The dangerous memory of the crucified and risen Jesus confronts the “lie” of racism, past and present. The cross and resurrection disrupt our forgetfulness about the lie and awaken memory of our complicity in the reality of racism and its ongoing diminishment of the lives of racially-minoritized people. Indeed, the dangerous memory embodied in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus creates tension that evokes a relational and agitational community of resistance to racist ideas and policies.

Howard Thurman (1899?1981) touched the lives of many leaders in and beyond the US civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Thurman earned his degree in politics/economics at Morehouse College and in theology at Rochester Theological Seminary. He served as dean of the chapel at Boston University from 1953 to 1965. At once mystic, pacifist and integrationist, his thought was vitally impacted by experience of oppression in America?s Deep South. Thurman was an isolated child in an aggrieved community, forced (...) back upon a deep inner spirituality to cope with material deprivation and indifference. He explored the importance of ?sites of memory? as a means of recovering emotion, not least grief. For Thurman, the individual is the point of departure, but is only fully constituted in ?the crucible of relationship?; the purpose of knowledge is action; and the object of action is to secure loving relationships. (shrink)

Miguel A. De La Torre rejects hope as the ethical basis for a politically effective and truly liberative form of solidarity. Kelly Brown Douglas, on the other hand, articulates a critical retrieval of hope emphasizing the interpretive relationship between the cross, the lynching tree, and the resurrection. Reading De La Torre and Douglas’s works through Natalie Carnes’s theological aesthetics suggests that their respective works can be engaged as “iconoclasms of fidelity,” or the salutary breaking of idolatrous images toward recovering faithful (...) ones. Examining #SprayTheirNames murals that were created in response to state violence against Black people in the United States, I argue that Carnes’s aesthetics framework holds the violence of the crucifixion and promise of resurrection in visual tension, thus decrying violent oppression while offering a beautiful and dangerous memory that catalyzes hope-filled movement in defense of Black lives. (shrink)

This study presents the Accra Confession as a theological response to the ecological crisis from a Reformed perspective while also addressing its critical weakness, namely the problem of universality in both Reformed ecclesiology and global approaches to ecological destruction. Because of a fragile universality, both Reformed churches and global institutions find it difficult to agree on a concrete plan to address climate change. Theologically, this difficulty arrives not primarily from disagreement with the existence or causes of climate change but how (...) Christian theological values translate concretely to acts of justice. This study proposes a way to ground these discussions on the concept of dangerous memory by resourcing the theology of Johann Baptist Metz. Dangerous memories allow stories of the suffering vanquished to be constitutive to the construction of caritas, which in turn serves as a suitable theological foundation for addressing differing approaches to engaging climate issues. Reading the Accra Confession as dangerous memory, then, provides a valuable resource to the Reformed community by allowing the testimonies of those affected adversely by climate change to substantially inform theological discourses on climate justice. (shrink)

(2005). The Unfinished Agenda of School Desegregation: Using Storytelling to Deconstruct the Dangerous Memories of the American Mind. Educational Studies: Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 24-40.

Pharmaceutical memory modification is the use of a drug to dampen, or eliminate completely, memories of traumatic experience. While standard therapeutic treatments, even those including intense pharmaceuticals, can potentially offer individual biomedical healing, they are missing an essential perspective offered by Christian bioethics: re/incorporation of individuals and traumatic memories into communities that confront and reinterpret suffering. This paper is specifically grounded in Christian ethics, engaging womanist understandings of Incarnational, embodied personhood, and Johann Baptist Metz’s “dangerous memory.” It (...) develops an ethical framework of Christian “enfleshed counter-memory” that responds to the specific challenge of pharmaceutical memory modification, and traumatic experience generally. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn earlier work we showed that individuals learn the spatial regularities within contexts and use this knowledge to guide detection of threatening targets embedded in these contexts. While it is highly adaptive for humans to use contextual learning to detect threats, it is equally adaptive for individuals to flexibly readjust behaviour when contexts once associated with threatening stimuli begin to be associated with benign stimuli, and vice versa. Here, we presented face targets varying in salience in new or old spatial (...) configurations and changed the target salience halfway through the experiment to examine if contextual learning changes with the change in target salience. Detection of threatening targets was faster in old than new configurations and this learning persisted even after the target changed to non-threatening. However, the same pattern was not seen when the targets changed from non-threatening... (shrink)

This essay arises out of a concern to understand how categories of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference--particularly between women--have been constructed in the past, in order to explore how these categories continue to be reproduced in more recent political and ideological conflicts. Until very recently, feminist theory relating to the writing of history has tended to emphasize questions of gender and their articulation with class, with the result that issues of "race" have been overlooked.Focusing on ideas about whiteness and the (...) various constructions of white racial identity can offer new avenues of thought and action to those working to understand and dismantle systems of racial domination. The recognition that the lives of women of color are inescapably prescribed by definitions of race as well as gender can also be applied to women who fall into the category "white."This essay argues for a feminist theory of history that inquires into the construction and reproduction of racialized femininities. Focusing on images and ideas about white womanhood produced at particular points in the past, examples from the author's book Beyond the Pale illustrate a range of questions that flow from having a perspective of race, class, and gender. The essay looks briefly at the idea of historical memory, using a discussion of oral history to consider ways in which social memory of Empire is continually affected and transformed by cultural forms in the present.Finally, by taking apart various constructions of white femininity in two narratives of cultural conflict, the essay demonstrates how a historically informed and "antiracist" feminism might intervene differently in debates about contemporary politics. (shrink)

