Memory, Moment, and Tears: A Speculative Approach to the Problem of Latin American Singularities

When you say that something is singular, you are surely sorting out a distinct meaning from a set of them. There is the colloquial use, in which “singular” refers, on the one hand, to something that is exceptional, remarkable, excellent, and on the other, to something that is particularly curious, strange, extravagant. Both meanings are evidently associated in that they stem from the original sense of uniqueness that the word bears. “Singular” is what is single, unique, as something that exists separately. To take it generally, being separate is being different. Again, being different is virtually to have an identity. And, in its turn, to exist separately is to be self-sufficient, autonomous, ontologically grounded in itself, as, you know, the Aristotelian first substance is. The combination of this ontological consistence with the uniqueness of what is singular carries a difficulty concerning identity. For identity is a function of intelligibility, and the singularity of what is strictly singular seems to oppose the exigences of rational clarification of beings.

Anyway, philosophy has always been confident of an inner light in things that is responsible for their respective identities, be it the discernability of the structure of their beings for the cognoscent, or the aboriginal endowment of a being that is capable of self-representation, and that is, of course, the light of conscience. But this confidence cannot be really firm without a complement. The problem with singularity is not only that it implies an incommensurability that is virtually resistant to its elucidation (among other things, only the work of art is acknowledged as being the measure of itself), but that this punctuality is also a temporal one—the stigmatic now of its existence. Therefore, to be actually intelligible, the thing requires a certain permanence, a span of time along which, by virtue of its repetitive presence, it becomes, so to speak, readable, the traces of its physiognomy recollectible.

So, something singular is liable to the attribution of identity inasmuch as it is continuous. And this continuity demands, on the part of the cognoscent, a peculiar receptivity: let us call it by its proper name, memory.

In the following, my purpose is to discuss briefly the import of memory on the problem of Latin American singularities. The line of my argument may somehow seem tortuous, this I cannot contradict; for the worse, it doesn’t deal with Latin American philosophy in any of the figures that were proposed for this symposium; my only intention is to suggest the need for establishing some conditions under which a thinking of the singular may be possible.

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Memory, it is said, is a function of identity. You must surely recall the obsession of the replicants in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner: they eagerly collected photos, ordinary images of ordinary moments that could give them the illusion of a past of their own and the sense of a personal identity, memories, as it is said in English, according to a use that, to my native Spanish speaker’s ear, sounds like a very suitable one. The motive that incited them to this unavoidably futile operation was the search for themselves, not at all divergent from our own anxieties: what are we, where do we come from, what awaits us—and just in the way it is stated in Deckard’s foreseeable speech, at the end. Among the impeccable products of genetic engineering and the well-known sprouts of natural procreation there is no difference, no real difference: they are all twinned in the fruitless longing for a guaranteed identity, for a definitive and steady self-possession; they are twinned in the ignorance of their lives’ coming vicissitudes. Or rather a single difference: the tenancy of personal memories. For everyone’s identity would depend on the possibility of the evocation of something that is strictly one’s own, nontransferable; identity would depend on the possibility of truthful memory—if there is one.

The most vigorous argument in support of the idea that memory is the basis of identity was offered by Hegel...