Introduction

as though in order to begin writing one did not have to forget or otherwise suppress most of what memory and reminiscence have meant; as though the entire matter of memory, reminiscence, recall, recollection, revery, and repetition were not an endless overture arising out of an absolute past and capable of infinite development; as though one were not always writing on the verge of both remembrance and oblivion alike. On the verge?

The dictionaries tell a long tale of the word verge, derived from the Latin virga, feminine in form yet referring to the shaft of a Gothic column (now obsolete) or to one of the male organs (also obsolete) or to any number of (obsolete) cylindrical objects. Virga is a branch, seedling, or switch; then a rod or wand; later it is a symbol of office, much as the pen with which one writes is an emblem of the scholar and poet. To be “within the verge” is to be within the area of jurisdiction represented by the verger’s scepter, infra virgam hospitii nostri, and soon verge comes to mean the precincts of a particular locale, its bounds or limits, and even the scope or range of a particular notion or category. More narrowly construed, the verge is the very edge, rim, or margin of that bounded space, its utmost limit; in this sense the word is used to suggest the end of a human life: “The mind was wandering, as it often does, on the dim verge of life.” The sly Regan has both this and the political sense in mind when she admonishes King Lear (Act II, scene iv) as follows:

Finally, to be “on a verge” is to be on the extreme edge of a bluff, cliff, or abrupt descent of any sort. Washington Irving on the Alhambra at Granada: “In the center of this basin yawned the mouth of the pit. Sanchica ventured to the verge and peeped in.” And not merely to be on it, since the verge is a brink “towards which there is progress or tendency.” The verge anticipates and thus precedes “the point at which something begins.” Something like a book, for example. Hence the familiar phrase “to be on the verge of,” as Sir Benjamin Brody employed it in his Psychological Inquiries: “We are here on the verge of an inquiry which has perplexed the greatest philosophers.”

As though the verge itself were not perplexing enough—rod, switch, pen, penis, precincts, realm, rim, and brink—there is a whole series of words to which it appears to be related. “To verge” is to skirt, circumvent, incline, or turn; to tend, descend, or veer off. All well and good. Yet virga is also discomfitingly close to both vir and virgo, and also to virago, not to breathe a word of potent vis or contagion virus. It seems to partake of all the opposites, as the following passage from the witches’ sabbath in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” intimates:

“And now my children, look upon each other.”

They did so; and . . . the wretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband, trembling before that unhallowed altar. . . .

“Welcome,” repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and triumph.

And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating on the verge of wickedness in this dark wood.

Thus the verge is both the vertical measure and the horizontal measure, the boundary marker and the greensward within, both spindle of time and stretch of space; both woman and man; paper and pen; hesitation and wickedness. Yet before I surrender fully to the viewless wings of The Oxford English DictionaryVultu hilari atque iocundoI would do well to recall the lesson of Ligeia’s eyesI cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely whereand then to begin. Again.

Until the modern age the word memory extended across the vast verge of the Latin memor, “to be mindful,” mens, “the mind,” and all the words that display the Indogermanic roots men-, mon-, mn-, words related to thinking, intending, and being conscious or mindful in any way. When Chaucer wished to assure his reader or listener that Arcite did not die or even lose consciousness as a result of the fall from his steed all he needed to write was, “For he was yet in memorie and alyve” (“The Knight’s Tale,” I. 2698). The sense of memory was so broad as to encompass both death and love: hē mnēmē is remembrance in general but also a record, memorial, or tomb; mnaomai means to turn one’s mind to a thing but also to woo and to solicit favor. Even the medieval German word minne, which we remember thanks to the minnesingers and Tristan’s ache of amorous love, derives from the sense of “having in mind.” How paltry the word memory has become since then! We no longer hold it in memorie and alyve—and the present book is unfortunately no exception to the rule. It reduces the sense of memory to what contemporary psychology and neurophysiology call “long-term memory,” that is, retention of persons, objects, or events from the distant past. Neither the acquisition nor retention of things we learn constitutes a part of the book, as though memory were not essential to the whole affair we call “education.” Neither genetics nor immunology plays a part in it—as though I were certain that it is only mere metaphor at work when we assert that template RNA “remembers” or that the host “recognizes” its own and “rejects” the foreign invader, as though one could forget genes and all the body and write ghostily of memory and reminiscence. Moreover, so many of the writers and thinkers who have devoted themselves to memory find no place here; they remain forgotten, along with their particular questions.¹ And still the book tries to do too much.

