History and Theory 47 (October 2008), 331-350

Wesleyan University 2008 ISSN: 0018-2656

Memory, memorials, and commemoration

Anita Kasabova
ABSTRACT

According to a popular view, the past is present here and now. This is presentism combined with endurantism: the past continuously persists through time to the present. By
contrast, I argue that memories, memorials, and histories are of entities discontinuous with
present experiences, and that the continuity between past and present in them is a construct. Memories, memorials, and histories are semantic means for dealing with the past.
My presupposition that past and present are different is supported by grammar: as verbal
tenses show, the past is not present here and now, for otherwise it would not be past. A
failure to note this difference is a lack of chronesthesia, a sense of time specific to human
beings. I argue that presentism fails to account for the temporal structures of memory and
the changes in perspective as we switch from the present to a past situation. My account
is perdurantist in the sense that it allows for temporal parts of things such as memorials or
tombstones, as well as events such as wars or commemorations. But my main goal is to
outline a semantic approach to the past: the tie between past and present actions and events
is the semantic groundconsequence relation: a past event is the antecedent grounding a
present situation, explaining why it is the case. In addition, I show how we refer to the
past by means of two rhetorical figures of speech: synecdoche, using the (emblematic-)
partwhole relation for relating the past to the present by transposing its sense; and anaphor, which has a deictic functionit points back toward the past. In references to the
past, the deictic field is a scene visualized by the speaker and addressees: the deictic field
is transposed from a perceptual to an imaginary space.
I. Is the past present? Presentism and its problems

A fundamental philosophical question is, how should we deal with the past? I
will examine this question by considering it within the context of memory. Here
is a brief review of the current metahistorical debate. Eelco Runia cites the opposition formulated by Pierre Nora between history and memory as two opposed
approaches to the past: while the historian reconstructs that which is no longer,
memory is alive and evolving. In the case of history, the temporal link between
. This paper was presented at the international colloquium Lestemps du monde et de lhistoire
organized by the New Bulgarian University in December 2007. I thank Franois Hartog for useful
comments, as well as Ivan Kasabov for discussing the issues involved, and Boriana Piryova for
pertinent questions. In particular, I wish to thank Brian Fay and the anonymous referees for their
constructive remarks that helped me to revise this essay.
. Eelco Runia,Burying the Dead, Creating the Past, History and Theory 46 (October 2007),
313-325. Runia cites the English translation of Pierre Noras Lieux de Mmoire [1984, 1992]: The
Era of Commemoration, in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996-1997), III, 606-638, and the General Introduction, in Rethinking
France: Les Lieux de Mmoire (New York: Columbia University Press, 19961997), I, vii-xxii.

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the present and the past is discontinuous, whereas in the case of memory, the
temporal link is continuous. On this view, memory is a depository or storehouse
of human actions and events, whereas historians are dissociated from the object
of their study: they investigate the past by registering, classifying, and analyzing
human actions and events. In response, Runia dismisses what he calls Noras
botanist conception of history because it puts the past at a distance and does
not account for the presence of the past. He suggests a reformulation of the opposition between history and memory as an opposition between history and commemoration. Yet he also attempts to reformulate the historians role (at least the
academic conception of the historian) by determining history as human-made
and by bringing it closer to commemoration.
For Runia, history is accessible to us and comprehensible for us because we are
the ones who made it. Commemoration is an attempt to account for unimaginable
events caused by our species: catastrophes produced not by nature but by human
acts, such as the Holocaust. Who are we that this could have happened? We cannot deny that it happened, but was it really we who did it? The we commemorating the event is not qualitatively the same we who produced the event. The
generation commemorating the Holocaust was not born when it was produced
and suffered, and this generation cannot go backto the anterior pastto the
time when this act was committed. According to Runia, this is the reason why
people make history and destroy the histories they live with, for they lack a sufficient reason for explaining these histories, that is, for considering themselves as
agents. I think Runia makes a good point but he does not argue for it or explain
how it is possible. How can present commemorators re-identify themselves as
past agents? I would like to adumbrate those conditions necessary for the re-identification by means of which later generations are able to conceive themselves as
agents of unimaginable events that occurred at an antecedent time.
Franois Hartog objects to both Nora and Runia that they (and others) misunderstand memory, in particular collective memory, regarding it as a vivid recognition and a faithful reproduction in opposition to history, which they regard
as being external and detached. For Hartog, we should talk about a change of
regimes of memory: oral societies are ruled by the regime of the transmission
of memory, whereas today we are ruled by a memory obliterated by the written
word. Todays memory-regime is a voluntary reconstruction, made possible by
an absence of transmission.
In what follows, I take this insight from Hartog and argue that memorythat
is, the conscious and personal memory of past actions and eventsis a retroactive
reconstruction of the past and that what is transmitted is the sense of these actions
and events. As for Runia, his rejection of a representationalist account of the past
comes at the price of importing the past into the present. Below, I argue against
the endurantist presentism of which Runias position is emblematic, namely, that
the past is present here and now. As grammar shows by means of verbal tenses,
. Runia rejects the representationalist conception of history (Presence, History and Theory 45
[February 2006], 1-29), as well as Noras project of commemoration, the famous memory-sites (Les
Lieux de mmoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 7 vols. [Paris: Editions Gallimard, 19841992]).
. I thank Franois Hartog for this remark during an informal communication.

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the past is not present; it was present and, once it qualifies as past, it is no longer
present. Consequently, in references to the past, the indexicals here and now
are shifted. I explain this in section III.a. In addition, in our experience of the
present, we have a sense of the past and the future, not because the past is present,
but because our sense of the present comprises the (immediate) past. This sense
is chronesthesia or time-awareness. As William James put it, our experience of
the present is not like a knifes edge but has a certain (specious) breadth, as if we
were sitting on a saddle from which we look at two temporal directions, forwards
and backwards. So, if we were unable to grasp the past, we would also be unable
to grasp what is happening at present.
This notion of a blurred present with indeterminate boundaries accompanies
a perdurantist account of events and actions as persisting occurrents, that is,
with different temporal parts or phases that can be accounted for by a tensed
theory of time: the structure of time corresponds to the structure of grammar
(at least of Indo-European languages). A memorial to the anonymous soldier
existed yesterday, exists today, and, unless someone destroys it, will exist tomorrow. By contrast, Runias account is endurantist: he claims that past events are
wholly present at any moment of their existence, so they are continuants without
temporal extension. This claim accompanies presentism, or the view that only
the present is real and that, necessarily, everything is present. One worry is that
this endurantist version of presentism confuses occurrents, that is, things that
persist by having temporal as well as spatial parts (namely, events such as wars,
commemorations, deaths, and burials), with continuants or physical objects that
have a spatial location and persist by enduring in time (such as books, memorials, or tombstones thaton the endurantist viewhave no temporal parts since
they exist as a whole at any given moment). I think this worry can be reduced
if we consider memorials and tombstones as continuants with genidentity, that
is, with an existential relation holding between their temporal parts or phases, a
relation that accounts for their identity across time in terms of their genesis from
one moment to the next. A memorial erected yesterday may be a ruin tomorrow,
but while it persists it instantiates an occurrent, such as a war or a revolution.
On this view, occurrents are components underlying continuants: occurrents are
not temporal parts of continuants (a soldiers death is no temporal part of his or
her tombstone), but they are related to continuants by a groundconsequence
relation: without the occurrent soldiers death there would be no continuant
tombstone. Perhaps occurrents could be considered as necessary filaments of
the continuants genidentical thread, since they compose a continuant across its
temporal stages. However that may be, my aim is to show how a continuant is
instantiated or presented by the sense of an occurrent as an exemplary component

