Memory of the Body,Temptation of Space

In this essay I examine the possibilities of approaching the phenomenon of memory from the point of view of space. Drawing on Edward Casey’s Getting Back into Place and on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the spatialized lived body, I attempt to show in what way memory can be said to belong to places. My inquiry ends with a discussion of Paul Ricoeur’s proposals on the narrative dimension of human space, which, I argue, allows us to consider why a building or a city may be said to produce a sensed duration by and through inscribing it in the durability of their materials and, at the same time, in human histories.