NOTES

PART ONE, CHAPTER ONE

1. Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley, in The Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1:465.

2. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. M. J. Levett, rev. Myles F. Burnyeat, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 181.

3. On all of this, see David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). What, the author asks, can be the truth of memory once past things are irrevocably absent? Does not memory seem to place us in contact with them through the present image of their vanished presence? What about the relation of presence to absence that the Greeks explored under the guidance of the metaphor of the imprint (tupos)? These are the implications of the tie between typography and iconography that he explores in close proximity to Jacques Derrida’s works on writing. Regardless of the fate of this metaphor as it moves into the era of neuroscience, thinking is doomed by the aporia of the presence of absence to remain on the edges, “on the verge.”

4. This passage is Krell’s alternative translation (with his emphases, 27).

5. A careful discussion in the tradition of English-language analytical philosophy of the strictly epistemic argumentation can be found in Myles Burnyeat, The Theaetetus of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990). According to the author, all the most important commentaries of the Theaetetus are in English. On “false judgment,” its possibility and its eventual refutation (65ff.); on the “wax block” (90ff.); on the “aviary” (105ff.).

6. The model of the block of wax had failed in the case of the faulty identification of a number by means of the sum of two numbers; abstract errors like this defy an explanation in terms of a misfit between perceptions.

7. One will note in passing the unexploited allegory of the archer who misses his mark (194a) and recall that hamartanein (to be mistaken and, later, to sin) is to miss the target.

8. We are leaving the Theaetetus just at the moment when the discussion, which up to now has been centered on false judgment, tightens around the strictly epistemic problem of the relation among these three themes, namely, knowledge, perception, and true judgment (201e). From a strictly epistemic viewpoint, one passes from the error of identification and description in the Theaetetus to pure errors of description in the Sophist (Burnyeat, The Theaetetus of Plato, 90).

9. In this regard, I would say, in opposition to Krell, that there is no reason to turn the discovery of this paradox against Plato and to discern in it a foretaste of the ontology of presence; the paradox seems to me to constitute the very enigma of memory, which will follow us throughout this book. It is rather the very nature of the problem that this paradox brings to light.

10. Sophist, trans. Nicholas P. White in Plato: Complete Works, 236–93.

11. Philebus, trans. Dorthea Frede in Plato: Complete Works, 399–456.

12. Was the French translator, Auguste Diès, right to render pathēmata by “reflection,” by reason of the comparison made in the Republic 511d, between discursive thinking or intuititon, considered states of the soul, and pathēmata? It is essential for the argument of the Philebus that the writing within the soul be of the order of attention. It will remain for Aristotle to treat the mnēmē as presence to the soul and the memory as a pathos.

13. My discussion concerning the status of the cortical trace appears in part 3, in the context of the problematic of forgetting.

14. The French translation of Petits Traités d’histoire naturelle and of our treatise, De la mémoire et de la réminiscence, is by René Mugnier (Paris: Éditions les “Belles Lettres,” 1965). I want to express here, in unison with so many others, my debt to the English-language translation and commentary offered by Richard Sorabji under the title Aristotle on Memory (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1972). Following his lead, anamnēsis could be translated by “recollection” (rappel); I have preferred the French remémoration, in agreement with the typology that follows this archeology of the problem.

15. Aristotle designates this evocation simultaneously by a substantive mnēmē and by a verb mnēmoneuin (449b4). Mugnier translates: “La mémoire et le souvenir,” and a little further on, “Faire acte de mémoire,” but Sorabji: “Memory and Remembering.” The substantive anamnēsis will also be paired with a verb, anamimnēskesthai. Mugnier: “Reminiscence” and “Souvenir par réminiscence”; Sorabji: “Recollection, Recollecting.”

16. Mugnier: “La mémoire s’applique au passé”; Sorabji: “Memory is of the past”; the Greek says: “tou genomenou,” what has occurred, happened.

17. Sorabji: “For whenever someone is actively engaged in remembering, he always says in his soul. . . .”

18. Mugnier: “Tout souvenir s’accompagne de la notion du temps”; Sorabji: “All memory involves time.”

19. “‘To be in time’ means, for movement, that both it and its essence are measured by time (for simultaneously it measures both the movement and its essence), and this is what being in time means for it, that its essence should be measured” (221a5–7). Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:374.

20. “Now we mark them (‘before’ and ‘after’) by judging that A and B are different, and that some third thing is intermediate to them. When we think of [noēsomen, distinguish by the intellect] the extremes as different from the middle and the mind pronounces [eipēi] that the ‘nows’ are two, one before and one after, it is then that we say [phamen] that there is time, and this that we say is time” (219a25ff.) [371–72].

21. We must then say that “it is the objects of imagination that are remembered in their own right, whereas things that are not grasped without imagination are remembered in virtue of an incidental association” (De memoria et reminiscentia, trans. Sorabji, 450a22–25).

22. What? The soul, or perception, sensation? Mugnier: “qui possède la sensation”; Sorabji: “which contains the soul” (450a25).

23. The expression zōgraphēma introduced above contains the radical graphē.

24. To this vocabulary must be added the term mnēmoneuma (451a2), rendered by Sorabji as “reminder,” a sort of memory aid, which I will take into account below in the phenomenological section of the present study. For mnēmoneuma, Mugnier employs the simple word “souvenir,” in the sense of that which makes us think of something else.

25. Mugnier keeps “Réminiscence,” Soabji proposes “Recollection.” I myself say “rappel” or “rémemoration,” in the perspective of the phenomenological sketch that follows these two “textual commentaries” on Plato and Aristotle. The distinction that Aristotle makes between mnēmē and anamnēsis appears to me to anticipate the one proposed by a phenomenology of memory between simple evocation and the search or the effort to recall.

26. Mugnier translates: “les réminiscences se produisent quand ce mouvement-ci vient naturellement après ce mouvement-là” (451b10).

27. See part 3, chapter 3.

28. In this sense, my undertaking is situated along the same line as my exploration of the basic capacities or powers—to speak, act, recount, hold oneself accountable for one’s acts—powers which I classify, in Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), under the heading of the capable human being.

29. I am anticipating here considerations that will find their proper place in the third part of this work, at the critical turning point between the epistemology of historical knowledge and the hermeneutics of our historical condition.

30. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Allen and Unwin, 1950). A systematic study of the relations between psychology and metaphysics will be offered in the third part of this work within the framework of an investigation devoted to forgetting.

31. Our chapter on forgetting (part 3, chapter 3) will focus at length on this ambiguity.

32. Henri Bergson, “Intellectual Effort,” in Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1975), 186–230.

33. See below, part 3, chapter 3, on forgetting.

34. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), Collected Works, vol. 4, trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).

35. In chapter 3 I shall consider the important analyses that Rudolf Bernet devotes to the phenomenology of time in Husserl.

36. With regard to this, the figure that accompanies the phenomenon of running-off in §11 should not mislead us: this is a spatial transcription suggested by the equivalence between the present and a point.

37. The word phantasma appears in §19, 68–70.

38. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

39. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

40. Recognition will be the object of particular attention in my study of forgetting below.

41. On the relation between document and monument, see part 2, chapter 1, below.

42. One can also situate the commemorative act within the pair habit-memory and recollection-memory. The mediation of texts (founding narratives, liturgical manuals) functions in this regard in the manner of the reminders mentioned earlier; there is no practice of ritual without recalling a myth that guides memory toward what is worthy of commemoration. Commemorations are in this way reminders of a sort, in the sense of reactualizations, of founding events supported by the “call” to remember which solemnizes the ceremony (commemorating, Casey notes, solemnizes by taking the past seriously and celebrating it in appropriate ceremonies [223]). An approach to the public phenomenon of commemoration, which is more critical than descriptive, will be proposed in part 3 within the framework of a critical philosophy of history. First, however, we have to pass through the layer formed by the epistemology of historical knowledge. The first mention of the pitfalls related to the praise of commemorations will be proposed in the following chapter.

43. Commemorative acts should not, of course, be restricted to religious and patriotic celebrations; elegies and funeral services are celebrations as well. I would say that they unfold in the time of the deceased’s close relations, halfway between private memory and social memory; but this time of the close relations and the space that is attached to it—the cemetery, the monument to the dead—stand out against the backdrop of public space and social time. Each time that we pronounce or write the phrase “in memory of . . .” we are inscribing the name of those we remember in the great book of co-memory, which in its turn is inscribed in the most comprehensive time.

44. See part 2, chapter 3.

45. Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung 1898–1925, ed. Eduard Marbach, Husserliana, vol. 23 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980).

46. See Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), Husserliana, vol. 10 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966). On the basis of these texts, Rudolf Bernet has edited and introduced the texts completing the 1905 Lectures and their additions under the title, Texte zur Phänomenologie des innern Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1985).

47. One text of Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923–1924), ed. and introduced by R. Boehm, Husserliana, vol. 8 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), expresses Husserl’s distress confronting the stupefying entanglement of the phenomena considered: “Apparently the memory presentifies in a simple manner a remembered past, expectation an awaited future, depiction (Abbildung) an object depicted, fantasy a fiction (Fiktum); in the same way as perception bears on a perceived. But in truth it is not like this” (my translation, 130). This is not the only time that Husserl admits his mistake. Raymond Kassis, an excellent scholar of the Husserlian corpus in its entirety, has pointed out pages to me from Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesungen (1906–1907), ed. and introduced by U. Melle, Husserliana, vol. 24 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), devoted to “the distinction between the consciousness of phantasy and primary memory” (255–58) and to the “analogies” between two sorts of presentifications. These continue to be temporal objects implying a “temporal extension.”

48. Beilage XIII: “Phantasmen und Empfindungen als wahrnehmungs Objekte und als Auffassungsinhalte vonWahrnehmungen,” Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, 166–69.

49. Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, text no. 4 (1908): “Glaube als Impression,” 218–28.

50. Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, text no. 6 (1909): “Erinnerung und Phantasie,” 241–48.

51. Ibid., 245.

52. Husserliana, vol. 10, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, makes a connection between Ideen I, 36 and following to text no. 19 of Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung concerning the operation that constitutes phantasy and the distinction between phantasy and memory in terms of fulfillment: “The thetically unmodified intentionality” of memories forms a barrier against any confusion with phantasy: the correlate of the latter is “pure possibility” with regard to its modality (“Reine Möglichkeit und Phantasie” [1922–23], Husserliana, 23:559).

53. I am reserving for chapter 2 of part 3, in the framework of a discussion on forgetting, the question of the role of the body and the brain at the point of articulation of a psychology, in the broad sense, and a metaphysics, conceived fundamentally as “the metaphysics of matter based on duration” (F. Worms, Introduction à «Matière et Mémoire» de Bergson [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997]).

54. In Poetics 1450a7–9, Aristotle makes the “spectacle” (opsis) one of the component parts of the tragic narrative. It designates the external and visible arrangement (cosmos) of the poem, the fable, alongside diction (lexis) which expresses its readability. Rhetoric 3.10.1410b33 says of metaphor that it “sets before our eyes.” We will find this same relation between readability and visibility once again on the level of the representation of historians (part 2, chapter 3).

55. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (New York: Citadel, 1965).

PART ONE, CHAPTER TWO

1. I myself attempted in Oneself as Another to consider operations traditionally assigned to distinct problematics as the diverse manifestations of the fundamental power of acting. The same pragmatic turning point is taken in each of the three major sections of the work: I can speak, I can act, I can recount (myself), I can ascribe my actions to myself as their actual author. I now say: I can remember. In this sense, the investigation of mnemonic phenomena proposed here forms a supplementary chapter in a philosophical anthropology of the acting and suffering being who is the capable being.

2. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

3. Georges Chapouthier, La Biologie de la mémoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 5ff.

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).

5. Georges Canguilhem, La Connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1965). On Kurt Goldstein, see the chapter, “Le vivant et son milieu” (143–47).

6. Gérard Leclerc, Histoire de l’autorité: L’Assignation des énoncés culturels et la généalogie de la croyance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986).

7. Henri Gouhier, Le Théâtre et l’existence (Paris: Aubier, 1952).

8. In addition to the work of Frances Yates, Harald Weinrich, in Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Munich: Ch. Beck, 1977), seeks an eventual ars oblivionis, symmetrical to this “art of memory,” which as been well verified historically. He devotes the opening pages of his book to the latter, memorization receiving preference over remembrance as the axis of reference for a literary history of forgetting, whose course meanders no less than does the mythical river that has given its name to his work. We will return to this in part 3, chapter 3.

9. Cicero bequeathed to the Medieval scholars several important writings on rhetoric: De oratore, De inventione (the Ad Herennium being considered its second part), and the Disputes Tusculanes which exerted a decisive influence in the conversion of Augustine (Confessions, book 6). He is the first Latin author to have, toward the end of De inventione, made memory part of the virtue of prudentia, along with intelligentia and providentia.

10. In truth, the medieval heritage of Aristotle concerning memory is threefold. First, the extension given to the metaphor of the imprint of the seal in the wax (first chapter of De memoria); next, the pairing of memory and imagination, of which it is stated in De anima that “it is impossible to think without images”; finally, including mnemotechnics among the procedures of the rational recollection of memories in the second chapter of De memoria (the choice of a starting point, ascending and descending the series of associations, and so on).

11. Cf. the beautiful pages devoted to Dante by Yates in The Art of Memory (95ff.) and by Weinrich in Lethe (142ff.). According to Weinrich, the typology of the beyond, which the poet reaches after drinking the waters of oblivion, makes Dante the Gedächtnismann, the man of memory (145). Weinrich knows no equal to the Divine Comedy except for Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

12. Yates concludes her chapter on “medieval memory and the formation of imagery” in these terms: “From the point of view of this book, which is mainly concerned with the later history of the art, it is fundamental to emphasize that the art of memory came out of the Middle Ages. Its profoundest roots were in a most venerable past. From those deep and mysterious origins it flowed out into later centuries, bearing the stamp of religious fervor strangely combined with mnemotechnical detail which was set upon it in the Middle Ages” (104).

13. Weinrich sees this denial of forgetfulness in the Greek episode of the feat of memory attributed to Simonides, who restored each of the deceased guests to his proper place at the banquet. According to Cicero, the poet is said to have suggested to Themistocles, who was exiled from his country, that he teach him the wonderful art of “remembering everything” (ut omnia meminisset). The great man is held to have answered that he would have more taste for an art of forgetting which would allow him to avoid the suffering of remembering what he did not want to and of not being able to forget what he did want to (Weinrich, 24). We shall return to this when we discuss forgetting as a magnitude in its own right.

14. Edward Casey mentions at the beginning of his work, Remembering, which we have abundantly cited in the preceding study, the wrong done to memory, in the precise sense of remembering, by the critique of the pedagogy that relies on memory, as if the case against memorization extended indiscriminately to the case of remembering, to the benefit of a culture of forgetting.

15. Montaigne, Essays, I, 25, quoted by Weinrich, who does not fail to mention in this connection Sancho Panza and his donkey, who contrasts with the sad figure of the “ingenious” knight (Lethe, 67–71).

16. Weinrich favorably quotes this statement by Helvétius: “The great mind does not in any way presuppose great memory; I would even add that the extreme extension of the one is absolutely exclusive of the other” (ibid., 78).

17. Quoted by Weinrich, 90.

18. See below on forgetting, part 3, chapter 3.

19. “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” trans. Richard T. Gray, in Unfashionable Observations, vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 83–167.

20. “Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1913–17), 126–36. Pagination will be given first for the German edition (when indicated by Ricoeur) and then for the English translation of the Standard Edition: “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” in vol. 12 (1911–13), trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 147–56.

21. “Mourning and Melancholia” appears in the Standard Edition, vol. 14: 243–58.

22. What may lead us to overlook the instruction we are seeking concerning the kinship between the work of remembering and the work of mourning is the fact that the term “work” is applied to both melancholia and to mourning within the framework of the “economic” model so fervently evoked by Freud during the period this essay was written. The theme of mourning, Peter Homans notes in The Ability to Mourn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), is not simply one theme among others in psychoanalytic description and explanation: it is tied to the symptoms of hysteria and to the famous statement: “Psychopaths suffer from memories.” In his Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Freud makes a connection between hysterical symptoms as mnemonic symptoms and the monuments that decorate our cities (Homans, 261). Monuments are responses to loss. What is more, the work of mourning is coextensive with the entire psychoanalytic enterprise, considered as renunciation and resignation culminating in reconciliation with loss. Homans provides a positive extension to this axial theme under the heading of individuation, understood as self-appropriation in relation to Phantasie and the capacity for storytelling.

23. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964).

24. The reader will not miss the parallel to the ars memoriae, discussed above, and the theory of melancholy. Was not Giordano Bruno, the author of Shadows of Ideas (De umbris idearum), a “madman”?

25. Saturn and Melancholy, 125ff. The parallel between the two thematics is held not to be accidental, as is confirmed by the reference to Saturn, “the star of melancholy,” in the literary, pictorial, and poetic tradition.

26. More than anyone else, it is Marsilio Ficino “who gives shape to the idea of the melancholy man of genius and revealed it to the rest of Europe—in particular, to the great Englishmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—in the magic chiaroscuro of Christian Neoplatonic mysticism” (ibid., 255). We are not far from the enthusiastic athletes of the ars memoriae, considering the astral connotations found in so many Renaissance thinkers.

27. It is true that the central figure has wings, albeit folded, which the “putti” enliven: a suggestion of sublimation? A crown encircles the head and, in particular, the number Four—the “magic square” of medical mathematics—appears as an antidote.

28. I encountered this problematic of the “sadness without a cause” at the end of the first volume of my Philosophy of Will under the title of the “Sorrow of Finitude.” Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 447–48.

29. Jean Starobinski, La Mélancholie au miroir: Trois lectures de Baudelaire (Paris: Julliard, 1989).

30. See below, part 3, chapter 3.

31. Starobinski marks in this way the path that, starting in ancient “acedia” and passing through Dürer’s Melencolia, leads to Baudelaire’s Spleen, which, in its turn, leads back to memory. See the third study of La Mélancolie au miroir: “Les figures perchées: ‘Le Cygne.’”

32. Evoking “poetic melancholy in post-medieval poetry” and in the great Elizabethans announcing Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” the authors of Saturn and Melancholy depict this aesthetic melancholy as “heightened self-awareness” (Klibansky et al., 228).

33. Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). My investigation took up thinkers as diverse as Marx, Althusser, Mannheim, Max Weber, Habermas (first period), and Clifford Geertz.

34. “With no notion of how metaphor, analogy, irony, ambiguity, pun, paradox, hyperbole, rhythm, and all the other elements of what we lamely call ‘style’ operate . . . in casting personal attitudes into public form, sociologists lack the symbolic resources out of which to construct a more incisive formulation.” Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 209.

35. Geertz, whose fields of study have been Morocco and Indonesia, readily admits this: “It is through the construction of ideologies, schematic images of social order, that man makes himself for better or worse a political animal” (ibid., 218). “The function of ideology,” he continues, “is to make an autonomous politics possible by providing the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the suasive images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped” (ibid.).

36. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 181–215.

37. By venturing the expression “surplus value,” I am suggesting that the Marxist notion of surplus value, focused on the production of values in the market economy, constitutes only one particular form of the general phenomenon of surplus value attached to the exercise of power, economic power in the capitalist form of the market economy being the variant specified by the division of labor between governing and governed.

38. See Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 68–102.

39. Michel Henry’s work on Marx’s ontology remains the prime reference for an in-depth understanding of the Marxian analysis of human reality. Michel Henry, Marx, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).

40. Jean-Luc Petit, Du travail vivant au système de l’action: Une discussion de Marx (Paris: Seuil, 1980).

41. This was the contribution made by Habermas at the time of Knowledge and Human Interests. (See Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 216–53.) An interest in emancipation, distinct from the interest in control and manipulation corresponding to the empirical sciences and even from the interest in communication belonging to the historical and interpretive sciences, is held to be the basis of the critical social sciences such as psychoanalysis and ideology critique.

42. Tzvetan Todorov, Les Abus de la mémoire (Paris: Éditions Arléa, 1995).

43. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, book 5.

44. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); see also Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998); The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice, trans. Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

45. Pierre Nora, “L’Ère de la commémoration,” Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 3, Les France, book 3, De l’archive à l’emblème (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 975–1012. “The Era of Commemoration,” Realms of Memory, vol. 3, Symbols, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 609–37.

46. See below, part 3, chap. 2, “The Uncanniness of History: Pierre Nora: Strange Places of Memory.”

47. Nora specifies: this “metamorphosis of commemoration” is held, in turn, to be “the effect of a broader metamorphosis: in less than twenty years France has gone from being a country with a unified national consciousness to a country with a patrimonial type of consciousness” (“The Era of Commemoration,” 621).

PART ONE, CHAPTER THREE

1. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 111ff.

2. Jean Guitton, Le Temps et l’éternité chez Platon et saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1933; 4th ed., 1971).

3. Augustine, Confessions 10.16, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 222–23. Quoted in Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1:231, note 3. Quotations from the Confessions are taken from the Pine-Coffin translation.

4. “My love of you, OLord, is not some vague feeling: it is positive and certain” (certa conscientia, in my consciousness, I am certain). “And yet when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of a kind that I love in my inner self” (ibid., 10.6).

5. “When I use my memory, I ask it to produce whatever it is that I wish to remember. Some things it produces immediately; some are forthcoming only after a long delay, as though they were being brought out from some inner hiding place; others come spilling from the memory, thrusting themselves upon us when what we want is something quite different, as much as to say ‘Perhaps we are what you want to remember?’ These I brush aside from the picture which my memory presents to me, allowing my mind to pick what it chooses, until finally that which I wish to see stands out clearly and emerges into sight from its hiding place. Some memories present themselves easily and in the correct order just as I require them. They come and give place in their turn to others that follow upon them, and as their place is taken they return to their place of storage, ready to emerge again when I want them. This is what happens when I recite something by heart [cum aliquid narro memoriter]” (ibid., 10.8, p. 214).

6. Once notions “have been dispersed, I have to collect them again, and this is the derivation of the word cogitare, which means to think or to collect ones thoughts. For in Latin the word cogo, meaning I assemble or I collect, is related to cogito, which means I think, in the same way as ago is related to agito or facio to factito” (ibid., 10.11, pp. 218–19). Verbs ending in -ito are frequentative verbs, which indicate repetition of the activity represented by the simple form of the verb.

7. More precisely, and more dangerously, the distentio is not only of the soul but in the soul. Hence, in something like a place of inscription for the traces, the effigia, left by past events; in brief, for images.

8. I will also hold in reserve the question of the status of the past as it is the target of memory. Must we say about the past that it is no longer or that it was? Augustine’s repeated recourse to expressions of ordinary language, in particular to the adverbial forms: “no longer,” “not yet,” “for how long,” “long-time,” “still,” “already,” as well as the dual treatment of the past as “being and not being” are but so many touchstones with regard to an ontology, which is prevented from unfolding by the thesis that time inheres in the soul.

9. John Locke, Identité et différence: L’Invention de la conscience, trans. and commentary by Étienne Balibar (Paris: Seuil, 1998).

10. The Latin sibi consciere, sibi conscius esse and the substantive conscientia, which translates the Greek suneidēsis, do not mean to be self-conscious but to be informed, to be made aware of something; it is a form of judgment. In the “dossier” that Étienne Balibar joins to his commentary one can read passages from Descartes’s writings, in particular the Replies to the Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Objections, The Principles of Philosophy, Conversation with Burman, and several letters (Locke, Identité et différence, 265–73). Nevertheless, the word “consciousness” is not absent: it is found in the Principles. Leibniz preferred “apperception” (Monadology, §14). The sole antecedent on the plane of vocabulary, Balibar tells us, is found in Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists (Identité et différence, 57–63).

11. On the variety of the usages of the word “self” allowed by the English language, see the valuable glossary appended to Étienne Balibar’s translation (ibid., 249–55).

12. In this regard, my critique in Oneself as Another, reproaching Locke with having confused idem and ipse, is not relevant to the letter of the Essay. The category of sameness reigns from one end of it to the other: personal identity does not propose an alternative to sameness; it is simply one variety of it, the most significant, to be sure, but one that remains within the formal unity of the idea of self-identity. Only a reading that draws its arguments from other sources than personal identity can be considered an alternative to sameness. In Locke, the self is not an ipse set in opposition to an idem; it is a same—and even a selfsame—placed at the summit of the pyramid of sameness.

13. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government ([1689] Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955).

14. The only plausible connection to be sought is found in the chapter on property (Locke, ibid., chapter 5). The earth and everything on it are given to men by God to assure their existence and well-being, but it remains for them to “appropriate them” (chapter 5, §26). Is this the concept of appropriation found in the Essay? It would seem to be, inasmuch as “every man has a property in his own person” (chapter 5, §27). But it is in a relation to others who might take it away. So it is in the language of right that it is spoken of and in relation to a genuine other: “this [his own person] nobody has a right to but himself” (ibid.). Moreover, to this bare property is joined labor, a category foreign to the Essay: “For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to” (ibid.).

15. My question does not coincide with that raised by critics as knowledgeable as Rudolf Bernet: for him, the question of confidence, so to speak, concerns the links that the transcendental phenomenology of time, culminating in the instance of the “living present,” retains with the “metaphysics of presence” tracked by Heidegger. For this post-Heideggerian reading, strengthened by Jacques Derrida’s perspicacious critique, the absence that permeates the presumed presence of the absolute present is infinitely more significant than the absence inscribed in the relation with that other absence, the “foreign” in relation to my sphere of ownness, to the mineness of personal memory.

16. The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time posed a considerable problem of editing, and then of translation. Around the core of the “Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time from the Year 1905” were collected the “addenda and supplements” (1905–10). It is this material that Heidegger published in 1928 in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phaenomenologiche Forschung. New manuscripts were included in volume 10 of the Husserliana, under the title, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917).

17. Cf. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3:44–59.

18. One also encounters the term Gegenwärtigkeit, translated here by “presence,” alongside Gegenwärtigung, translated by “presentation,” in juxtaposition with Präsentation, whose translation poses no problem.

19. In the time lectures, we read: the flow is “one, unique” (§39, 84).

20. References to recollection are not absent, but connected to retention; §39 talks in this regard of what “in the retaining, is retained of the second degree” (86). In addition, the notion of the retention of retentions is contained in that of “retentional being-all-at-once” (§39, 87) in which otherness is canceled out. It is true, however, that with the return of the opposition between “impression and reproduction” (§42) the break with presence tends to be felt once again. But the affirmation of the two phenomena and their repeated correlation win out over the recognition of their differences.

21. Readers familiar with Husserl’s work will have noted the proximity of my analyses to those of the excellent and learned interpreter of Husserl, Rudolf Bernet, whose “Einleitung” accompanies the Texte zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985), xi–lxxvii; as well as “Die ungegenwärtige Gegenwart, Anwesenheit und Abwesenheit in Husserls Analysis des Zeitbewusstseins,” in E. W. Orth, ed., Phänomenologische Forschungen (Freiburg, Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1983), 16–57; and “La présence du passé dans l’analyse husserlienne de la conscience du temps,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 19 (1983): 178–98. Rudolf Bernet’s thesis—that what is unexpressed in Husserlian thinking lies in his unperceived allegiance to the “metaphysics of presence” that Heidegger sees as pervading Western philosophy in the guise of the forgetfulness of Being—is plausible, despite the violence cloaking this interpretation. But this should not preclude all attempts to rectify Husserlian phenomenology on its own terrain of eidetic analysis. In particular, it does not require abandoning the reference of temporal experience to the present. Without the mark of the now, how could one say that something begins or ends? It is sufficient not to confuse the living present with the point-like instant of objective time: the reduction of objective time protects us from this confusion; without the present, there is no before, no after, no temporal distance or depth. It is in the experienced present itself, as Augustine perceived, that distentio animi operates. The evocation of an eternal present does not lead to dissolving the contrasts and tensions internal to time, but, far from this, serves as a means of contrast, revealing the tear, the rip, discussed by Bernet (“La presence du passé,” 179). At the limit, the reversal by which a phenomenology of difference would come to occupy the same territory as the phenomenology of identical self-presence produces its own difficulties. Interpretations other than those inspired by Heidegger are still possible: did not Husserl breath new life into the presuppositions of the Fichtean philosophy of identity, without necessarily attaching to this vein of thought the presumed single phylum of the metaphysics of presence? We might also ask, along with Emmanuel Levinas in his great text, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), whether the first denial is not fundamentally an ethical one, and whether it is not the failure to acknowledge the original otherness of other people that produces the blindness with regard to all the forms of otherness, taken one by one. But we can also presuppose that there is no one reason for the multiple forms of blindness to the negative but only a “family resemblance” inaccessible to systematic unification, which would paradoxically mark the triumph of identity in the very name of difference. In The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wicksell, 1998), O. Birnbaum successfully explores the resources of this family resemblance characterizing all the figures of negativity in Husserl’s work. The most remarkable family resemblance in this regard would belong to two denials, the denial of absence within internal-time and the denial of the foreign in egology—the foreign(er), the figure without which egology could never begin. Bernet can be cited again here: “L’Autre du temps,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Positivité et Transcendance, ed. Jean-Luc Marion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 143–63. There then remains to take into account Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, volume 23 of Husserliana, along with the distinction between memories as intentional objects and memory as the apprehending of time; it is solely with the latter that the present discussion is concerned.

22. Time and Narrative, vol. 3, gives priority to a different problematic, that of the intuitive character of time-consciousness in comparison with its invisibility, which the Kantian transcendental aesthetics would appear to require.

23. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser, Husserliana, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963); Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), which I shall cite here. I proposed an analysis of the Cartesian Meditations as a whole, along with a separate study of the “Fifth Cartesian Meditation,” in Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 82–142.

24. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, “Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation,” in ibid., 115–42.

25. One speaks, in this way, of analogical “apperception.” Hundreds of pages were devoted to this unlocalizable analogical apperception in the long-left unedited manuscripts dealing with intersubjectivity, finally published under the direction of Iso Kern.

26. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich; trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968; reprinted Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).

27. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1950; reprinted 1980). In French, there is a newer, revised critical edition by Gérard Namer which incorporates numerous passages concerning The Collective Memory from previously unpublished writings found in Halbwachs’s notebooks: La Mémoire collective (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997).

28. See Patrick H. Hutton, “Maurice Halbwachs as Historian of Collective Memory,” in History as an Art of Memory (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 1993), 73ff. Hutton gives Halbwachs a place of honor in a sequence which, in addition to Wordsworth and Freud, includes Philippe Aries and Michel Foucault. For her part, Mary Douglas is the author of an important introduction to the English translation of The Collective Memory in which she compares Halbwachs’s contribution to that of Edward Evans-Pritchard. Her own study, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), finds a basis in Halbwachs for her study of “structural amnesia,” to which I shall return in my chapter on forgetting. Numerous, too, are the French historians who recognize in Halbwachs’s work more than a simple appendix to Émile Durkheim’s sociology, namely, a genuine introduction to the confrontation between collective memory and history. In this regard, we will confine ourselves in this chapter to an analysis of chapter 1, “Individual Memory and Collective Memory” (22–49), of The Collective Memory. I will set aside for a discussion that will take place within the framework of the critical philosophy of history, the key chapter titled, “Historical Memory and Collective Memory” (50–87). The distinction between collective memory and historical memory will then be given an importance equal to the sole distinction we are concerned with at this stage of our investigation, the distinction between individual memory and collective memory.

29. Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Alcan, 1925; Albin Michel, 1994). There is a partial English translation of this work in Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 37–189.

30. Later we shall have the opportunity to discuss the tie Halbwachs establishes between memory and space. This is the title of one of the chapters of The Collective Memory: “Space and the Collective Memory” (128–57).

31. Note the emphasis on notions of place and displacement.

32. The historians whom we shall consult in part 2 concerning the constitution of the social bond will restore this initiative to social actors, whether this is in situations of justifying or contesting action in the course of life in various “cities.” Halbwachs, however, moves beyond the objection that he himself raises, namely, that the movements of situating oneself, relocating and displacing oneself are spontaneous movements that we know, that we can perform. Paradoxically, the response that he opposes to the sense data theory of memory rests on a deep-seated agreement with the latter concerning the status of the original impression, of sensible intuition.

33. What ultimately weakens Maurice Halbwachs’s position is his recourse to a sense data based theory of sensible intuition. This recourse will become more difficult after the linguistic turn and, even more so, after the pragmatic turn taken by the epistemology of history. This double turn, however, can already be made on the plane of memory. Remembering, we said, is doing something: it is declaring that one has seen, done, acquired this or that. And this act of memory is inscribed within a network of practical exploration of the world, of the corporeal and mental initiative which make us acting subjects. It is then in a present much richer than that characterizing sensible intuition that memories come back, in a present of initiative. The preceding chapter, devoted to the exercise of memory, authorizes a rereading of mnemonic phenomena from a pragmatic viewpoint before the historical operation itself is placed back in the field of a theory of action.