. William James, Principles of Psychology [1890] (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), I,
609.
. On the temporal parts of physical objects, see Theodore Sider, Four-Dimensionalism: An
Ontology of Persistence and Time (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); on
endurance, persistence, and invariance, as well as continuants and occurrents, see Peter Simons, The
Thread of Persistence, in Persistence, ed. C. Kanzian (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2008), 165-183.

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of the continuant. The occurrent can instantiate a continuant as a whole because

it is an exemplary or defining part of that continuant.
Ii. The semantics of the past and the sense of the word memory

How does memory deal with the past? Memory, that is, the conscious and living
memory of human actions, only apparently presents a continuous link between
the present and the past. Both the memory of human actions and history presuppose a temporal gap or distance between the time of occurrence of an event or
action and the time of its recollection; they presuppose the experience of before
and after. In addition, both approaches to the past presuppose a sequential temporal order and a semantic dependence-relation between the antecedent and the
consequent. This dependence-relation is denoted by the conjunct because: the
antecedent (the past action or event) grounds the consequent (the present action
or event) by giving the reason of the consequent (why it occurred). Thus the
groundconsequence relation obtains in consecutive clauses, such as: he is in
prison because he committed a crime. The antecedent explains the consequent.
But the two temporal phases before and after are relative to the present position now, as the grammar of Indo-European languages shows (since they have
at least three tenses). Verbal tenses or inflexions indicate the time of a narrated
event relative to the time at which the narrator is speaking. Verbal tenses function as referential operators and, pace presentism, we need temporal propositions,
especially for dealing with the past. The temporal distance of a retrospective
account is linguistically expressed by tenses: the before-past (ante-preterit),
simple past (preterit), and after-past (post-preterit) are the main tenses expressing
distant and nearer past times with regard to a zero-point now.
The past has several tenses, but the grammatical structure expressed by verbal
inflexions such as is or was is based on the semantic dependence relation between
ante and post. This sequential ordering relation is necessary for expressing
temporal positions. The main divisions in time (in Indo-European languages) are
based on the ante-post principle: positions in time are constructed from a theoretical zero-point now back to the post-preterit, preterit, and ante-preterit tenses, and
forward to the ante-future, future, and post-future. In addition, a past-tensed statement also characterizes the unmentioned time of the utterance, since the time of the
utterance is not represented in the content of a statement in the past tense. For the
present tense is temporally neutral; it is the zero-case of temporal indication.
The relation between present results of past events and the past events themselves is expressed by a perfect that tends to become a preterit or aorist, as in
he (has) passed out because he (has) drunk too much. Provided it bears the
same relation to a past period as the perfect does to the present, a retrospective
past time is expressed as the ante-preterit: I have seen him last week becomes
I had seen him last week. In addition, the use of the imperfect and the perfect
tenses modulates our focus on the past. As Otto Jespersen put it, the imperfect
is used by him to whom one day is as a thousand years and the aorist by him
. I have developed this view in Kasabova, (On Autobiographical
Memory) (Sofia: New Bulgarian University Press, 2007).

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to whom a thousand years are as one day. We use the aorist or historical past
when we condense series of actions as one, editing or abstracting from episodes
we consider inessential, while we use the imperfect for focusing on a particular
action without abbreviating its duration. Using the aorist, we focus on the past
from a birds-eye perspective that gives a panoramic or small-scale view of a
situation, whereas we use the imperfect for a close-up view that shows the subject
on a large scale.
Unlike the notion of commemoration, the notion of memory (at least as regards
conscious and personal memory) implies that we consider ourselves as agents:
when we retrieve an event from our past experience we construct the past by
positioning it and taking it as true. We speak of objects and actions that no longer
exist but which are the referents of our linguistic assertions; these objects are
things in virtue of which our assertions are true or false. If we could not refer
back to previous positions in time, there would be no memory of intentional acts
or no autobiographical memory. Nor would we be able to study past events. Thus
memory depends on our capacity of chronesthesia, our sense of the past, enabling
us to bring back to the present our experience of an event that took place at an
anterior time. This is why the past of our own recollections is constructed retroactively, and the past becomes past under a particular description.
Presentists of Runias stripe would reject the claim that the past is a retroactive
reconstruction, just as they would reject the claim that the past is represented in
the present. One ground for doing so is a realist view with regard to the past. On
the realist view, a statement about a past event is true or false independently of our
knowledge of this event. Runia subscribes to a strong brand of realism by claiming
that the past is present here and now: the past invades the present despite historians attempts to put it at a distance. Far from being represented or reproduced in
the present, the past manifests its presence in the here and now. The past is not
present by representationaccording to Runia representation is a metaphorical
figure that alienates the past; rather, the past is conserved in an underlying way,
by means of temporal transposition or metonymy. Runia claims that metonymy
brings about a transfer of presence rather than a transfer of meaning.10 His example
of the metonymic presence of the past is the touristic pilgrimage to battlefields
or sites of concentration camps. He explains this pilgrimage as a desire for commemoration, a memory boom that he thinks is an important current historical
phenomenon.11 He seems to consider the past as a twin world, existing here and
now, in a different dimension he calls metonymic. But metonymy is a form of
linguistic exposition that operates semantically and not physically. Below (in part
III), I present my view of the role of rhetorical figures in transposing the past.

. Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar [1924] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), 276.
. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 249.
10. Runia, Presence, 1.
11. RuniaBurying the Dead, Creating the Past, 315.