Part One inquires into “Typography, Iconography, Engrammatology.” It tries to show how the model for memory that has prevailed in Western thought from the Presocratics through modernity—the impressing of an imprint (typos)or the incising of a figure on the waxy surface of the mind or soul—seeks to solve the enigma of memory itself. That enigma has two aspects. First, memory appears to have both active and passive components or typographic styles. We remember without effort whatever “makes an impression” on us; but we can also “hammer something into our heads” in order not to forget. Passivity, however, most often prevails: Leopold Bloom may remember to pick up the soap for Molly, but he will also—in consequence of faulty mnemotechnic—forget to retrieve the housekey from the pocket of his discarded trousers. And whatever Bloom may do or not do on June 16, 1904, Blazes Boylan will be on his mind throughout the day and into the night. The common experience of memory as a faculty or power that we can exercise but also as a force that has a mind of its own seems to have shaped philosophical accounts of memory—as typography—early on. Yet typography is introduced to solve the enigma of memory under a second aspect. How do I know that what I am “now” remembering actually “corresponds” to what occurred in the past? What is the truth of memory? Whatever took place back then is (only as) past; it is bygone, irrecoverably absent; it is, as Heidegger said in one of his earliest lectures on time, vorbei. Yet my memory seems to put me in touch with such absent beings. At this instant, as I remember something far distant, what is it precisely that is present to me? Whatever it is, is it the same as what I once perceived or felt? Is it a copy or likeness derived from an original? Is it an icon of some now vanished presence? Typography proves to be in service to iconography . However, iconography itself proves to be a science of differences as well as likenesses. No typos can ever fully restore what one might have taken to be its “original.”

What then about the graphics of both typography and iconography? Impression or incision in memory is invariably described as a kind of writing, sometimes with illustrations, sometimes not. Memories are letters and words incised on a wax tablet or inscribed on a blank sheet of paper; they can be stored away, then retrieved at will and read at a later date. It makes little difference whether such inscription is being described by Socrates with a kind of childish delight or by a computer technologist taking a very grown-up pride in the achievements of his apparatus; it matters little whether it is Aristotle writing in terms of letters or Descartes speculating on tapestries of traces, threads, and nerve tubes; the contemporary neurophysiologist may even suppress all talk of engrams and appropriate the language of electrical circuitry and the micro-chip. Yet the problem remains one of encoding data, then storing, retrieving, and decoding it. Wax tablets, tabulae rasae, and even rude slabs or soft clumps of wax have a marvelous staying power. They are the hardest of hardware. Any account of memory and reminiscence must therefore try to say something about the convergence of typography and iconography in what I shall call engrammatology: discussion of the multifaceted role of inscription in memory processes—whether “passive” or “active,” whether of reception or retrieval—will conduct us to the point where we shall have to ask whether writing is a metaphor for memory or memory a metaphor for writing.

I begin with Aristotle’s Peri mnēmēs kai anamnēsis, “On Memory and Reminiscence,” only then returning to Plato in search of clues concerning the mystery of mnemic presence: the presence of what is past, of what has passed, of what was, as presence of the imprints (typoi), likenesses (eikones), and inscribed letters (grammata) of memory. It soon turns out to be not so much an inquiry into the psychology of the mnemic faculty as a question concerning the being of beings, the ways in which (past) beings show themselves (now) in presencing. Such self-showing has everything to do with time, as one would expect in the case of memory and reminiscence, time and images . Images that show themselves as images of things that once were but now no longer are. Yet one may well doubt whether Plato and Aristotle succeed in accounting for the mysterious appearance in the soul of the impressed image or typos, an image that is held to be a likeness or eikon of the thing now past, a likeness that is “read off” or “gleaned” from the image as though it were in fact a text composed of letters, grammata, a text that effaces itself before the full meaning and perfect (re)presentation of the past experience itself. Plato’s Theaetetus introduces with panache the typography of images on the wax tablet of the soul, the gift of Mnemosyne, Mother of the Muses, to mortals. Yet in Republic, Parmenides, Sophist, and Timaeus the iconography of such images in wax comes to crisis. And the effort to encode and decode such icons by means of the syllables and letters of a text—in Plato’s Phaedrus, Cratylus, Philebus, and again Sophist and Theaetetus—is fraught with difficulties of all kinds. Nor do Aristotle’s treatises On the Soul and On Memory and Reminiscence resolve the aporias of typography, iconography, and engrammatology. However, none of this prevents that tripartite mechanism from becoming the prevalent model for memory and reminiscence from antiquity onward. Insofar as the theme of memory pervades western philosophical anthropologies, psychologies, theologies, and even cosmologies, the mnemic mechanism comes to have profound consequences for the history of metaphysics as “ontotheology.”

