Amnesia as a Type of Social Forgetfulness: Towards Refining the Concept

The aim of the article is to clarify the concept of social amnesia since its use is extremely contradictory in the discourse of social sciences and humanities. The relevance of this topic is explained by researchers' growing interest in the dialectics of memory and oblivion within the framework of memory studies as a separate research area. To achieve the aim, the author uses the methodology of conceptual analysis, primarily in the version proposed by the Russian political philosopher M. Ilyin. When discussing the differences between social amnesia and other sociomnemonic deficits, the author critically assesses the existing experience of typologizing social forgetfulness (F. Ankersmit, P. Connerton, et al.). The author emphasizes that, in current research papers, instead of the stated typologies of sociomnemonic deficits, their phenomenologies are often proposed. Based on the levels of forgetfulness indicated by St. Augustine in Confessions, the author identifies forgetting, oblivion, and amnesia as the three most common types of memory deficits that differ in the degree of loss of mnemonic ability. In favor of this typology, the author gives a number of linguistic (by comparing the semantics of the corresponding terms), philosophical (using conceptual distinctions proposed by P. Ricard, B. Vivian, et al.) and sociological (based on the concepts of structural and media amnesia as well as on the concept of amnesty as a kind of prescriptive forgetting) arguments. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that it is necessary, first of all, to distinguish conceptually between the pragmatics of forgetting/remembering (when forgetting can be a form of remembering and vice versa) and the symbolism of oblivion, which implies the loss of memory of past events. An important distinction of oblivion from forgetting and amnesia is the taboo status of the forgotten. Neither amnesia nor the pragmatics of forgetting needs this, nor are they accompanied by the "ghosts of memory" that complement the symbolism of oblivion. On the other hand, social oblivion is not completely traceless since the memory of the very fact of forgetfulness and the ability to remember itself are preserved as well as the ability to operate with symbolic memory figures as analogs of categories of understanding. On the contrary, social amnesia involves the weakening of memory as a cognitive ability of social actors as a result of the destruction of above-mentioned figures, as well as the disappearance of basic knowledge of the past as a condition for identifying people with their communities. But, unlike the medical concept of amnesia, memory dysfunction in social amnesia does not lead to the loss of these social identities alone; at the same time, it is a necessary condition for the formation of new communities.

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