For Walter Benjamin the problem of memory is the problem of interpretation. He was intrigued by the question if we are equipped with one memory that allows for various competing versions of the past (as was the case of Marcel Proust, carefully analysed by Benjamin) or whether the plural interpretation of the past is irreducible, because memory, entangled by its complicated relations to language and personal experience, establishes its own ultimate truth. Benjamin's answer is not straightforward. On one hand, our experiences are retained in an unambiguous form, on the other, however, when we recreate them and contemplate them they are subjected to the idiomatic medium of language. As a result our recollections are locked in a tug of war between a more or less accurate vision of the past and continually changing description of it, imposed by shifting application of general rules of language. The process of recollection is thus capable of creating and discovering new meanings of the past.
The author discusses the question of 'narcissism', specifically understood in the phenomenological works of Merleau-Ponty, in which it denotes a perception that discovers truth within itself, the unexpressed, pre-rational truth of the world as it is, which best captures the process of painting as a work of art. Merleau-Ponty believes that although it evades the claims made by the rationalizing description, the relation between the visible and the invisible generates a linguistic, discursive meaning. In other words, it is possible to speak about art in the language of philosophy and, in addition, to speak well by doing justice to a given work of art, or not. Does the philosophical discourse apply painting as an illustration, or perhaps it unites in a common objective the solution of the mystery of visibility, or discovers within it its own 'silent' reflection? Regardless of the answers we give to these questions, the problem of 'narcissism' - a perception which finds the truth within itself - remains a problem not only of contemporary philosophy but also of contemporary art.
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