Preface

This book has enjoyed a long and interesting death. I can see now that I will never write it and hence want to relate what it was supposed to have been. As well as I can remember.

When it was time for me to prepare a research proposal for my doctoral dissertation—in October of 1969—I submitted two of them. One involved Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, the other promised some “essays in the phenomenology of memory.” Even at that time the memory project would not stop proliferating, would not hold to a particular center, and my advisor suggested I stick to the presumably more clearly delineated topic. Which I have done now for twenty years.

Had I written about memory I might have told how, a year earlier, an astonishing discovery had come my way, quite by chance. In order to relax and settle down to sleep I began to write about some of the earliest recollections of my childhood, often mere images or vague sentiments devoid of context: my father hoisting me high over his head as I sat on the staircase; or playing by myself under a table with a fire engine; or bringing water to my earliest playmates and heroes, who came each week to collect the trash. My discovery was simply that in writing about these early memory images a vast store of remarkably detailed memories—in fact, an entire world of the most intense perceptions and feelings—began to unfold. I started to trace in the writing of these early memories, at first gropingly, though not without stylistic affectation, a world I assumed had been lost—no, that had indeed been lost, absent, “unconscious,” call it what you will.

Such writing succeeded where no simple act of will or decision could. Succeeded in what? Who could say that these memory sequences were not eminent fictions? True, my mother, to whom I later sent a number of such sketches, confirmed them in various points of detail. For example, in one I was able to reconstruct the entire floorplan of the house I lived in until I was three, starting with that red engine under the dining table, the sun shining through the window at one end of the room, the stairway barely visible in the adjacent room. Such confirmations frightened rather than emboldened me: I did not want to be Borges’ Funes el memorioso, laden to death with memories. Yet I did not need the confirmations to be disturbed by the power of these past presences that, far from being “haunting,” as they properly ought to have been, were (as Husserl says) leibhaft da, bodily present, in flesh and in blood.

None of these things, I am sure, would have actually found their way into the dissertation. Instead, I planned to write about the failure of neurophysiological research to render plausible accounts of long-term memory; about the more fruitful psychoanalytic hermeneutic of memory and forgetting; and I would have focused on discussions in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on time-consciousness and embodied memory. Yet behind all this brave science two problems preoccupied me. First, the problem of the disparity between voluntary and involuntary memory; second, something I called the problem of memory and affirmation. About the first I wrote (I quote myself now, with apologies, inasmuch as my proposal, marked “First Choice,” is before me as I write):

How is it that I appear to be both slave and master with respect to my memory? For the most part I am fed memories, am thrown into them by the vicissitudes of my situation; my memory flow seems autonomous, almost schizophrenic, perpetually announcing to me my bondage to a past. At the same time, I can remember; that is, I am able to pursue a memory, fasten onto it, and interrogate it. I appear to be able to adopt a stance over and above the involuntary flow of memory. But what sort of “I” is this? What must my consciousness be in order to do such a thing?

It is fortunate that I never executed this plan, which began with a lie. Never did I “pursue” a memory, much less “fasten onto it” and, philosopher-policeman, “interrogate it.” The writing that had opened up the dimension of memory to me was never so cocksure, sustained, or confident. It was on the contrary so vulnerable that after I resuscitated the plan to write about memory eight years ago I had to look on while the project died under my hand. Died by a kind of irony, an ironizing into which I slipped as soon as I had to deal with my earlier memory sketches, a coyness by which I sought to protect myself from myself. When I saw this inexpugnable irony, this paralyzing mockery in every line I sketched, I realized that On the Verge would never be written. For it would mean exposing and killing something that was my life. It was not simply that these memories were “dear” to me, that I “cherished” or “embraced” them nostalgically. They were both an embarras de richesse and an embarrassment. And this was the second problem, the question of memory and affirmation, which I had broached gingerly in my proposal in this way: “Memory has a way of transforming any content into a wondrous appearance, bathing even the most traumatic event in a soothing light, a yes-saying. To call this ‘distortion’ is perhaps to miss part of the meaning of the phenomenon of memory. ...” I wanted that soothing light for my writing, but it turned out to be a darkness. A darkness that irony and science could only disperse, never penetrate. No doubt it was Nietzsche who had moved me: I wanted to oppose the affirmation of eternal recurrence and amor fati to what Paul Ricoeur was calling “consent,” a word that seemed lukewarm and saccharine, whereas Nietzsche’s was fire and wine. Yet whatever that yes-saying might have been that guided my writing twenty years ago, irony and a kind of anxiety organized a wake, raised a din, and celebrated the untimely death of On the Verge.

Not that yes-saying is done. Only that through recurrence it has become rather more wakeful. More wakeful. Silence for those “essays” in the “phenomenology of memory” and, above all, those “autobiographical” musings. For the moment, a certain modest joy in these appendages, these bits of bone and cartilage. Disiecta membra may have some merit on their own, on their own give some pleasure.

D. F. K.