History, Epistemology
I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history [historiē], that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds, manifested by both Greeks and barbarians, fail of their report, and, together with all this, the reason why they fought one another.
The chroniclers [logioi] among the Persians say that it was the Phoenicians who were the cause of the falling-out . . .
§ Herodotus, The History 1
The second part of this work is devoted to the epistemology of historical knowledge. Here I want to situate this stage of my inquiry and its principal interconnections.
On one side, I consider the phenomenology of memory to be ended, making reservation for the cultural variations that historical knowledge, when integrated into individual and collective memory, may introduce into self-understanding in the mnemonic mode. A subtle combination of those features of memory we can call transhistorical and its variable expressions over the course of history will have to be taken into account when the time comes. This will be one of the themes of the hermeneutics of the historical condition to be dealt with in part 3, chapter 2. Before that, however, history will have to have attained its fully autonomous status among the human sciences, following the vow that orients this middle section of my work. Then, on a second degree level of reflection, the question of the internal limits of a philosophical project that often remains tacit can be posed. This question has to do not only with the epistemological autonomy of historical research but also with the self-sufficiency of history’s own self-awareness, in accord with the favorite expression that presided over the birth of and apology for the German school of history. It is within the framework of this reflection on the limits stemming from a critical philosophy of history that the confrontation between intending the truth of history2 and the aim of that veracity or, as I shall put it, the intention of being faithful to memory (part 3, chapter 1) can be brought to a good ending. Until then, the status of history as regards memory will be held in suspense without my, for all that, forbidding myself from noting along the way the resurgence of the aporias of memory in their cognitive and practical aspects, principally the aporia of the representation of an absent something that once happened, along with that of the use and abuse to which memory lends itself as actively exercised and practiced. Yet this obstinate return of the aporias of memory at the heart of historical knowledge cannot take the place of a solution of the problem of the relations between knowledge and the practice of history and the experience of lived memory, even if this solution were to present ultimately indecisive features. Nevertheless, these features will have to be painfully won on the field of battle of a reflection carried to its limits.
It remains the case that the autonomy of historical knowledge in relation to the mnemonic phenomenon remains the major presupposition of a coherent epistemology of history both as a scientific discipline and a literary one. At least this is the presupposition assumed in this middle part of this work.
I have adopted the expression the “historical”—or better “historiographical”—operation to define the field traversed by the following epistemological analysis. I owe it to Michel de Certeau in his contribution to the large-scale project edited by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora under the title Faire de l’histoire.3 Beyond this, I have also adopted the broader lines of the triadic structure of Certeau’s essay, although I give them different contents on some important points. I first tried out this clear and insightful tripartite approach in an essay requested by the Institut International de Philosophie.4 Keeping this double influence in mind, I shall call the “documentary phase” the one that runs from the declarations of eyewitnesses to the constituting of archives, which takes as its epistemological program the establishing of documentary proof (chapter 1). Next I shall call the explanation/understanding [explicative/compréhensive] phase the one that has to do with the multiple uses of the connective “because” responding to the question “why?”: Why did things happen like that and not otherwise? The double term “explanation/understanding” is indicative of my refusing the opposition between explanation and understanding that all too often has prevented grasping the treatment of the historical “because” in its full amplitude and complexity (chapter 2). Finally, I shall call the “representative phase” the putting into literary or written form of discourse offered to the readers of history. If the major epistemological crux occurs in the explanation/understanding phase, it does not exhaust itself there inasmuch as it is the phase of writing that plainly states the historian’s intention, which is to represent the past just as it happened—whatever meaning may be assigned to this “just as.” It is also at this third phase that the major aporias of memory return in force to the foreground, the aporia of the representation of an absent thing that occurred previously and that of a practice devoted to the active recalling of the past, which history elevates to the level of a reconstruction (chapter 3).
At the beginning of each of these three chapters in part 2 I shall lay out the program belonging to each of these phases. Here I shall confine myself to a more specific statement of the historian’s threefold commitment.
I have proposed the word “phase” to characterize the three segments of the historiographical operation. There is no need for any equivocation concerning the use of this term. It is not a question of distinct chronological stages, but of methodological moments, interwoven with one another. As will be repeated, no one consults an archive apart from some project of explanation, without some hypothesis for understanding. And no one undertakes to explain a course of events without making use of some express literary form of a narrative, rhetorical, or imaginative character. Any idea of chronological succession must be banished from our use of the term “operative phase.” It is only in the discourse undertaken here on the moments of the unfolding of the historiographical operation that these phases become stages, successive steps in a trajectory that unrolls its linearity. We can completely avoid such equivocation regarding succession if we speak of levels, a term that evokes superposition, stacking things up. But we need to keep an eye out for another equivocation as well, that of a relation between an infra-and a super-structure, much used and abused by vulgar Marxism (which I am not confusing with Marx’s major works). Each of the three operations of the historiographical operation stands as a base for the other two, inasmuch as they serve successively as referents for the other two. In the end, I have preferred the term “phase” inasmuch as, in the absence of a chronological order of succession, it underscores the progression of this operation as having do to with the historian’s intention of a true reconstruction of the past. It is only in the third phase—as has already been suggested—that the intention to represent the truth of past things openly declares itself, through which the cognitive and practical project of history as it is written by professional historians defines itself over against memory. A third term, which I preferred in my preliminary work, is “program.” It works well to characterize the specificity of the immanent project in each step along the way. In this sense, it has an analytic privilege in regard to the other two terms. This is why I have made recourse to it whenever the accent is placed on the nature of the operations undertaken at each level.
