The Historical Condition
Our examination of the historiographical operation on the epistemological plane is concluded: it was conducted across the three moments formed by the archive, explanation/understanding, and historical representation. We now open a second-order reflection on the conditions of the possibility of this discourse. It is intended to occupy the place of a speculative philosophy of history, in the twofold sense of the history of the world and the history of reason. The set of considerations belonging to this reflection is placed under the heading of hermeneutics, taken in the most general sense of examining the modes of understanding involved in forms of knowledge whose aim is objectivity. What is it to understand in the historical mode? This is the most inclusive question opening this new cycle of analyses.
It gives rise to two sorts of investigations; these are divided into two areas, the critical and the ontological.
On the side of critique, reflection consists in imposing limits on any totalizing claim attaching to historical knowledge; it takes as its target several forms of the speculative hubris that leads history’s discourse about itself to set itself up as the discourse of History in-itself knowing itself. To the extent that it carries out this task, critical examination provides the validation of the objectifying operations (coming under the heading of epistemology) that preside over the writing of history (chapter 1, “The Critical Philosophy of History”).
On the side of ontology, hermeneutics assigns itself the task of exploring the presuppositions that can be termed existential, both those of actual historiographical knowledge and those of the preceding critical discourse. They are existential in the sense that they structure the characteristic manner of existing, of being in the world, of that being that each of us is. They concern in the first place the insurmountable historical condition of that being. To characterize this historical condition, one could have used, emblematically, the term “historicity.” If I, however, do not propose to use this term, it is because of the equivocations resulting from its relatively long history and which I will attempt to clarify. A more fundamental reason leads me to prefer the expression “historical condition.” By condition, I mean two things: on the one hand, a situation in which each person is in each case implicated, Pascal would say, “enclosed” (enfermé); on the other hand, a conditionality, in the sense of a condition of possibility on the order of the ontological, or, as we have said, the existential, in particular in relation to the categories of critical hermeneutics. We make history, and we make histories (nous faisons l’histoire et nous faisons de l’histoire) because we are historical (chapter 2, “History and Time”).
The coherence of this enterprise then rests on the necessity of the twofold passage from historical knowledge to critical hermeneutics and from the latter to ontological hermeneutics. This necessity cannot be demonstrated a priori: it is confirmed only through its enactment, which also serves as its test. Up to the end, the presumed connection will remain a working hypothesis.
I decided to conclude the third part of this work with an exploration of the phenomenon of forgetting. The word figures in the title of this work, on an equal footing with memory and history. The phenomenon indeed has the same scope as the two great classes of phenomena relating to the past: it is the past, in its twofold mnemonic and historical dimension, that is lost in forgetting; the destruction of archives, of museums, of cities—those witnesses of past history—is the equivalent of forgetting. There is forgetting wherever there had been a trace. But forgetting is not only the enemy of memory and of history. One of the theses to which I am most attached is that there also exists a reserve of forgetting, which can be a resource for memory and for history, although there is no way to draw up a score sheet for this battle of the giants. This double valence of forgetting is comprehensible only if the entire problematic of forgetting is carried to the level of the historical condition that underlies the totality of our relations to time. Forgetting is the emblem of the vulnerability of the historical condition taken as a whole. This consideration justifies placing the chapter on forgetting in the hermeneutical part of this work following ontological hermeneutics. The transition from one problematic to the other will have been prepared by the general review of the relations between memory and history in the final section of the chapter that will precede it. In this way, the triad placed at the head of this book will come full circle with the chapter on forgetting (chapter 3, “Forgetting”).
One party to this inquiry is missing, however: forgiveness. In this sense, forgiveness pairs up with forgetting: is it not a sort of happy forgetting? Even more fundamentally, is it not the figure of reconciled memory? Surely. Nevertheless, there are two reasons that prompted me to examine it outside of the text, so to speak, in the form of an epilogue.
On the one hand, forgiveness refers to guilt and to punishment; yet, the whole of our analyses evaded this issue. The problem of memory basically concerned faithfulness to the past; yet guilt appears as an additional component with respect to the recognition of images of the past. It, therefore, would have been necessary to hold it in suspension, as I did in the case of the fault at the time of the Philosophy of the Will. History is a different matter: here, truth in its critical relation to the faithfulness of memory would be at stake; to be sure, we could not have failed to discuss the great crimes of the twentieth century. But it is not the historian who terms them such: the reprobation cast on them and the judgment considering them unacceptable—what an understatement!—is uttered by the citizen, which the historian, it is true, never ceases to be. The difficulty, however, is precisely to exercise historical judgment in a spirit of impartiality under the sign of moral condemnation. As for the inquiry into the historical condition, it also borders on the phenomenon of guilt and hence on that of forgiveness; but it is incumbent on this inquiry not to step beyond the threshold framing the idea of being indebted, in the sense of depending on a transmitted heritage, apart from any sort of accusation.
Another reason: if, on one hand, guilt adds its weight to that of indebtedness, on the other, forgiveness offers itself as the eschatological horizon of the entire problematic of memory, history, and forgetting. This original heterogeneity does not exclude the possibility that forgiveness imprints the mark of its signs on all the instances of the past: it is in this sense that it offers itself as their common horizon of completion. But this approximation of eskhaton guarantees no happy ending for our enterprise as a whole: this is why it will be a question only of a difficult forgiveness (epilogue).