The Function of Memory in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy
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For Walter Benjamin the problem of memory is the problem of interpretation. He was intrigued by the question if we are equipped with one memory that allows for various competing versions of the past (as was the case of Marcel Proust, carefully analysed by Benjamin) or whether the plural interpretation of the past is irreducible, because memory, entangled by its complicated relations to language and personal experience, establishes its own ultimate truth. Benjamin's answer is not straightforward. On one hand, our experiences are retained in an unambiguous form, on the other, however, when we recreate them and contemplate them they are subjected to the idiomatic medium of language. As a result our recollections are locked in a tug of war between a more or less accurate vision of the past and continually changing description of it, imposed by shifting application of general rules of language. The process of recollection is thus capable of creating and discovering new meanings of the past.
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