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Ii.a Memory or our access to the past

Regarding our access to the past, it seems useful to consider the etymology
of memory. The words memory, memorial, and commemoration are Latinisms derived from the Greek nouns mnemon and Mnemosyne. The latter is the
mother of the Muses and counterpoint to Lethe, the personification of forgetfulness (oblivio) or loss of memory. People who have lost their memory have lost
access to reality and the truth about themselves; that is why loss of memory
(lethe) is paired with truth (aletheia) in the sense of that which is not forgotten.12
Mnemosyne personifies the conservation of memory by registering past events
and bringing them back into the present, thus functioning as a truth-bearer of
statements about the past. The type of memory personified by Mnemosyne is the
living memory of human actions and intentionsthat which is currently called
autobiographical or episodic memory, namely, the capacity to orient oneself
toward the past and to bring back into the present an experience that occurred at
an anterior time.
Mnemosyne has a commemorative aspect, particularly in oral cultures: if we
recall someone today, this recollection is the work of the mother of the poets
Muses. While oral cultures are ruled by the transmission of memory, this transmission is no high-fidelity reproduction of the past: what is transmitted is the
sense of past events and actions achieved by transposing or shifting the index of
the context from the perceptual mode of lived or immediately given situations to
the memory mode of reproduced situations. If memory allows for vivid recognition, this is because memory gives the conditions for re-identification, namely
that today we can situate a past episode in a spatio-temporal context. Recognition
presupposes cognition or cognitive access to the past; in what follows I suggest
that this access is possible by transposing the deictic coordinates of a hic et nunc
situation in the egocentric mode to the anaphoric mode of an as if situation. Thus
a representation or presentification of past actions makes possible a cognition of
what is and what will be. For if we forget who we were or what we did in the
past, we also ignore, at least in part, who we are and what we do at present; that
is to say, we are mentally disoriented or derangedwe are not in compos mentis.
Hence the notion of memory is determined by the opposition between retrieval
and forgetting: the capacity to retain (meminisse), preserve, retrieve (reminisci),
and recollect (recordari) on one hand, and the incapacity to retain, preserve,
retrieve, and recollect on the other.
What are the effects of preserving the past? First, we should follow Aristotle
by distinguishing between the retentive and retrieving functions of memory: the
former preserves an event from forgetting and erasure, while the latter recalls it
and brings it back to the present.13 As I shall argue, forgetting is a necessary con12. Cf. Samuel Ijsseling, Drie Godinnen: Mnemosyne, Demeter, Moira (Amsterdam: Boom,
1998), 25-26.
13. Aristotle, On Memory, transl. J. I. Beare, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes,
Bollingen Series 71 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), I, 714-720. As does Plato,
Aristotle considers recollection (anamnesis) as retrieving an experience or anterior cognition (451a,
29-31). But Aristotle draws two distinctions: (1) between the capacity of retrieval (anamnesis) and
the capacity of retention (mneme), and (2) between retention as an act (the retention of an experience)

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dition for enabling retrieval, because the conscious memory of human actions and
intentions is characterized by selectivity rather than storage: we remember some
things rather than others. But there are different approaches to the problem of
preserving the past. In the context of oral and written memory-regimes, to borrow
Franois Hartogs term, this problem is expressed as a distinction between memory and writing. While Aristotle distinguishes between the functions of memory,
Plato distinguishes between what he considers to be internal and external properties of memory. This is how the problem of preserving the past is addressed in the
Phaedrus: in the myth of Theuth, the Egyptian god tells king Thamus that writing
is the potion for memory and for wisdom. Thamus replies that the discovery of
writing will introduce forgetfulness in the soul of those who learn it: they will
not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing. . . .
You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding.14
Plato expresses the distinction between retention and retrieval as a distinction
between remembering and reminding. Memory is put on a par with remembering and transmitting past information by word of mouth, whereas reminding is
considered as a function that is external to memory.15 Reminding is entailed by
writing, and writing introduces forgetfulness because writing obliterates memory.
Writing things down in order to preserve them from being forgotten thus becomes
a way of burying them. So, does the historian write in order to bury actions and
events, so that they may be forgotten? Runia seems to think that this is the case by
accusing the historian of keeping the past at a distance. Yet historians are rarely
eyewitnesses to the events they write about. They are at a distance, unlike the
writers of autobiographical texts or memoirs, such as the one by Mahmoud Darwish entitled, precisely, Memory for Forgetfulness. This is an eyewitness account
of the war in Beirut.16 For Darwish, the act of writing is a cure of memory in that
it enables forgetfulness, while the text that is the result of this act is a memorial built against forgetfulnessnot the authors but that of those who are at a
spatial or temporal distance from the event. To them, information about the past
is transmitted by means of writing, enabling others to understand it. Darwishs
case shows that, while retention is personal, retrieval (or recollection) can also
be collective.
Likewise, Herodotus and Thucydides wrote things down in order to make sure
they would not be forgotten and to enable a living recollection of past actions
and events in the presenta present to the configuration of which those actions
and events had significantly contributed. Interestingly, Thucydides writes about
events of his own time that he witnessed (the Peloponnesian War between Athens
and Sparta) and not of a past that was distant for him. So a historian can also be
an eyewitness. Personal recollections or autobiographical memories, if they are to
and the disposition not to forget. In addition, the retentive capacity necessitates a temporal gap (prin
chronisthenai) (449b, 24-25). That is why memory belongs only to beings with a sense of (the passage
of) time. Cf. Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (Providence: Brown University Press, (1971), 1.
14. Plato, Phaedrus, transl. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 79.
15. Thus L. Robins translation of the Phaedrus uses the noun mmoire (Paris: Gallimard,
1950).
16. Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995).

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yield knowledge, must have direct informational access to past events, as well as
an I-perspective that enters into a perception with a sense of ownership. If my
recollection is to qualify as a source of knowledge, it has to be grounded in my
perception and I have to be aware of that perception as being mine. When I say
that I remember drinking a glass of red wine last night, I am aware of referring
to the source of my previous experience. Obviously, the first-person perspective
is no safeguard against confabulation or remembering things that did not happen.
Since recollections are (re-)constructions with a perceptual and non-conceptual
content, they allow for distortions or the possibility of misrepresentation. In my
view, the correctness conditions for recollections and narratives should allow for
gradations between truth values (as in fuzzy logic), because they are systematizations of acquired knowledge with degrees of cognitive and semantic indeterminacy. I return to this point in section III.
If this is so, that is, if historical accounts involve indeterminacy, could we not
extend the notion of history to include memoirs such as Darwishs or the little
known Anonyma, a remarkable eyewitness account of the last days of World
War II and the first two months of the Russian occupation of Berlin?17 Beyond a
personal experience, the latter documents a past time that has gained in historical
significance: a diary exemplifying the spring of 1945 in Berlin from the losers
point of view. As the author puts it: A strange time. To experience history at
first hand, things that later will be chanted and narrated. But nearby they dissolve
into burdens and fears. History is very taxing.18 Two questions are in order: since
in its making, history seems to evoke affective reactions rather than conceptual
reasoning, could we not accept that history, as a human-made product, involves
a perspective on events that have elapsed or are elapsing into the past (and thus a
temporal limit between the presently lived moment and the past)? But mere proximity (of the narrator to the actions and events he or she describes) is not a clearcut criterion for differentiating between historical and non-historical accounts.
Second: is historical perspective expressible only in the third person?
II.b Why memory is not a storehouse of past experiences

