THE MEMORY. A TIME OF FORGETFULNESS

DONZIS Liliana

In 1924 Sigmund Freud was surprised with a technique of writing and memory which was produced by the impression of a line on a celluloid lamina affixed to a layer of wax, something was engraved on this, leaving a mark that later could be erased. By way of a marvelous block, Freud proposed that the memory was supported in a writing and in the discontinuance of the perceptive system. This last aspect constitutes: "The foundation of the idea of time." (1) Writing and discontinuance link the before and the after. A line left, in the past tense of the verb, a mark that a posteriori will be erased. As such the Freudian time means that the future is sedimented with marks of the past that will be actualized by retro-action in the series.

The Freudian memory is woven on the loom of forgetfulness. The erasing of the mark involves a complex process whose original knot is irreducible.: the urverdrängt never reappears, like a magnet, radical forgetfulness attracts the new impressions to the receiving system whose functionality is to discontinue. The impressions drawn will carry this scansion, this silence, this waiting that we can designate as cut and silence: discontinuous of perceptible time. The knot is formed by spinning and losing, the woven work which is lost can be called forgetfulness. If the memory succeeds in returning in a code and possible decoding of marks, it is because it paid its debt to the price of forgetfulness. The memory is produced in the return of forgetfulness by ways of fiction, on occasions concealing that watched over and reveals something of the truth of the starting points: it is nourished by forgetfulness by speaking with the language of the repression. Between the before and after the astuteness of the strategy of forgetfulness is woven. The memory is the marvelous writing of the real that allows to protect the fugacity of the instant in which incalculable lines are written a priori. That memory, who protects effective forgetfulness, fails but is not unsuccessful in its attempt of returning, it removes the possibility of a return in the perfect tense of the verb. Said in another way, the memory is the impossible certainty of the remembrance. The forgotten pieces chosen from the real are remembered.

Freud situates the institutive times of the subject of the unconscious in which the repression delimits a before and an after of the operations that, in infantile sexuality leave as a balance the entrance of a logic which is called lactation: a time in souffrance of the subject, waiting for sexual enjoyment and the questioning of it. In this period an accumulation of image and pre-conscious character history is produced that as such they join with the series of mnemic marks, with the marks of the Wortvorstellung, representation of the word that will shape the littoral of the phantomlike scene for the neurotic figure. (2)

As from the teachings of Lacan is it possible to carry out another lecture in the times of writing of the subject? Are the institutive times that delineate in the perspective of the subject of the unconscious the same as those of the time of the subject of the act? And even of the time or times that concern to the knotted called R.S.I of the cadenudo, subject enchained in the knot?

*The memory veil of the phantom of a time in act.

We learn with Lacan that the memory is not the optical illusion in which we can find the past, but that on the contrary the forgetfulness is the stumbling block of the memory. There is not enough ink to write everything, the castration concerns the subject and the Other of the language. Time and writing of the subject is produced in the same instance as the act. The memory is fugacity, that instance in which the remembrance is only the facade, the veil of the phantom, that little bit of modesty that barely allows us to go on dreaming and which puts us on the road to desire and wakening. To escape with the significant of the torments of enjoyment to: "Draw a line with the timid but well-intentioned scalpel, an incision to life and not only that life marks us." (3)

"The statute of that unconscious is so fragile in the ontic plane, it is ethic". (4)

It concerns to the castration of the Other of the language and situates the subject between two deaths: the death of the living being and the mortification for the significant. Forgetfulness is on the side of the second death first in the logical sense. The significant inscription leaves indelible marks since in it the letters of the mother language are strung together, the lalangue, that incalculable source of the memory of the language which in neurosis becomes body. In this way it operates by way of the transmission of the language that pierces the pulsating space making the letter the beginning time of the parlêtre. We suffer a language among others, there lies the literal of the unconscious. It is not just about the mark and its erasure, symbolic baggage that the significant carries, but also the symptom which blunts the phallic enjoyment that allows the real to appear and on occasions this savoir y faire avec son sinthome.