In one way or another, typography, iconography, and engrammatology in the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies implicate both the body and soul of mortal rememberers: memory and reminiscence, revery and recollection, remembrance and recall prove to be eminently psychosomatic. Whereas the traditional oppositional pairs activity/passivity, thought/sensation, mind/matter, and spirituality/corporeality impose themselves on virtually all accounts of memory, reminiscence, and writing from antiquity through modernity and into the present, that imposition never fully succeeds, is never fully convincing. If for Plato’s Cratylus the body is the burial crypt and prison cell of the soul, it is also the hospice that protects and rescues the soul. Furthermore, it is the soul’s semaphore—the signaller and giver of signs. Such signs, whether as typographic vestiges or engrammatological notations, are central to Augustine’s account of the iconographic memory of the soul: the engrammatology of memory reverts willy-nilly to typography in the signs and spaces of the body, on which the soul’s iconography thoroughly depends. On the far side of the mnemotechnical tradition, the tradition that preserves through the ages the hermetic art of “inner writing,” Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind also seeks to liberate the mind totally from its corporeal integument—that is to say, from an inherently “unstable” and “unreliable” memory, the weak reed of all cognition. Yet the typography, iconography, and engrammatology of sensation and intellection alike indicate that flight from corporeal memory to pure intuited presence in the mind is futile: if the analogy that is naturally suitable for both sensation and intellection is that of signet ring on wax tablet, whereby the reading of the resultant figures by the mind’s eye ostensibly stands in iconic relation to a gleaning of the absent things themselves, then Descartes’ distrust of memory—where that analogy has its ancient domicile—betrays the fact that the confidence in intuited presence, the confidence that undergirds an entire tradition, is chimerical. Thus Descartes’ efforts to distill an “intellectual memory” from a grosser corporeal variety founded in the very trope that slips unobtrusively in and out of his texts on the body, the soul, and ideas: “I do not posit any other difference between the soul and its ideas than that between a piece of wax and the diverse impressions it can receive” (Letter to Mesland, May 2, 1644). If the soul is a waxen gland, then the ensouled creature is dead; it has, as Kierkegaard would say, merely neglected to wake up to that fact.

That the soul is a waxen gland wholly at the mercy of a mimetic typography is the lesson of Descartes’ physiology, as elaborated in his Treatise on Man. An account of memory and reminiscence in Cartesian physiology is left to ponder the ultimate oxymoron of the system: the frenetic “animal spirits” reenact in microcosm the comedy of an impossible mimesis, a botched iconography, in which all hopes for the restoration of pure presence are dashed. Neither the “spirits” nor “little gland H” nor the nerve tubes leading to “region B” of the brain learn to decipher the figures that are stamped or woven there. Engrammatology fails, though again it is as if no one notices, no one remembers. Not even when Descartes demonstrates that the human being as such is a mimetic effect, an icon, a “type”—an automaton.

By rights, one ought to pursue the mnemic model of typography, iconography, and engrammatology through detailed readings of the British empiricists and the eighteenth-century French and nineteenth-century German materialists, mechanists, and epiphenomenalists. Yet even a brief look at Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, and an even briefer glimpse at David Hartley (through the critical eyes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), will convince us of the staying-power of the ancient model for memory. In contemporary empirical and cognitive psychologies, neurophysiology, and biochemistry, as well as data-processing and information technology, the selfsame model perdures—even if wax has given way to magnetic tape or the floppy disc. That is why Coleridge’s proto-phenomenological critique of Hartley’s associationism still strikes us as relevant: we recognize in it the lineage that also produces the phenomenologies of Erwin Straus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. These phenomenological accounts—whether of sensibility, perception, imagination, or memory—challenge the hegemony of typography, iconography, and engrammatology. They more than challenge it. Merleau-Ponty in particular finds himself on the verge of a new way of thinking about memory, one that is embedded in the lived body and the flesh of the world. He invokes what he calls the “hollow” (creux, related to our “crux” and “crucible”) of “wild being,” the hollow or clearing in visibility and in subjectivity as a whole, as though in distant reminiscence of Plato’s khōra, the “receptacle of becoming,” as elaborated in Timaeus. The hollow heralds the passing of an epoch of mnemic metaphysics. It marks the inception of a memory beneath the traditional ontotheological uses of recollection, a memory no longer in thrall to presence. Merleau-Ponty leads us to the very verge of a past that—as he says—has never been present.

