Eva Meyer: Remembering Forward

“And this is how we use the word ‘love’: that the space of something that has been lived is first determined by it, through which thinking may come alive again.” From love to worldliness, from memory to possibility, from the conjunction “and” to an indomitable multiplicity premised on a resistance to closure, sameness, and totality—Remembering Forward enacts a thinking environment to which everyone contributes something of themselves, without ever being identical with the self or the environment. Eva Meyer: Remembering Forward is a reader that brings together a diverse range of essays by philosopher, writer, and filmmaker Eva Meyer. With some of the texts published here for the first time in English translation, the selection spans her work from across four decades—drawing on her first book Zählen und Erzählen: Für eine Semiotik des Weiblichen (Counting and Recounting: For a Semiotics of the Feminine), from 1983, to her most recent one, Mondän werden (Becoming Worldly), published in 2023. The collection is organized around recurrent motifs in Meyer’s œuvre as it traces the seemingly impossible activity of remembering forward—a thought experiment in which language opens up to its own memory and creates surroundings for becoming worldly. It includes an introduction by Vivian Liska, author of When Kafka Says We, and an afterword by Laurence A. Rickels, author of I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick, as well as a full catalog of Meyer’s works in English translation.