Memory and Its Vicissitudes: An Examination of Memory, Trauma, and History

Abstract

Partially borrowing a title from Freud’s “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” this thesis will take up a similar project in the sense that it will examine the different destinies or variations that memory fulfills as a dynamic apparatus, and one important aspect of human embodied experience. By eliciting Spinoza and Freud as the foundational theories on mind and its relation to body, I contour a discussion of individual trauma, historical trauma, and testimony that situates the human individual as both a producer and produced by historical and political conditions. Ultimately I advocate for a dialectical approach that values stories as the last mode of communicating reflective human experience, and sees the “past” as history living in the present.