Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.
Interpretation
Remembrance allows us to redefine the past, giving life to what could have been while acknowledging what was.
This quote by Giorgio Agamben explores the concept of remembrance as a transformative act. It suggests that remembering is not merely recalling events as they occurred but is an active engagement with the potential of those memories, enabling us to reinterpret and reimagine our past. In this sense, memories can be incomplete or unrealized, but they possess the power to evolve and take on new meaning, thus affecting our present and future perspectives.
In practice
A speaker reflecting on personal growth at a reunion could use this quote to inspire others about learning from the past.
Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system
To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.
One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.
The true objective of war is peace.
It is hard to imagine a world without forgiveness. Without forgiveness life would be unbearable. Without forgiveness our lives are chained, forced to carry the sufferings of the past and repeat them with no release.
If you meet with a system of theology which magnifies man, flee from it as far as you can.
Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.
The shallow, as intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.
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