In this innovative study, Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and memory, suggesting that, instead of understanding human rights in a normative fashion, human rights should be treated as an ideology. Conceptualizing human rights as an ideology gives us useful theoretical and methodological tools to recognize the real impact human rights has on the ground. David traces the rise of the global phenomenon that is the human rights memorialization agenda, termed 'Moral Remembrance', and explores what happens (...) once this agenda becomes implemented. Based on evidence from the Western Balkans and Israel/Palestine, she argues that the human rights memorialization agenda does not lead to a better appreciation of human rights but, contrary to what would be expected, it merely serves to strengthen national sentiments, divisions and animosities along ethnic lines, and leads to the new forms of societal inequalities that are closely connected to different forms of corruptions. (shrink)

Optogenetics is an invasive neuromodulation technology involving the use of light to control the activity of individual neurons. Even though optogenetics is a relatively new neuromodulation tool whose various implications have not yet been scrutinized, it has already been approved for its first clinical trials in humans. As optogenetics is being intensively investigated in animal models with the aim of developing novel brain stimulation treatments for various neurological and psychiatric disorders, it appears crucial to consider both the opportunities and dangers (...) such therapies may offer. In this review, we focus on the memory-modifying potential of optogenetics, investigating what it is capable of and how it differs from other memory modification technologies. We then outline the safety challenges that need to be addressed before optogenetics can be used in humans. Finally, we re-examine crucial neuroethical concerns expressed in regard to other MMTs in the light of optogenetics and address those that appear to be unique to the memory-modifying potential of optogenetic technology. (shrink)

The article argues that the prohibition of abortion in Chile, other than when the mother's life is in danger, is a form of human rights violation targeting women specifically. The Pro-Birth Policy was established in Pinochet's Chile as a response to the previous government's attempts, under Allende, to encourage family planning and to educate and inform women about their choices. This had been done to put an end to the increase in back-street abortions with the inevitable toll on women's lives. (...) Pinochet's regime reversed these women-oriented family planning policies, and criminalized abortion, on the basis of costs to the state and, more importantly, the need to increase the birth rate for reasons of national security. Women's bodies were used by the Pinochet regime, both by sexual violence and torture, and by the denial of women's reproductive and sexual rights, as a means to impose discipline and order on society. The fact that this is still not acknowledged in the construction of a collective memory indicates that the issue has not yet been resolved in democratic Chile. (shrink)

Women’s embodied memories of “Dangerous Breasts”, generated as part of a wider collective memory project on women’s breasts, Iconstruct women as always at risk of our bodies turning against us. We trace through memory stories how we inscribe our bodies as “dangerous” through practices involving silence, fear, surveillance and diagnosis. We examine how regimes directed at the prevention and treatment of breast cancer serve, in our memories, to increase anxiety and distance us from our bodies and (...) any sense of agency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:American Memory in Henry James: Void and ValueMartin WarnerAmerican Memory in Henry James: Void and Value, by William Righter, edited by Rosemary Righter ; xi & 220 pp. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004. $79.95.The perennial debate about what Arnold termed "culture and anarchy" was both enriched and rendered more subtle by the work of Henry James. The late William Righter's fine and discriminating intelligence helps us to (...) think this through. This is no standard monograph on Henry James. While well-aware of the critical traditions of Jamesian scholarship (and the knowledgeable will be able to detect in his sensitive and often enlightening readings of the texts his engagement with those traditions), Righter sits lightly to this scholarship, ploughing his own furrow, using the later work of Henry James as a lens to question "void and value" in twentieth-century and, by extension, contemporary culture. American Memory in Henry James is elegantly, and indeed sometimes elusively, written, as befits a work on a man whose own stylistic stringency is, alas, so often not emulated by academic writings on his work. The flipside of this, of course, is that a reasonably educated background, including some acquaintance with James's texts, is assumed.Righter is concerned to explore the capacity of the novel form as represented by James to apprehend, through formal arrangement, the apparent incommensurability of the forces that drive history, culture, and human psychology on the one hand, and the frameworks of intelligibility and value within which we seek to live and by means of which we seek to exercise some control over them, on the other. James is apt for this purpose since he focuses on cultural dislocations, between America and Europe, and between past and present. America, for James, represents the overcoming of a late nineteenth-century tradition of civility (primarily, in his case, transcendentalist and Unitarian) by big business and the criteria of capitalism. This precipitates a split between "wasp" culture and an alienated, urban culture, both in danger of losing touch with their roots. Europe, of course, stands for continuity, in this specifically cultural sense, rather than rupture, and the project of importing European culture into America through museums (The Golden Bowl is very much in point here) is one of the ambiguities to which the text recurs.The first part, "America Deconstructed," sets the stage, using James's The [End Page 447] American Scene to analyze his notions of historical change and progression, and their implications for a sense of stable American identity. How is a society so committed to change and progress to honor its past creatively? Part two, "The Note of Europe," engages with The Ambassadors, seeing the victory of Wollett as an indication of the insubstantiality of a certain type of expatriate community, of Americans seeking to take on European culture. The main weight of the text is taken by the engagement with The Golden Bowl, to which the next two parts are dedicated. "Amerigo in American Nowhere" explores the way in which the central characters operate in a sort of void, with social context stripped away to reveal the dynamics of their failed equilibrium. In this, "America" and "England" have become virtually typological symbols. In the light of this reading of the text, Part four, "A Dark Fable of Love and Power," explores the implications for our shaping intelligence, especially ethical intelligence. In suggestive dialogue with Putnam and Nussbaum, Righter points to the difficulty of seeing the relevance of anything like the Categorical Imperative to The Golden Bowl. Rather, in this novel "the language of morality has been examined, picked up, turned over, taken to pieces. But this very process has in the end indicated its unsuitability as an ultimate explanatory scheme." He argues that James poses the possibility that the novel "adds up to a total story which is intelligible beyond the possibilities of a conceptual sorting out" (pp. 154-55).But this raises the question of what the criteria for intelligibility could be in such a case, if beyond the conceptual lies the imaginative. The final part, "Form and Contingency," engages with this issue. James's difficulty here, it is argued with respect to the late... (shrink)