At first blush, the Freudian typography of effraction or breaching, elaborated in the famous (or notorious) metapsychological venture of 1895, the “Project” toward a “Scientific Psychology,” seems to conform to the traditional mnemic model. Yet the stakes here are undoubtedly higher than they ever were before. Effraction occurs, not on wax or in pallid automatons, but in the flesh of protoplasm; this more excruciating typography involves trauma, repression, enforced oblivion, bodily suffering, psychic misery, and the immanence and imminence of death. Freud’s energetics of quantity-flow via breaching and his economy of resistance by means of contact-barriers confront a problem quite similar to that faced by Cartesian physiology: again and again the “Project” appeals to the very phenomena it is supposed to be explaining, presupposes what it claims to be accounting for. Worse, it makes its own explanandum utterly impossible. The mnemic typography of effraction requires that Freud distinguish between two types of neural systems, the one (ɸ) permeable and responsible for perception, the other (Ψ) impermeable and so providing a matrix for inscribed memories. However, the very breaching of contact-barriers in Ψ through the typography of effraction tends to reduce that system to ɸ—to the very perceptual system that Ψ was called upon to supplement. Memory, the very life of the psyche, remains mysterious.

Freud’s 1895 “Project,” no matter how hastily sketched, no matter how faulty, is the highly complex culmination of typography, iconography, and engrammatology. Culmination and crisis. This becomes particularly clear in Freud’s discussion of “quality signs” and “reality signs,” by which the psychic system knows and remembers its parlous world. Such signs are the en-grammatological hallmarks of his system. In the third and final part of his “Project,” on the “normal processes in Ψ,” quality and reality signs assume the explicitly linguistic character that up to that point they had manifested only implicitly; they function as inscribed, incised, yet fundamentally written and read linguistic signs. Not surprisingly, these engrammatological tracings are said to be essential for “ego-formation,” consciousness, and thought, all the traits of human subjectivity. Ironically, the engrammatological apparatus that Freud thirty years later finds best suited to serve as an icon of psychic processes as a whole (especially the process that grants perdurant memory traces), namely, the famous “Mystic Writing Pad” of 1925, fails as dramatically as the 1895 “Project.” Fails by reason of a lapsus calami, a slip of the stylus, a vicissitude of the verge, as Freud’s Notiz on the mystic writing pad obfuscates the two things it most wants to bring to the fore by way of its “analogy.” Which would suggest that Freud’s is not a career advancing from physiology to grammatology but a sustained venture in engrammatology. But that—like all typographic, iconographic, and engrammatological matters—is a difficult story. Suffice to say that in the end psychoanalysis is not about the restitution and restoration of past glories: effraction or breaching is not the advance guard of a psychoanalytic Church Militant, but the embarrassed science of the vulnerability, exigency, and even calamity of an outraged life. A life that is ever on the verge.

Part Two of the present volume—for what I have described above is the movement of the three chapters of Part One—takes a second look at this life on the verge of memory, reminiscence, and writing. How does the engrammatology of memory and reminiscence relate to the grammatology envisaged more than two decades ago by Jacques Derrida?² No doubt, the thought of the trace of writing unites the two projects. Yet if the trace of grammatology pertains to a system of differences—and to difference with an a—we may anticipate that Derrida’s project will not be in service to anything like iconography. Indeed, if Derridean grammatology announces the closure of the metaphysics of presence, the mnemic model that promises to restore the presence of the past will itself be disengaged and set aside. That model nevertheless allows us to pose some questions concerning what Rodolphe Gasche calls the “quasi-transcendental” status of the Derridean notions of trace, arche-writing, arche-synthesis, and differance. Such questions come to a head in Derrida’s invocation of “the absolute past,” the past hinted at by Merleau-Ponty, as a past that “has never been present,” the past of a radically irrecoverable pastness and passivity. To envisage such a past, however darkly, is to have experienced the failure of the traditional model for memory. To the extent that typography, iconography, and engrammatology characterize an essential operation in the Platonic text, the failure of the model spells the dissolution of what one might call “Plato’s dream,” the dream that by some pharmaceutical wizardry the noxious effects of writing can be neutralized, and the “good” scripture of reminiscence distilled from the “bad” script of texts.³

