The Hermeneutics of Forgetting
The Hermeneutics of Forgetting

Summary/Abstract: In an article titled ―An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget about It!‖ (PMLA 1988), Umberto Eco avers his skepticism towards the possibility of an ars oblivionalis, which could be translated, in light of his arguments, rather as a semiotics of forgetting, which is impossible, from the author‘s viewpoint, because of the involuntary and passive character of forgetting. At the same time, the notion of forgetting keeps emerging in the European cultural and literary history. As Harald Weinrich showed in a book published in 1997, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, the history of European literature and history abounds in examples of authors who integrated forgetting in their poetics. We can therefore, speak at least of a cultural history of forgetting and even of a poetics and hermeneutics of this concept. This essay will define and analyze the hermeneutics of forgetting as presented in the works of Harald Weinrich and Paul Ricoeur.

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