Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.
Interpretation
Remembrance allows us to redefine the past, giving life to what could have been while acknowledging what was.
This quote by Giorgio Agamben explores the concept of remembrance as a transformative act. It suggests that remembering is not merely recalling events as they occurred but is an active engagement with the potential of those memories, enabling us to reinterpret and reimagine our past. In this sense, memories can be incomplete or unrealized, but they possess the power to evolve and take on new meaning, thus affecting our present and future perspectives.
In practice
A speaker reflecting on personal growth at a reunion could use this quote to inspire others about learning from the past.
Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system
To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.
One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.
Forbidden pleasures alone are loved immoderately; when lawful, they do not excite desire.
Who knoweth if to die be but to live, and that called life by mortals be but death?
Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs.
He who looks sinward has his back to God-he who looks Godward has his back to sin.
My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminuation, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution. It is reason and not passion which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision.
Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent natural regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
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