The doom of Plato’s dream is doubtless a long time coming. One would have to examine the effects of the dissolution patiently in a whole range of texts, only a few of which will come to the fore here. Yet if inscription of memories in the soul brings to crisis the very distinction between the inside and outside of mind or spirit, we can anticipate that Hegel’s Erinnerung, “interiorizing remembrance,” will have to play an essential role on the verge of memory, reminiscence, and writing. On the verge of remembrance tout court. Whether in the mature system of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences or in the earlier Philosophical Propaedeutics and Phenomenology of Spirit, “interiorizing remembrance” seems to be both essential to the system and essentially anomalous there. Erinnerung occupies an impossible place in Hegel’s thought of memory proper, Gedächtnis. Remembrance not only exceeds the system as a whole but also causes it to unravel. The fact that Erinnerung and Gedächtnis stand on either side of Hegel’s account of language, signs, reading, and writing has something to do with their excessive, disruptive character. There can be neither a phenomenology nor a philosophy of the subject without Erinnerung and Gedächtnis. Yet with them there can only be a thinking that shatters confinements without ever achieving the vaunted freedom of the absolute. Absolute knowing—insofar as it rescues itself from total oblivion—remains on the verge.

If the mnemic dialectic of interiority and exteriority no longer dominates Martin Heidegger’s thought, his thinking devotes itself nonetheless to commemoration. Such commemoration (Andenken, Nachdenken, Gedenken) commences with the fundamental ontology elaborated in his magnum opus, Being and Time.⁴ In Heidegger’s analysis of ecstatic-horizonal temporality, the one ecstasis of time that receives a novel name is that of the past—of which, Aristotle says, memory is. Whereas Heidegger accepts the traditional designations for future and present, he rejects altogether the notion of Vergangenheit, “the past,” “the bygone.” He analyzes instead what he calls the temporal ecstasis of “having-been,” the perfect form, Gewesenheit. One might wonder whether his emphasis on what has been, ge-wesen, retains something of Hegel’s insistence on essence, Wesen, and whether one ought to contrapose to both Hegel and Heidegger Nietzsche’s forceful “It was.” The imperfect, the imperfection of verging time, as opposed to time’s perfection.

If Gewesenheit is the ecstasis of disposition and repetition, of the fundamental mode of mood, and especially the mood of anxiety, we will want to examine closely these less than perfect aspects of fundamental ontology. Something like a gap or chasm opens up in Heidegger’s analysis of the temporal unfolding of anxiety; the attentive reader is suddenly stranded on the verge of that gulf. Anxiety is to provide a “hold” (Halt) for our essentially oblivious existence, an existence for which the forgetting of being is always more primordial than any remembrance of time will ever be. The gap that opens in the text and displaces the fundamental-ontological axis of (in)appropriateness (Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit) will allow no hold whatsoever. Neither Heidegger’s use of Nietzsche’s Use and Disadvantage of History for Life on behalf of his own notion of “historicity” nor his own later meditation on Mnemosyne in “What Calls for Thinking?” can provide the hold he seeks. While memory gathers thought, the granting of what is to be thought withdraws. Heidegger’s thinking early and late leaves us on the verge of withdrawal and expropriation, where nostalgia for the heartland and homeland of memory strives with letting-be. Letting what be? Nothing else than what is “bygone,” the spurned passing by and away, the constitutive Vorbei! of human existence as perceived in Heidegger’s earliest writings. But also the Vorbeigang of divinity, the passing of “the last god.” Nothing is more helpful in banishing nostalgia than Nietzsche’s reminders, in the second and third treatises of On the Genealogy of Morals, concerning the painful prehistory of memory, the typography of punishment and incision. A typography, needless to relate, without icons or idols.

Can we say “yes” to such passing and such pain? Or must one remain on the verge even of affirmation? Not so much by withholding assent, even less by a begrudging refusal to engage, than by devoting oneself to a thinking of affirmation that is both suspicious of redemption and susceptible of yes-saying? A hesitant thinking that traces an experience of mourning, and the default of mourning, in the direction of mirth? The tonalities of laughter, from bitterness to mockery to potlatch, raise the variable music of such mourning. Pierre Klossowski’s thinking of Nietzschean eternal recurrence as embodied, pulsional anamnesis and amnesia offers a point of departure for such thinking. Derrida’s recent reflections on “impossible mourning,” the promise of memory, and the double-yes of Joycean affirmation—an affirmation of life down to the very ashes—are its major way stations. Along with commemorations of both Hegel and Heidegger, who are not to be forgotten.

Affirmation leaves the recuperative and restorative machine of typography, iconography, and engrammatology to its own devices. It turns instead, as Nietzsche will always have anticipated, to the verge of musical ideas. Fragmented ideas, no doubt, of mirth and mourning, as though in order to begin