Now, let me explain why forgetting is necessary for retrieval and recall, two functions of the mental capacity called autobiographical memory. The retrieval of
events in our personal lives concerns those events that are meaningful for us. I
suggest that our access to the past is semantic, that is, it is an access to the sense
of the past. We remember some things rather than others because they stand in a
sense-making relation of antecedent and consequent, where the former explains
why the latter is the case. An upshot of this is that if we were to remember every
single detail of our lives, we would be unable to understand (or make sense of)
them. We would have no recollections, properly speaking, if we were to function entirely in the mode of retention. Alexander Luria discussed the case of the
mnemonist Shereshevskii who recalled every detail of what he had to memorize
17. Anonyma: Eine Frau in Berlin. Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen vom 20. April bis 22. Juni 1945
(Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag, 2003).
18. Ibid., 26, my translation.

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but could not understand what he had memorized because he was unable to forget
or recall selectively. Shereshevskii could not abstract from the details of whatever
he had to retain and so he was unable to cognize the principles, reasons, or sense
of what he memorized. His failure to forget, and thus his inability to select, was in
part a cognitive failure, a failure due in part to the absence of a gap between past
experiences and present memories.19 To put it another way: if the temporal link
between past experiences and present memories were continuous, we would have
no sufficient criteria for individuating our memories. Only a presentist would
have no problems with this situation, and I now want to show why the presentists
account is an unsatisfactory and insufficient way of dealing with the past.
An analogous case to Shereshevskii is that of Ireneo Funes, the hero of Borgess
short story, Funes the Memorious.20 Ireneo suffers from his capacity to retain
every detail of his experiences, and that is why he cannot understand his own
experiences, which, in his mind, are present contiguously. He lives in a present
that is too full, and his problem is not his inability to represent the past but rather
his inability to select or abstract. Presentism implies an account of memory as a
present storehouse of past events. But this view fails to explain how we acquire
knowledge. Shereshevskii and Ireneo each have an infallible memory that stores
their experiences down to the last detail but, since this memory is incapable of
forgetting, it lacks the plasticity necessary for consolidating a coherent sequence
of past experiences by economizing or abstracting from uncountable details that,
because they are uncountable, are irrelevant to the construction of the sequence.
Thus Ireneos system of enumeration is doomed to fail because he lacks the principles of enumeration.
Not only does the storehouse model not explain how we acquire knowledge,
it does not even account for how we retain information. The act of retention also
has a temporal structure (albeit a discrete one), and presentism fails to account
for this structure because it does not allow for temporal parts. If we deny that
physical continuants, such as plants, persons, or memorials, have temporal parts,
how do we account for the changes through time, say, in a person who changes
from a child to an adult? A presentist would say that there is no need to explain
how a continuant changes through time, since only the present is real: now the
person is an adult and the child he or she was doesnt exist, since the child is not
temporally present. Thus the presentist eliminates the problem of inconsistency
by reducing temporal structure to the present: being a child and being an adult are
two inconsistent properties that cannot belong to the same being at the same time.
While this view may be conveniently myopic to preclude queries about identity
through time, it fails to account for non-present objects and their non-present
times. So, if you are a presentist who wants to talk about the past, you have to
import the past into the present.
For the presentist, memory stores past experiences by importing these experiences into the present, so our past experiences are present here and now. But how
19. Alexander Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist [1968] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987).
20. Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious [1942], in Ficciones, ed. J. Sturrock, 1962, http://
evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/borges.htm. Accessed June 20, 2008.

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do these experiences persist? And are the present experiences the same ones as
yesterdays or last years experiences? The presentist may assume that the past
is unchanging: that is, one and the same experience is first retained and then
retrieved. So we have the same experience now as we had yesterday or last year.
I think the presentist claim that we have unchanging past experiences is counterintuitive: I do not have the same perspective of my childhood experiences now
and when I was a child. My past experiences appear to me with regard to my
relative position: when I was nine years old, I had a different memory of my
earlier childhood experiences than when I was a teenager with additional childhood memories and a different hic et nunc; I have yet another perspective on my
earlier and later childhood experiences, including my different memories of them.
In other words, the presentist position fails to account for changes of context and
for complexity of content or various combinations of content, not to mention the
different modes of presenting an experience. (By content I mean that which is
referred to in an utterance, perceptual experience, thought, or recollection.) One
question the presentist ignores is whether the time of the utterance or experience
is part of the content or not. It seems clear that an important difference between
lived experience and recollected experience is that the latter includes the time of
the lived experience as part of the content. For the memory of an experience is a
shift in perspective analogous to a second- or third-person perspective on a firstperson experience. Moreover, the presentist faces yet another worry: either our
memory can store an unlimited number of unchanging items, or we can have only
a limited number of one and the same ideas. In the first case our memory risks
overpopulation, and in the second case, our explanation of the past begs the question by presupposing that which it is supposed to explain, namely, the acquisition
and preservation of experiences by memory. I suggest that what is preserved is
neither the original experience nor a copy, but rather a compilation or compression of original experiences. What is retained is more like a trace of the original
experience that may be reactivated or retrieved.
I said that retention also has a temporal structure, a discrete structure of discontinuous mental episodes, pace presentism. My claim is based on Husserls
theory that retention is a primary and implicit form of memory in which the
past is perceived and presented.21 Retention is an intentional mode of presenting moments of the just-past phase of an object or event. For example, retention
intends the duration of a melody (as a past object) as well as the duration of the
experience of my hearing the melody (as a past mental act). So in retention or
primary memory, we are aware of hearing the melody as a temporal process,
that is, as having temporal extension. In recollection or secondary memory, the
retention is made explicit, in that the reproduced past object or event bears the
21. Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung: Zur Phnomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwrtigungen, Texte aus dem Nachla (18981925), Husserliana 23,ed. Eduard
Marbach (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 290-292; Zur Phnomenologie des
inneren Zeitbewusstseins (18931917), Husserliana 10, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague, Netherlands:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 88, 379 (hereafter PZB). According to Husserl, retention has a double
intentionality with a horizontal and a vertical axis. The horizontal axis depicts the continuity of an
object or event, such as a melody, and the vertical axis depicts the phases of consciousness or the
continuity of temporal experience.

