In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Is There a Duty of Memory? Reflections on a French Debate
  • Myriam Bienenstock (bio)

Paul Ricoeur must have been amongst the first in France to cast doubt on the devoir de mémoire ("duty of memory") as an imperative: in his magnum opus, La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli (Memory, History, Forgetting), published in French in 2000,1 Ricoeur initiated an inquiry into memory, history, and forgetting, which was welcomed and praised by the French media. The call for remembrance, the devoir de mémoire ("duty of memory"), invoked so frequently in our times, appeared to him, under closer scrutiny, quite problematic. Is it possible, he asked, to claim Tu te souviendras ("You will remember")—i.e., to use the verb "to remember" in the future tense—whereas its content relates to the past? Is it appropriate to claim Tu dois te rappeler ("You ought to remember")—to create for the verb an imperative form—when it is the very nature of memory to spontaneously develop, and then merely emerge as an affection, a pathos? According to Ricoeur, many other questions arise, as soon as one begins to reflect more carefully upon the expression devoir de mémoire. The call for remembrance might appear as a demand made upon memory to by-pass the historian's work. It could be understood as a claim raised by memory against the work of the historian ("une revendication de la mémoire contre l'histoire").2 Ricoeur, who conceives his book as "a plea on behalf of memory as the womb of history" ("un plaidoyer pour la mémoire comme matrice d'histoire"3), warns against the temptation to play memory against history. To say: "you will remember," is also to say: "you will not forget." The "duty of memory" might thereby lead not just to an optimal use, but also to the worst possible misuse of memory. Ricoeur concludes that it would be appropriate to replace the expression devoir de mémoire ("duty of memory") by another expression, that of travail de mémoire ("work of remembering").

In recent years, such considerations have multiplied in France. Quite often, Ricoeur's theses are pushed to an even more extreme formulation, in a sense he himself would not have endorsed. Here, I shall take for my first example a presentation by Jean-Pierre Cléro, [End Page 332] Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rouen, during a conference on the theme "L'indicible: dans l'espace franco-germanique au XXe siècle" [The Unutterable: in the French-German space during the twentieth century], which took place in November 2003 at Cléro's university. The article itself was entitled "Sur l'expression 'devoir de mémoire,' ou de quelques dangers d'évoquer l'indicible" ("On the expression 'duty of memory', or about certain dangers, in evoking the unutterable).4 Cléro claimed that Ricoeur had not gone far enough: according to him, the famous Protestant philosopher was perfectly aware of the difficulties with which the notion of a "duty of memory," commonly presented as a kind of "faithfulness" to that which happened (fidélité à ce qui s'est passé), is beset. Nevertheless, Ricoeur would still have endorsed that "annoyance" ("l'embarras").5 Cléro is not prepared to do so: he finds the expression devoir de mémoire "unbelievably vague" (incroyablement vague),6 and therefore philosophically unacceptable. The Ten Commandments in the Book of Exodus and the Book of Deuteronomy may well have had a perfectly clear and precise meaning, but rambling about a "duty of memory" would be as confused as it would be to suddenly announce a "duty of perception," or a "duty of reason"; for who would be in a position to be able to prescribe such a duty? Isn't it only to oneself that one should prescribe it? And what might be the content of such a duty? Could one derive it from its form (as Cléro seems to hint that one should), or does one rather want to argue that some special remembrances should be singled out, which would have to be preserved absolutely, or be registered within the frame of a memory, individual...

pdf

Share