fORGETFUL rEMEMBERING*

Forgetting how to remember is a chore, as is remembering how to forget. The immanence of forgetful remembering, remembering forgetfulness. Now that I am a doctoral student forgetting is much easier, as is remembering all that I have forgotten to forget, this binary of forgetful remembrance. The history of philosophy forces one to be forgetful, to forget all that we were taught, the tutoring of past, present and future. To be forgetful in this manner is to remember that forgetting is the principal of the philosophy of history, the historical history of forgetful remembering. Forgetfulness, in this manner, can be likened to a cessation, a suspension of will and knowledge, a deferral of belief and opinion, a remembering how to forget. In context, then, Plato’s forms, his Ideal of ideals, is as new as that first breath of air, the parturition of air, knowledge, belief, opinion and will, a newly opened birthing canal, a way out, a way back in, a forgetful remembering, a remembered forgetting. Trying to force Plato into the twentieth century, into an ideology of non-immanence, a dialectical non-historicism, recentness, is like trying to regain that first breath of air, trying to remember the forgetfulness of that first breath, that first expression of wilfulness.