Screen Memory - Department of English

passing as something else. 7
The falsification of the past produced in screen memories
plays its part in the construction of subjectivity (or, as Lacan
would have it, “resubjectified” through the “mnemonic
catastrophe” of nächtraglichkeit): the innocent, pleasant, clear
principles of existence thus displayed would obviously support a
particular myth of childhood and human nature (Smith 85). Screen
memories are part of a system (perhaps the system itself) that
produce narratives of normality, of a glowing childhood.
But if screen memories are partly or wholly false, is there
an alternate concept of true memory in the Freudian system? In
the screen memory essay, Freud pays lip service to “normal”
memory, a memory that is abruptly bracketed by the existence of
these aberrations, but it is unclear whether he really credits
its existence. Is the state of childhood memory the condition of
all memory? Leclaire seems to think so: “The practice of analysis
forces us to recognize that all the recollections registered in
what we call memory always create . . . a limit or a screen,
beyond which unfolds the scene of another memory” (76). Terdiman
puts an extreme case:, conscious “recollection exhibits a
positively wanton disloyalty to the truth. There seems no
seduction before which its representations will not yield”
(1993:291). Forgetting also seems to be traumatic for Benjamin, a
form of repression; as he says, “forgetting is never innocent”
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