Forgetting Follow

Abstract

Memory in Ireland is a performative cultural industry that is regulated by the threat of forgetting. Forgetting cannot be cured, because it determines the phenomenology of memory. The more one attempts to defend against forgetting as a phenomenon, the more likely it is that memory becomes imaginary, because remembrance is essential. To this end, Paul Ricoeur has argued that ‘forgetting has a positive meaning insofar as having-been prevails over being-no-longer in the meaning attached to the idea of the past’.² This chapter will argue that if forgetting is modelled as a positive phenomenon, it requires the concomitance of memory and the imagination. Ricoeur, however, has argued that ‘the pitfall of the imaginary’ haunts the phenomenology of memory as ‘a sort of weakness, a discredit, a loss of reliability of memory’.³ This chapter will invert Ricoeur’s supposition by considering the ephemerality of performance in relation to forgetting as a productive and performative event that summons the contemporaneity of subterranean histories, alternative temporalities and multidirectional memories. Forgetting seen from this perspective offers a radical philosophy of performance as historiographical research, where the phenomenology of forgetting orchestrates theatre practice and the practice of theatre history.

There was no light. Nothing was illuminated. Memories and all of the darkness.

Shane O’Reilly¹