We use our hands for many tasks and sensory orientations, including eating, communicating, and bathing. We hold, and manipulate a variety of objects, artifacts, and people, feeling for warmth, coldness, texture, hardness, and softness. We approach people or objects with greetings, embraces, and caresses, and to shove, hit, or defend ourselves against other people and potentially dangerous things. Yet just because our hands play such a central role in so many aspects our lives, they may also play an inordinate (...) role in our memories and imagination. This paper highlights the place of hands in memory and imagination and how these memories and imaginings, in turn, affect not only how we use our hands and for what purposes, but with whom we use them and under what circumstances. (shrink)

The empirical data do not unequivocally support a consistent fixed capacity of four chunks. We propose an alternative account whereby capacity is limited by the precision of specifying the temporal and spatial context in which items appear, that similar psychophysical constraints limit number estimation, and that short term memory (STM) is continuous with long term memory (LTM).

This paper puts forward a general framework for thought about human information processing. It is intended to avoid some of the problems of pipeline or stage models of function. At the same time it avoids the snare of supposing a welter of indefinitely many separate processes. The approach is not particularly original, but rather represents the common elements or presuppositions in a number of modern theories. These presuppositions are not usually explicit, however, and making them so reduces the danger of (...) slipping back into earlier modes of thought.The key point is to distinguish between persisting representations and the processes that translate one representation into another. Various classes or groups of persisting representations can be distinguished by the experimental treatments that interfere with them. In particular, there now seem to be several kinds of short-term or temporary storage, different from each other as well as from longterm memory; the translating processes also have several different modes or kinds. A particularly important aspect of the current position is that a model of this general type no longer requires some external agent to direct and control long sequences of behaviour. (shrink)

Aggleton & Brown rightly point out the shortcomings of the medial temporal lobe hypothesis as an approach to anterograde amnesia. Their broader perspective is a necessary corrective, and one hopes it will be taken very seriously. Although they correctly note the dangers of conflating recognition and recall, they themselves make a similar mistake in discussing familiarity; we suggest an alternative approach. We also discuss implications of their view for an analysis of retrograde amnesia. The notion that there are two routes (...) by which the hippocampus can reactivate neuronal ensembles in the neocortex could help us understand some currently puzzling facts about the dynamics of memory consolidation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Memory and Justice:Narrative Sources of Community in Camus's The First ManJohn Randolph LeBlancThere as a certain frustration involved in trying to find Albert Camus's conception of justice in express positive statements. But inasmuch as Camus saw his work in the trope of journey, his complex set of ideas about justice are to be discerned in the narrative structure of his texts. This is particularly so in his last (...) work, the incomplete autobiographical The First Man.1 In the novel, Camus has his protagonist and fictional self Jacques Cormery seek the sources of his orientation to questions of love and justice by attempting to reconstruct the brief life of a father he never knew. It is in the life reconstructed, chiefly through the recollected memories of those who knew the man that Jacques comes to understand his own responses to questions of love and justice. A necessary by-product of the process is that through his questioning, Jacques recreates a community of which he is a product but, until the journey is undertaken, he has never been a part. His journey is, thus, one of self-discovery and inextricably ties justice to community formation. Camus's last novel, I will argue, suggests the importance of memory and narrative to the fundamental questions of political theory, particularly, questions regarding community-formation and the role and nature of justice.IContemporary reflections on the nature of politics take narrative encounters with reality seriously. The significance of narrative to political theory is, I think, tied to the Augustinian recognition that, temporally speaking, we live forward but learn backwards. It is through reconstructing [End Page 140] our experiences as individuals that we learn about who we are and how we got here. Recent political theory has come to recognize that this epistemological structure works at both the individual and the communal level. Michael Walzer, for example, has suggested that a community's culture is the story its members tell so as to make sense of the different pieces of their social life and justice is the doctrine that distinguishes the pieces.2 But distinguishing the pieces can mean and has meant blocking or restricting our access to that reconstruction. While a time-honored political practice, the impulse to control the contents of the narrative by deeming it unworthy or too dangerous to speak became a self-conscious political practice and a particularly dangerous phenomenon in the last century. Controlling the contents of narrative means control in past, present, and future tense. Memory can become a site of resistance because narrative depends on memory for its points of reference. What gets narrated gets remembered. Most often, what does not get narrated either gets lost or must find another way.Narrative and memory have always been political resources, Joshua Foa Dienstag suggests in his important work on memory and narrative in political theory, but the self-conscious control of them is dangerous.3 At the end of a century wherein we perpetrated much we might be tempted to forget, it is increasingly evident that we must remember before we can speak of justice, that is, our stories must be told and heard before we can reconstitute (or re-member) a functional conception of political community. It is in these terms that I want to talk about narrative and its relationship to political community and justice. But what is silenced is as important as what is articulated. Dienstag, who reads political theory as narrative, suggests that, practically speaking, what we have learned is that memory unarticulated is even more dangerous than memory manipulated. Memory unarticulated either festers and becomes a flashpoint for turmoil or is articulated by an interest for its own ends and becomes a tool of control if not oppression. In either case, memory is bastardized to the ends of power politics and distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic experiences becomes the province of politicians. Leaving these distinctions to politicians, I want to suggest, is risky business. When memory represents the absence of a set of experiences rather than their presence, we are confronted by the end of a community rather than its beginning.All cultures, Walzer suggests, have an interest in... (shrink)