The final word of this general orientation will be about the term “historiography.” Until recently, it designated by preference the epistemological inquiry such as we are undertaking here following its threefold rhythm. I use it, as does Certeau, to designate the very operation in which historical knowing is grasped at work. This choice of vocabulary has a major advantage that does not appear if we reserve this term for the writing phase of the operation, as suggested by the very composition of the word: historiography or history writing. In order to preserve the amplitude of the term “historiographical,” I will not call the third phase the writing of history, but instead the literary or scriptural phase, when it is a question of the exposition, presentation, or exhibiting of the historian’s intention taken in terms of the unity of its phases, that is, the present representation of absent, past things. Writing, in effect, is the threshold of language that historical knowing has already crossed, in distancing itself from memory to undertake the threefold adventure of archival research, explanation, and representation. History is writing from one end to another. And in this regard, archives constitute the first writing that confronts history, before it completes itself in the literary mode of “scripturality.” Explanation/understanding thus finds itself encased, upstream and downstream, by two writings. It gathers energy from the former and anticipates the energy of the latter.
But it is above all the setting out in writing of the historian’s knowledge starting from the upstream side of archives that gives rise to the question of confidence that cannot be answered from inside the epistemology of historical knowledge, the question of what finally becomes of the relation between history and memory. This is the question of confidence that a critical philosophy of history has the task, if not of resolving, at least of articulating and considering. But it is posed in an originary manner by the entry into writing of the historian’s knowledge. It floats as the unsaid over the whole undertaking. For me, who knows what follows, this unsaid, which will be taken up in part 3, needs to be left in suspense, in reserve, something like a methodological epoché.
To indicate this setting in reserve, in the most decidedly interrogative, skeptical way, I have chosen to place in the position of prelude a kind of parody of the Platonic myth from the Phaedrus dedicated to the invention of writing. Inasmuch as the gift of writing is held by this myth to be the antidote to memory, and therefore a kind of challenge opposed by the truth claim of history to memory’s vow of trustworthiness, it can be taken as the paradigm for every dream of substituting history for memory, as I shall consider further in the beginning of part 3. Thus, it was in order to underscore the gravity of a cultural choice from which there was no going back, that of writing history, that I have amused myself in my own fashion, with what was first due to Plato, in reinterpreting, if not rewriting, the myth his Phaedrus recounts concerning the invention of writing. The question whether the pharmakon of history-writing is remedy or poison, to take one of the propositions of the myth in the Phaedrus, will continue to accompany our epistemological inquiry as a kind of background music before breaking forth in full force on the reflective plane of the critical philosophy of history.
Why refer to myth, even in the preliminary material of a highly rational epistemological analysis? In order to confront the aporia in which every inquiry bearing on the birth, the beginning, the beginnings of historical knowledge gets lost. This perfectly legitimate inquiry, to which we owe many worthwhile works,5 rests, insofar as it itself is historical, on a kind of performative contradiction, namely, that the writing of beginnings presupposes itself as already existing in order to think of itself at its birth. We need therefore to distinguish origin from beginning. We can seek to date a beginning in a historical time scanned by chronology. This beginning is perhaps not discoverable, as the antinomies articulated by Kant in the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason suggest. We can, of course, indicate something as a start in a critical treatment of testimonies, but this is not a beginning of the mode of historical thinking, if we mean by this a temporalization of common experience in a way irreducible to that of memory, even collective memory. This unassignable anteriority is that of the inscription that, in one form or another, has always accompanied orality, as Jacques Derrida has magisterially demonstrated in his Of Grammatology.6 Human beings have spaced their signs, at the same time—if this has a meaning—that they have woven them together in terms of the temporal continuity of the verbal flow. This is why the beginning of the historian’s scripturality is undiscoverable. The circular character of assigning a historical beginning to historical knowledge invites us to distinguish, at the heart of the amphibolous concept of birth, between beginning and origin. The beginning consists in a constellation of dated events, set by the historian at the head of the historical process that will be the history of history. It is toward this beginning or these beginnings that the historian of the birth of history advances by a retrospective movement that produces itself within the already constituted setting of historical knowledge. The origin is something else again: it designates the upsurge of the act of taking a distance that makes possible the whole enterprise and therefore also its beginning in time. This upsurge is always current and always already there. History continues to be born from this taking of a distance which consists in the recourse to the exteriority of the archival trace. This why we find its mark in the innumerable modes of graphism, of inscription that precede the beginnings of historical knowledge and the historian’s profession. The origin, therefore, is not the beginning. And the notion of birth conceals beneath its amphiboly the gap between the two categories of beginning and origin.
It is this aporia of birth that justifies the Platonic use of myth: the beginning is historic, the origin is mythic. It is a question, of course, of a reuse of a form of discourse appropriate to any history of beginnings presupposing themselves, such as the creation of a work, the birth of an institution, or the vocation of a prophet. Reused by the philosopher, myth presents itself as myth, in the guise of an initiation and supplement to dialectic.