Memory and Its Traces

Contrary to what one might naïvely assume, memory is not like a tape recorder replaying reality in deferred time, it is instead more similar to a machine composing and recomposing, very often guided by the heart and its reasons (which reason knows nothing of), traces gathered in various ways. It is no coincidence that in English and French, we say remembering by heart or par coeur. We search for the traces of our memory, trying to recompose them according to a coherent form that may have never existed. Ulrich Neisser compares what happens when we try to remember events from our past to the work of a paleontologist assembling a dinosaur skeleton from scattered fossils: we recreate, from traces found here and there, entire scenes whose correctness we will never be able to verify. And it is precisely in this that memory shows all its inventiveness on the one hand and fragility on the other because the risk is that of remembering something that never happened. This is the reason why Maurizio Ferraris decides to treat imagination and memory together, namely because imagination consists of the reprocessing of memory traces. But if memory is a reconstruction of the past (and not an accurate snapshot of it) while thinking we are remembering actual events, we are maybe just constructing memories. And, if so, is it plausible to imagine having any kind of control over that process? By working on imagination, memory, and traces, keywords in Ferraris’ thought, this essay will try to sketch some possible answers.