We will refer to embodied and historical human memory, determined by the mediations of space and time and exposed to ethical dilemmas that, according to Ricoeur, ipseity encounters in its capacity of welcoming the other. Our reflection focuses on memory troubled by the mediations which belong to the corporal and existential condition of the modern self, amid a technological and cultural eruption. Such a context affects personal as well as collective memory, the exercise of the self's capacity to act as well as suffer - and particularly its memory. We will show a dynamic and receptive sense of memory, exposed to the fragilities that affect our narrative human identity, by determining its powers that leave a mark at the level of consciousness and body. We will, in the end, examine the voluntary and involuntary effects that question the very capacity of memory, influencing imagination and the self's ethical response.