For once our societies are in agreement with the social and human sciences, that is, the sciences that have made these societies their subject of study and claim to provide them with a knowledge of themselves that the societies treat with a distant respect without being very sure they really need it: for our societies, as well as for the social and human sciences, memory is on the agenda, it has become a compulsory reference point. Our societies even agree to hear about a ‘duty to remember’ resembling an ethical and political requirement they could not evade. The preservation and promotion of every trace of the past has become one of the most general and least discussed aspects of every cultural policy. The term ‘heritage’ has entered the official language and is combined with a large number of adjectives: artistic, ethnological, archaeological, ecological, animal and plant. It is as if, in order to find an excuse and make people forget, societies, which on one hand are clearly ambitious for strong economic growth, progress and adaptation to new technologies, had on the other to compensate by making frequent reference to a past they do not wish to lose, destroy or consign to oblivion, even though they continually turn their back on it.

A community's collective memory of a period or a concrete event largely consists of the representations shared by most of those, individuals or groups, who create that story. These representations are organized around a main axis giving them a meaning that allows them to function as the foundation for the community concerned. This founding condition of memory, which has already been highlighted by Maurice Halbwachs in his pioneering book La Mémoire collective, the act of rescuing the past from oblivion and setting it up as a reference point for community identity, transforms remembering into an imperative for survival, whose ethical character and collective influence make the duty to remember ‘a practice indispensable to any affirmation of belonging to a group’.

Social memory does not exist only as a collection of remembrances that a group recognizes as theirs. Much more than simple forms of expression of memory, the more or less ritualized situations it is involved in serve to express its continuity. Rituals are an attempt to preserve the cultural identity of a people, or a section of a people. It is clear that the social imaginary more often than not tends to give them a very big part to play. And so rituals appear to be an expression of memory that should be represented, or presented again, as synonymous with history. This imaginary sets up memory as something absolute: it must know everything. Symbolically confused with history, memory may even, in this imaginary, make it possible for people to find their place in the world. Memory and history may then be the elements making up reason. In losing their memory - or their history - they would lose the ability to distinguish and discern.

The problem of the construction of memory that faces the Afro-Brazilian population presents itself as more than a simple need for an identity connected to an original past, but in addition as essential, because for historical reasons their social reality has not yet reached the end of its struggle.

It is with a woman's memory and body that I am happy to serve literature. In the entrails of past ages I try to search, among so many memories, for women's memory in particular. I am trying to find out how this memory is made up, from what material and with what texture. In the final analysis this memory has always been all around, at every period since the creation of the world.

… Let us situate ourselves vis-à-vis the judge that affects each of our hours and that we call ‘memory’. Memory is a law-court in permanent session but it is arbitrary: it hands down gratuitous reward and generous punishment. Whole years of our existence remain buried under the weighty stones of oblivion and, in contrast, dazzling deeply rooted moments rise to the surface. The peculiarity of this inner court is its utter amorality. It does not act in accordance with codes or established moral laws, not is it founded on any ethical values, whether positive or negative. Of course it cannot be said that it is unconnected with consciousness, but it acts, so to speak, according to the instinct of consciousness.

Stendhal said of one of his most significant works, De l'amour, published in 1822, that it was ‘ideological’. ‘Ideology’ in a pre-Marxist sense, the meaning used by Comte Destutt de Tracy, a contemporary of Napoleon, to whom we owe the term's invention, is a science. Emerging from the language developed by the empiricists, particularly the British ones, ideology as a discipline has the task of describing ideas, their components and especially their origins, its aim being to understand how ideas emerge and evolve. But instead of trying to study how an idea develops, Stendhal admitted that he was more interested in a particular feeling. And he embarks on a description of love, particularly from the second chapter on, with the clear aim of reaching an understanding of the emotion's components. In fact he will concern himself only with ‘passionate love’, amour passion. And this is important for several reasons that I shall explain, the context of the period being one of the most salient. At that time love was turning towards ‘passionate love’, that is, the passion par excellence. For the idea of love that had prevailed prior to the 19th century was not associated with passionate love. It is true that Stendhal had not failed to quote the Lettres de la religieuse portugaise (a 17th-century work, attributed to Mariana Alcoforado, a Portuguese nun, but which, as we now know, is part of French literature), nor other texts earlier than the 17th and 18th centuries that evoked a type of emotion as strong as passionate love. But, as the 18th turned into the 19th century, passionate love was, generally speaking, a novelty and Stendhal is among those who were to elaborate most extensively on this theme.

Français, vous avez la mémoire courte (You French have short memories) was the title of a film showing in a cinema opposite Saint-Sulpice church. It was the early 1960s; scarcely 15 years had passed since the end of the Second World War and the horrors of Nazism had not yet been fully revealed. Germany was an occupied and divided country. France was fighting in Algeria.

Ancient philosophers believed that three anecdotes are enough to characterize a philosophical temperament. As soon as I accepted the invitation to participate in a research devoted to the triple topic: ‘Trace, print, remains’, three anecdotes at once came to mind. I shall use them to establish a preliminary understanding of the concept of trace, which we shall subsequently approach from a more philosophical perspective.

1. In 1929, a few months before his death, Aby Warburg wrote an introduction to his last intellectual project: the ‘Picture Atlas’ (Bilderatlas) which he dedicated to Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, whose name was inscribed on the front door of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek he had founded. The opening sentences of Warburg's introduction, first published 70 years after his death in Italian translation, read: ‘The conscious creation of distance between the self and the external world may be called the fundamental act of civilization. Where this gap conditions artistic creativity, this awareness of distance can achieve a lasting social function.’

The war America waged in Vietnam, the first to be witnessed day after day by television cameras, introduced the home front to a new intimacy with death and destruction. Ever since, battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment. Creating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.