34. H. L. A. Hart, “The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 49 (1948): 171–94. The substantive ascription and the verb to ascribe have been constructed half-way between “description” and “prescription” to designate in particular the attribution of something to someone.

35. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Fourth Study.

36. P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959). I examine the general thesis in the first study of Oneself as Another, 27–39, in the framework of a general theory of “identifying reference” (how is it that we recognize that one individual is not another?). I apply it and make it more precise on the level of the theory of action in the Fourth Study, “The Aporias of Ascription” (96–112). It is the latter analysis that I take up again here, applying it to mnemonic phenomena.

37. I tested this theory of attribution in my discussion with Jean-Pierre Changeux, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 125–33.

38. The conception proposed here of the self-attribution of the acts of memory finds valuable support in the analysis of the speech act of self-designation of the witness, who attests to his own engagement in the act of bearing witness (cf. below, part 2, chap. 1).

39. This fixity of attribution in the case of memory explains Husserl’s shift in his vocabulary of intentionality, which, from intentionality ad extra, as in perception, becomes intentionality ad intra, horizontal intentionality, proper to the passage of memory along the axis of temporality. This horizontal intentionality is the very consciousness of internal time.

40. Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125.

41. Marie Balmary is a French psychoanalyst, whose works include Le Sacrifice interdit: Freud et la Bible (Paris: Grasset, 1986).

42. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

43. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967). See also by the same author, Collected Papers, 3 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962–66), and The Structure of the Life-World (London: Heinemann, 1974).

44. Weber, Economy and Society.

45. In Time and Narrative, 3:109–16, I examined the “succession of generations” within the framework of the connectors that assure the transition between phenomenological time and the common time of history, between mortal time and public time. The mere “replacement” of generations is a phenomenon related to human biology. Whereas, the interpretive sociology of Dilthey and Mannheim elucidates the qualitative features of the phenomenon of the “succession” (Folge) of the “generational bond.”

46. Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, 139–214.

47. Bernard Lepetit, ed., Les Formes de l’expérience: Une autre histoire sociale (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).

48. Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles: La Microanalyse à l’expérience (Paris: EHESS-Gallimard-Seuil, 1996).

49. Jean-Marc Ferry, Les Puissances de l’expérience: Essai sur l’identité contemporaine, vol. 2, Les Ordres de la reconnaissance (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 1991).

50. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, De la justification: Les économies de la grandeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

51. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 247.

PART TWO, INTRODUCTION

1. Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 33. Herodotus: the “father of history” (Cicero) or the “father of lies” (Plutarch)?

2. In his book L’Histoire (Paris: A. Colin, 2000), François Dosse proposes a sequence of six developments that mark out the history of history. The first of these sets in place “the historian, as a teacher of truth” (8–29). The problematic of truth begins not with Herodotus, the first histōr, but with Thucydides and his “cult of the true” (13). It developed through the birth and death of history as erudition. And it reached a peak with the methodological school and Charles Seignobos, before Ferdinand Braudel imposed a structural form on it that will be called into question under the banner of the “crisis of causality” at the end of the second of the major developments presented by Dosse.

3. In an initial, shorter version published in one of the three volumes edited by Le Goff and Nora—Faire de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974)—Certeau proposed the expression “historic operation.” In the longer version, published in his The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), he adopts once and for all the phrase “historiographical operation.”

4. Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophies critiques de l’histoire: Recherche, explication, écriture,” in Fløistad Guttorm, ed., Philosophical Problems Today (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 1:139–201.

5. François Châtelet, La Naissance de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1996). See also A. D. Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), esp. “The Place of Herodotus in the History of Historiography,” 127–42. François Hartog, in The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), notes the substitution of histōr for bard (iii–viii, 275–85) in the vocabulary of Herodotus’s preface. There where Homer invokes his privileged relation to the Muses (“tell me, Muse, the man of a thousand twists . . .” Odyssey 1.1), Herodotus speaks of himself in the third person, of himself and his place: Herodotus of Halicarnassus is here setting forth his research. After him, Thucydides will say that he has “written” the narrative of the war between Pelponnesians and Athenians. In this way, the renown (kleos) of Greeks and barbarians, once “exposed,” then “written” will be a “possession [ktēma] forever.” In any case, we cannot speak of a clear and definitive break between the bard and the historian, or, as I shall say below, between orality and writing. The struggle against forgetting and the culture of eulogy, in the face of the violence of history, against the backdrop of tragedy, mobilizes all the energies of diction. As for the break with myth, as an event in thinking, it is still in terms of myth that it can be spoken of, like the birth of writing.

6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

PART TWO, PRELUDE

1. See his magnificent essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–171.

2. Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 506–56; Greek terms added.

3. On the continuity between historiography and the ars memoriae, see Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 1993).

4. The context and coherence of ideas here leads me to distance myself from Luc Brisson, who translates hupomnēsis by remémoration. I prefer translating this word by “memorization” or aide-mémoire. In Theatetus 142c2–143a5, M. Narcy translates “I put in writing . . . in order to remember,” with an interesting note: “hupomnēmata: literally, support of memory” (Plato, Théétète, trans. Michel Narcy [Paris: Flammarion, 1994], 306). Léon Robin has “notes” (Plato, Oeuvres completes, trans. Léon Robin. 2 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, 1985]).

5. I will recall here my hypothesis concerning the polysemy of the trace: as material imprint, as affective imprint, and as documentary imprint. And, in each case, as exteriority.

6. I can admit this new recourse to inscription without having to call upon Platonic reminiscence, with the idea of the psychic trace, the perseverance of the first impression, the notion of affection, of pathos, which the encounter with the event consists in.

PART TWO, CHAPTER ONE

1. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). This is the third volume of a trilogy that includes Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) and Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). “If imagination,” notes Casey, “projects us out beyond ourselves while memory takes us back behind ourselves, place subtends and enfolds us, lying perpetually under and around us” (xvii).

2. In “Architecture et narrativité,” in Catalogue de la Mostra “Identità e Differenze” (Triennale de Milan, 1994), I tried to transpose to the architectural plane the categories linked to threefold mimesis in the first volume of my Time and Narrative: prefiguration, configuration, refiguration. I showed in the act of inhabiting the prefiguration of the architectural act, inasmuch as the need for shelter and circulation lays out the interior space of a dwelling and the given intervals to traverse. In turn, the act of construction is given as the spatial equivalent of narrative configuration through emplotment. From narrative to the edifice, it is the same intention of internal coherence that dwells in the narrator’s and the builder’s mind. Finally, the inhabiting, which results from this act of construction, can be taken for the equivalent of that “refiguration” that, in the order of narrative, takes place through reading. The inhabitant, like the reader, welcomes the construction with his expectations and also his resistance and challenges. I ended this essay with some praise of traveling.

3. Casey does not ignore the problems posed by architecture. Nevertheless, in his section titled “Building Sites and Cultivating Places” (Getting Back into Place, 146–81), the accent is more on the penetration of the natural world into the experience of “places built at the margins.” The enclosure of the building is considered in relation to its periphery; monuments stand out against the background of their surroundings. The site and the edifice pursue their competition. This approach assures gardens and parks a fair evaluation that attention devoted exclusively to palaces and less prestigious buildings tends to overlook. In return, the specific problems posed by the art of constructing do not receive their due in an approach more dominated by the opposition between place and space than by their interweaving, which for my part I interpret on the model of the interweaving of cosmic and phenomenological time.

4. Casey, Remembering, 277.

5. For what follows I draw upon François Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, trans. Peter V. Conroy Jr. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994). For the influence of geography, see 15–16, 57–58, and 109–11.

6. Georges Canguilhem, “Le vivant et son milieu,” in La Connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1965), 129–54.

7. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972–73). This is a translation of the second revised edition. The first edition was published in 1949. There is a fourth French edition (1979).

8. Allow me to recall my earlier comments on the first part of The Mediterranean: “Humans are everywhere present and with them a swarm of symptomatic events. The mountains appear as a refuge and a shelter for free people. As for the coastal plains, they are not mentioned without a reference to colonization, to the work of draining them, of improving the soil, the dissemination of populations, displacements of all sorts: migrations, nomadism, invasions. Here, now, are the waters, their coastlines, and their islands, They, too enter into this geohistory on the scale of human beings and their navigation. The waters are there to be discovered, explored, traveled. Even on this first level, it is not possible to speak of them without mentioning relations of economic and political dominance (Venice, Genoa). The great conflicts between the Spanish and Turkish empires already cast their shadows over the seascape. And with these power struggles, events are already taking shape. Thus the second level is not only implied by actually anticipated in the first: geohistory is rapidly transformed into geopolitics.” Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1:209.

9. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, 3 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1981–84).

10. One could pursue this odyssey of turn by turn lived, constructed, traversed, and inhabited space by an ontology of “place,” at the same level as the ontology of historicity that we shall consider in part 3 of this work. Cf. the essays in Pascal Amphoux et al., Le Sens du lieu (Paris: Ousia, 1996), and Augustin Berque and P. Nys, eds. Logique du lieu et oeuvre humaine (Paris: Ousia, 1997).

11. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 3:105–9.

12. Krzysztof Pomian, L’Ordre du temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), ix.

13. On this subject, see Paul Veyne, L’Inventaire des différences: Leçon inaugurale du Collège de France (Paris: Seuil, 1976), and Pierre Nora, “Le retour de l’événement,” in Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de l’histoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 1:285–308.

14. Pomian risks stating that the conception of a linear cumulative and irreversible time is partially verified by three major phenomena: the growth in population, available energy, and the amount of information stored in the collective memory (92–99).

15. The key text in this respect is that by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Race et histoire (Paris: UNESCO, 1952; Gallimard, 1987). Pomian (149) quotes one highly significant passage from it: “The development of prehistoric and archaeological knowledge tends to spread out in space those forms of civilization which we imagined as spread out in time. This means two things: First, that ‘progress’ (if this term is still suitable to designate a very different reality from the one to which it was first applied) is neither necessary nor continuous; it proceeds by leaps and bounds, or as the biologists would say, by mutations. Secondly, these leaps and bounds do not always go in the same direction; they go together with changes in orientation, a little like a chess knight that can always avail itself of several progressions but never in the same direction. Humanity in progress hardly resembles a man climbing up a flight of stairs, with each of his movements adding a new stop to all those he has passed. It is rather like a player whose luck is resting on several dice and who, each time he throws, sees them scattered on the table, with a variety of combinations. What one wins on one throw is always liable to be lost on another. It is only from time to time that history is cumulative—in other words, that the numbers can be added up to form a favorable combination.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Race and History,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Monique Layton (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 2:337–38.

16. Pomian, along with René Thom, has made a considerable effort to resolve the problem posed by this dissolution of the historical into the systematic, at the price of a “general theory of the morphogenesis which is a structuralist theory” (Pomian, 197). On Thom, see ibid., 196–202.

17. See also Krzysztof Pomian, “L’Histoire des structures,” in Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel, eds., La Nouvelle Histoire (Paris: Retz CEPL, 1978), 528–53; partially reprinted (Brussells: Ed. Complexes, 1988). He emphasizes the shift in the concept of substance in relation to the level of ontology. The result is the definition of the notion of structure proposed in L’Ordre du temps: “An ensemble of rational and interdependent relations whose reality is demonstrated and whose description is given by a theory (which constitutes, in other words, a demonstrable object), and that realizes a reconstructible, observable object whose stability and intelligibility it determines” (215). For Pomian, structure as a theoretical object is in line with the divisions that govern his book: visible/invisible, given/constructed, observed/demonstrated. The theoretical/historical divide is another such aspect.

18. I am in debt here to the work of Renaud Dulong, Le Témoin oculaire: Les Conditions sociales de l’attestation personnelle (Paris: EHESS, 1988). It allowed me to improve an earlier version of the present analysis, despite some disagreement with his final thesis of an overall antinomy between “historical testimony” and historiography, a thesis resulting from an almost exclusive focusing on the testimony of war veterans and especially survivors of the Shoah. These are testimonies that resist historiographical explanation and representation. And it is entry into an archive that they first of all resist. The problem posed then is that of the meaning of these limit-case testimonies along the trajectory of a historiographical operation that runs into its own limits at each step along the way, up to the most demanding kind of reflection (see part 3, chap. 1). Yet Dulong’s work initially presents a description of the essence of testimony that does not exclude its being set into an archive, even though he does not develop this theory.

19. The speech-act by which the witness attests to his personal engagement brings a striking confirmation to the analysis proposed above of the self-attribution of remembering—it is already a kind of prepredicative self-designation.

20. In his Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (London: Faber, 1973), Émile Benveniste notes that in Roman law the word testis, derived from tertius, designates the third parties charged with witnessing an oral contract and skilled at certifying such an exchange. The French edition, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), is cited by Dulong, Le Témoin oculaire, 43.

21. On this distinction between ipseity and sameness, see my Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 140–68. On promises, see G. H. von Wright, “On Promises,” in Philosophical Papers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1:83–99. To “assure” that something has happened, to certify it, is equivalent to a “promise bearing on the past.”

22. Here I am in complete agreement with Renaud Dulong’s treatment of eyewitness testimony as a “natural institution” (Le Témoin oculaire, 41–69). Dulong notes that his analyses are close to those of the phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz’s The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), as well as to Hannah Arendt’s theory of public space.

23. It is this use that von Wright calls “institution” in his “On Promises.” This use is close to Wittgenstein’s notions of language games and “forms of life.”

24. The presupposition of a common world is relatively easy to formulate so long as it is a question of common perceptions. This simplified situation is the one postulated by Melvin Pollner in “Événement et monde commun,” subtitled “Que s’est-il réellement passé?” in Jean-Luc Petit, ed., L’Événement en perspective (Paris: EHESS, 1991), 75–96. The sensus communis there is defined by the presupposition of a possible shared world. “We shall call an idiom of mundane reason the ensemble constituted by this presupposition and by the inference operations that it allows” (76). It is this presupposition, taken as “incorrigible,” unfalsifiable, that allows him both to inventory the disagreements and to take them as puzzles reducible through procedures of sagacity. In the case of a cultural world, the criteria of agreement are more difficult to establish. It is much more problematic to affirm that disagreements are distortions. This would be the case if we naïvely adopted the two paradigms criticized above of the video recording and the disengagement of the observer. The assumption of a shared world then becomes one of ideal harmony rather than of like-mindedness. This idea is then that of the presupposition of a shared form of life against the background of a unique perceived world. To the extent that the events that interest historians are taken to be important, significant, they overflow the perceptual sphere and enter that of opinions. The presumed sensus communis is a particularly fragile world of belief, which makes room for conflicts based on disagreements, differences in opinion, leading to controversy. It is in terms of this condition that the question of the plausibility of the arguments advanced by the protagonists is posed. A place is made then for the logical argumentation of the historian and the judge. But the difficulty in hearing the testimony of survivors of the concentration camps constitutes perhaps the most disturbing calling into question of the reassuring cohesion of an alleged common meaningful world. They are “extraordinary” testimonies in the sense that they exceed the capacity of “ordinary” understanding,” in the sense that Pollner calls mundane reason. In this regard, the disheartened reflections of Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier, 1961), and The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), are cause for reflection.

25. This moment of archiving testimony is indicated in the history of historiography by the appearance of the figure of the histōr, known to us through Herodotus, Thucydides, and other Greek, then Roman historians. I have already referred, following François Hartog, to the break between the bard or rapsode and the histōr. In his The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), Hartog spells out the relation between the histōr and the witness from this perspective. Before him, Émile Benveniste had emphasized the continuity between the judge who settles conflicts and the eyewitness: “For us, the judge is not the witness; this variation prejudices the analysis of the passage. But it is precisely because the ístōr is the eyewitness, the only one who can settle the dispute, that made it possible for ístōr to acquire the sense ‘one who decides by a judgment on the question of good faith’” (Indo-European Language and Society, 441–42, cited by Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus, 271). Undoubtedly, one should have distinguished here between the person who gives a testimony and the one who receives it; this witness becomes a judge. In this respect, Hartog broadens the gap between the histōr and the eyewitness by intercalating a chain of “the indicators of enunciation” between the seeing and the “exposition” of an inquiry: I saw, I heard, I say, I write (289). This game of enunciation thus takes place between the eye and the ear (260), between the written and the oral (273–82), wholly in the absence of any sanction by a master of the truth (ibid., xix). Writing, in this sense, constitutes the decisive mark. To it are grafted all the narrative strategies whence proceed “the narrative’s ability to persuade the addressee to believe it” (294). I shall return to this thesis below in my discussion of the concept of historical representation.