Merit of psycho-analysis is to warn that something will be heard even if later. For psycho-analysis the memory is not a social emblem, nor a demand of the subjectivity of the epoch after Auschwitz. Lacan reminded us in Seminario XIV, "What is made as analysis of the subjectivity of contemporary history is history that I call totalitarianism."

The memory is not a historical archive, but a letter that influences in each one, one by one.

If history is connected to logos, the memory is to the ethics of the unconscious.

The memory is the risk of not knowing, it is the putting into play of the act that makes the discourse ethic. Its faults, which are structural, constitute scansions to be elapsed. They concern the veil that puts on the modesty cover so that the rest ignore the real. The memory veils the anxiety and maybe we find here one of the motives for which culture reclaims Memory in front of the social misfortunes of the twentieth century. The word memory in this sense has been converted into a conjuration to the demon of sex and death, taking them to the farthest extremes of the ignominy in the Shoah and in the genocides that were produced in Latin America in the last decades, though we well-know they were not the only ones.

The real of the extermination of the Shoah in not representable. There is something that does not stop being written about, even when we try to transfer the letter, it burns, because enjoyment of the traumatic is what Freud taught us in "Mas allá del Principio del Placer", it demands elaboration, Durcharbeiten. Why?

In the uniqueness of the subject the repetition installs that equal and the different, the drawing that makes one countable to the series that distinguishes it from another, and while the demands from the culture is that this will never be repeated.

To veil the dead, the protagonists of a history without protagonists, to return them the name of which they were divested of.

"We say, ´Nazi language´ language and not discourse, language who pretends to not have limits....it converts the subject into human carrion, there is something that exceeds the phantomlike and floods the every day speech with opaqueness, because when it comes to extermination all phantom has been dissipated." (5)

The memory of the extermination, is the N.N memory., Night and Fog, No Name , at most a number. In the concentration and extermination camps there was no place for names, there were assignations, such as: rag, garbage, trash. Not even dead or a cadaver. Euphemisms of the extermination phenomina of the discourse. (5)

The difference between the genocides of Latin America, for example which happened in Argentina during the time of the Process, implied taking the subject to the maximum possibilities of subjectivity in the interrogation under torture. "Inform on!, Denounce!, Talk!".

Their names and bodies disappeared and our NN travel the contemporary history of totalitarianism.

The memory has lakes and allows us to dress as phantom and forgetfulness the real of the screams of death as a limit of life. In this sense the structure of the memory acts like the letter in the quality of the vehicle of a transmission that makes language that sediment in which the history of the subject is written, such as the lalangue archive, always ready to make incidents in the significant and transform itself into a dream or nightmare. The guardian of time to watch over the impudence and the madness that it can transport, hear all the screams of all the voices, of all the executions, of all the bonfires with smells of human flesh burned. Together with the visions of hair and gold teeth pressed together, together with babies snatched from the arms of their families in this or that camp.

Memory, temporality without time that allows cuts and silences.

Discontinuity in the perceived that allows the subject to weave with the letter that mistakes the lapsus of forgetfulness, oxygenated modesty of the efficacy of a memory that when it forgets, writes.

1. Freud, S.: El block Maravilloso. O.C. Ed. B. Nueva.
2. L. Donzis: ¨Psychoanalysis with children". Ed. Homo Sapiens. Page 193.
3. L. Donzis: Fragment of a delicate history. Inedited. Presented in the Seminary: "Character. Temperament and Figure until the Interment?" EFBA 2000.
4. Lacan,J.: Seminary XIV. La lógica del fantasma. Inedited, internal version of the EFBA.
5. Perla Sneh and Juan Carlos Cosaka. The Shoah in the century. Ed. Xavier Boveda.

(-) Analia Stepak. The real of the history presented in the Foundation Meeting of the Convergencia, 1998.