History and memory rank as central themes in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. As one of the last philosophers of the 19th century, Nietzsche naturally belongs to the so-called ‘historical century’. The contentious exchange with the past and with antiquity – as much as the mechanisms, the dangers, and the lessons of memory and tradition – are continually examined and stand in close relationship with Nietzsche’s vision of life and his project of human development. As Jacob Burckhardt once (...) wrote of the cultural critique to his Basel colleague: "Fundamentally, you are always teaching history". Following Burckhardt’s judgment, the contributors focus on the analysis of core questions in the philosophies of history and memory, and their respective convergence in the thought of Nietzsche. The epistemological relevance of these central concepts will be thematized alongside those concerning tradition, and education. The discussion of these rich themes unifies a broad spectrum of questions, ranging from cultural memory to contemporary philosophy of mind. The contributions are revised versions of selected papers presented at the 2018 conference of the annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society in Naumburg. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a general framework for thought about human information processing. It is intended to avoid some of the problems of pipeline or stage models of function. At the same time it avoids the snare of supposing a welter of indefinitely many separate processes. The approach is not particularly original, but rather represents the common elements or presuppositions in a number of modern theories. These presuppositions are not usually explicit, however, and making them so reduces the danger of (...) slipping back into earlier modes of thought.The key point is to distinguish between persisting representations and the processes that translate one representation into another. Various classes or groups of persisting representations can be distinguished by the experimental treatments that interfere with them. In particular, there now seem to be several kinds of short-term or temporary storage, different from each other as well as from longterm memory; the translating processes also have several different modes or kinds. A particularly important aspect of the current position is that a model of this general type no longer requires some external agent to direct and control long sequences of behaviour. (shrink)

There has been a growing interest in research concerning memory modification technologies (MMTs) in recent years. Neuroscientists and psychologists are beginning to explore the prospect of controllable and intentional modification of human memory. One of the technologies with the greatest potential to this end is optogenetics—an invasive neuromodulation technique involving the use of light to control the activity of individual brain cells. It has recently shown the potential to modify specific long-term memories in animal models in ways not (...) yet possible with other MMTs. As the therapeutic potential of optogenetics has already prompted approval of the first human trials, it is especially important and timely to consider the opportunities and dangers this technology may entail. In this article, we focus on possible consequences of optogenetics as an MMT by analyzing fundamental threats potentially associated with memory modifications: the potential disruption of personality and authenticity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to say something about the continuing impact of the Holocaust as an historical event through the application of aspects of Arendt's political thought and, at the same time, to say something about Arendt's distinctive understanding of the problems of post-Holocaust culture. An aim of this sort carries the intrinsic danger that the event in question becomes simply an illustration or grist to a particularinterpretative mill, an outcome that would be particularly undesirable here if it (...) afforded the Nazi Holocaust merely exemplary status. However, the danger may be easier to avoid in this case than in many due to a particular aspect of Arendt's thought itself. She places consistent emphasis upon the importance of the unprecedented event, the eventthat even with hindsight carries a sense of complete improbability and which changes the world and how we think about it. Arendt usually has in mind here ''positive'' political events such as acts of foundation but I want to suggest that implicitly her thought can also accommodate the notion of the Holocaust as an unprecedented ''negative''; an event that persists in its impact not because, like foundational acts, it establishes a self-reproducing arena of action and judgment, but because it insinuates a self-reproducing form of ruin. Arendt would have been sympathetic, I think, to Yehuda Bauer's description of the Holocaust as an ''upside-down miracle.''1 Undoubtedly, she regarded the Holocaust as having a symbolic significance, representing the apotheosis of the experience of modernity. The destruction of the personality in its juridical, moral and political forms enacted as a principle the superfluousness of mankind already present in the experience of modern mass society, where the vital distinction between freedom and necessity is obscured as social life fallsincreasingly under the rule of impersonal processes.2 This symbolic rendering aside, however, implicit in Arendt's thoughts on the political conditions of cognition, is an available sense of a continuing, more than symbolic significance attaching to the Holocaust as an unprecedented negative occurrence which changed things for good. Equally, and by the same token, bringing Arendt's thought to bear here will reveal an acute sense of the irreversible novelty of the contemporary, post-Holocaust situation and of the unprecedented cultural and political predicament it involves: the internal relation she posits between human plurality and cognitive certification illuminates the sense in which events involving the emasculation of plurality, and a consequent erosion of the basis of cognition, create problematic legacies for the historical imagination and in turn pose a continuing threat to freedom. I will suggest that Arendt's political thought is self-consciously located within, and structured by, this situation. It has been argued that the Holocaust represents an ''unmasterable'' episode; that it resists proper comprehension or analysis. There may be good reasons for thinking that in some sense this is true. Some critics of this view have taken it to imply that we cannot learn anything from the Holocaust as an historical event.3 In fact, I will argue, Arendt's approach delivers a sense in which this ''unmasterable'' event may carry a particular kind of significance and establishes a particular kind of point to attempts at Holocaust remembrance. At issue throughout will be the Arendtian conception of judgment. I shall suggest that what is at stake is the possibility of judgment and that this implicates the possibility of culture. I will begin by looking at some symptoms of what I take to be the problem of the Holocaust as an historical event, as an object for historical memory, and at how these may be generalised in a way which invites an Arendtian commentary. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 224–228 Introduction Jamie Allen Thierry Geoffroy’s conceptual, event- and environment-based art practice has generated over two-decades of definitional activity around what he terms “format art.” The works re-galvanize the energies of a syndicatable, open and atmospheric arrangement, of varying specifics dependent on context, participants and environment. With formats like the Emergency Room, Biennalist, and the Critical Run, Geoffroy endeavors to imbricate art and artist in the most exigent and current of social, political and mediatised spectacles. The result (...) seems to plant us at a triangulation of the configurations proposed by Alan Kaprow, Andrea Fraser and Alan Abel. Geoffroy plays up a guileless innocence (at times sporting the “Naive Blue Helmet”) as he interviews spectactors at the 2012 dOCUMENTA13 exhibitions in Kassel, Germany. What he evokes is a declamation of the appropriative, unenthusiastic, cool inclinations of the mainstream art festival, the profligate biennial (triennial, quadrennial, etc.) circuit and national and global ideological cultural-engines. In propositional artifacts, definitional articles and direct transmissions from Geoffroy’s Emergency Room field office at dOCUMENTA13, the masking of an emergency is here questioned: Can an art show like dOCUMENTA be dangerous? —JA Is dOCUMENTA designed to make people cry about something and not make them see something else? Is the contemporary a distraction from the present? Can art in delay have any impact with today? Do we learn anything by seeing art shows reflecting on history? Could 860,000 visitors have been intoxicated by an apathic gaze than keep them away from reacting? Why is dOCUMENTA proud of having recieve no critic? Why is proximity less important? Why was dOCUMENTA in Kabul? Can weapons designed to kill protesters sold to a repressing regime be contradictory to the support of the Arab Spring? Is the contemporary like a flea market to avoid to debating the important topics of today? Can art be in advance of the broken arm, and avoid accident? Is the goal of dOCUMENTA to create a revolution or to entertain? Is dOCUMENTA betterly done than Disney Land? Is it better to watch Fox News for two years or to go to dOCUMENTA for two days? If a curator, curating a contemporary art show about war, forgets to debate about the weapons factories next door, should it be considered as a professional mistake? Is it OK to employ philosophers to promote vodka? Is navigation a threat? Can an art show like dOCUMENTA be dangerous? Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel author of the month Global Art and the Museum @ZKM: " THE NEXT DOCUMENTA SHOULD BE CURATED BY A TANK " Link to Emergency Room Dictionary < /a> "COOLNESS" from the EMERGENCY ROOM DICTIONARY by COLONEL MUSIC Biennalist at dOCUMENTA 13 "TIRED" from the EMERGENCY ROOM DICTIONARY by COLONEL MUSIC Link to " APATHY " (from the Emergency Room Dictionary ) AWARENESS MUSCLE [fr. muscle de la conscience ] In the same sense memory can be trained, an awareness muscle can be developed by an effort. To develop the awareness muscle, the artist has to reduce his gesticulations. When an artist is busy the artist is not very aware the artist is occupied. A daily training is necessary But how to train? Scanning the news in a critical way could be one exercise. Daily debating politics with others could be another. Looking at other point of views usually produces significant improvements. Fighting prejudice is an excellent exercise. Many other forms of training could also produce beneficial effects for the awareness muscle. Continuous and daily training is important. For instance rewinding and slow motioning what has been absorbed getting away the sugar from the propaganda machines talking to everyone excercise comparatif critical run. If not daily trained the awareness muscle can degrade into atrophy To develop the awareness muscle requires will-power Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel. (shrink)