26. See Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991).

27. “The gesture which attaches ideas to places is precisely the historians’ gesture. For them, comprehension is tantamount to analyzing the raw data which every method first establishes according to its own criteria of relevance—in terms of productions whose locality can be determined.” Michel de Certeau, “The Historiographical Operation,” in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 56–57; a portion of this essay had been previously published in J. Le Goff and P. Nora, eds., Faire de l’histoire, 1:3–41, under the title “L’opération historique.”

28. Certeau deals with the establishing of “documents” within the framework of the second historiographical operation, which he puts under the heading of “a practice,” in a subsection titled “The Establishment of Sources or the Redistribution of Space” (The Writing of History, 72–77). “In history, everything begins with the gesture of setting aside, of putting together, of transforming certain classified objects into ‘documents.’ This new cultural distribution is the first task” (72).

29. Time and Narrative, 3:116–17.

30. See Françoise Hildesheimer, Les Archives de France: Mémoire de l’histoire (Paris: Honorée Champion, 1997); Jean Favier and Danièle Neirinck, “Les Archives,” in François Bedarida, ed., L’Histoire et le métier d’historien en France, 1945–1995 (Paris: Éd. de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1995), 89–110. The latter authors adopt the rather broad definition of archives given by a French law from 1979: “Archives are the set of documents, whatever their date, their form, and their material support, produced or received by any person or legal entity and by any public or private service or organization in the exercise of their activity” (93).

31. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1964). The writing of this book, in solitude, was cut off by the arrest and execution of this great historian and resistance fighter by the Nazis.

32. Below, I shall propose to reinforce the distinction between these two kinds of testimony, written and unwritten, by adding to the second one the notion of an index and of indexical knowledge as proposed by Carlo Ginsburg.

33. “The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies” (Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 26).

34. Ought we also to acknowledge the physical fragility of the documents in archives, natural and historical catastrophes, human disasters, great and small? I shall return to this below in part 3 when I speak of forgetting as the effacing of traces, in particular of documentary ones.

35. Did Charles Seignobos really say: “It is useful to ask oneself questions, but very dangerous to answer them”? Bloch, who doubts this thesis, but cites it, hastens to add: “Surely, this is not the remark of a braggart, but where would physics be today if the physicists had shown no greater daring?” (ibid., 17).

36. Lorenzo Valla, La Donation de Constantin (Sur la «Donation de Constantin», à lui faussement attribuée et mensongère [c. 1440]), trans. Jean-Baptiste Giard (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993). This founding text of historical criticism poses a problem for reading and interpretation in that it makes “coexist rhetoric and philology, fictive dialogue and the minute discussion of documentary tests in the same work,” according to Carlo Ginzburg’s introduction to this translation (xv). It is necessary to go back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric to find a rhetorical model for the proofs (ta tekmēria) (1354a) relevant to the rationality belonging to rhetoric, in terms of the notions of the “persuasive” and the “probable.” To be sure, Aristotle had in mind the judicial form of rhetoric, as including “human actions” (ta prattonta) (1357a) among past actions (1358b), unlike deliberative rhetoric, the more noble form, dealing with future actions, and epideictic rhetoric, having to do with praise and blame of present actions. This model was transmitted to the scholars in the Italian Renaissance by Quintilian, well known to Valla, whose Institutio oratoria, book 5, contains an ample development of such proofs, among which are documents (tabulae), such as wills and official documents. “Constantine’s Decree,” notes Ginzburg, “can easily fall within his latter category” (xvi). Set against this background, the mixture of genres of Valla’s text is less surprising. It is made up of two parts. In the first one, Valla argues that there is nothing plausible about the donation of a good part of the imperial possessions Constantine is supposed to have made to Pope Sylvester. This rhetorical part is organized in terms of a fictive dialogue between Constantine and the pope. In the second part, Valla argues on the basis of logical, stylistic, and “antiquarian” proofs to demonstrate that the document upon which the Donation was based (the alleged Decree of Constantine) was counterfeit.

Starting from an admission that the “distance between Valla as polemicist and rhetorician, and Valla as the initiator of modern historical criticism seems impossible to carry through in practice” (ibid., xi), Ginzburg polemicizes against those among our contemporaries who, following Nietzsche, make use of rhetoric as a skeptical instrument of war against the alleged tenacious positivism of historians. To fill this gap and rediscover an appropriate usage of the notion of proof for historiography, Ginzburg proposes to return to that propitious moment when, in the prolongation of Aristotle and Quintilian, rhetoric and proof were not separated. Rhetoric has its own rationality; as for proof in history, as Ginzburg’s important article on the “evidential paradigm,” which I shall discuss further below, demonstrates, it does not principally obey the Galilean model from which proceeds the positive or methodological version of documentary proof. This is why historians’ debt to Valla is so great. From him follow the Benedictine erudition of the congregation at Saint-Maur and Mabillon’s contribution to the study of diplomatic documents. Cf. Blandine Barret-Kriegel, L’Histoire à l’âge classique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988). This search for documentary veracity is also to be found in the methodological rules for the internal and external criticism of sources in the twentieth century in the school of Monod, Langlois, Seignobos, Lavisse, and Fustel de Coulanges.

37. Recall that we had already encountered Descartes for the first time with the decline of the ars memoriae and Giordano Bruno.

38. Jeremy Bentham, Traité des preuves judiciaries (Paris, 1822); A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (London: J. W. Paget, 1825). See also R. Dulong, Le Témoin oculaire, 139–62, and Catherine Audard, ed., Anthologie historique et critique de l’utilitarisme, vol. 1: Bentham et ses précurseurs (1711–1832) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999).

39. “Here the path of historical research, like that of so many other disciplines of the mind, intersects the royal highway of the theory of probabilities” (Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 124).

40. Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125.

41. This last feature relates the rapid, subtle, clever grasping of clues to the Greek mētis analyzed in Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

42. The notion of document, under which are conjoined those of clue and testimony, gains in precision by being paired in turn with that of the monument. Jacques Le Goff, in an article titled “Documento/monumento” in the Enciclopedia Einaudi (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 5:38–48, which is not translated in his collection of essays, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), retraces the criss-crossing adventure of these two notions. The document, reputedly less concerned to flag the hero’s glory, first of all has won the day over the monument when it comes to praise; in any case, for an ideological critique, the document turns out to be no less biased than the monument. Whence the plea for the mixed concept “document-monument.” Cf. Time and Narrative, 3:117–19.

43. This book, written a year before the author’s death, is a long reflection on his earlier work, Survival in Auschwitz. See in particular the chapter titled “To Communicate.”

44. This is the title of a volume edited by Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

45. Levi in this regard refers to “the anguish inscribed in everyone of the ‘tohu-bohu’ of a deserted and empty universe, crushed under the spirit of God but from which the spirit of man is absent: not yet born or already extinguished” (The Drowned and the Saved, 85, cited by Dulong, Le Témoin oculaire, 95).

46. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffry Haight and Annie Hamler (Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1992).

47. Jean Améry, Par-delà le crime et le châtiment: Essai pour surmonter l’insurmontable (Paris: Acts Sud, 1995).

48. For a fairer reading of Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, trans. G. G. Perry (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979 [French original, 1898]), see Antoine Prost, “Seignobos revisité,” Vingtième Siècle, revue d’histoire, no. 43 (July-September 1994): 100–18.

49. Antoine Prost, Douze Leçons sur l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1996); Paul Lacombe, De l’histoire considérée comme science (Paris: Hachette, 1894).

50. Henri I. Marrou, The Meaning of History, trans. Robert J. Olson (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966).

51. In Pierre Nora’s “Le retour de l’événement,” in J. Le Goff and P. Nora, eds., Faire de l’histoire, 1:210–28, it is the status of contemporary history that is primarily in question, and hence of the proximity of the reported past to the historical present, in a time like ours where the present is experienced “as charged with an already ‘historic’ meaning” (210). It is this weight of the present on “doing history” that authorizes saying that “current affairs, that generalized circulation of historical perception, culminate in a new phenomenon: the event” (211). Its appearance can even be dated to the last third of the nineteenth century. What is at issue is the “rapid accession to prominence of this historical present” (211). Positivists are reproached for having made the past something dead, cut off from the living present, the closed field of historical knowledge. That the term “event” does not designate what happened finds confirmation in the simple fact of speaking of the “production of the event” (212) and of “metamorphoses of the event” (216). What is at issue are passing facts picked up by the mass media. Speaking of important facts like the death of Mao Tse-tung, Nora writes: “The fact that they happened does not make them historical. For there to be an event, it has to be known” (212). History thus competes with the media, movies, popular literature, and all the means of communication. Something like direct testimony returns here with the cry: I was there. “Modernity secretes the event, unlike traditional societies that tend rather to rarify it,” states Nora (220). In my vocabulary, an event would be what Nora calls historical, its having taken place. And I would set aside what he calls an event which with its close tie to “its intellectual significance” brings “close a first form of historical elaboration” (216). The event, he exclaims, “is what is admirable in democratic societies” (217). With this “the paradox of the event” gets denounced (222): when the event springs up the underlying depths of the non-event rise to the surface. “The event has the virtue of bringing together a bunch of scattered meanings” (225). “It is up to the historian to unknot them in order to return from the evidence of the event to the system that produces it. For unity, if it is to be intelligible, always postulates the existence of a series that novelty brings to light” (225). And thus the event—the “contemporary event”—regretfully gets handed over to the dialectic fomented by the enemies of the event, the structuralists.

52. Émile Benveniste, Problems of General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1977).

53. There are historians who have known how to find an echo of dead voices in the archives, such as Arlette Farges in Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Seuil, 1989). Unlike the judicial archive that “presents a chopped up world,” the historian’s archive hears the echo of “those derisory laments over derisory events, where some people dispute over a stolen tool and others over the dirty water poured on them. These tiny facts, signs of a minimum disorder having left traces since they gave rise to reports and interrogations, where almost nothing is said and yet so many things transpire, are places to investigate and for research” (97). These traces are in the strong sense of the term “captured words” (97) It thus follows that the historian is not the one who makes past people speak but someone who allows them to speak. In this, the document leads back to the trace, and the trace to the event.

PART TWO, CHAPTER TWO

1. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957).

2. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1:182–92.

3. Pierre Chaunu, Histoire quantitative, histoire sérielle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1978).

4. François Dosse, L’Histoire (Paris: Armin Colin, 2000), places the second stage of his overview of history under the sign of “causal imputation” (30–64). This new problematic begins with Polybius and “the search for causality.” It passes through Jean Bodin, inventor of “the order of probability,” then traverses the age of Enlightenment, and reaches its peak with Fernand Braudel and the Annales school, before the consideration of narrative that comes with “the interpretive turn,” which leads to the threshold of the third problematic, that of consideration of narrative per se.

5. Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984); Antoine Prost, Douze leçons sur l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1996).

6. In Time and Narrative, I essentially devoted my analysis to this confrontation between causal explanation and explanation in terms of reasons for. See Time and Narrative, 1:125–28.

7. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968; reprinted Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), part 1, chap. 1, §1.

8. G. H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971). I discussed von Wright’s model in some detail in Time and Narrative, 1:132–43. Since then, I have undertaken in a number of essays to pacify the quarrel between explanation and understanding. The opposition was justified at a time when the human sciences felt the strong attraction of the models then dominant in the natural sciences under the pressure of positivism of a Comptean type. Wilhelm Dilthey remains the hero of the resistance of the so-called Geisteswissenschaften to the absorption of the human sciences by the natural sciences. The actual practice of the historical sciences leads to a more measured and more dialectical attitude.

9. In speaking of a configuring act I am adopting the vocabulary of Louis O. Mink, Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard R. Vann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

10. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, trans. Lilian A. Clare (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1923; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

11. I justify this expression below in taking up the relation between truth and interpretation in history.

12. The first warning shot had been given as early as 1903 by François Simiand in his famous article “Méthode historique et science sociale,” Revue de synthèse historique 6 (1903): 1–22, 129–57, reprinted in Annales (1960). The target was Seignobos’ La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences socials (Paris: F. Alcan, 1901). Historicizing history, the object of all these sarcasms, would better be known as the methodological school, following the wishes of Gabriel Monod, the founder of the Revue historique, with which Annales was meant to compete. A fairer judgment can be found in the article already referred to of Antoine Prost, “Seignobos revisité,” Vingtième Siècle, revue d’histoire, no. 43 (July-September 1994): 100–18.

13. Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953).

14. A. Burguière, “Les Annales, 1929–1979,” Annales 34 (1979): 1344–59; J. Revel, “Histoire et science sociale, les paradigms des Annales,” Annales 34 (1979): 1360–76.

15. Lucien Febvre, Martin Luther: ADestiny, trans. Roberts Tapley (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1929); The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); Amour sacré, amour profane: Autour de l’ «Heptameron» (Paris: Gallimard, 1944).

16. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973); Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Mauyen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

17. Febvre’s The Problem of Unbelief, which deals with Rabelais, will later be compared to Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the same figure: Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolksy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

18. François Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, trans. Peter V. Conroy Jr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). The new French edition of 1997 has a preface that takes into account developments that I shall also consider below, drawing upon the historian Bernard Lepetit.

19. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “History and Anthropology” [1949], which was reprinted as the introduction to Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 1:1–27, to which Fernand Braudel replied with “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée” [1958], Writings on History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25–54.

20. I considered in detail the epistemology at work in Braudel’s masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, in the first volume of Time and Narrative, 1:101–6. There I undertook a reconstruction of this work that today I would call narrativist, in which I took the Mediterranean itself as a quasi character within an overarching political plot.

21. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, 3 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1988–90).

22. A. Burguière, “Les Annales, 1929–1979”; J. Revel, “Histoire et science sociale, les paradigms des Annales.”

23. J. Revel, “Histoire et science sociale, les paradigms des Annales.”

24. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1981).

25. Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, 1500–1640: An Essay in Historical Psychology, trans. R. E. Hallmark (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975); De la culture populaire en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: La Bibliothèque bleue de Troyes (Paris: Imago, 1999); Magistrats et Sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle: Une analyse de psychologie historique (Paris: Seuil, 1989).

26. Robert Mandrou, “L’Histoire des mentalités,” Encyclopedia Universalis (1968), 8:436–38.

27. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).

28. Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

29. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1990).

30. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds. Faire de l’histoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Partially translated in English as Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

31. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000, trans. Barbara Bray (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971).

32. Jacques Le Goff, “Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities,” trans. David Denby, in Jacques Le Goff and Pierra Nora, eds., Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, 166, quoting Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 3: The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott Montcrieff and Terrence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 319.

33. Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990); Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle: Les Attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments (Paris: Plon, 1973).

34. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds., A History of Private Life, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987–91).

35. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981); see also the work of Alain Corbin, including The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

36. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, trans. Peter Rivière (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1978).

37. Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). A French translation was published in 1996.

38. “The all-important distinction that has scrupulously to be observed is—to put it in the social anthropologists’ terms—that between actors’ and observers’ categories. In the evaluation of the apparently puzzling or downright paradoxical, a crucial issue is, I argue, precisely the availability or otherwise of explicit concepts of linguistic and other categories” (ibid., 7).

39. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Myth and Thought among the Greeks; Détienne and Vernant, Cunning Intellgience in Greek Culture and Society; Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Greek Rationality and the City,” in The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 249–62.

40. Speaking of the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical in the age of classical Greece, Lloyd notes: “It must be seen as an item in, and the product of a hard-hitting polemic in which inquiries fought to distinguish themselves from rivals, notably but not exclusively from traditional claimants to wisdom” (Demystifying Mentalities, 35). Later, speaking of the tie between the development of philosophy and Greek science, on the one hand, and political life, on the other, he asks how far this hypothesis “can take us towards an understanding of the distinctive features of the styles of inquiry developed in ancient Greece” (36–37). The expressions “style of inquiry” and “style of argument” recur frequently.

41. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972).

42. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970). See also my earlier discussion of this work in Time and Narrative, 3:216–19.