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341

character past.22 That is why there is a shift in the mode of presentation. I suggest
this shift is a transposing of deictic coordinates from the egocentric mode to the
anaphoric mode. I recollect an object or event as having perceived that object or
event at an earlier time: I recall the train as having seen it (I was there) rushing
into the station last week (then).
III. The rhetorical figure that transposes
the sense of the past: synecdoche

In order to avoid the presentist dilemma of having to explain unchanging past

experiences in the present by using the storehouse-model of memory, I suggest
that the past is a retroactive reconstruction by memory, and that memory should
be conceived as an adaptive mental capacity that retains and reproduces past
experiences by means of a commutable semantic relation between present and
past experiences. Or, to use a metaphor, memory is the selfs filter to the past, and
this filter sifts the content of the earlier experience and thereby modifies it. The
past is transposable through rhetorical figures, not because it is present contiguously, but because it necessitates a semantic transposition or relocation by means
of a partwhole relation establishing the link between what is retained and what
is retrieved.
The partwhole relation that is the basis for a relocation of the sense of the past
in the present is expressed by synecdoche, a rhetorical figure that replaces a word
by an exemplary or emblematic concept of the same domain, either generically
(when a specific part is named by means of the class it belongs to) or specifically
(when a part names a whole). This figure permits changing levels in a containment hierarchyfrom the particular to the general level (when a species is named
for a genus), or vice versa (when a genus is named for a species). In other words,
either the part is named for the whole (point of steel names a sword), or the
whole is named by a (defining) part (sail names a ship, an elephant is recognized by its tusk, and a lion by its claw because these are defining parts of the
whole). The content of such utterances is semantically dependent on the cultural
or extra-linguistic context as well as on the linguistic context, that is, the relation
between an utterer and an addressee. In addition, the content of the utterance is
affected by the synecdoche because, for the addressee to grasp the sense of what
the utterer is uttering, as in I see a sail far away or youll feel the point of my
steel, this partwhole relation has to regulate the content of the utterance: the
synecdoche affects the content of the utterance by modifying the circumstances
of the utterance.
Synecdoche should not be confused with metonymy, a rhetorical figure that
names the attribute of a whole by designating another contiguous part of that
whole. For example Persian, referring to the old name of a country and the
language of a region, designates a cat from that region. In contrast, if I say, I
see a sail in the distance, I name the boat (the whole) by indicating its defining
or exemplary part. Memorials are exemplary parts of a whole: the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier presents or exemplifies a part of an entire event that occurred
22. Husserl, PZB, 55.

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in the past. It presents a type of event and that is how the memorial serves as an
example. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier makes visible, or names by hypotyposis, all soldiers killed in war(s). (I take the word hypotyposis in the Kantian sense as the visible presentation of a concept.23) A memorial is exemplary
because it generalizes a historical fact by putting it into relations of resemblance
and difference with other facts.24 There is no need to resort to the claim of a
structural isomorphism between the past event and the present memorial in which
a memorial would be an essential part of the war because the memorial is a presentation of the war enabling our recollection of the war. Instead, the memorial
enables recollection because it is a distinctive sign of a past event. The same goes
for commemorations: All Souls Day commemorates all the (faithful) now dead,
Memorial Day recalls all American soldiers fallen in war. But neither memorials nor commemorations are essential parts of past events; they serve merely to
transpose the sense of a past event, for the synecdoche operates on the part as a
motif of the whole.25
I think this operation of synecdoche is the reason why autobiographical
accounts or memoirs, as the one by Mahmoud Darwish, Anonyma, or the testimonies of Auschwitz survivors such as Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel or Night by
Elie Wiesel, to cite only two, are more appropriate for effectuating the recollection of the horror of these events than a visit to the site of the genocide: they open
a window to the past for younger generations.26 First, these texts are memorials,
written so that the past and its victims will not be forgotten. They are exemplary
memories because, by recovering the recollection, as Tzvetan Todorov puts it, I
make an exemplum of it and I learn a lesson from it; thus the past becomes a principle of action for the present.27 The past is subservient to the present because
it is used in view of the present, as a model for understanding new situations,
with different agents.28
III.a. A note on the indeterminacy of memoirs and histories

This reference to memoirs is underwritten by my admittedly disputable view concerning the validity of memoirs and histories, the upshot of which is that the truth
value of historical accounts is not necessarily greater than that of memoirs: both
kinds of narratives are classified as nonfiction, yet their accuracy is a question of
degree since, as I mentioned above in section II.a, such accounts are cognitively
and semantically indeterminable. Even regarding nonfiction, there are gradations between the truth values of true and false. The tertium non datur principle
23. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Darstellung subiectio sub aspectum [1790]
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1974), I, 59.
24. See Tzvetan Todorov, Les abus de la mmoire (Paris: Arla, 2004), 46.
25. See Ivan Kasabov, (The Grammar of Semantics) (Sofia: St.
Kliment Ohridsky Press, 2006), 195-197.
26. Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys [1947] (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1995); Elie
Wiesel, La Nuit, transl. M. Wiesel [1958] (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit; New York: Hill & Wang,
2006).
27. Todorov, Les abus de la mmoire, 31 (my translation).
28. Ibid.