At present, when we live under the duress of the speed/quantity/fleeting impressions dictatorship, no possibility avails to formulate one’s total identity in horizontal and vertical dimensions, and therefore a serious danger confronts us to loose our historical consciousness and the taste of the wholeness of life. Intrying to reach ever-new modes of acceleration, we tend to forget what is really worthwhile. Loosing of memories as to the events, emotions, places, people and things, culminates in the total loss of memory (...) concerning Memory itself – not only as a psychological quality of remembering, but Memory as a phenomenon of life-consciousness. This leads us to the question of memory and its connections with consciousness, with being (also with the forgetting of being) with time, with the past and with the future; also with death and the wholeness of life. In the paper different understanding of memory have been considered: memory as being inphilosophy of St. Augustin, memory as Bildbewustsein in Husserl’s phenomenology and memory and narrative in W. Benjamin’s philosophy. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the representations of time and memory in Holocaust literature through a comparative study of Charlotte Delbo’s memoir Days and Memory and Ida Fink’s three stories “A Scrap of Time,” “A Second Scrap of Time,” and “Traces.” Although both the writers make use of time and memory to represent the Holocaust, their ways of representation vary significantly. Memory and time are used in Delbo to show the timelessness in complex layers of memory and (...) to recreate a reality through inventive narrative style. Whereas, in Fink, they are used to delineate the scraps of time in the ruins of memory and to create a tragic domestic reality through conventional narrativity. Moreover, this essay cautions against the danger of misrepresentation of memory as “amnesia,” often represented in the canonical postmodernist views of memory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recognizing Wounds and Giving Uptake The Undoing of Dominant Collective MemoriesEmily Walsh*, PhD (bio)I want to begin this response by thanking Dr. Kirmayer and Dr. Potter for taking the time to craft insightful and intellectually stimulating responses to my article. Both commentaries enabled me to clarify the complexity of the question of how best to commence the undoing of dominant collective memories (DCMs) in psychiatry. In this response, I (...) will clarify what I intend to capture by the term DCMs, tackle two problems identified with my account, and end by remarking on the solutions proposed by the authors, defending that a hybrid combination of both positions leaves us with the most robust solution to the problems created by DCMs.I briefly outline in the article that DCMs are singular and exclusionary collective memories underpinned by colonialism. Potter expresses concern about being left with uncertainty regarding what sorts of DCMs serve to deny the violence faced by the colonized given this definition. This concern is important as it shows that there is some conceptual confusion about how to distinguish ordinary collective memories from DCMs, which I propose ought to be rejected. Addressing this concern would also be useful for the reason Potter makes; to help better motivate why change is required in psychiatry regarding DCMs. In response to Potter's definitional concern, I will now posit a thicker explanation of DCMs, which outlines how they are distinct from ordinary collective memories on three grounds.DCMs are unique from other kinds of collective memory insofar as they deny that there could be various perspectives of the same event. This denial occurs in multiple ways, such as silencing, scapegoating, attacking, and undermining others' perspectives, painting certain actors as all good and others as all bad. Therein lies the danger of DCMs as I have defended that people are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but they are at the mercy of their social situation. Good examples of cases of the kind of DCMs I have in mind are how colonial nations defend their reasons for engaging in colonialism and failing to acknowledge sectors of history entirely (such as failing to recognize horror crimes against certain social and ethnic minorities). Such a failure to integrate both positive and negative parts of a nation's history is not [End Page 249] present in all contexts. For instance, Germany has integrated teaching about the horrors endured during Nazi Germany into their historical narrative of the past to avoid reproducing similar atrocities in the future. Places like the UK and Canada are slower to follow suit and admit that there are horrors present in the nation's past too.DCMs are also unique in legitimizing and reproducing negative and positive stereotypes, ideals, and cultural myths. Such stereotypes tend to be harmful such as "I expect X group always to steal," but they can also be positive "I expect X to be the most intelligent person I've ever met." As Fanon instructed us (Fanon 1964, 1967), these stereotypes are entrenched in the content of DCMs. Similarly, they are reproduced with the intent of controlling specific populations of persons. If, after all, I have 'evidence' that you are a thief by 'nature,' I will seek to protect my belongings from you. The problem is that the 'evidence' is not evidence—it is a form of DCM. The evidence fails to see processes of racialization and colonialism and thereby, advertently or inadvertently, reproduces them.As reiterated by Kirmayer in his commentary, DCMs are not primarily concerned about individual and discrete events, but they aim to produce narratives of events. According to Kirmayer, these narratives are imbued with explanations and rationalizations that drive the plot forward in time. My primary concern in the article was to show that DCMs can work to move the plot backward in time as a means of controlling specific populations—back to a time the world does not recognize as a time but forces racialized persons to keep perpetually enduring the aftereffects of (Al-Saji, 2013, 2021). Thus, there are deep contradictions in DCMs which are not present in all collective memories. On the one hand, DCMs deny the violence inflicted on the... (shrink)

