory is a form of knowledge. 5 Even when we vaguely remember what has been, memory is at work cognitively. Yet in postmodem terms the object of memory's cognition is at most a trace. In breaking with the modem sense of an empirical mark standing for an original non-trace, the postmodem 'trace' also has its origin in a trace.6 The distinctiveness of this concept is its differential relation to a non-origin created by a lack of nostalgia for what has been lost; the trace's lack of origin renders doubtful the reality of the past. However, the postmodem challenge to the reality and temporal identity signified by the trace has not been decisive. Ricreur presents a strong case for retaining the significance of the trace as a vestige of the past.7 To support this case I argue that memory continues to condition what appear to be attempts to rediscover and retain traces of a past about which women and men have written and seek to write.
This activity of writing a narrative of the past, or of telling a story, is part of what has been called 'our ordinary reliance on memory'.8
