Paul Audi, philosopher. “You want to forget, is that possible?”

If in order to act people must remember and therefore recognize what they already know, they must also forget their past if it prevents them from living. Some memories really can be deadly. Some pasts can, if not kill, at least shatter or paralyze when they lead us to the side of our history and its reworking to the detriment of our future, which is the “will of chance.” And, in fact, who doesn’t want to have life ahead of them? But is that possible when memories are like heavy weights tied to your ankles, keeping your head under water?

I, for one, value oblivion more than I hate my childhood. I no longer want to know anything about what he has given me to experience, except the desire to end the demonic power of the past called repetition. I certainly imagine that the bad memories are there, and that they are so bad that they like to stay within my reach in case the masochist in me gets the idea to join them. The return of the Rejected would mean the triumph of fate. Because the past itself is destiny.

Involuntary memory

And, according to Kundera, destiny is what life turns into when the image of life separates from life and dominates it. So much so, he adds, that there is no changing it, especially since the picture of life has meanwhile become more real than it is supposed to be. What terrifies me is that life creates a frozen frame from which I can no longer reinvent myself and thus surprise myself. But “the past is an intruder that cannot be suppressed,” as Javier Marías says.

And in fact, as with Proust, we sometimes experience involuntary memory, those spontaneous memories that suddenly rise to the surface in response to a given perception or sensation. Just next to this involuntary memory, and next to voluntary memory, which sometimes requires enormous effort to find, for example, a word we think we have on the tip of our tongue, and next to involuntary forgetting, which has pathological aspects, there is voluntary forgetting.

This stubborn refusal to remember, which psychologists advise against, has an ethical significance when it puts itself in the service of becoming, that is, it cries out: “Vade retro, damn the past! I will not allow the vampire that you are to swallow a drop of my blood.’ The problem, however, remains that if we don’t want to remember something, we have to remember it. that in order to get rid of an unwanted person, you should already have him in front of you. If it is voluntary, forgetting therefore seems, if not impossible, then at least paradoxical. So forgetting is to be desired rather than desired. What is desire really, if not waiting for a miracle?

Paul Audi is a philosopher, author Disturbing identity

(Éditions Stock) and professor-researcher at the PHILéPOL Research Center of the Sorbonne Paris-Descartes University.

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