"The dead might not be there to receive it, but you can at least attempt to send a message of gratitude back to the dead. Instead we are obsessed with this dumb idea of the future."  - SIMON CRITCHLEY (paraphrased)on Hegelian ‘spirit’ and on forgiveness as a condition for difference and open futures. 
 - How do forgiveness and gratitude constitute an ability to relate to death, and how does this make us access memory, past and open future? Critchley's narrator in his book, who gradually becomes psychotic in his mad search for a memory machine, is also called by the name 'Simon Critchley'. The even took place as part of an architecture conference: Is architecture the most psychotic of all arts because it is able to create objectivity, a total looking from the outside? Some excerpts from Simon Critchley's performance and talk: "We can abolish the future to find gratitude to the past" - "Ideology is the production of the future. ..The future is the externalization of memory through the internet" - "If I had no memory, had I ceased to exist?" - "The least one can do is to create other, better kinds of memory? The Internet as externalisation of memory is the road we move down at present." - "I couldn't think of anything apart rom death and the prospect of breakfast creal." - "The Hegelian art of memory is the filling up of the void of the self. ..The movieshow begins again and again - repetition and repetition and so on." - "The Hegelian spirit can only be read in reverse" - "Time is the experience of becoming,  a slowmotion succession of spirit" - "The phenomenology is a memory theatre" - "Absolute knowledge is only possible by recollection" - "By spirit Hegel means the entire developments of the world. Images have to be grasped internally by the self when substance becomes subject" - "Will writing as an aide of memory destroy memory? - Writing as threat of oblivion?" - "Remembering is dismembering, says Kafka in his letter to the father" - "The relief of foregoeing the conterfeit existence..." - "I began to cry. ..The hallucinations disappeared. ..A fear of death. ..Even if I hanged myself I would still not experience bliss. ..It seemed all so perfect before: contingency would be abolished, it was the dream of the perfect death. A garden of delight." - "We cannot remake ourselves through memory"

Andy Vantino