In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera writes: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This perspective—one that bears the mark of life under a totalitarian regime in which repression often took the form of enforced forgetting—assumes that remembering is always a virtue, and that to not remember is a failure. But can forgetting be a virtue? How do we understand the relationship between what needs to be forgotten in order for other things to be remembered? This event will explore how the humanities and the sciences engage with the various functions and values of forgetting.

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