Memory of the Body, Temptation of Space

Abstract

In this essay I examine the possibilities of approaching the phenomenon of memory from the point of view of space. Drawing on Edward Casey’s Getting Back into Place and on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the spatialized lived body, I attempt to show in what way memory can be said to belong to places. My inquiry ends with a discussion of Paul Ricoeur’s proposals on the narrative dimension of human space, which, I argue, allows us to consider why a building or a city may be said to produce a sensed duration by and through inscribing it in the durability of their materials and, at the same time, in human histories.

Notes

1. Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 184.

2. Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92); (abridged English translation, Realms of Memory [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98]).

3. Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: P.U.F., 1950).

4. Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place, 2d ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009).

5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 293.

6. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 90, 61.

7. Casey, Getting Back into Place, 48.

8. Ricoeur, La mémoire, 185.

9. Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Hombre et espacio, trans. Jaime López de Asiain y Martin (Barcelona: Biblioteca Universitaria Labor, 1969), 49; originally published as Mensch und Raum (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963); English translation: Human Space, trans. Christine Shuttleworth (London: Hyphen Press, 2008).

10. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 164; Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, “Espace et schéma corporel dans la philosophie de la chair de Merleau-Ponty,” in Le corps en acte: Centenaire Maurice Merleau Ponty, ed. Alain Berthoz and Bernard Andrieu (Nancy: Presse Universitaire de Nancy, 2010), 126.

11. Saint Aubert, “Espace et schéma corporel,” 124, 128–29. See Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 114.

12. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 161: “La conscience est l’être à la chose par l’intermédiaire du corps. Un mouvement est appris lorsque le corps l’a compris, c’est-à-dire lorsqu’il l’a incorporé à son ‘monde’, et mouvoir son corps c’est viser à travers lui les choses, c’est laisser répondre à leur sollicitation qui s’exerce sur lui sans aucune représentation.”

13. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 177.

14. Renaud Barbaras, “De la phénoménologie du corps à l’ontologie de la chair,” in Le corps, ed. Jean-Christophe Goddard (Paris: Vrin, 2005), 227. Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant de l’expérience. Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris Vrin, 1998), 95–136.

15. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 167.

16. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 169.

17. Thomas Fuchs, “Body Memory and the Unconscious,” in Founding Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically, ed. Dieter Lohmar and Jagna Brudziňska, Phaenomenologica 199 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 69–82.

18. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 168.

19. Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace, 8th ed. (Paris: P.U.F., 1974), 32.

20. Bachelard, La poétique, 35, 27, 83.

21. Casey, Getting Back into Place, 328.

22. Ricoeur, La mémoire, 186. See my “Herméneutique, architecture et humanisation de l’espace,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 91.1 (2011): 67–81.

23. Paul Ricoeur, “Architecture et narrativité,” Urbanisme 303 (1998): 49.

24. Ricoeur, La mémoire, 186.

25. Ricoeur, “Architecture et narrativité,” 48. Architecture and urbanism thus put in place, regarding space, the three narrative mimeses.

26. Paul Ricoeur, Du texte à l’action. Essais d’herméneutique II (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 170.

27. Ricoeur, “Architecture et narrativité,” 49.

28. Ricoeur, “Architecture et narrativité,” 51, 49. 

29. Ricoeur, La mémoire, 187.

30. Ricoeur, “Architecture et narrativité,” 51.

31. I do not explore here Ricoeur’s insight in La mémoire (188–91) on the role of space as a historical figure, as demonstrated by Fernand Braudel’s project of a geohistory.

32. Let us consider, as an example, Ground Zero in New York. There is a memorial with the names of the victims of 9/11, the victims of the 1993 attacks on the WTC, and the names of those who died in the rescue operations. Each name is inscribed in bronze plaques around two giant quadrangular lakes that are themselves inscribed in the urban landscape as two footprints of the destroyed twin towers. In the durability of the stone, absence, pain, tragedy thus rests engraved, but also opens to the narrative appropriation of those who visit that built place in grief. In fact, through space something can begin to be told about the past in a way we can handle: “here is the name of …,” “the towers once stood here and now…”; “I also have a large lake of absence in my soul….” In this sense, built spaces can and must help us save memory from sterile repetition, paralysing nostalgia, venomous resentment and vainglory. See Paul Ricoeur, “Le bon usage des blessures de la mémoire,” at: http://www.fondsricoeur.fr/photo/temoin(4).doc.

33. I follow here Ricoeur’s evaluation of Freud’s contribution to the study of the resistance to remember traumatic events (Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke [Ficher Verlag, 1913–17], 126–36). Ricoeur is most of all interested in what Freud means by “travail de mémoire” and “compulsion de repetition” (Ricoeur, La mémoire, 84).

34. Ricoeur, “Architecture et narrativité,” 51.