Observations on the philology of guilt

Abstract

The concepts of memory and justice and their interrelation go back to the dialectic between orality and writing pointed out by Havelock regarding Plato. Philosophy and Jurisprudence share a written nature, in which the oral anamnesis conflicts with the written amnesia, the collective with the individual, the exterior with the interior. The logos, philosophical and legal, is the reason for the written word. What matters is not so much memory, but rather the guilt that precedes it. Writing is the concealment of guilt in the depths of our interior. Memory, then, can reconnect us with this original guilt by projecting us into a vivifying and oral dimension, but it cannot exempt us from looking outside the factum, not only to the verum, because it is in the factum that we find the manifestation of this guilt.