Seven types of forgetting

Abstract

Much of the debate on cultural memory has been shaped by the view, commonly held if not universal, that remembering and commemorating is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily a failing. But this assumption is not self-evidently true. This article seeks, therefore, to disentangle the different types of acts that cluster together under the single term `to forget'. I suggest that we can distinguish at least seven types: repressive erasure; prescriptive forgetting; forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity; structural amnesia; forgetting as annulment; forgetting as planned obsolescence; forgetting as humiliated silence.