The article is based on an analysis of the works of the French historian Pierre Nora, who, trying to find a "true" history, comes to the opposition of history and memory. Outright political agitation and national imperatives are dominated in History, therefore history cannot be correct and objective. Instead of history, the philosopher believes, we should focus on the right memory. But when memory itself has been torn apart, it can only exist on the basis of " (...) class='Hi'>memory places" - mnemonic places. The power of memory is preserved now in the places of memory that accumulate and preserve history. Places of memory have lost their physical or geographical meanings. Meaning and sense are made places of memory, important place for history. Due to the nature of the memory places, the multiplicities of their interpretations are the normal. And the past, therefore, became a poly semantic space, focused on the co-presence of many different versions of the interpretation of the same memorial structures (monuments, historical facts and events, texts of the past). Contrasting memory and history, P. Nora concludes about "the tyranny of memory (it is reminiscent of Reeker's statement). In his opinion, at any moment the memory is ready to lift history under itself, to "memorize" it, it deeply and dangerously distorts the meaning of words. Precisely because there is no collective memory, the places of memory appear that designed to compensate for its absence. When the space of memory disappears, mnemonic places appear. It is through mnemonic places (places of memory) as spaces that provide access to traditions, Nora moves from the present to the past. But the noble goal of finding the truth, of recreating traditions, has turned into honoring memory for political purposes, where the past has become the rhetorical construct of the present. Hence, the perception of truth is changing. Now, the truth is not in the "factuality" of the data, but in their "relevance". In the end, Nora makes a rather devastating conclusion for history- that the past has lost its meaning, the present historical consciousness gives meaning to all possible and valid versions of the past, and that official memory (politics of memory) is associated with practices of selective forgetting or memory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:358 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY und k6nnen es nur sein. Das Gleiche ist der Fall mit den Erfahrungstatsachen des wissenschaftlichen Versuches und im Grunde aller Wissenschaft gibt es nichts anderes und kann es nichts anderes geben. Mag ein gewandter Dialektiker die Voraussetzungen, yon denen er ausgeht, noch so sehr durcheinanderwirbeln, sie verbinden und zu Schliissen aufeinandertiirmen: Was er erhiilt, wird stets wieder eine Aussage sein. Niemals wird er zu einem (...) Gesetze gelangen, das lauten wiirde: Tue dies! oder Tue dies nicht! also zu einem Satze, der dem sittlichen Gesetze entsprechen oder ibm entgegenstehen kSnnte,r Kann Morscher dann noch immer behaupten, dass Poincar6 nur kategorische Syllogismen oder nur Schhssfolgerungen mit gerade Priimissen im Sinne hatte? Wir sind dem t3bersetzer eine Ehrenrettung schuldig: wenn er hier "syllogisme" mit "logischer Schluss" iibersetzt hat, hat er keinen Fehler begangen, es trifft ihn nicht der Tadel, durch eine scblechte Ubersetzung eine Legende hervorgerufen zu haben. Morscher soUte jedoch nicht, wenn er "syllogisme" liest, "kategorischer Syllogismus" verstehen, lind bei geistesgeschichtlichen Diskussionen immer den hermeneutisch relevanten Kontext beachten, d.h. wnigstens den Absatz, den er gerade analysiert, zu Ende lesen. Es liisst sich rticht daran zweifeln, dass Hare mit Recht [PR] Poincar6 zuschreibt. Nicht ganz sicher bin ich, ob Poincar6, wenn er sah und es ausdriicklich sagte, dass die iiblichen logischen Regeln fiir Imperativfolgerung nicht anwendbar sind, damit auch gleichzeitig die Entwicklung einer Imperativlogik (Normenlogik) forderte, oder ob er sich dieser programmatischen Konsequenz nicht ganz bewusst war. OTAWEINBERGER Universitiit Graz RUSSELL'S REALIST THEORY OF REMOTE MEMORY In a paper on Bertrand Russell's theory of memory1 David Pears undertakes to amend certain aspects of his version of Russell's theory of memory which he had presented in his Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy. ~ In that work Pears had attributed to Russell an extreme realist theory of memory from 1905 through 1918, i.e., a general theory of memory according to which the mind maintains direct contact by the dual relation of acquaintance with past sense-data. 3 This, he now believes, is historically incorrect in view of two of Russell's lesser known papers which have since come to his attention and which make it clear that in 1915 Russell held the extreme realist account only in connection with immediate memory--i.e., with memory within what is often called the specious present--and that as regards remote memory--i.e., memory of things not very recent and, so, outside the specious present--past sense-data 7 Poincare, Letzte Gedanken, aus dem FranzSsischen iibersetzt yon Karl Lichteneeker (Leipzig : Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1913),pp. 226 f. 1 D. F. Pears, "Russell's Theories of Memory 1912-1921," in Bertrand Russell's Philosophy, ed. George Nakhnikian (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 117-137. The papers are from the Indiana University Russell centenary conference, 1972. 2 (London: Collins~I967), pp. 7I, 181-182. 3 Ibid. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 359 were knowable only by description and not by acquaintance.4 But Pears still argues, as against J. O. Urmson,5 that Russell did hold the realist theory of remote memory before 1915, although he was "changing his mind" in that year and, by 1917 ("The Philosophy of Logical Atomism"), had definitely abandoned the theory,e I believe that Pears is partly right about this matter: Russell almost certainly did hold a realist theory of remote memory before 1915. However, it can be shown, I think, that the theory was abandoned, not in 1915 or later, but in 1914. Pears shows beyond any reasonable doubt that Russell held a realist theory of remote memory in 1912. The strongest evidence may be found in a passage in Problems of Philosophy: There is some danger of confusion as to the nature of memory, owing to the fact that memory of an object is apt to be accompanied by an image of the object, and yet the image cannot be what constitutes memory. This is easily seen by merely noticing that the image is in the present, whereas what is remembered is known to be in the past. Moreover, we are certainly able to some extent to compare our image with the object remembered, so that we often know, within... (shrink)

