Remembering the Present

In his Deja Vu and the End of History, Italian philosopher Paolo Virno explores the phenomenology of memory, especially in its relation to philosophies of history. The deja vu of the title isn’t a metaphor; following Henri Bergson, Virno argues that it represents “the untrammelled extension of memory’s jurisdiction, of its dominion. Rather than limit itself to preserving traces of times past, memory also applies itself to actuality, to the evanescent ‘now’” (7).

For Bergson, the intriguing philosophical question about the experience of deja vu is not why it happens but why it’s not happening all the time. That inverted question rests on Bergson’s claim that memory is “never posterior to the formation of perception; it is contemporaneous with it” (quoted in Virno, 11). Memory “exhibits a difference of nature as compared to perception, and, at the same time, an equal intensity” (11). Deja vu‘s “re-evocation of what is happening right now” is “the condition of possibility of memory in general,” since “there would be no memory at all, if it were not, first of all, memory of the present” (12). We always remember what is happening while it’s happening, but we don’t always recognize it because of “the impulse to action always and on each occasion privileges the perception-form to the detriment of the memory-form” (12). We give attention to the task-at-hand, and hence don’t recognize that memory and perception are both operative in every present moment.

Our very experience is constituted by a soft form of deja vu. Our perceptual experience is tracked by the virtual mirror of memory. As Bergson puts it, “Our actual existence . . . whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself all along with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every aspect of our life presents two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other. Each moment of life is split up as and when it is posited. Or rather, it consists in this very splitting” (quoted, 15).

Virno traces the idea of a present memory back at least to Augustine. In a passage in de Trinitate 14, Augustine writes, “let anyone who denies that there is any memory of things present, attend to the language used even in profane literature, where exactness of words was more looked for than the truth of things. ‘Now did Ulysses suffer such thing, nor did the Ithacan forget himself in so great a peril.’ For when Virgil said that Ulysses did not forget himself, what else did he mean, except that he remembered himself. And since he was present to himself, he could not possible remember himself unless memory pertained to things present. And, therefore, as that is called memory in things past which makes it possible to recall and remember them, so in a thing present, as the mind is to itself, that is not unreasonably to be called memory, which makes the mind at hand in itself” (quoted, 131).

Virno explains, “The object of memory is not . . . a more or less immense mass of mental acts, but rather the mind as a trinitary potential, the capacity-to-remember, the capacity-to-think, the capacity-to-will. But already for Augustine the different faculties were all comprised by one single faculty, the memory, designating that which designates the mind as a whole. The memory of the present, with which the mind knows itself, is, then, in the first place the memory of the capacity to remember” (131).

By this theory, we have no sense of self, no “presence of the self to the self” without the simultaneity of perception and memory. One might be tempted to say that experience involves the perichoretic penetration of memory and perception.