Abstract
Alongside the history of memory theatres, let us imagine an obscure genealogy of forgetting machines, apparatuses of power/knowledge whose operations not only shape the seeable and sayable but also engage the movements of eruption-erasure, the comings-and-goings, hither-and-thitherings that give existence rhyme if not reason. Within such a genealogy, memory theatres would continue to evoke the anamnesis or total recall that defines ideational knowledge, while their backstages and infrastructures would reveal in ghostly form the flipside, the massive effects of active and passive forgetting that shadow and project any apparatus. Memory theatres and books along with them would then become what they already are: forgetting machines, technologies of life–death. To put things another way: any memory system entails processes of forgetting, for in memorizing something one way, innumerable other ways are forsaken. What types of thought and action did alphabetic writing and Platonic ideation make the world forget?
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