Time of Memory

Charles E. Scott is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is the author of several books, including Boundaries in Mind, and two that have been awarded "Choice Book of the Year": The Question of Ethics, and On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics. He is also the coeditor of several volumes published by SUNY Press, including most recently Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought.

"The Time of Memory is a tour de force in its comprehensive treatment of the subject of memory. It traverses the landscape of philosophical and psychoanalytical treatments of memory—offering adept and accessible accounts of Jungian notions of mythical memory, Nietzschean notions of genealogical memory, phenomenological and hermeneutical accounts of fused and ecstatic memory, and recent studies of archeological and transformational memory in poststructuralism and postmodern philosophy."This work is thoroughly scholarly in its rigorous attentiveness to the matter under investigation, but Scott does not approach the problem of memory from an abstract, merely epistemological point of view. His study of memory is itself a memorial, a performance of the various kinds of re-membering he discusses. It is written with extraordinary grace and fluency and is rich with concrete references that elucidate the difficult points. Readers will appreciate that finally we have a treatise on memory that is full of memories." — Walter A. Brogan, Villanova University

• Preface CHAPTER ONE Introduction: Measuring Shadows CHAPTER TWO Mnemosyne's Loss and Stolen Memories Remembering Hans Georg GadamerMnemosyne and LetheHeidegger and DerridaA Notation on Mnemosynic ThinkingStolen Memories: An Excursus on Memorial Fusions CHAPTER THREE On Originating and Presenting Another Time: The Art of Tragedy First Fragmentary ImageMemory-TimeSublime ForeignersA Second FragmentMemory and the Future of Dionysian Thought (Without Prophecy)Last Fragment CHAPTER FOUR Powers of Transformation within a Memorial Reading: Narratives of Dionysus DionysusDionysian Memory and ThoughtAn Excursus on Sanity and a Sublime Aspect of Dionysian OccurrencesDionysian Self-Criticism CHAPTER FIVE The "Power" of Nondetermination with Determinations in Appearances Engagement and EncounterApollinian ForceNature, Ecstasy, and the Sublime CHAPTER SIX Institutional Songs and Involuntary Memory: Where Do "We" Come From? Locating the Present-Past CHAPTER SEVEN When the Company of Time Casts No Shadow: Memory of Differences and Nondetermination A Transition to Orders of Disorder by Means of Dionysus' MasksOrders of Samenesses and Differences—And In Between ThemSimilitude and a Birth of Difference in Binary Structures: An ExpositionEstablishing DiscontinuitiesAn Instance of Establishing Discontinuity: Signs of RepresentationThe Space of a QuestionFrameworks for Analyses: An Excursus on Full Houses CHAPTER EIGHT Repetitions and Differenciations SingularitiesLiberation from Common Sense and Good SpiritSingularity and Memory CHAPTER NINE Gifts of Fire: Witnessing and Representing Trace and Blindness: Witnessing the Touch CHAPTER TEN A Symptom of Life in the Absence of Light The Worldliness of "Inner," Private ExperienceMeaning Is the Face of the OtherA Sense of the Absence of Light in RelationsReturn to Infinite Meaning CHAPTER ELEVEN Gifts without Fire: Thinking and Remembering What We Philosophers DoStrategies for Thinking (With Attention to Its Drawing Powers)Two Strategies for ThinkingThought and EthosObserving in a Subjunctive Mood Notes Index