CAN WE REMEMBER THINGS we have never learned? Can we remember the future? Or can we only remember the past, only recover events and knowledge from behind us up to the present, things that are suddenly needed or valuable now? These and similar questions are emerging at the end of the age of modernism with unexpected intensity: keywords such as “memory” and “remembering” are showing up ever more frequently in the bibliographies of critical discourse. Just why this should be happening is a difficult question. Ian Hacking, in his remarkable book on the philosophical problems of repressed memories and multiple personalities, links the phenomenon to the history of the concepts of self and identity in European thought. Other observers have pointed to the sudden collapse of the totalitarian political systems of Eastern Europe, which have unleashed torrents of private and public recollection of everything that oppressive regimes had excluded from collective memory, had banned from the historical narrative. Certainly, one could also point to the symbolic implications of the year 2000, a millennial threshold that touched at a very deep level the relations between history and prophecy in the Christian cultures.

One aspect of the crisis of memory that is specifically modern and has been foregrounded by Goethe in Faust arises from the dispersal of topics. The information explosion that began with the discovery of “new worlds” has not abated, and now we are struggling to cope with a situation in which bits of knowledge are scattered over an immense terrain, the mysterious “Internet,” much as the fragments of a bomb, the structures, and the victims are chaotically strewn over the surrounding space in the wake of a terrorist attack.