The Presence of What’s Gone, Memory not as recollection—but as return. - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Presence of What’s Gone
The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Some things don’t leave. They recede, they quiet, they fold into the background—yet their presence lingers. Not as memory in the traditional sense, but as atmosphere. As interruption. As an intimacy that returns without warning. In this episode, we reflect on memory not as recollection, but as the return of what never fully disappeared. It is a meditation on presence—subtle, embodied, and philosophical.

Philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Henri Bergson, and Paul Ricœur have each, in their own way, helped us reimagine time, identity, and the ghostlike logic of recollection. Where Derrida’s hauntology considers the presence of absence, Bergson’s durée evokes the elasticity of time as lived experience. Ricœur invites us to see memory as narrative identity—never static, always becoming.

This is not a discussion of supernatural ghosts, but of lived presence: the way a scent, a room, or a forgotten gesture reactivates something felt more than remembered. Memory returns through the body before it arrives in language. Through architecture, silence, and breath, the past re-enters not to be replayed, but to be reinhabited. And sometimes, what haunts us is not grief—but care. Not pain—but meaning.

Why Listen?

• Memory as presence, not storage
• Haunting as a lived phenomenon, not a metaphor
• Revisiting the self through the structure of time
• Quiet philosophy grounded in sensation and space

Further Reading

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• Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida — Hauntology, historical residue, and the persistence of absence.
• Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson — A philosophical meditation on duration, sensation, and time.
• Memory, History, Forgetting by Paul Ricœur — The ethical and narrative dimensions of remembering and being remembered.
• The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio — How memory and consciousness shape our embodied sense of presence.

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