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.

Eva Meyer, a trained puppeteer and philosopher, began publishing in the late 1970s in Die Schwarze Botin (The Black Messenger), the magazine of the second wave of the German women’s movement, and co-founded Lilith, the women’s bookshop and publishing house in West Berlin. Her work traverses fields such as philosophy, literature, architecture, cinema, cybernetics, and psychoanalysis, introducing modes of thinking and writing that undermine identitarian approaches and enact political theory as storytelling. Expanding her writing practice to film in the late 1990s, she co-authored, with Eran Schaerf, essay films such as Flashforward (2004), and Only Six Can Play This Game (2022). Meyer has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and the University of Basel, among others, and was Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair and Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in 2018.

Vivian Liska is a Professor of German literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Since 2013 she is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and, since 2024, a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature. She has published extensively on literary theory, German modernism, and German-Jewish authors and thinkers. She is the editor or co-editor of numerous books, among them The Idea of Europe (with Vladimir Biti and Joep Leersen; 2021). Her English book publications as author include When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (2009).

Laurence A. Rickels published widely on A- and B-cultures and the history of psychoanalysis. His most recent publication, Critique of Fantasy (2021–22), will be followed by The Impostors: On the Unconscious and in the Language of the Third Reich. Since the late 1980s he has also seen through to publication The Case of California (1991), The Vampire Lectures (1999), Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002), I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (2010), and Germany: A Science Fiction (2015). He has held professorships at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, and European Graduate School, Saas Fee.