Memory, time and responsibility

The chapter sets to explore the relationship between memory and responsibility. Here both are interpreted as figures of time, closely intertwined with the idea of social continuity, and therefore capable of connecting the past and the future through the present. Memory, by definition the ‘custodian of time’, evokes social processes that concern both the construction of personal identity, by virtue of the sense of continuity that it ensures, and the capacity to engender forms of collective identity based on redefining the past in light of the needs of the present. Responsibility, as an ethical dimension structured around the idea of a continuous time that extends from the past to the future via the present, shares with memory the interactive nature, as well as an emphasis on choice and a tension towards the future. Both memory and responsibility regard the subject’s ability to recognize his or her own specificity, and at the same time, duration over time. And though these aspects might seem purely individual, they are both bound up not only with intersubjectivity but also with institutional processes. The chapter argues in particular that memory and responsibility have a shared frame of reference in the notion of duration – understood, à la Bergson, as the continuation of what no longer exists in what persists.