Milan Kundera writes somewhere: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."¹ These are powerful words, words worth remembering in our time of rapid globalization—a time when, attracted by the lure of technocracy and technopolis, humankind seems ready to plunge into global historical amnesia. Kundera stresses memory or memory-work—not in order to foster nostalgia, but to retrieve resources of empowerment and social imagination, resources enabling humans, especially the oppressed and marginalized, to 'struggle against power." Kundera's words find an echo in the work of Herbert Marcuse who, in Eros and Civilization, wrote that "the restoration of remembrance to its rights, as a vehicle of liberation, is one of the noblest tasks of thought." As in the case of Kundera, remembrance for Marcuse was not equivalent to nostalgic escapism; partly under the influence of Freudian teachings he argued that, through memory-work, the "forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies." With specific reference to Marcel Proust he added that, in opposition to a narrow empiricism, "the orientation to the past tends toward an orientation to the future: the recherche du temps perdu becomes the vehicle of future liberation."²