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343

(which allows only two truth values) is not applicable to either memoirs or histories because these accounts have cracks and fissures: they leak. Memoirs and
histories are cognitive processes or systematizations of human actions, events,
and experiences. Such accounts are categorizations or taxonomies that attempt
to explain or make sense of the latter. But these taxonomies have neither clear
boundaries for differentiating or marking the objects they denote, nor distinct
criteria for determining the content of their statements. They are indeterminate
because the necessary and sufficient conditions defining the entities these statements describe are fluid. Thus the question of the decisive events of the Persian
Wars under Xerxes remains undecided because Herodotus, the father of history,
has been accused of confabulation.29
Why do memoirs and histories leak? Under a description, an action or event
appears continuous, but this continuity consists of discrete and punctuated events
that are organized according to certain laws or principles. Likewise, an observed
or narrated event appears continuous to us, but its continuity emerges from a
discrete underlying structure. Descriptions refer to actions and events as having
a continuous linear timeline in the backgrounda timeline that is a construction,
for this continuity is an imperceptible duration: it can only be grasped by
introducing limits, and it is infinitely divisible into discrete stages or points.
Punctuated events can be measured in seconds (pulling the trigger) or over a long
period (planning a crime). To put it differently, punctuated events can be finegrained (recollections and memoirs) or coarse-grained (historical narrations).
Typically, the former are written from a first-person perspective and the latter
from a third-person perspective. Fine-grained events can be discriminated as
points on the abscissa of temporal succession because that is how they appear or
become phenomenologically accessible to us. By contrast, coarse-grained events
appear in a historical narration or epic from a third-person position. The whole
(the fable or plot-structure) is organized in a discrete three-part structure of
beginning, middle, and end, at least according to Aristotle, who recommends
using dramatic plot-structure for epic narratives so that events appear bound
semantically in a coherent configuration despite their being contingently
connected and having occurred to one or more persons in a particular period of
time without a single end (telos).30
A historian would object that, unlike memoirs, history deals with facts. But
what are facts and which level of description picks them out? Are they things,
actions, events, situations, states, or processes? Implicitly, facts are held to be
something that happened (an occurrent), or is the case, or corresponds to truth, or
makes a statement true. Facts are thus correlated to truth. Etymologically, facts
are related to acts, since the word fact is derived from factum, the Latin neutral
past participle of facere, to do. That is why facts are explained by correlating
actions and events. When a historian says that the French Revolution is a fact,
by fact he or she probably intends a series of situations, persons, events, and
actions that resulted in the abolition of the Bourbon monarchy. These situations,
29. See the German introduction to Herodotus by Lars Hoffmann (Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag,
2007), 17.
30. See Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 7, 23.

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persons, and events can be correlated as terms of either a causal or a grounding

relation of explanation: a because relation explaining an occurrent.31 The fact
that the French Revolution resulted in overthrowing the Bourbon monarchy is
explained by the facts that the Bastille was seized on July 14, 1789 and that the
National Assembly drafted a new constitution: it is explained in terms of the
groundconsequence relation.
In addition, memoirs and histories are not cases of veritas est adaequatio rei
et intellectus, that is, they are not precise copies of past actions and events, but
are instead selective compilations or consolidated sequences of past actions and
events. Recollections (mental states recalling the past), autobiographical accounts
or memoirs, as well as historical accounts, are reconstructions or compilations
of a number of past perceptions edited into a coherent sequence or episode. In
addition, the correspondence between past events and present accounts, regardless of whether they are recollections or narratives of facts, is a construct postulating a causal relation between agents and events, a construct that correlates
past agents and events. Past episodes are constructs under present descriptions or
recollections that, in the case of recollection, modify our past perceptions as well
our self-presentation by either improving or devaluing our past self (or selves). In
the case of history, past episodes are descriptions modifying the temporal order
of occurrence by postulating a linear timeline. Besides, historians also modify
the focus on actions and events, by singling out some of them rather than others,
depending on their present position. That is why descriptions of the past are not
true in the strict sense of the correspondence theory of truth, that is, that a statement or a belief is true if and only if it corresponds to reality.
What validity or truth-degree should we assign to memoirs and history? Regarding memoirs, the question is not so much whether truth really matters but to what
extent we can justifiably accuse someone of lying when he or she tells us about
his or her past. The question is not only: who wouldnt embellish or dramatize
their character and situation when trying to publish?and subsequently face a
moral jury of disgruntled readers and furious fellow-writers who claim that you
have discredited their tradebut rather: how truthful can you possibly be in recollecting your past? Publishers consider memoirs as nonfiction and, while fiction
has no claims to truth, nonfiction does. Yet both genres are telling stories, namely
constructing a continuous sequence of events to produce a purposive unity of
action. However that may be, autobiographical recollections are truth-committed
31. If we consider a fact to be what makes a statement true by the obtaining of a state of affairs:
the window is broken, we could argue with Husserl that facts are not natural kinds but complex
and formal entities consisting of more basic ontological parts, such as processes, states, and punctual
events that can be causally explained. If we accept the reduction of facts to obtaining states of affairs,
we can explain how facts make statements or beliefs true: the statement that John broke the window
is true if and only if this statement corresponds to an obtaining state of affairs (it is the case that
John broke the window). What makes my statement John broke the window true is not the broken
window in front of me but the obtaining state of affairs. The correspondence relation could be further
reduced to an identity relation, by saying it is true that John broke the window is the same as saying it is an obtaining state of affairs that John broke the window. See Kevin Mulligan and Fabrice
Correia, Facts, in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/facts/.
Accessed June 20, 2008; also Michael Lynch, Truth in Context (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998),
119-121.

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in that they disclose grounds for beliefs and actions, but they do not have truthmakers (for example, facts to which they correspond), nor do recollectors try to
come to know the truth when remembering; rather, they recall what the story
demands, or give a coherent account that warrants the re-presentation of their
past. My hunch is that such coherence is also what historians aim for, salva
veritate by modifying the veritates value. Epistemically speaking, the truth of
historical accounts is measured in terms of their belonging to a coherent system
of beliefs. Semantically speaking, truth is a property of statements and beliefs:
it picks out a real property of linguistic statements, but the predicate true may
vary across contexts.32 Hence the truth of memoirs and histories is relative to
context.Whether coherentist and epistemic or correspondentist and semantic, the
notion of truth applicable to both kinds of accounts is tied to belief or taking-tobe-true (with degrees of conviction). Both memoirs and history claim that what
is past was once present. How is this possible unless we believe it was present,
that is, unless we take it to be true? Belief is a necessary feature of memory and
history: I trust my memory or a historical account as a source of information
about the past if I am certain that my recollection (or the history) represents an
earlier perception of an event. But recalling something is distinct from knowing
that something is true, and even my certainty that I am remembering an event of
my past does not guarantee the truth of my recollectionor of a written historical account. Besides, why should recollections be faithful reproductions of past
events? They are selective and do not reproduce the real time of the occurrence
of past events. Historical accounts, on the other hand, tacitly presuppose that they
are faithful reproductions of past events, and the question is not only whether this
is indeed the case but to what extent it can be the case.
III.b. Retroactive construction of the past through
imagination-oriented deixis and the anaphoric mode

Recollection or recall does not necessitate personal memories or lived experience: recollection is incited by the transposition of the sense of a lived experience that can be seen again by focusing on that event, except that, instead of
using perception, we use imagination. For in the mode of recollection the origo
of visual directions, or deictic reference, is displaced in imagination; this is what
the linguist and Gestalt-psychologist Karl Bhler calls imagination-oriented
deixis.33 Either I displace a scene by focusing on it, or I am transposed by means
of an imaginary change of location, and the scene is described as an action in
32. On my view, truth is primarily a semantic notion and truth values are assigned by interpretation relative to a conceptual scheme. The predicates true and false, Alfred Tarski taught us,
apply to sentences in an interpreted object-language. See his The Semantic Conception of Truth
and the Foundations of Semantics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944), 341-376.
Of course one could object that Tarskian truth predicates are not applicable to natural languages and
hence are not materially adequate. However that may be, true is a predicate and hence applicable to
linguistic entities rather than non-linguistic ones. Yet there is no need for eliminating the metaphysical
status of truth in the way of deflationist accounts. On a minimalist view, truth is metaphysically thin,
as Lynch puts it (Truth in Context, 125-131).
33. Karl Bhler, Deixis am Phantasma, [1934], in Sprachtheorie (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer
Verlag, 1965), 134-140 (my translation).