This article uses a comparative approach to elucidate the ways in which women’s testimony operated in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in Rwanda’s gacaca courts, to draw out some important lessons for future mechanisms of transitional justice. The author argues that while restorative justice mechanisms allow more space for including women’s own experiences of human rights violation than conventional trials, they may pose greater danger for those who testify. A significant problem resulting from the narratives of both gacaca (...) and the TRC is the way in which a ‘singular woman victim’ emerges that elides the complexity of women’s experiences in collective memory. It is feared that what has emerged from the official discourse of these two truth-seeking mechanisms is a one-dimensional female victim subject – in South Africa, she is of secondary importance, in Rwanda, she can only be Tutsi, and in both cases she is stripped of all agency, where rape becomes definitive of her experience. (shrink)

Algorithmic probability and friends: Proceedings of the Ray Solomonoff 85th memorial conference is a collection of original work and surveys. The Solomonoff 85th memorial conference was held at Monash University's Clayton campus in Melbourne, Australia as a tribute to pioneer, Ray Solomonoff, honouring his various pioneering works - most particularly, his revolutionary insight in the early 1960s that the universality of Universal Turing Machines could be used for universal Bayesian prediction and artificial intelligence. This work continues to increasingly influence and (...) under-pin statistics, econometrics, machine learning, data mining, inductive inference, search algorithms, data compression, theories of intelligence and philosophy of science - and applications of these areas. Ray not only envisioned this as the path to genuine artificial intelligence, but also, still in the 1960s, anticipated stages of progress in machine intelligence which would ultimately lead to machines surpassing human intelligence. Ray warned of the need to anticipate and discuss the potential consequences - and dangers - sooner rather than later. Possibly foremostly, Ray Solomonoff was a fine, happy, frugal and adventurous human being of gentle resolve who managed to fund himself while electing to conduct so much of his paradigm-changing research outside of the university system. The volume contains 35 papers pertaining to the abovementioned topics in tribute to Ray Solomonoff and his legacy. (shrink)

This (by no means exhaustive) survey of Postman’s work reflects on his penetrating analyses of contemporary technology. He focused attention on the ways technology today, especially the television and the computer, inevitably change us. The essential questions he asks us to ask (and answer) are, How does technology affect us? Is it for good or ill? and Must we accept all technological advances? Postman recognized the current dominance and autonomy of technology as well as the concomitant dangers and consequently made (...) the case and the plea for the reassertion of human over technological values. (shrink)

Reformed ecclesiology suffers from a lack of a concrete sense of catholicity, a lack that easily shatters unity in the church. This article broadly sketches a way in which Reformed confessions and the practice of confessing can help fill that lack, drawing from Robert Schreiter's The New Catholicity. By understanding confessing in terms of remembering dangerous memories, Reformed catholicity has the potential for enabling the church to be a unifying witness in an age where globalizing forces have fragmented societies (...) and inflamed troubling sentiments. (shrink)

More precisely, transhumanists advocate increased funding for research to radically extend healthy lifespan and favor the development of medical and technological means to improve memory, concentration, and other human capacities. Transhumanists propose that everybody should have the option to use such means to enhance various dimensions of their cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being. Not only is this a natural extension of the traditional aims of medicine and technology, but it is also a great humanitarian opportunity to genuinely improve the (...) human condition. (shrink)

These three reflections look at the theological and ethical implications of sexual violence in light of the attention brought by #MeToo. The first explores ethnographic interviews which indicate that Church leaders, teachers, and parents contribute to rape culture by leaving sexual violence unaddressed in Christian sexual education, arguing that it must be reconstructed to eliminate the Church’s participation in a culture that promotes gender-based violence. The second notes that feminist scholarship has made the case that rape and “unjust sex” are (...) associated with what is considered acceptable heterosexuality, require the category of “cultural sin” to account for the social responsibility of persons. Finally, the third explores how a feminist political theological ethics of “dangerous memory” is required to critique of the structures and systems that violate women’s selves and bodies. (shrink)

