Memory and the Construction of Personality

In the face of sudden and unexpected changes, in the face of collapsing regimes or vanishing ways of life, we are often amazed by the great number of men and women, intimately linked to these changes, who forget a substantial part of their history and modify the meaning of their pasts.

Bodei will therefore address the topic of the relationship between memory and the construction of the personality by describing some of the means through which collective memory –  and individual memory as well – comes to be reformulated after the occurrence of these traumatic events or, in any case, of elements of discontinuity in the history of peoples and of individuals. Through a kind of rapid chess game, in seven theoretical moves, he wants to show the complex relationships between memory and forgetting in moulding both collective and personal identity.

Remo Bodei is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to this, he taught for many years at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa. He has lectured at numerous European and American universities [such as Tübingen, Berlin, Geneva, King’s College of Cambridge, École Normale Supérieure in Paris, New York University and UNAM in Mexico City]. His early work is concerned with German Idealism, the Romantic Age, aesthetics and utopian thought. For more than two decades, he has been working on the theory of the passions, models of consciousness and problems related to individual and collective identity. His books have been translated into several languages. His recent publications in English include We, the Divided: Ethos, Politics and Culture in Post-War Italy, 1943-2006 (2006) and The Logics of Delusion (2007).

Part of the Lecture Series 'Welt global denken – Politische Perspektiven in der italienischen Gegenwartsphilosophie', organized by the Istituto Italiano di Berlino in cooperation with the ICI Berlin.