The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For

The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For is the first English translation of a work by Jean-Louis Chretien, one of France’s leading phenomenologists. Chretien unfolds the ideas of memory and loss, of the immemorable, and of hope, in a manner that opens a phenomenological path to the heart of classical thought. This line of reflection places him in the company of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and Michel Henry, in attempting to join philosophy and religion after Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. The extremities of time exceed our memory and expectation. For philosophy, beginning with Plato, the truth of being is immemorable and cannot be rediscovered except in passing through forgetfulness. How are we to understand this first forgetting? Modern analyses live from a denial of loss: everything would be unforgettable, and is always preserved in memory. For Christian thought, to hope against all hope and to remember the origin are two essential acts of faith. Memory must die in order to be reborn, in order to purify itself of all nostalgia and become memory of the promise. Augustine and John of the Cross, after Philo the Jew, teach us what contemporary thought has begun to rediscover: only the Other is unforgettable, for it alone is unhoped for. The translation is preceded by an introductory essay on the work of Chretien by translator Jeffrey Bloechl.