Radical Orthodoxy offers insight into the relationship between Christianity and culture. But it errs in its one-sided reading of modernity, its attempt to reduce philosophy to theology, and its prescription of a pre-modern metaphysics as the only authentic theological foundation. These suggest a fear of contingency and a desire for the immediate grasp of the divine which might circumvent history’s messiness. The result is a construal of reality that is in general inimical to an authentic Catholic reading of reality. Catholic (...) theology must be more faithful to the incarnational and eschatological structure of revelation—and thus to contingency—than either it or Radical Orthodoxy has been in the past. Aquinas’ defense of philosophy and Metz’s principle of “dangerous memory” offer ways to overcome this fear and to enjoy created contingency, secure in hope for the eschatological transformation which God in Christ has promised to all persons and all epochs. (shrink)

History is not the record of humanity’s progress through otherwise empty time. It is rather to be conceived messianically, i.e., in terms of God’s eschatological promises and the interruptive capacity of dangerous memories of human suffering. This insight is contained in both the historical philosophy of Walter Benjamin and the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz. Metz’s theological categories also contribute an understanding of messianic history that avoids the dualism of Benjamin’s description of history in both messianic and materialist (...) terms. (shrink)

Memorialization in the form of the architectural statue can suggest that our stance towards the past is concrete while memorials in the form of repeated social activity represent reconciliation with the past as a continual process. Enacted memorials suggest that reconciliation with the past is not itself a thing of the past. Each generation must grapple with its inherited memories, guilt, and grief and self-consciously take its own stance towards that which came before it. This article considers Dominik Smole’s post (...) World War II rewrite of Antigona as an enacted memorial within the context of socialist Yugoslavia. The practice of restaging Antigona in Slovenia may be seen as the practice of meta-memorialization, which routinely returns to the past while openly weighing the dangers of awakening the unburied dead against the dangers of letting the unaddressed conflicts of the past sleep. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Report on the Tenth European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies Conference:History as a Challenge to Buddhism and ChristianityJohn O’Grady, Elizabeth J. Harris, and Jonathan A. SeitzThe Tenth Conference of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies (ENBCS) brought together between sixty and seventy people at the Oude Abdij, Drongen, Belgium, between 27 June and 1 July 2013, to examine the theme “History as a Challenge to Buddhism and Christianity.” It was (...) a collaborative effort between the ENBCS and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The 2011 ENBCS conference had focused on whether hope was a relevant concept for Buddhists and Christians. The choice of history as a theme complemented this. It also resonated with a research concern of both KU Leuven and the Network.Five key themes were chosen for examination: the traditional Christian and Buddhist conceptions of history; Jesus and the Buddha: fact and fiction; Buddhist and Christian historiography; dangerous memory in Christianity and Buddhism; and permitting historical consciousness in Buddhism and Christianity. Each was approached from a Buddhist and a Christian perspective. An opening lecture addressed the theme “Modern Historical Consciousness and the Challenge to Religion.” In addition, eighteen research papers on Buddhist-Christian relations were given in parallel sessions on Friday evening and Saturday morning. These covered topics as various as the writings of Edmund Pezet (Pierre Gillet), Paul Knitter’s understanding of Buddhist-Christian double belonging (Achim Riggert), Keiji Nishitani and the death of God (Jonatan Navarro Estrada), the encounter of Zen Buddhism and Christianity in the works of D. T. Suzuki (Mariusz Rucki), Buddhist-Christian encounters by Han Yong Woon (Seung Chul Kim), and “Liberating the Conflict from ‘History’ in Sri Lanka” (Jude Lal Fernando).Perry Schmidt-Leukel (Münster, Germany), in the opening lecture, discussed [End Page 189] seven challenges that modern historical consciousness was posing to religion: the challenge of falsification (when historical evidence, for example, showed some doctrines cherished by believers were not taught by the founder), the challenge of uncertainty or methodological doubt, the challenge of methodological naturalism (should a natural explanation be considered more probable than a supernatural one?), the challenge of the distance between past and present, the challenge of change (religions are not static), the challenge of demystification, and the challenge of relativity (the writing of history is perspectival, conditioned by context). He stressed that it would be a blessing to religion if these challenges were faced and, throughout the conference, encouraged other speakers to face them.The first theme was tackled by Mark Blum (Berkeley, USA) from a Buddhist perspective and Jan-Olav Henriksen (Norwegian School of Theology) from a Christian perspective. In a magisterial historical and geographical survey of the Buddhist tradition, Blum first noted that no one had unearthed a traditional notion of Buddhist history in the early texts. The theme of decline and reformation had been taken from Indian cosmology, but with a Buddhist twist and the conviction that it was pointless to talk about beginnings. And in the growth of the Mahāyāna tradition, a dehistoricization of the Buddha had occurred in the belief that the Buddha’s dharma-body was his only “real” body.Henriksen argued that Christian salvation history had its origin in the narrative of the Fall, an event for which there was no historical evidence, and developed into a history of God’s call (election) to all people that they should be brought together in community. It was a history that was linked with the divine logos, a force that Christian theology has seen as deeply interwoven into creation from the beginning of time and that was made human in Jesus.Terrence Merrigan (KU Leuven, Belgium), giving a Christian perspective on the second theme, distinguished three quests or attempts to reach the historical Jesus. The first, from 1774 to 1906, sought to uncover the Jesus that had been obscured by dogma. It imploded with the realization that separating “core” from “myth” was impossible, and conditioned a reactive “no-quest” in the first half of the twentieth century. A “new quest” arose in the 1950s, initiated by Käsemann’s reaction to the theologies of Barth and Bultmann. A further quest that appealed to archaeology and the... (shrink)