The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

The habitual union of memory and history is being replaced in our time by a deep rift between them, in which both sides change their very essence. Memory becomes a rift in the very ideology of history. The author surveys various possibilities of memory as an act performed by the remembering subject (“performative act”), not so much in relation to his or her individual past as in relation to a common present. The author looks at memory as the practice of subjectivity, i. e. only in one of the modes of its existence. The exercise of memory as a practice of subjectivity brings together different types of memory, whether they are personal or transpersonal. The issue in question is what happens with the subject of commemoration, himself. This article looks at three types of memory and remembrance. Psychological memory demonstrates the fragmentation and lack of self-sufficiency of human experience of “the self”, and the fundamental lack of integrity of this experience, which turns into need and deficiency.
Ideological memory presupposes that the past “belongs” to a subject which is forging and finalizing history (for instance, the state) – to one who holds the exclusive right to “tell history’s story”.
The third type of memory might be called performative: it assumes not the ability to recall, but the establishment of relationship with those who are present even in their absence. At its centre is the restoration of memory as an act and event in which a radical, transhistorical experience can take place. This act establishes a community of the living with the dead; this community has a paradoxical, temporal nature.