43. “And to those who might be tempted to criticize archeology for concerning itself primarily with the analysis of the discontinuous, to all those agoraphobics of history and time, to all those who confuse rupture and irrationality, I will reply: ‘It is you who devalue the continuous by the use that you make of it. You treat it as the support-element to which everything else must be related; you treat it as the primary law, the essential weight of any discursive practice; you would like to analyse every modification in the field of this inertia, as one analyses every movement in the gravitational field. But in according this status to continuity, you are merely neutralizing it, driving it out to the outer limit of time, towards an original passivity. Archeology proposes to invert this arrangement, or rather (for our aim is not to accord to the discontinuous the role formerly accorded to the continuous) to play one off against the other; to show how the continuous is formed in accordance with the same conditions and the same rules as dispersion; and how it enters—neither more nor less than differences, inventions, innovations or deviations—the field of discursive practice’” (The Archeology of Knowledge, 174–75).

44. As for example with the clinical medicine considered in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), which appears again in The Archaeology of Knowledge. What would an archaeological treatment of its relation with medical and nonmedical practices, including political ones, look like? We can see what is set aside: the phenomena of expression, of reflection, of symbolization, of the causal relation transmitted by the consciousness of speaking subjects. But what is the positive relation to nondiscursive practices? Foucault confines himself to assigning to archeology the task of showing how and in what sense “political practice” is part of “its conditions of emergence, insertion, and functioning” (163) for example of medical discourse. But it is not a question of its determining this sense and this form.

45. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 57.

46. Michel de Certeau, L’Absent de l’histoire (Paris: Mame, 1973).

47. Certeau’s Possession at Loudon, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), would pose a comparable problem when it comes to the composition of a history, beyond the contribution of this work to what would become French microhistory from the point of view of a choice of scale.

48. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott with some notes and corrections by the author; edited by Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000). Elias integrates into this book the most important results from his The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983), a work with an unusual history. It was written in 1933 when the author was an assistant to Karl Mannheim at the University of Frankfurt, but not published until 1969, with a preface titled “Sociology and History.”

49. Roger Chartier, “Formation sociale et économie psychique: La société de cour dans le process de civilization,” in Elias, La Société de cour, trans. Pierre Kamnitzer and Jeanne Étoré (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1974), i–xxviii.

50. As regards the relation between history and society, the preface written in 1969 is not conclusive inasmuch as it is history in the manner of Ranke that is criticized, that is, a history that privileges the individual, the will of decision makers, and the rational desires of men of power. But the historical character of social formations, such as the court, rules out any identification with presumed unchanging invariants. The concept of social change places Elias after all on the side of historians. Chartier’s preface is quite clear in this regard.

51. “In reality the result of the civilizing process is clearly unfavourable or favourable only in a relatively few cases at each end of the scale. The majority of civilized people live midway between these two extremes. Socially positive and negative features, personally gratifying and frustrating tendencies, mingle in them in varying proportions” (The Civilizing Process, 378).

52. Rationalization would be a good term to focus on for a discussion confronting the emphasis placed on uncertainty by microhistory and that placed on rationalization as the regulation of drives by Elias.

53. It really is a question of what German calls Schamangst, shame combined with anxiety, rather than what another tradition, that of Simmel or of Max Scheler, prefers to oppose to a sense of guilt.

54. Here I come back to what Roger Chartier says in his preface to the French translation of The Court Society: “By characterizing each social formation or configuration starting from the specific network of interdependencies that bind individuals to one another, Elias means to comprehend the relations that hold together different groups both in terms of their dynamics and their reciprocity of relationships and, in this way, to avoid overly simple, univocal, fixed representations of social domination or cultural diffusion” (La Société de cour, xxv).

55. Norbert Elias’s contribution to a history of ideas and of representations finds partial extension on the sociological plane in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. By taking up the notion of habitus, which according to him “accounts for the fact that social agents are neither particles of matter predetermined by external causes nor tiny monads exclusively guided by internal reasons, executing a kind of perfectly rational action program,” Bourdieu places himself in the dialectic of the construction of the self and institutional constraints established by Elias. See Pierre Bourdieu, with Loïc J.-D. Wacquant, Responses (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 110. He takes up and completes the trajectory from social constraint to self-constraint outlined by Elias by giving a richer import to the notion of habitus: “The habitus is not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure: the principle of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes.” Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 170. Thus, habitus allows, on the one hand, the articulation of representations and behaviors, and, on the other, the linking of these representations and behaviors to what Bourdieu calls “the structure of social space,” which allows the grasping of “a point of view on the whole set of points from which ordinary agents (including the sociologist and the reader, in their ordinary behavior) see the social world” (ibid., 169). For individuals, habitus leads to the emergence of a “classification system” that continuously transforms “necessities into strategies, constraints into preferences, and without any mechanical determination . . . generates the set of ‘choices’ constituting life-styles which correspond to the condition of which it is the product” (175). In this way, the back and forth movement from the “structure of social space” (and from the “fields” that overlay it according to Bourdieu) to the representations and behaviors of agents is grasped in its complexity. Each “field” has its own logic, which imposes “retranslations” on the “structured products (opus operatum) which a structuring structure (modus operandi) produces” as “the practices and products of a given agent” (172–73). In studying taste, Bourdieu establishes in this way the correspondence between the social layer and the psychic layer outlined by Elias discussed above: “The different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate . . . are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of the different classes and class fractions. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (6–7). In this way he shows how to explain how representations are necessary for grasping this correspondence, this tangle of “systems of dispositions,” and thus imply understanding the relationships of agents to “the structure of social space” in their historical aspect. “The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by history” (3), writes Bourdieu in his study of taste. Thus the notion of habitus as it has been used allows grasping “the general laws reproducing the laws of production, the modus operandi” (173, n. 3) and reestablishes the “unity in practice” by conveying more than the reason for the “products (opus operatum)” (172). The heuristic value of the explanation/understanding phase of habitus and the methodological use Bourdieu makes of it is thus justified.

56. Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), no. 65, 48.

57. Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles: La Microanalyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).

58. Revel has associated himself and Bernard Lepetit with some of the most active microhistorians: Alban Bensa, Mauricio Gribandi, Simona Cerutti, Giovanni Levi, Sabina Loriga, Edoardo Grandi. We need to add to these names that of Carlo Ginsburg, to whom we shall make frequent reference.

59. “Let us immediately note that the ‘micro’ dimension, in this regard, enjoys no particular privilege. It is the principle of variation that counts, not the choice of a particular scale.” Jacques Revel, “Microanalyse et construction du social,” in Jeux d’échelles, 19.

60. Another fragment from Pascal can be cited here: “What is man in the infinite? But, to offer him another prodigy equally astounding, let him look into the tiniest things he knows. Let a mite show him it in its minute body incomparably more minute parts, legs with joints, veins in its legs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops: let him divide these things still further until he has exhausted his powers of imagination, and let the last thing he comes down to now be the subject of our discourse. He will perhaps think that this is the ultimate minuteness in nature” (Pensées, no. 199, 88). See Louis Marin, “Une ville, une campagne de loin . . . : Paysage Pascalien,” Littérature, no. 161 (February 1986): 10, cited by Bernard Lepetit, “De l’échelle en histoire,” in Jeux d’échelles, 93.

61. Bernard Lepetit, “De l’échelle en histoire,” 71–94; Maurizion Grimaudi, “Échelles, pertinence, configuration,” ibid., 113–39.

62. What was said earlier about the notion of place prepared the way for our saying this now.

63. The Nietzschean notion of monumental history I shall refer to in part 3 will confirm this, as also does the place already referred to several times in our discourse on history of the notion of a monument coupled with that of a document.

64. I was surprised in reading the methodological texts of microhistory to see the well-known anthropologist Clifford Geertz accused by Giovanni Levi and others of having described what he took to be shared beliefs at the level of cultures at a certain geographical breadth in terms of models imposed on their submissive receptors. “I pericoli del Geerzismo,” Quaderni storici, cited by Jacques Revel, Jeux d’échelles, 26, n. 22 and 33, n. 27. On the other hand, one Scandinavian author, Fredrik Barth, draws on Geertz in his study of social agents in his research concerning land and its relation to ethnic identity, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). See also, Selected Essays of Fredrik Barth, vol. 1, Process and Form in Social Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). There is an essay introducing his work in Jeux d’échelles: Paul André Rosental, “Construire le ‘macro’ par le ‘micro’: Fredrik Barth et la microstoria,” 141–59.

65. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), xiii.

66. “It is absurd to equate the ‘culture produced by the popular classes’ with the ‘culture imposed on the masses,’ or to identify the features of popular culture exclusively by means of the maxims, the precepts and fables of the Bibliothèque bleue. The shortcut taken by Mandrou to circumvent the difficulties inherent in the reconstruction of an oral culture actually only takes us back to the starting point” (ibid., xv–xvi). Geneviève Bollème’s use of literature of colportage falls under similar objections. On the other hand, Bakhtin escapes this criticism with his groundbreaking book on the relationship of Rabelais to the popular culture of his day, although it remains true that his protagonists speak mainly through Rabelais’ own words. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s analysis in Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York: George Braziller, 1979), even though based on a hostile source, is a good one in Ginzburg’s eyes. On the other hand, Foucault’s insistence on the exclusions and prohibitions through which our culture is constituted risks making popular culture exist only through “the act that suppresses it,” as in his Madness and Civilization. If madness can speak only through the available language of reason that excludes it, the protagonists are condemned to silence.

67. Ginzburg’s preface ends with an audacious prospective: Menocchio precedes us along the way that Walter Benjamin traces in his “Theses on History,” where we read: “Nothing that has taken place should be lost to history . . . but only to redeemed humanity does the past belong in its entirety.” “Redeemed and thus liberated” (xxvi), adds Ginzburg, who thereby indicates his own conviction.

68. Giovanni Levi, Le Pouvoir au village: Histoire d’un exorciste dans le Piémont du XVIe siècle, trans. Monique Aymard (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). First published in Italian as L’eredità immateriale: Carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1985).

69. “Therefore I tried to study a minuscule fragment of the Piedmont of the sixteenth century, using an intensive technique to reconstruct the biographical events of all the inhabitants of the village of Santena that have left some documentary trace” (cited in Jacques Revel’s preface to Levi, Le Pouvoir au village, xiii).

70. Revel quotes Levi as saying: “This society, like every other society, is made of individuals aware of the zone of unpredictability within which each one has to try to organize his behavior. And the uncertainty comes not only from the difficulty in foreseeing the future, but also from the permanent awareness of having only limited information about the forces at work in the social setting in which one has to act. It is not a society paralyzed by insecurity, hostile to all risk taking, passive, clinging to unchangeable values for self-protection. To improve predictability in order to increase security is a powerful model of technical, political, and social innovation” (preface to Levi, Le Pouvoir au village, xxiii–xxiv).

71. This question of the relationship between and the reciprocal relevance of microhistory and macrohistory poses the fundamental epistemological problem in the human sciences of how to aggregate data. Can we simply pass from the “micro” to the “macro” scale and transpose conclusions from one scale to another without making some difference?

72. Revel seems to doubt it: “Read at ground level, the history of a place is probably different from all other places” (preface to Levi, Le Pouvoir au village, xxx).

73. Bernard Lepetit, ed., Les Formes de l’expérience: Une autre histoire sociale (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).

74. See Bernard Lepetit, “Histoire des pratiques, pratique de l’histoire,” ibid., 12–16.

75. One can see a progressive opening to this by the editors of Annales in two critical articles in the journal: “Histoire et science sociale: Un tournant critique?” (1988): 291–93, and especially “Tentons l’expérience,” (1989): 1317–23.

76. Here I want to repeat my debt regarding sociology to Clifford Geertz, to whom I owe the concept of mediated symbolic action used in my From Text to Action and Ideology and Utopia. This is why the warning against Geertz by the microhistorians of Quaderni seems to be a bit unfair.

77. “More than any one scale, it is the variation in scale that seems fundamental here” (Revel, preface to Levi, Le Pouvoir au village, xxx).

78. See Paul André Rosental, “Construire le ‘macro’ par le ‘micro’: Fredrik Barth et la microhistoria,” in Jeux d’échelles, 141–60.

79. “For Durkheim the notion of a ‘basic norm’ corresponds to a threefold necessity. Its nature permits society to hold together, without principles external to itself, and without in any particular situation either falling into anomie or having necessarily to again elaborate its solidarity at some cost. It constitutes an ad hoc hypothesis or a tautological proposition equivalent to an explanatory detour that would allow for its detailed specification” (Petit, “Histoire des pratiques, pratique de l’histoire,” Les Formes de l’expérience, 17–18).

80. See Jacques Revel, “L’institution et le social,” in Les Formes de l’expérience, 63–85; Simona Cerutti, “Normes et pratiques, ou de la légitimité de leur opposition,” ibid., 127–51.

81. One important source for this idea comes from Luc Boltanski’s book on middle managers, which presents a remarkable example of a particular historical institution captured in the process of coming into existence: The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

82. Regarding the examination of condemnatory behavior, see Luc Boltanski, L’Amour et la Justice comme compétences: Trois essais de sociologie de l’action (Paris: Métaillé, 1990), part 1: “Ce dont les gens sont capables.”

83. Laurent Thévenot, “L’action qui convient,” in Patrick Pharo and Louis Quéré, eds., Les Formes de l’action (Paris: EHESS, 1990), 39–69.

84. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, De la justification: Les économies de la grandeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). I discussed this work in my The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 81–86, in another context, that of the “plurality of instances of justice,” in comparison with Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: In Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1982). Compared to Walzer, what is at stake for Boltanski and Thévenot is not the problem of the domination of one sphere over another, hence of fairness, but that of the resolution of conflicts, hence of compromise for the common good.

85. There is room for a comparison here with the tenacious idea of human plurality found throughout the work of Hannah Arendt.

86. Here a sociology of reading adds reinforcement to my argument. See Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

87. A typology of these modes of availability fits easily with my comments concerning the use and abuse of memory, depending on whether it is blocked, manipulated, or commanded.

88. The following observations arise from reading the articles, in Les Formes de l’expérience, by André Burguière, “Le changement social” (253–72), and Bernard Lepetit, “Le présent de l’histoire” (273–98).

89. See the discussion on this point by J. Revel at the end of his “Presentation” of the work of Giovanni Levi, in Le Pouvoir au village.

90. What Giovanni Levi writes about, at Santena, is “the local modulation of large scale history” (ibid., xxi–xxii). Revel dialectizes this category by writing: “It is the major figure through which the people of Santena learn of their time. They have to come to terms with it and, to the measure possible, reduce it” (ibid.). Levi himself raises the question: “This is not a society paralyzed by insecurity, hostile to every risk, passive, holding onto unchanging values for self-protection. To improve the predictability in order to augment security is a powerful engine of technical, psychological, and social innovation” (xxiv). We see that he himself links together reduction of uncertainty and security. The logic of the idea of a strategy implies this inasmuch as it leads to calculations in terms of gains and losses. We may think that this is sufficient to have refuted a unilateral vision of power exercised from above to below. In fact, it is not a simple contrary of the law tending toward a concentration of power that the careful deciphering of the individual and familial strategies of a village points out. The “immaterial” power, the impalpable capital that a modest local podesta draws from the equilibrium among protagonists, can be understood only in light of a strategic logic aiming at reducing uncertainty.

91. Lepetit, “Le présent de l’histoire,” Les Formes de l’expérience, 273–98. Boltanski and Thévenot make use of the same constellation of temporal modes grouped around the theme of adequacy to the present situation, as Lepetit points out (274).

92. Lepetit refers here to Laurent Thévenot, “L’action qui convient,” in Les Formes d’action.

93. Bernard Lepetit’s comments on the present of history go well with my notion of the present as “practical” initiative rather than as “theoretical” presence (From Text to Action). In turn, the category of initiative leads to a more encompassing dialectic, like the one through which Koselleck characterizes the temporalization of history in his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). Within this broader conceptual framework, the present as initiative must then be understood as the shifter between the horizon of expectation and the space of experience. We shall examine Koselleck’s categories in greater detail in part 3.