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which I participate through the narrators eyes. In the first case, I have a birdseye view (in the aorist tense and from a third-person perspective) of a historical
site that I visit in an imaginary journey; in the second case (in the imperfect tense
and from a second-person perspective), I am displacing myself in situ. In both
cases, I follow the narrators deictic clues: here, in the center of the camp, was
the Appelplatz, over there were the crematories. When my tactile and visual
coordinates are displaced or connected to a corresponding imagined visual scene,
I see the described scenes by constructing them in my imagination and I come
to know the victims through the eyes of the witness-narrator, that is, through the
narrative perspective and deictic coordinates of the first person. In recollection, as
in a dramatic narrative, the index of the context is shifted from the mode of here
and now to the mode of as if. A past situation is treated as if it were presently
given when the egocentric deictic field is transposed by imagination and the narrator guides the reader with an orientation in imagination. Hence, as Bhler says,
what is absent is cited in the present space as in drama.34
According to Bhler, the demonstratio ad oculos is constructed in imagination by means of an anaphoric use of deictic words where the deictic field is an
imagined visual scene (common to the utterer or narrator and the addressee) and
the anaphoric use of deictic words ensures the composition of that scene.35 In
recollection, the referential mode of deictic utterances is no longer egocentric but
anaphoric: they refer back to the referents indicated by their antecedents, thus
enabling an addressee to take up again a past situation. An anaphor is a deictic
word such as this or there used to refer back to something just mentioned:
a pointing to something that is not to be looked for and found at places in perceptual space but rather at places in the whole of speech.36 Anaphoric pointing
ensures a taking up of a past state of affairs: the backlink points to something
from which the consequence is drawn, and in order to find this something I have
to turn back toward the preceding sentences.37 This backlink is based on the
semantic dependence relation between an antecedent and a consequent where the
antecedent grounds the consequent, as I argued above, for the antecedent provides
the because of the consequent and justifies or motivates it, by giving the reasons
why the consequent is the case. The referents of the recollective mode (which
simulates the perceptual mode) are past actions and events. Recollection presents
an action by means of simulation or mimesis, just as a dramatic performance is
the mimesis of an action.38 The objects presented in recollection are actions. I am
suggesting that recollection is a dramatic process that presents what is absent by
shifting the deictic coordinates. Besides, since recollection is a dramatic process,
the addressee can affectively react to the past event by reliving the eyewitnesses
emotions, since their tragic narrative affects the addressees by inciting their
empathy and fear. By means of this semantic transposition, todays addressees
can envisage the idea that, in different temporal and spatial circumstances, they
34. Ibid., 140.
35. Ibid., 123, 137.
36. Ibid., 121.
37. Bhler, Rckverweis, in Sprachtheorie, 389.
38. Cf. Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 2,1448a.

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might not only have suffered the genocide but committed itbecause these
addressees are able to re-identify the past event at present.
Re-identification is a necessary condition of recollection: we are consciously
accessing and retrieving a past experience and presenting it as our own, that is, as
belonging to our past. This re-identification is expressed by a doxastic and cognitive state in recollection, a remembering that or judging that we recognize a
past event and can situate it in a spatio-temporal context. Recollective judgments
express the relation between a present rememberer and a remembered object by
predicating my present consciousness of a past thing. Thus in the judgment, I
remember this book, my remembering is said of this book. Presumably, recollective judgments also account for the temporal order of a memory experience.
For example, I remember that I first went to the library to look for the book and
then had an argument with a colleague about presentism. In making a recollective
judgment I resituate the episode in the context of my personal experience by
indicating when and where it occurred, and I re-identify a thing as being the
same as the one I saw at an earlier time. For a recollective judgment confirms the
truth of my recollection by re-identifying a present event as being the same one
as the past event of my recollection. A recollective judgment expresses a cognitive state of a past object or event, even in cases where I do not have a personal
experience of the past object or event, since I can come to know this object or
event by accessing the past by transposition or a shift of the deictic coordinates
from the egocentric to the anaphoric mode, and I can affirm that I know it. This
judgment affirms my access to the past and the cognitive value of this access, by
re-identifying the past object or event.
III.c. Inventing the past?

Even if the semantic transposition effected by synecdoche is facilitated by

narrative, the placeor sitealso plays a role in this transposition, for the
partwhole relation that transposes the past to the present corresponds to such
mnemonic techniques as the place system or memory theater. According to
Roman texts such as the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, a place system
involves memorizing and visualizing a street of houses or the rooms of a house
as a background for situating or mapping the main points in a speech onto the
different places in the memory theater fixed in our minds.39 We then move from
place to place as we recollect the various parts of our speech or poem from the
rooms or figures we have used to retain them. Our knowledge is organized on
39. Although Noras well-known project takes a cue from the memory theater, his concept of
memory sites differs from the ancient theory in that it aims to make a cultural cartography of French
history based on Noras assumption that memory is a social phenomenon that offers a high-fidelity
reproduction of the past. His opposition between memory and history is entailed by this assumption,
namely that memory provides a living transmission of past events whereas history operates from a
distance and gives a classification of these events, revealing their true story. As I said at the beginning of this paper, I think Franois Hartog rightly objects to this view, that Noras opposition is better
explained as a change of memory regimes from oral transmission to the absence of transmission following the invention of writing. I also think that memory, whether oral or written, is truth-committed
although it lacks truth-makers.

