The Punctum and the Past
Sartre and Barthes on Memory and Fascination
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Abstract
This article extrapolates a theory of memory as an intentional consciousness from Sartre’s early, scattered references to memory. There are three key questions: How does Sartre conceive of memory’s intentional structure? Its temporal structure? And how does memory display both continuity and discontinuity in the stream of consciousness? Starting from the Sartrean insight that memory is a ‘double consciousness’ the article offers an analysis of how memory helps to constitute a temporally complex mode of being-in-the-world. Aside from memory’s usefulness in this regard, memory also has the power to disturb consciousness and disrupt its projects. Roland Barthes’s concept of the punctum – which is connected to analyses of mourning – helps to clarify this. A synoptic analysis of Sartre and Barthes allows for a phenomenological description of how consciousness can be stuck in the past, confronted by something that was, and which holds the mind captive.
Contributor Notes
Patrick Eldridge is a doctoral candidate at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven’s Higher Institute of Philosophy. He is attached to the Husserl Archives research unit there and is preparing a dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology of memory. His research focus is on the connections between memory and time-consciousness. His research areas include phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of time and psychoanalysis. He is originally from Ottawa, Canada.