94. René Rémond, Les Droites en France (Paris: Aubier, 1982).

95. The thrust of Rémond’s book is twofold: on one hand, the relevance of the binary distribution of political opinions between right and left since the French Revolution; on the other, that of a threefold division among reputedly right-wing opinions (legitimism, Orleanism, Bonapartism). Rémond presupposes the constructed character of what he recognizes as a “system” and presents it as an “attempt to make sense of French political life” (ibid., 15). Neither the numbering nor the definition of the figures that give a rhythm to the tempo of the political history of contemporary France are immediately observable facts; even if their identification is suggested by actual practice, it stems from “propositions,” “axioms” that the researcher constructs. “Every social reality presents itself to our gaze as an indistinct, amorphous ensemble. Our mind is what traces out the lines of separation and regroups the infinity of beings and positions into a few categories” (18). On the other hand, René Rémond thinks that this intellectual construction can be verified by “reality,” where reality is the evaluations at work in political decisions—that it has an explanatory and predictive value equal to that of astronomy. In this sense, we can say that “the distinction is indeed real” (29): “In politics more than in any other domain, what is taken to be true becomes so and weighs as heavily as did the initial situation” (29). The major presupposition is that of an autonomy of political ideas compatible with the thematic variability of criteria of belonging (liberty, nation, sovereignty). “The system of linked presuppositions” (31), whose combination assures the cohesion of the whole, stands out against this background: relativity of the two major categories in terms of each other; a structural, and more precisely, a topological aspect to this bipolarity and others similar to it; a conjunctural renewal of the criteria of distribution and modulation by a plus or minus factor, excluding the extremes; and sensitivity to circumstances beginning with the spatial distribution of the constitutional Assembly in 1789. Do we not find here our triad of “structure, conjuncture, and event” applied to representations? The primacy granted to the binary structure—“The parties turn about a fixed axis like entwined dancers who describe these ballet-like figures without breaking stride”—is authorized by an audacious speculation on the preference given conjointly by thought and by political action to such binarism: a horizontal axis on one side, practical dilemmas on the other. Rémond can legitimately compare these sorts of “archetypes” (39) to Max Weber’s ideal types. However, the primacy given to structure as much as to the binary opposition between right and left in France runs up against some limits. In the first place, the overall displacement of the left toward the right, which assures the dynamics of the system, continues to appear “mysterious,” “strange,” given to “paradoxes” (35), so strong is the negative connotation of the label “right wing.” Nevertheless it sees that “joining the political game, the apprenticeship of practice, and the gradual acceptance of the operative rules lead to a gradual rallying to the regime” (36). A pragmatic constraint? Rémond’s explanation seems to me to rejoin my reflections on the pragmatics of social action and on the conditions of “fitting” action, without for all that going so far as to theorize the interplay of initiatives and expedients of the partners in the game in situations of uncertainty, as in microhistory. In the second place, his argument concerning the threefold division of the right, which is the book’s central thesis, is a problem following the brilliant plea for binarism. The proof of the relevance of this distribution in a sense is more historical, inasmuch as it is less systematic. What counts as proof then is the possibility of identifying the same three denominations over a rather long period, hence, “the continuity of each of them over the generations” (10). Here the details count: five hundred pages are required to help the reader in orienting himself in political space.

96. See Jacques Le Goff, “Les mentalités: Une histoire ambiguë,” in Faire de l’histoire, 3:114; “Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities,” in Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 170.

97. See Roger Chartier, Lecteur et lecteurs dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Seuil, 1987); idem., ed., Histoire de la lecture: Un bilan des recherches (Paris: IMEC Éditions and Éd. de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1995).

98. To complicate things even further, we could bring in the political dimension of the idea of representation. Its most important components allow it to be brought near to memorial and historiographical representation by passing through the ideas of delegation, substitution, and visible figuration, which we shall encounter below. In truth, this political dimension is not absent from the represented objects taken into account by historians. To the double taxonomic and symbolic function of the idea of representation already referred to, can be added “the institutionalized and objectified forms thanks to which ‘representatives’ (as collective instances or unique individuals) mark in a visible, perpetuated fashion the existence of a group, a community, or class.” Roger Chartier, “Le monde comme representation,” in Au bord de la falaise: L’Histoire entre certitude et inquiétude (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 78.

99. See my discussion in Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 254–66.

100. Louis Marin, La Critique du discours: Études sur la «Logique de Port-Royal» et les «Pensées» de Pascal (Paris: Minuit, 1975).

101. Carlo Ginzburg, “Représentation: Le mot, l’idée, la chose,” Annales (1991): 1219–34. Ginzburg’s article is included in this issue of Annales under the rubric “Pratique de le représentation.”

102. Ginsburg acknowledges his debt here to E. H. Gombrich and his famous book, Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), as well as to Gombrich’s Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1994).

103. “It is the real, concrete, corporeal presence of Christ in the sacraments that, between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, allowed the crystallization of that extraordinary object from which I began, that concrete symbol of the abstraction of the State: the effigy of the kind called representation” (Ginzburg, “Représentation: Le mot, l’idée, la chose,” 1230).

104. Along with Roger Chartier, I acknowledge the debt contracted by the epistemology of history in regard to the whole of Marin’s oeuvre. See, for example, his “The Powers and Limits of Representation,” in On the Edge of the Cliff, 90–103.

105. “We have seen in what sense the theological body can be said to be the semiotic function itself. Moreover, we have clarified how it was possible in 1683 for the Port Royal logicians to believe that there existed a perfect adequation between the Catholic dogma [of the real presence] on the one hand and a semiotic theory of meaningful representation on the other” (cited by Chartier, ibid., 93–94).

106. Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image (Paris: Seuil, 1993).

107. Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

PART TWO, CHAPTER THREE

1. Michel de Certeau places the third phase of “The Historiographical Operation” under the title “A Writing.” The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 86. I have adopted the same sequence for this book. In this section, he also deals with representation as “literary staging” (86), which he still calls “historical writing” (87). Writing, he says, could be the “inverted image of practice,” that is, construction properly speaking. “It creates these narratives of the past which are the equivalent of cemeteries within cities; it exorcises and confesses a presence of death amidst the living” (87). I shall return to this latter theme below.

2. François Dosse places the third section of his book, L’Histoire (Paris: Armin Colin, 2000), under the heading “narrative” (65–93). From Titus-Livy and Tacitus the narrative road passes through Froissart and Commynes and reaches its peak with Michelet, before dividing into different “returns” to narrative and before being incorporated in Michel de Certeau’s overall historiographical operation.

3. In this sense, the work marks an advance over my Time and Narrative, where the distinction between representation as explanation and narration was not made, on the one hand because the problem of the direct relationship between narrativity and temporality occupied my attention at the expense of the passage through memory, on the other because no detailed analysis of the procedures for explanation/understanding was proposed. But, at bottom, the notion of the plot and of emplotment remain primordial in this work as in Time and Narrative.

4. On this point, too, the present work goes beyond Time and Narrative, where the resources of rhetoric were not distinguished from those of narrativity. The present effort to disentangle the rhetorical from the properly semiotic aspects of narrative will find an opportune occasion for testing out our hypotheses about reading in a discussion of Hayden White’s theses.

5. See François Furet, “From Narrative History to Problem-Oriented History,” in In the Workshop of History, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 54–67.

6. In the preceding chapter, I have briefly described the coming to predominance of the notion of structure, understood by historians in a twofold sense as static—the relational architecture of a given ensemble—and dynamic—as durably stable, at the expense of the idea of the point-like event—whereas the term “conjuncture” tends to designate midrange time in relation to the long time of structures. In this way, the event found itself removed to third place, following structure and conjuncture; the event was then defined as Pomian puts it “as a discontinuity noted within a model.”

7. See Time and Narrative, 1:141–55.

8. See ibid., 1: 155–74.

9. Louis O. Mink, Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

10. Ibid., 182–203.

11. See also Lawrence Stone, “Retour au récit, réflexions sur une vieille histoire,” Le Débat, no. 4 (1980): 116–42.

12. Aristotle’s Poetics explicitly links the grasping of this coherence by the spectator to catharsis. The “purifying” of the passions through fear and pity is in this sense the effect of the intellectual comprehension of the plot (cf. Time and Narrative, 1:31–87).

13. The category of recognition—anagnōrisis—which designates the narrative moment that permits concordance to compensate for the discordance arising from the surprising event set within the plot also stems from a general theory of the plot.

14. It was in regard to the extending to history of the categories illustrated by traditional and fictional narrative that in Time and Narrative I added the phrase “quasi” to the notions of plot, event, and character. There I spoke of a second-order derivation of history with regard to traditional and fictional narrative. Today, I would remove the “quasi” and take the considered narrative categories as operators in the full sense of the term on the historiographical plane, inasmuch as the presumed tie in this work between history and the practical field in which social action unfolds authorizes applying the Aristotelian category of “actors” directly to the domain of history. The problem posed is no longer that of a transposition, of some expression starting from other, less scholarly uses of narrative, but of the articulation between narrative coherence and explanatory connectedness.

15. I am leaving aside examination of one component of the plot that Aristotle held to be marginal, but that he nevertheless includes within the perimeter of the “parts” of the muthos, the fable, the plot, namely, the spectacle (opsis) (Poetics 57 and 62a15). Although it does not contribute to the meaning, it cannot be excluded from consideration. It designates the side of visibility added to that of the readability of the plot. The question arises as to what point in the staging of the written form making it visible becomes important. Here seduction by the pleasurable gets added to persuasion by the probable. I shall have more to say about this with regard to the rhetorical component of representation, and more particularly in connection with the “prestige of the image.”

16. F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983).

17. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 105–15. This essay is set within the framework of a broader inquiry aimed at defining what “the question of historical time might be,” concerning which Koselleck says that it belongs to “those questions which historical science has the most difficulty answering” (xxi). I shall propose a discussion of the Koselleck’s major theses in this collection and in L’Expérience de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard-Seuil-EHESS, 1997) in the next chapter in relation to the notion of truth in history. Thus his essay as considered here has been detached from its broader context.

18. Here we come back again to Ginzburg’s evidential paradigm.

19. “The processual character of modern history cannot be comprehended other than through the reciprocal explanation of events through structures, and vice versa” (Koselleck, Futures Past, 110). Koselleck, it is true, protests against the amalgamation of event and structure. The temporal strata never fully fuse; succession leaves room for the surprise of the unexpected event. The cognitive relationship of the two concepts, which is one of deviation, is not abolished by the sort of negotiation the narrative brings about between them. Conceptuality and singularity remain heterogeneous to each other.

20. I tried to rediscover for metaphorical discourse its own mode of referentiality at the point conjoining “seeing as” and “being as.” This particular kind of referring seemed to me capable of being transposed to the narrative plane as it applied to fictional narrative. What is more, it seemed to me that its power of refiguration could be assigned to fictional narrative through the intermediary of the reader coming to the text with his own expectations structured by his way of being in the world—it is these ways of being in the world that are refigured by the fictional narrative.

21. François Hartog’s The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) proposes an interesting argument about the idea of historical representation for discussion. It has to do, as his subtitle—the representation of the other—indicates, with the barbarian space brought on stage by the narrative of the Median wars. Hartog has chosen to isolate from the overall narrative context the “Scythian logos” (3–11). It is not the truth of the statements having the Scythians as their object that interest him. What is said about the Median wars considered in its full historical scope is set aside, suspended, to the profit of a narrative segment that Hartog sees delimited by a set of “narrative constraints” (35–40) that work to pick out the relevant features of the nomad something like the reticulated grid of an artist who paints with watercolors (319): “the Athenian, that imaginary autochthous being, has need of an imaginary nomad. The Scythian conveniently fitted the bill” (11). In this way, the text of The History will be treated as a mirror, not just for the histōr faced with the test of writing, but for the barbarian whose alterity is reflected in it and for the Greek who deciphers his identity in it. One question arises at the edges: how can one be a nomad? But this question does not lead to any referent. In this sense, one does not “exit” the text. One is confronted with statements from the same context—barbarian others, Greeks. The “representation of the other” stems from the same “rhetoric of otherness” (212). If reading nonetheless leads beyond the text, it is not in the direction of the events that occurred in the setting of the Median wars, but at the level of the Greek intratextual imaginary of the fifth century: “it is a movement outward that takes place through and in language, and on the level of the imaginary” (321). The “effect of the narrative” (321) is what “Herodotus’s mirror” is, a mirror for viewing the world.

In that this work admits its limits (quid of the Median wars?), it is wholly legitimate. It just makes more difficult the question of speaking the truth in history. The investigation into making something believed constantly puts off the question at the risk of completely losing sight of it. The paradox of the narrative vector is thus powerfully indicated: as a guide toward the referent, the narrative is also its screen. Nevertheless, does not the very thesis of evaluating “the effect of the Histories on the Greek’s imaginary representation of the work” (356) raise the question of the referent in another way—was that effect of the text reached? A history of reading seems required here that would take as its referent the fifth-century Greek reading Herodotus. Do we really know this better than we do the battle of Salamis?

22. “We shall give the name ‘standing-for’ [représentance] (or ‘taking the place of’ [lieutenance]) to the relations between the constructions of history and their vis-à-vis, that is, a past that is abolished yet preserved in its traces” (Time and Narrative, 3:100).

23. See ibid., 1:52–87 for my earlier discussion of the general problem of the relations between configuration and refiguration.

24. See Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 79–124. There we read: “A narrative is a long sentence, just as every constative sentence is in a way the rough outline of a short narrative” (84); “nor does the homology suggested here have only a heuristic value: it implies an identity between language and literature” (84–85).

25. Time and Narrative, “The Semiotic Constraints on Narrativity,” 2:29–60.

26. Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 127–40; see also “The Reality Effect,” ibid., 141–48. Here we might also refer to the criticism directed by theorists of the new novel—especially, Jean Ricardou in Le Nouveau Roman (Paris: Seuil, 1973)—against the “referential illusion” of the realist novel.

27. A more technical discussion is required concerning the role of “notations” in the formation of the “reality effect.” Undoubtedly they constitute a good criterion for characterizing some novels as realist. But do they function in the same way in historical narrative? This is not certain. I suggest that they need to be assigned to the dimension of visibility as much as to that of the readability of the literary structures of historical discourse. But, even then, the notations are not separable from the “annotations” that—set at the bottom of the page, which the realist or naturalist novel does without—indicate the documentary sources that the point-like statements about isolated facts are based upon. Annotations, in this way, are the literary expression of the first-order documentary reference of historical discourse.

28. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). For my earlier discussion of White, see Time and Narrative, 1:161–68; 3:151–56. See also Roger Chartier, “Figures rhétoriques et représentation historique,” in Au bord de la falaise (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 108–25.

29. A rhetorical theory of argumentation is not absent from the contemporary discussion. See, for example, Wayne Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); closer to the relation between rhetoric and logic is Stephen E. Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958).

30. After all, the idea is not foreign to Aristotle’s Poetics insofar as a coefficient of probability is attached to the emplotment. What is more, metaphor stems as much from rhetoric, as the theory of probable discourse, as from poetics, as the theory of the production of discourse.

31. What White calls style should be compared with the same notion in the work of G. G. Granger, Essai d’une philosophie du style (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968). The difference is that for White style is not the focused production of an appropriate individual response to an equally individual situation, but the expression on the manifest plane of the constraints governing the deep structures of the imagination.

32. Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), attacks two targets. On the one hand, there is the belief there is something beyond any history asking to be told; on the other, is the claim that history can be “told straight” by an honest or industrious historian using the “right” method. Only the second charge touches White. There must be something voluntary, finally repressive—as we also read in Foucault—in the imposing of order. The contrary plea for discontinuity begins with consideration of the document, basking in the prestige of the archive. The debris of the past is scattered, as are testimonies about the past. The discipline of documentation adds its own selective destructive effects to every mode of loss of information that mutilates alleged “documentary evidence.” Thus, rhetoric is not something added to the documentation, it already is invested in it. We would like the narrative to attenuate the anxiety arising from the lacunae in the documentary evidence. But the narrative in turn gives rise to new anxieties, tied to other discontinuities. Here is where the discussion over the tropology introduced by White comes in. The tropological reading, it is said, becomes upsetting in turn—and therefore a new source of anxiety—if we do not construct a new system on the basis of White’s four tropes. The alleged “bedrock of order” itself must be taken as an allegorical play where irony is recognized both as the master trope within the system and a point of view on the system. White is suspected of having drawn back before what at the end of Tropics of Discourse he himself calls, in a mixture of sympathy and anxiety, “the absurdist moment.” Kellner does not tell us how we should write history, nor how the professional historian negotiates with doubt that would not be “hyperbolic” but truly methodic. We are only told how not to write history.

33. Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

34. Two of his articles in The Content of Form—“The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” and “The Politics of Historical Interpretation”—have been the target of critiques coming from the camp of professional historians, among them Momigliano, Ginzburg, Spiegel, and Jacoby.

