Hypomnema (Greek. υπομνημα, plural υπομνηματα, hypomnemata), also spelled hupomnema, is a Greek word with several translations into English including a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.
Michel Foucault uses the word in the sense of "note", but his translators use the word "notebook", which is anachronistic (see codex and wax tablet). Concerning Seneca's discipline of self-knowledge, Foucault writes: "In this period there was a culture of what could be called personal writing: taking notes on the reading, conversations, and reflections that one hears or engages in oneself; keeping kinds of notebooks on important subjects (what the Greeks call 'hupomnemata'), which must be reread from time to time so as to reactualize their contents." In an excerpt from an Interview with Michel Foucault in The Foucault Reader, he says: "As personal as they were, the hypomnemata must nevertheless not be taken for intimate diaries or for those accounts of spiritual experience (temptations, struggles, falls, and victories) which can be found in later Christian literature. [... T]heir objective is not to bring the arcana conscientiae to light, the confession of which—be it oral or written—has a purifying value."
Plato's theory of anamnesis recognized the new status of writing as a device of artificial memory, and he developed the hypomnesic principles for his students to follow in the Academy. The hypomnemata constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation. They also formed a raw material for the writing of more systematic treatises in which were given arguments and means by which to struggle against some defect (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or to overcome some difficult circumstance (a mourning, an exile, downfall, disgrace).
and a paper:
Foucault and the Hupomnemata: Self Writing as an Art of Life. By Matthias Swonger, University of Rhode Island
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Matthew Frankel, English
Keywords: Foucault, Self Writing, Hupomnemata
Abstract
Michel Foucault tells us about a form of self writing called the hupomnemata in
an essay titled Self Writing in his book Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. In its simplest
definition, the hupomnemata is a notebook, or journal of sorts for the Ancient Greeks.
However, unlike the intimate, confessional journals later found in Christian literature, the
hupomnemata does not intend “to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to
say the unsaid, but on the contrary to capture the already said, to collect what one has
managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the
self” (Ethics 210-211). The hupomnemata is not an art object that is distinct and separate
from the writer, “they must form part of ourselves: in short, the soul must make them not
merely its own but itself” (Ethics 210). The creation of the hupomnemata is the creation
of the self, or as Foucault claims, the hupomnemata is a tool for the Greeks concept of
“epimeleia heautou,” or “care of the self.” It is not a detached documentary, the
hupomnemata makes the writer just as surely as the writer makes the hupomnemata. In
this project, I will examine the differences between the hupomnemata, and modern forms
of self writing. I will also examine the relationship between Foucault’s work on the
hupomnemata and his work on the concept of parrhesia, or fearless speech, and his ideas about the nature of authorship. Following this analysis, I will create my own piece of
writing which, in the spirit of the hupomnemata, attempts to enable me to “form an
identity through which a whole spiritual genealogy can be read” (Ethics 214).
