ABSTRACT
Memory is dialectical. It is an act of spiritual activity and creativity as much as it is a state of passivity and dependence; it constitutes one’s identity as much as it changes and distorts such identity. Memory seems to be the act of retrieving something buried in the past, but it is instead the action coming from the present that institutes something past for the first time. Although memory is a journey in the inner dimension of the self, it is also, at the same time, the highest act of alienation and exteriorization – Er-Innerung is, dialectically, Ent-Äusserung. This is the first lesson of Hegel’s philosophy. But memory is also the fundamental ‘methodological’ function through which dialectic articulates its processes – its formal thought processes as well as the real historical processes taking place in the social, collective and institutional world of Geist, or ‘Spirit’. This is the second lesson of Hegel’s philosophy. And yet, to tease out these apparently simple claims from his complex philosophical system is no easy task. This explains, at least in part, why readers and interpreters have generally failed to appreciate the extent to which the concept of memory plays a constitutive role in Hegel’s thought, surfacing at so many levels in his system and assuming so many forms – individual and collective forms, logical, phenomenological, psychological, artistic forms.
