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.
Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.
What is true stillness? Stillness in movement.
As long as we are among humans, let us be humane.
Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.
We have to live with ambiguity. We have to give ourselves over to it. The question is: How? How are we going to live in a universe where important questions will always go unanswered?
There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the 'end of time,' or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.