Obsession: Simon Critchley on Memory Theater

Noted philosopher and notorious obsessor Simon Critchley will share his fascination with memory theaters. Ever since reading the wonderful Frances Yates at a tender age, he has been completely obsessed with the classical arts of memory and in particular with various crazy attempts to build a memory theatre, a kind of machine that would permit total recall of the entire sum of knowledge. Critchley will talk about how the occult and hermetic arts of memory were revived in the Italian Renaissance, in Shakespeare and mobilized in Hegel before turning to his own attempt to build a memory theatre in the Netherlands. It ended in disaster.