35. The principal pieces of this controversy were published as Ernst Reinhard Piper, ed., Historikerstreit (Munich: Piper, 1987), and translated into French as Devant l’histoire: Les Documents de la controverse sur la singularité de l’extermination des Juifs par le régime nazi, trans. Brigitte Verne-Cain et al. (Paris: Cerf, 1988). In English, there is a special issue on the Historikerstreit in New German Critique, no. 44 (Spring, Summer 1988) that focuses on Habermas’s arguments with the historians. Ernst Nolte’s famous title, “A Past that will not Go Away,” has had a wide impact through the Western world. Henry Rousso was to apply it to the case of the French memory of the Vichy regime in modified form as un passé qui ne passe pas in Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998).

36. “The exterminations of the Jews of Europe as the most extreme case of mass criminalities must challenge theoreticians of historical relativism to face the corollaries of positions otherwise too easily dealt with on an abstract level” (Probing the Limits of Representation, 2). It is true that Friedlander grants to these critiques that it is not possible to sum up in superhistory the point of view of the executioners, the victims, and the spectators who were part of the events. The difficulty, therefore, is not an invention of postmodernism; it will have served a revelatory role in regard to an inextricable dilemma arising from the “final solution” itself.

37. Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37–53.

38. Why not the comic genre, practiced in a satirical tone, as in Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 1986)? Nor is there any decisive argument to be drawn from the history of literary genres to judge the attempted tragic representation in Andreas Hillgruber’s two essays, Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des Europäischen Judentums (Berlin: Siedler, 1986). Nothing forbids making heroes of the characters, as the tragic mode requires. Another contributor to Friedlander’s volume, Peter Anderson, explores the resources of a literary genre close to the collatio of ancient rhetoric practiced by Hillgruber, the procedure consisting in placing two narratives side by side, that of the murder of the Jews and that of the expulsion of Germans from their ancient territories in the east: juxtaposition, it is suggested is not the same as comparison. But can one avoid exculpating one through the transfer of the emotional charge of the one to the other?

39. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), which I had cited already in Time and Narrative, 2:162 n. 8. In his first chapter, Auerbach underscores the depth, the richness in background of biblical figures, such as Abraham, the apostle Paul, in contrast to Homer’s characters who lack such depth. He sees in this depth an indication of reality.

40. Ginzburg thinks he can undercut White’s argument by bringing to light its suspect roots in the relativism and idealism of the Italian thinkers Croce and Gentile. He follows their trace up to White’s The Content of the Form.

41. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present, trans. David Ames Curtis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

42. This is how Friedlander takes Ginsburg’s essay: “Although the criticism of White’s position . . . opts for an epistemological approach, Carlo Ginsburg’s passionate plea for historical objectivity and truth is as much informed by a profoundly ethical position as by analytic categories” (Probing the Limits of Representation, 8).

43. In one of the essays in Friedlander’s collection, C. R. Browning summarizes his work in the archives on a German reserve police battalion operating in a Polish village: “German Memory, Judicial Interrogation and Historical Reconstruction: Writing Perpetrator History from Postwar Testimony” (ibid., 22–36).

44. Cited by Dominick La Capra, “Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians’ Debate” (ibid., 108–27).

45. “How should one negotiate transferential relations to the object of study?” asks La Capra (ibid., 110). He then goes on to apply his criterion to the terms of one of the sharpest debates in the controversy among German historians: the question whether the Holocaust (the term chosen by La Capra, who takes care to justify it) ought to be treated as a historical phenomenon as unique or as comparable. This is not my problem here. But it is interesting to note the way in which La Capra applies his criterion, which we can call therapeutic. There is a sense, he says, in which the event has to be taken as unique, both as regards the magnitude of its destructive effects and as regards its origin in the behavior of a criminal state. There is also a sense in which it is comparable inasmuch as uniqueness is linked to difference and difference to comparison, and in that comparing is part of understanding. But it is the way in which the argument for uniqueness and that for comparability are handled that is important. The question in both cases is to know whether, for example, comparison contributes, through leveling situations, to denial, or whether, in the opposite sense, the vehement assertion of the incomparable uniqueness of the event does not end up, along the way of sacralization and monumentalization, in a fixation on the trauma, which following Freud has to be assimilated to repetition, which, we have seen, constitutes the major resistance to working through and leads to being caught up in acting out. We could say the same about the choice of scales discussed above, where one either immerses oneself in the daily life of the German people or attempts instead to pierce the secret of decisions taken at the peak of power. The question then is no longer that of the primacy of uniqueness or of comparability, or of centrality opposed to marginality; it is knowing in what way each approach contributes to a useful negotiation of the “transferential relations to the object of study.” The impasses of working through are no less on one side than on the other.

46. Jürgen Habermas, “Apologetic Tendencies,” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 212–28.

47. Nothing is said here about the beneficial influence on collective memory that can be expected from the great criminal trials of the second half of twentieth century and the publication of their proceedings. That presupposes the penal qualification of mass crimes, hence a connection between moral and legal judgment. The possibility of such a qualification is inscribed in the event itself as a third-person crime; that is, one committee by a state that owes security and protection to whomever resides within its jurisdictional territory. This aspect of the “historization” of traumatic events concerns not only their figuration but also their legal qualification. See Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997). I shall return to this point on the occasion of a discussion having to do with the relationships between the historian and the judge. But we can already observe that such a legal qualification negates the thesis that the events of Auschwitz are unspeakable in every regard. We can speak and must speak about them.

48. I dealt with the “interweaving of history and fiction” on the basis of a counterpoint relation in chapter 8 of the second section in volume 3 of Time and Narrative, after having considered separately, on the one hand, “Fiction and Its Imaginary Variations on Time” (chap. 5) and, on the other, “The Reality of the Past” (chap. 6). The purpose of this book was to directly scrutinize the relationship between narrative and time without any regard for memory. It was “the neutralization of historical time” that served as an introductory theme to the great interplay of imaginative variations produced by fiction at the site of the fault line between lived time and the time of the world. The liberation of fictional narrative with regard to the constraints of calendar time was taken as a cultural fact documented by literary history beginning from Greek epic and tragedy through the modern and contemporary novel. The word “contract” [pacte] was cited once in volume 2 (183, n. 65) in referring to Philippe Lejeune’s On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

49. The world of the text: “a world we might inhabit and wherein we can unfold our ownmost potentialities” (Time and Narrative, 2:101). This theme was introduced in volume 1 of Time and Narrative under the heading of threefold mimesis, where refiguration constituted the third stage in the movement of the figure, after configuration, and before that, the prefiguration of time (1:52–87). The theory of the intersecting effects of the fictional and the historical narrative constitutes the central discussion of the means of refiguring time in volume 3 of Time and Narrative. The only question allowed, so long as we take as given the difference between wholly constituted literary genres, is that of the “interweaving of history and fiction” on the plane of the effective refiguration of lived time, without regard for the mediation of memory. This interweaving consists in the fact that “history and fiction each concretize their respective intentionalities only by borrowing from the intentionality of the other” (3:181). On the one side, we can speak of the historicization of fiction to the degree that the willing suspension of suspicion rests on a neutralization of “realist” features not only of the most elaborated kind of historical narratives but also of the most spontaneous narratives of everyday life, as well as of all those narratives that stem from what we can call narrative conversations. With Hannah Arendt, I said that narrative tells of the “what” of action. It is action, as a model of actuality, that bears narrative to its proper sphere. In this sense, to recount something is to recount it as though it were past. The “as though it actually happened” is part of the meaning we attach to every narrative. At this level, the immanent sense is inseparable from an external, asserted, negated, or suspended reference. This adherence to a reference ad extra to the sense even in fiction seems to be implied by the positing character of the assertion of the past in ordinary discourse. Something that was is affirmed or denied. The result is that the fictional narrative preserves this positing feature in the mode of the “quasi.” The quasi events and the quasi characters of fictional plots are quasi past. Moreover, it is thanks to this simulation of existence that fiction can explore aspects of lived temporality that the realist narrative does not reach. The imaginative variations on time explored in volume 2 of Time and Narrative draw their explorative force, their force of discovery, of revelation from the deep structures of temporal experience. Whence results the character of verisimilitude that Aristotle attaches to epic and tragic tales. And it is thanks to this relation of verisimilitude that fictional narrative is authorized to detect unactualized potentialities of the historical past, in the mode of imaginative variations. On the other side, an effect of “fictionalizing history” is produced, assignable to the impact of the imaginary in this regard: the construction of ways of measuring time (from the gnomon to the calendar to the timepiece) and of instruments for dating historical time—as products of the scientific imagination. As for those traces that are the documents in the archive, they only become readable under the guidance of interpretive hypotheses engendered by what Collingwood called the historical imagination. Here is where we come to a phenomenon to which our present analysis will apply that goes well beyond the imaginary mediations just enumerated: namely, the power to “depict” attached to the properly representative function of the historical imagination.

50. See Reinhart Koselleck, “Representation, Event, and Structure,” in Futures Past, 105–15. Among the problems of representation (Darstellung), he distinguishes between narrating (erzählen) and describing (beschreiben), structure falling on the side of description and event on that of narrative.

51. Louis Marin, Opacité de la peinture: Essais sur la représentation du Quatrocento (Paris: Usher, 1989), 251–66.

52. For Aristotle himself, a more secret connection is established between the power of metaphor to set before the eyes and the project of persuasion that animates rhetoric, namely, the power of metaphor to “signify things in act” (1411b24–25). When is discourse most likely to signify things in act? The answer is found in the Poetics, the science of the production of discourse: It is when the muthos, the fable, the plot succeeds in producing a mimēsis, an imitation, a representation “of men acting and in act” (Poetics 1648a24). A bridge is thereby constructed between visibility in discourse and the energy in human things, between the live metaphor and live existence. The expression “to set before the eyes” will make a considerable impact from Fontainier’s rhetoric to Pierce’s semiotics. Cf. my The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S.J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), chap. 5, §2, “The ‘Iconic’ Moment of Metaphor,” and §6, “Icon and Image.”

53. Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

54. Marin finds a basis for his exegesis of political power in Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s great book, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1937), which lays out the function of the juridical and political model played by the Catholic theology of the corpus mysticum in the elaboration of the theory of royalty, and of the royal crown and dignity. If only the physical body of the king dies and his mystical body remains, it is because, under the aegis of the theology of the sacrament, the monarchical institution rests on the “repetition of a sacred mystery of the sign and of the secret” (Portrait of the King, 9).

55. Marin speaks here of a parody of the Eucharist: “an insuperable boundary” between “the Eucharistic symbols of Jesus Christ” and “the political signs of the monarch” (ibid., 12) was crossed by power’s desire for the absolute, thanks to “the fantastic representation of the absolute monarch in his portrait” (12).

56. The Port Royal logicians provided an analytic instrument for distinguishing narrative and icon in L’Art de penser in examining the statement “the portrait of Caesar is Caesar,” and by exemplifying with cards and portraits the definition of the sign as a representation grounding the right to give the sign the name of the thing signified (ibid., 9).

57. “The King’s Narrative, or How to Write History,” ibid., 39–88.

58. “The Royal Host: The Historic Medal,” ibid., 121–37.

59. “Vivid description of a scene, event, or situation, bringing it, as it were, before the eyes of the hearer or reader.” Oxford English Dictionary—trans.

60. The expression “sets before the eyes,” which comes directly from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, is applied by Fontanier to hypotyposis, which, Marin notes, brings narration to the height of style by annulling the fiction of a presence “before their eyes” (Portrait of the King, 122).

61. Beyond Pascal, whom I shall return to below, the Grand Siècle does not seem to have pushed its self-critique beyond the fragile distinctions between praise and flattery. Is praise distinguished from flattery only by its moderation, its restraint, and its paralipsis (“praise the king everywhere, but so to speak without praise”), taking into account the authorization granted by the ecclesiastical or political institution? Must the flatterer also be a parasite, as La Fontaine’s maxim in the tale of the crow and the fox suggests? Here we need to read again the well-known passage on flattery in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, as Marin recommends (“The Fox’s Tactics,” 94–104). I would add here the pages Norbert Elias devotes to the courtier in his The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).

62. This second-degree critical relation between the mere account of procedures of praise and the Pascalian critique of the imagination is presented in the introduction to the Portrait of the King as bringing to light a “counter model” (3) in regard to the theory of language of the Port-Royal philosophers, to whom Marin had devoted an earlier work titled La Critique du discours: Études sur la «Logique de Port-Royal» et les «Pensées» de Pascal (Paris: Minuit, 1975). In fact, the political use of the theological model of the Eucharist in which Marin sees the semiotics of the proposition and the theology of the sacrament converge has been characterized as a misappropriation.

63. Marin’s comment on the ironic tone of §95 (“The more hands one employs, the more powerful one is. Elegance is a means of showing one’s power”) introduces the interesting notion of a “surplus value,” more exactly of a signifying surplus value, that in my Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), I made use of in a neighboring context, Max Weber’s theory of domination and his typology of legitimating beliefs. I compared what is said there about belief as a “surplus” with the idea of a surplus value in the symbolic order.

64. This is why we must not separate the discourse of the imagination from that of custom, nor from that of madness. “Respect and fear” (§25) make the bridge between the discourse of “weakness” and that of “justified force”—to such an extent that the very theme of the imagination does not exhaust all the effects of force and the effects of meaning in politics. The idea of law also has a place in such an articulation: The law is law and nothing more. “Custom is the whole of equity for the sole reason that it is accepted. That is the mystic basis of its authority” (§60).

65. According to one of Pascal’s Discours sur la condition des Grands, a great person is property holder, “a rich man whose having determines his being” (Portrait of the King, 216).

66. Marin was so seduced by this “image” of a drowned king that he used it to conclude Portrait of the King, in a symmetrical position in relation to the “fragments of the Pensées on force and justice” that make up the “overture” to the work. What is more, he returns to it in Des pouvoirs de l’image, gloses VI, “Le portrait du roi naufragé,” 186–95.

67. Eric Weil, Philosophie politique (Paris: Vrin, 1956), prop. 31.

68. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, De la justification: Les économies de la grandeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

69. Quoted by Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 6. In his English History, Ranke sought to “extinguish my own self . . . to let the things speak and the mighty forces appear which have arisen in the course of the centuries” (ibid., 5).

70. E.g., this from the preface to the 1869 edition: “In these memorable days, a great light appeared, and I glimpsed France. . . . The first time that I saw it as having a soul and as a person.”

71. Braudel echoes Michelet on the opening page of his Identity of France, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1988): “Let me start by saying once and for all that I love France with the same demanding and complicated passion as did Jules Michelet; without distinguishing between its good points and its bad, between what I like and what I find harder to accept. But that passion will hardly intrude up the pages of this book. I shall keep it carefully to one side. It may play tricks on me, and catch me out, so I shall keep it under close watch” (15). Pierre Nora is no less indebted to Michelet and Braudel in Les Lieux de mémoire, especially in the third volume, titled Les France. Responding to the charge of nationalism, he places under the quasi name of “Francité” (“Frenchness”) the unique organism that together comes together as a kind of secular trinity: the Republic, the Nation, Frances, and he adds, pretending to ask a question: “Have you noticed that all the great histories of France, from Étienne Pasquier in the sixteenth century to Michelet, and from Michelet to Lavisse and Braudel, begin or end with a declaration of love for France, a profession of faith? Love, faith, these are words I have been careful to avoid, replacing them by those called for by our age and the ethnological point of view.” “La Nation sans nationalisme,” in Espaces Temps, Les Cahiers, no. 59–60–61 (1995): 69.

72. Roger Chartier, “History between Narrative and Knowledge,” in On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, Practice, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 13–27.

73. Jacques Revel, “Microhistoire et construction du social,” in Jeux d’échelles: La Microanalyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 15. “With the microhistorians . . . the search for a form does not stem fundamentally from an aesthetic choice (even if it is not lacking). It seems to me instead to belong to a heuristic order; and this in a double way. It invites the reader to participate in the construction of a research object; it associates him with the elaboration of an interpretation” (ibid., 32–33). The parallel with the novel after Proust, Musil, or Joyce suggests a reflection that surpasses the fixed framework of the realist novel of the nineteenth century: “The relation between a form of exposition and known content has become the object of an explicit interrogation” (34). And to evoke the disorienting effect in relation to the interpretive model of the dominant discourse, he invokes Fabrice at Waterloo who “only perceives disorder” (35).

74. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic.