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the basis of our imaging capacity. Probably the basic principle at work in such
partwhole organization is semantic: a law governing different semantic roles
for connecting words (or numbers) to images in a hierarchical order, such as the
tree of knowledge, the Pythagorean number triangle, or Lulls circles that serve
to compute features and symbols in a context (the place system) by enabling
different combinations or calculations. A very similar partwhole organization
in a place system is used in rhetoric by the topoi of invention that are places
for finding things, namely the relations between places and the parts of a discourse or event one wants to recall. The invention of the past is thus a technique
for reconstructing the past. Probably Vico, as a rhetorician, used the expression
inventing the past in this sensewhich, by the way, corresponds quite well
to R. G. Collingwoods historiographical conception of the historical imagination.40 On this conception, the historian has mentally to grasp and reanimate his
or her object. For the historians task is to find, or invent, a way for this object to
continue living. Hence the historian has to project a semantic context that relates
the chronology of past events to the present and to us, in order to examine the
assumptions of past agents by representing not only their actions and objectives
but also the consequences of their actions that continue to influence the present.
III.d. synecdoche and memory

Autobiographical memory also functions by means of this semantic relation

between a whole and its parts. Synecdoche enables the instantiation of an entire
event by one of its parts, more precisely by its emblematic part or defining feature,
because when I see that part I recollect the rest. For example, if I am prompted
with the line: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,
this cue may enable me to recall the entire sonnet; a picture of a seaside resort
can evoke the recollection of a past seaside vacation. Friends of the so-called
memory traces theory41 explain the semantic relation between a past experience and a present recollection as follows: a recollection is partially grounded by
a trace or latent engram of a past experience (such as the one of having learned
a poem by heart at school) and this trace is reactivated by a configuration of the
experience of a past event with a present experience containing a distinctive sign
of the past experience. The trace is a sequel of an experience, and the renewal
or recollection of this experience is possible if the signal received at present is
compatible with the past experience. The recollection of an event and the original
experience of that event stand in a wholepart relation: first, because this relation holds between the trace that is a latent sediment of the original experience
40. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History: Roman Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946).
41. On memory traces, see Max Deutscher, Remembering Remembering, in Cause, Mind,
and Reality, ed. J. Heil (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 53-72; Richard Semon, Die Meme (Leipzig:
Engelmann, 1904); John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Endel Tulving, Neurocognitive Processes of Human Memory, in
Basic Mechanisms in Cognition and Language, ed. C. von Euler et al. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1998),
261-281. I argue for a dispositional trace theory in Kasabova, (On
Autobiographical Memory).

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at a time t1 and the signal motivating the recollection of the original experience
at a time t2; second, the retrieval of an experience at t2 is possible without the
circumstances that produced it at t1. Neither that which is retained (the trace) nor
that which is retrieved (the recollection) is completely identical with the original
experience, but they are related by a common part (an attentive perception of the
trace) that is expressed by the synecdoche. The trace is not a copy of the past
event but more like a compression or residue of the former. Nor is the distinctive
sign reviving the trace a copy of the past event, but a characteristic feature that
specifies that event.
Even short-term memory, that is, the retentive memory of our actual perceptions, only retains what is significant and thus functions by means of synecdoche.
Roman Ingarden describes this form of memory as living memory and gives
the following example: when reading a novel, I condense and abbreviate the
sense of the part I have already read because, as I continue reading, my living
memory retains those parts of the novel that are representative of the whole, such
as the culminating phases of events, the main characters, and any other facts
that particularly impressed me or evoked my emotions. In other words, I retain
that which draws my interest or is particularly significant, since I cannot retain
the entire work.42 After all, the recollection of an event is not identical with the
experience of that event. First, recollection and experience (or perceptual experience) are different modes of apprehending an object. Second, recollection and
experience have different temporal structures: a recollection is a compilation of
past experiences in which the latter are not recalled in real time but are edited
in subjective time, as a film director cuts, selects, and organizes the scenes of a
film in a sequential order of before and after. The experience of the event is
thus reconstructed in recollection. Hence the experience of an event and the recollection of that event do not have the same mode of presentation or the same time.
However, by means of synecdoche, the past can be partially present. A recollection does not recall all the parts or components of a past experience. Otherwise
it would be obstructed by numerous details, as in the cases of Shereshevskii or
Ireneo Funes who are unable to instantiate their past experiences because they
cannot configure what they remember at present with their past experiences. For
that which is explicitly recalled is only a part, albeit a significant and defining
part, of what is implicitly retained. This transposable part that is instantiated by
synecdoche is identical to the original experience because it expresses the same
sense as the former. Thus the instantiated part names the original experience.
That is why a memorial names the past event that it exposes at present, by shifting the index of the context. In an analogous manner, a recollection shifts the
orientation-field of a perceptual situation by citing a past event in present space.
Synecdoche is an operator of this shift.

42. Roman Ingarden, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1968),
100-106.

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IV. Conclusion

In lieu of a conclusion, I would like to indicate some implications of my analyses

for history. My claim that memory and memorials are not cases of veritas est
adaequatio rei et intellectus also holds for history. History, it is said, deals with
facts and hence has a privileged relation to truth and our knowledge of truth.
Thus Thucydides considered history as a narrative of facts. A narrative is a written account of sequentially connected events involving a narrative perspective,
either close-up or birds-eye or something in between. It follows that a narrative
also involves a narrator or agent who registers events, using the first-, second-, or
third-person perspective. Written recollections, memoirs, and history are all narratives oriented toward the past. While the former are usually expressed from a
first-person perspective, history is written from the third-person perspective, as
its name indicates. Does the impersonal narrative voice warrant for truthfulness
by using a higher degree of generality? If so, a narrative that has the quality of
being general rather than individual is evaluated on its lack of personality.
Historical accounts follow Thucydides principle of postulating a causal
relation between agents and events. Thucydides writes: Learning also that the
Athenians were sending an embassy to Camarina, on the strength of the alliance
concluded in the time of Laches, to gain, if possible, that city, [the Syracusans]
sent another from Syracuse to oppose them.43 I think this causal relation is
grounded on the semantic relation of ground and consequence. As I argued
above, this relation sequentially orders their positions in time as ante and post
where the former explains the latter earlier grounds; later is grounded in
earlier because earlier explains later. The former gives reasons for the
latter (and the latter are positioned as having occurred before). For historians
order actions and events according to a final end (depending on the historians
position), and their perspectives shape their account with regard to either victory
or defeat. In addition, tense distinctions indicating the position of an action or
event in the past, present, or future are defined in relation to the position in time
when the action or event is describedfrom the perspective of the theoretical
zero-point now or the time of the historians writing. Consecutive clauses
expressing the groundconsequence relation, such as she cried because he hit
her, coordinate the agentive relation and the sequentially ordered positions in
relation to the action. This is also how the because relation coordinates agents,
actions, and events in recollection. Remembering that John broke the window, I
posit my past perception of that event as antecedent to my present recollection
that is its (partial) consequence. Since my recollection occurs because of my
perception, my recollection is justified or explained because the groundconsequence relation obtains.
New Bulgarian University
Sofia, Bulgaria
43. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, chapter XX, Project Gutenberg e-text
(2004), http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7142. Accessed June 20, 2008.