Memory and Identity

As a visual person, I found myself creating images in an attempt to make sense of the theories posited by Bergson in lieu of writing notes in the margins. Similarly, I found myself doing much the same thing with the Delueze article in response to Bergson. I think I was most struck and interested by the section of the Deleuze article which he further explains Bergson's idea of "attention to life." I took this to mean the moment in which the past merges with the present in an attempt to find a "moment of contact" or to form a recollection. Once this contact has been made "recollection images" are then formed. It is at this point that the two moments connect creating some sort of harmony and are "pushed to their limit." The fourth movement involves the actual movement of the body in response. I think what I found to be most interesting about this chain of events is how instantaneously all of these events occur. Deleuze goes on to explain that even one faulty moment in the process would blur the recollection.

This made me then think about instances in which these events do not occur in the way that Deleuze explicates. Both Deleuze and Bergson mention schizophrenia in addition to other conditions. This made me think of a lit. course I took where we discussed the idea of memory loss and the loss of identity. I know I am jumping around a bit here, but I see a connection between the two. In relating memory to this idea of identity, Dennis Sumara states that “identity never really exists in ways expressed by commonsense discourses but, instead, occurs when memory intersects with projected contexts. I can never really pin down my identity ‘in this moment’ since ‘this moment’ is being used to interpret a relationship between the remembered past and the predicted future. That, of course, is why losing one's memory inhibits relationality and dramatically erodes one's own experience of identity” (52). As I was reading, I continued to think about this connection.