Remember—When?

In the Confessions, Augustine argues that God is found in memory. One indication of this is that we all desire true happiness, even though we certainly have not found it in our lifetimes; this indicates that we must remember it from somewhere or somewhen. This chapter asks what it means to find a God only in memory and what kind of memory that could be. After reviewing the mnemonic options of forgetting, mourning, and melancholy, it turns to the possibility of haunting. In conjunction with Judith Butler’s theory of a forbidden melancholic queer identification, it asks about a haunting by God and, then, how such a God is to be conceived. The result ties an immemorial past to a future of possibility and a mutual entanglement of hope with loss