Memory. Reflections from Paraguay

Abstract

If there is one issue that has dominated almost all the intellectual discourse of what we call Western thought during the 20th century, that issue has been language. The thinking thing of the 17th century, the dawn of the modern world, seems to have turned into a speaking thing in the 20th century. The century of its crisis. This makes sense: among other things, language appeared as a window that would allow us to observe what is hidden within that sort of Dr. Jekyll, which is the world as we know it today. Despite disagreements, the foundational certainty was and still is relatively simple: language, stories, narratives, discourses with which we explain ourselves, no matter how rational, causal, or evident they may appear, may fail to fulfill their promise of describing us as we are. Perhaps they do much more than that. There seems to be a kind of shared hypothesis among those who made language an object, at least, of suspicion: perhaps we are not users of language, but wanderers in the labyrinths of its confinement. Thus, understanding the imprisoning capacity of our narratives, critiquing it, has been and continues to be a focus of contemporary thought, like the classic device of a thread in a maze. Since I've mentioned it, I must say that Ricoeur occupies a privileged place in that typical work of the 20th century. Considering that it is a persistent century in its inertia, that is, in its forms, in its logic, and of course, in the criticisms it generated, among all possibilities, I choose to present the group of works that continues to bring two legacies from that century of language, and that, I believe, are visible throughout this dossier. Of course, this is not a choice devoid of a certain arbitrariness, I hope, not substantial.