Mnemotechnics and the Discrete Voice

What may be recalled is not necessarily what can be recorded; and yet what is remembered is often a photograph, which makes accessible in the future an experience that was never otherwise present. This sense of time – in time – concerns the “hauntings, spirits, delusions” that attend the question “who am I?” and is the scenario explored in two essay-films – Loving Memory and Dahlem Dorf – to which Bernard Stiegler very kindly “lent his voice” for me. (The first of these films offers a meditation on a London cemetery full of gravestones in the form of books; and the second offers a meditation on the Africa Gallery of the former ethnological museum in Berlin, before its move to the Humboldt Forum. In both cases, however, the film is also engaged in critical self-reflection on its own medium.) As a contribution to this symposium honouring Stiegler’s memory, I wish to return to this voice (as it now returns to me), allowing a question of thinking, perhaps, to return to itself.