The Forgetting That Remembers: Abgrund, Membrure, and the Medium of Resistance

In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Immanuel Kant offers an analogy that clarifies what this essay investigates: "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space" (Kant, 1998, A5/B8-9). The dove experiences air as limitation, as obstacle to perfect flight. Yet air does not oppose flight but constitutes its medium. What appears as resistance enables the movement it seems to hinder. This essay develops forgetfulness as ontological structure through sustained engagement with Martin Heidegger's Identity and Difference (1957/1969) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968). Forgetfulness names neither memory (explicit retention) nor forgetting (erasure) but the operative-imperceptible framework making both possible. The analysis reveals a ternary structure: memory, forgetting, and forgetfulness, where forgetfulness constitutes the medium, not a position between the two, but that which enables the space where both memory and forgetting emerge. Through examination of cases where forgetfulness fails (Borges's Funes, Luria's Shereshevsky), the investigation demonstrates thought's metabolic character: not synthesis preserving inputs but destructive transformation producing genuine novelty through what Heidegger terms Abgrund (withdrawing ground) and Merleau-Ponty calls membrure (invisible framework). Forgetfulness emerges as the constitutive mechanism enabling unprecedented beginnings to enter existence through discontinuity itself, which is precisely what the appearance of limitation had concealed. The past that withdraws does not vanish into deficiency; it sinks into the operative ground from which the present draws the room to begin, and only because it has withdrawn can anything genuinely new arrive rather than the old returning under another name. Thought moves the way the dove flies, carried by the very resistance it takes for an obstacle.