75. I have presented a longer analysis of Ankersmit’s Narrative Logic in my “Philosophies critiques de l’histoire: Recherche, explication, écriture,” in Fløistad Guttorm, ed., Philosophical Problems Today (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 1:139–201. There I emphasize in succession the refutation of every correspondence theory of truth between a narratio and something that one is incapable of showing; of the affirmation of heterogeneity between the narrative form and the reality that supposedly occurred; of the kinship existing between the narrative kernel and the effect that develops its meaning with the relation Leibniz establishes between “substance” and its “predicates” which are held to inhere in the substance; and finally, of the complementary recourse to criteria for maximizing the scope of grand narratives that tempers the author’s professed idealism. What remains solid, in my opinion, is the question of the “reality” over which different narratios clash in such a way that we can say that one of them rewrites a preceding one dealing with the same theme. What does “past” mean when one declares that “the past itself does not impose the ways in which it should be represented”? Is not the error here wanting directly to stamp the large scale narratios with a truth-coefficient, independently of the partial statements arising from the documentary procedure and the explanations limited to shorter sequences?

76. This is Roger Chartier’s thesis at the end of his discussion of Hayden White’s work. White, we recall, accepts as unsurpassable a semiological approach that calls into question the soundness of testimonies to events and thus authorizes us “to pass over the question of the text’s ‘honesty,’ its objectivity” (The Content of the Form, 192, cited in On the Edge of the Cliff, 38). Chartier replies: “Isn’t the very object of history to understand how, in each particular historical configuration, historians put into operation research techniques and critical procedures that give their discourses (in an unequalled measure) just such an ‘honesty’ and ‘objectivity’?” (ibid.) Elsewhere, he declares: “Rightly to consider that history belongs to the class of narratives is not for all that to take as illusory its intention to be true, to be a truth understood as an adequate representation of what once was.” “Philosophie et histoire: Un dialogue,” in François Bedarida, ed., L’Histoire et le métier d’historien en France, 1945–1995 (Paris: Éd. de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1995), 163.

77. We cannot insist too much on the critical turn that the famous quarrel over the Donation of Constantine represents for historiography. Cf. Carlos Ginzburg’s preface to Lorenzo Valla, La Donation de Constantin (Sur la «Donation de Constantin», à lui faussement attribuée et mensongère [c. 1440]), trans. Jean-Baptiste Giard (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993), ix–xxi.

78. Karl Heussi, Die Krisis des Historismus (Tübingen: Mohr, 1932). Cf. Time and Narrative, 3:143.

79. German gives a further basis for this with the distinction between Vertretung and Vorstellung, “taking the place of” [lieutenance] serving to translate Vertretung. Cf. Time and Narrative, 3:143.

80. This conceptual articulation depended on a dialectic transposed from that of the “great kinds” in Plato’s late dialogues. I privileged the triad of “Same, Other, Analogous.” Under the sign of the Same I placed the idea of a reenactment of the past following Collingwood. Under the sign of the Other, the apology for difference and absence, where I brought together Paul Veyne and his Inventory of Differences and Michel de Certeau and his insistence on the past as “absent from history.” Under the sign of the Analogous I placed Hayden White’s tropological approach. Then I brought together the analysis of the “such that” from Ranke’s formula (“such as it really happened”) and the analysis of the “like” in the last study in my The Rule of Metaphor, where I linked the “seeing as” of the semantic plane to the “being as” of the ontological one. In this way it became possible to speak of a “metaphorical redescription of the past” by history.

81. Upon rereading this section, the most problematic notion of this whole second part is assuredly that of standing for [représentance], first made use of in Time and Narrative. Is it only the name of a problem taken as a solution or, worse, an expedient? In any case, it is not the fruit of some improvisation. It has a long lexical and semantic history before historiography:

(a) As a distant ancestor it has the Roman notion of repraesentatio, used to speak of the legal substitution exercised by the visible “representatives” of a “represented” authority. The substitute, “taking the place of,” exercises his rights, but depends on the person represented. In contact with the Christian concept of Incarnation, the notion acquired a new density, that of a represented presence of the divine, which finds in the liturgy and in sacred theater its sphere of expression.

(b) The word passes from classical Latin to German through the intervention of the term Vertretung, the exact doublet of repraesentatio. (The French translators of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method [Paris: Seuil, 1996] translate Vertretung, repraesentatio by représentation-suppléance [146]. One might also have said représentation vicaire. Or one could have preserved the Latin repraesentatio.) In the context of hermeneutics applied to works of art, Vertretung frees itself from the tutelage of Vorstellung in the sense of subjective representation, of appearance (or better, apparition) in and for the mind, as is the case in Kant and in the tradition of transcendental philosophy. Here the “phenomenon” remains opposed to the “thing in itself” that does not appear. Gadamer gives full development to the idea of Vertretung by restoring its “ontological valence” to it. Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 134. The word then rejoins the broader problematic of Darstellung, which the French translation renders as “représentation” in the sense of exposition, exhibition, monstration of an underlying being. This is the theme to which the Gadamerian hermeneutic of the work of art is devoted. The pair Darstellung/Vertretung thus moves from the liturgical to the aesthetic playing field in terms of the core concept of Bild (picture image). The two notions for all that are not aestheticized, at least in the restricted sense of a drawing away from Erlebnis, lived experience. On the contrary, it is the whole aesthetic field that, under the aegis of Bild, regains its ontological dignity with the “mode of being of the work of art” (ibid., 101f.) being what is at stake. The Bild, according to Gadamer, is more than a copy (Abbild), it is delegated to represent a “model” (Ur-bild) taken in the broad sense of a set of ways of being in the world, in the form of affective tones, real or fictional characters, actions, plots, and so forth. What is important in this “ontological process” (Geschehen) is that the dependence of the image on its model is compensated for by the “surplus” (Zuwachs) of being that the image confers in return on the model: “The original acquires an image,” Gadamer insists, “only by being imaged, and yet the image is nothing but the appearance of the original” (142).

(c) It is against this background that we should set the attempted transposition of the “representation-supplement” from the aesthetic sphere to that historiography, and with it the whole problematic of Darstellung/Vertretung. One step in this direction is the image composing the memory. This certainly belongs, according to Gadamer, to the problematic of the sign and of signification (140). The memory designates the past, but it does so in figuring it. Was this not already the presupposition borne by the Greek eikōn? And have we not spoken with Bergson about the memory-image? And did we not grant to narrative and emplotment as an image of this the power to add visibility to the readability of the plot? It thus becomes possible to extend to the memory-image the problematic of the representation-surplus and to add to its credit the idea of a “surplus of being” first granted to the work of art. With the memory too, “by being presented it experiences, as it were, an increase in being” (140). What is thereby augmented by the figured representation is the very belonging of the event to the past.

(d) It remains to complete the rest of this trajectory: from memory to the historian’s representation. My thesis here is that its belonging to literature, therefore to the field of writing, does not set a limit to the extension of the problematic of representation-supplement. From Sprachlichkeit to Schriftlichkeit, the ontological structure of Darstellung continues to demand its rights. The whole of textual hermeneutics is thus placed under the theme of the increase in being applied to the work of art. In this regard, we must renounce the at-first seductive idea of a restitution by exegesis of the original thought, an idea that, according to Gadamer, remained Schleiermacher’s tacit presupposition (166). Hegel, on the other hand, was fully aware of the impotence of any restoration. We need only to recall the celebrated passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit on the decline of the ancient way of life and its “religion of art”: “The works of the Muses . . . are now what they are for us—beautiful fruits torn from the tree; a friendly fate presents them to us, as a girl might offer those fruits. We have not the real life of their being.” No restoration can compensate for this loss. In replacing these works in their historical context, we set up with them not a living relationship but one of mere representation (Vorstellung). The task of the reflective spirit is something different: that the spirit be represented (dargestellt) in a higher way. Erinnerung—internalization—begins to carry out this task. Here, concludes Gadamer, “Hegel points beyond the entire dimension in which Schleiermacher conceived the idea of understanding” (168).

(e) Such is the long history of representation-supplement I discern in the background of the notion of standing for in history that I have been advocating. Why, in spite of this brilliant ancestry, does the idea of representation-supplementation, of standing for, remain problematic? A first reason for this uneasiness has to do with the fact that it stands at the turning point from epistemology to ontology. The anticipations of an ontology of the historical condition, such as they shall appear in part 3, may be denounced as intrusions of “metaphysics” into the domain of the human sciences by the practioners of history concerned to banish every suspicion of a return of the “philosophy of history.” For my part, I assume this risk from the thought that to refuse to take into account at an opportune moment problems having to do with the hermeneutics of the historical condition condemns us to leave unelucidated the status of what legitimately announces itself as a “critical realism” professed at the boundary of the epistemology of historical knowledge. Beyond the questions of method, a deeper reason has to do with the notion of the representation of the past in history. Why does the notion of representation seem opaque if not because the phenomenon of recognition that distinguishes every other relation of memory to the past is without parallel on the plane of history? This irreducible difference risks being misunderstood with the extending of the notion of the representation-supplement of the work of art to memory and to the writing of history. But this gap will continue to be challenged by our subsequent reflections on the relations between memory and history. The enigma of the past is finally that of a knowledge (connaissance) without recognition (reconnaissance). Is this to say, however, that the historian’s representation remains purely and simply in default in relation to what, in my epilogue to the Epilogue I shall take to be the small miracle of memory? This would be to forget the positive side of the representation-supplement, namely, the surplus that it confers on the very thing that is represented. It is even, I believe, with the historian’s representation that this augmentation in meaning is brought to its peak, precisely because of a lack of intuition. This surplus is the fruit of the whole set of historiographical operations. It is thus to be used for the benefit of the critical dimension of history. The idea of standing for is then the least bad way to render homage to a reconstructive effort that is the only one available for the service of truth in history.

PART THREE, PRELUDE

1. “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” trans. Richard T. Gray, in Unfashionable Observations, vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Ernst Behler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 83–167.

2. “The observations offered here are also unfashionable because I attempt to understand something in which our age justifiably takes pride—namely, its historical condition—as a detriment, an infirmity, a deficiency of the age, and furthermore, because I am even of the opinion that all of us suffer from a debilitating historical fever and that we at the very least need to recognize that we suffer from it” (ibid., 86).

3. An anthology of medical vocabulary, suited to the thematic of life, could be composed: saturation, nausea, distaste, degeneration, staggering weight, burden, infirmity, loss, break, death. On the other side, cure, health, remedy . . .

4. “But I have to concede this much to myself as someone who by occupation is a classical philologist, for I have no idea what the significance of classical philology would be in our age, if not to have an unfashionable effect—that is, to work against the time and thereby have an effect upon it, hopefully for the benefit of a future time” (ibid., 86–87).

5. A remark here regarding the French translation: das Unhistorisches must not be translated as “non-historicité” under penalty of spilling over into a separate problematic, precisely that of Geschichtlichkeit, which is framed by an entirely different philosophical horizon and constitutes a very different attempt to pass beyond the crisis of historicism. We shall return to this later.

6. “Only insofar as the truthful person has the unconditional will to be just is there anything great in that striving for truth that everywhere is so thoughtlessly glorified” (ibid., 123).

7. “Measuring past opinions and deeds according to the widespread opinions of the present moment is what these naïve historians call ‘objectivity’” (ibid., 115). And further: “This is how the human being spins his web over the past and subdues it, this is how his artistic urge expresses itself—not, however, his urge to truth or justice. Objectivity and justice have nothing to do with one another” (126).

8. Does not the call to arms “‘Division of labor!’ ‘In rank and file!’” (ibid., 136) find an echo in Pierre Nora’s disillusioned admission: “Archive as much as you like: something will always be left out”?

9. Nietzsche cannot resist making the outrageous claim that Hegel identified the “universal process” with his own Berlin existence (ibid., 143–44). All that came after was no more than “only a musical coda of the world-historical rondo—or more precisely, as superfluous” (143). Of course, according to Nietzsche, Hegel “did not say this” (143), but instilled the reason to believe so in the minds of others.

10. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, the editors of the standard critical edition of Nietzsche’s works, cite an earlier version of this page: “Science views both as poisons; but it is really only a lack of science that lets them be conceived as poisons and not as remedies. A branch of science is lacking; a kind of higher hygiene that examines the effects of science on life and determines the permitted amount from the standpoint of the health of a people or of a culture. Prescription: The ahistorical teaches forgetting, localizes, creates atmosphere, horizon; the suprahistorical makes more indifferent the allurements of history, has a soothing and diverting effect. Nature philosophy art pity” (ibid., 362).

PART THREE, CHAPTER ONE

1. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).

2. In Time and Narrative, 3:208–16, I introduce Koselleck’s analyses just after my confrontation with the Hegelian philosophy of history (“Should We Renounce Hegel?” 193–206), and I attempt to place them under the heading of a hermeneutics of historical consciousness, whose primary category is that of being-affected by the past, which I owe to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Koselleck is thus placed between Hegel whom I do renounce and Gadamer, to whose position I adhere. What is then lacking in this arrangement is the recognition of a transcendental dimension of metahistorical categories. This recognition became possible only at the term of a patient reconstruction of the historiographical operation freed from the limitations of a dominant concern with narratology. It is in relation to the models of the historiographical operation that the categories examined by Koselleck define their metahistorical status. I am not thereby repudiating the hermeneutical approach of Time and Narrative: Koselleck himself participates in the research group that publishes under the heading Poetik und Hermeneutik, alongside Harald Weinrich and Karl Heinz Stierle. It was in volume 5 of this collection, under the title Geschichte, Ereignis und Erzählung (History, Event, Narrative) that the articles reprinted in Futures Past were first published: “History, Histories, and Formal Structures of Time” (92–104) and “Representation, Event, and Structure” (104–15).

3. The title Futures Past can be understood in the sense of the future as it no longer is, the future over and done with, characteristic of the period in which history as such was thought.

4. If Kant did not write the critique of historical judgment that would form the third part of the Critique of Judgment, he did indicate its outlines in The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 233–327. In the second part, section 5 we read: “There must be some experience in the human race which, as an event, points to the disposition and capacity of the human race to be the cause of its own advance toward the better, and (since this should be the act of a being endowed with freedom), toward the human race as being the author of this advance. But from a given cause an event as an effect can be predicted [only] if the circumstances prevail which contribute to it” (301). This “prophetic history of the human race” (301) is based upon signs that actual history provides of the cosmopolitan destination of the human race. The French Revolution was one of these signs for Kant. He says about it: “Such a phenomenon in human history will not be forgotten” (section 7, 304).

5. Koselleck devotes a separate analysis to this notion of disposability (Futures Past, 198–212).

6. Treitschke’s statement, related by Koselleck, is often cited: “If history were an exact science, then we should be in the position to reveal the futures of states. But we are not able to do this; everywhere, historical science runs up against the puzzle of personality. It is persons, men, who make history; men like Luther, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck. This great heroic truth will remain true forever; and it will always be a puzzle to we mortals how these men appear, the right man at the right time. Genius is formed by the times, but is not created by it” (quoted by Koselleck, ibid., 313–14).

7. In the introduction to Faire de l’histoire, the novelty of the undertaking is stressed: “A collective and diverse work, this book claims nonetheless to illustrate and promote a new type of history.” The novelty, under three headings: “New Problems,” “New Concepts,” “New Objects,” corresponds to the parceling up of the historical field during that period. In this sense, it is in agreement with the unification of the concept of history that will be at issue below.

8. Reinhart Koselleck, “Geschichte,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975), 2:593–717.

9. This is the title given to a collection of articles, including “The Concept of History,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.

10. “The uncovering of a naturally historical time in the concept of history coincides with the experience of modern Times” (ibid., 21).

11. “This world of experience has an immanent claim to truth” (ibid., 22). And further: “To express this in the form of an exaggeration, history [Geschichte] is a kind of transcendental category concerning the condition of the possibility of histories” (ibid., 27). Droysen will say that “it is itself its own form of knowledge” (quoted in ibid.).

12. In Koselleck’s incredibly well-documented essay, one learns of the separate contributions of thinkers as important as Chladenius, Wieland, Humboldt, Schlegel, Schiller, Novalis, and, in particular, Herder, to say nothing of the greats of the German historical school: Ranke, Droysen, Niebuhr, Burckhardt.

13. “The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process. This conviction and intuition is a hypothesis in the domain of history as such. In that of Philosophy it is no hypothesis. It is there proved by speculative cognition, that Reason—and this term may here suffice us, without investigating the relation sustained by the Universe to the Divine Being—is Substance, as well as Infinite Power; its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form—that which sets this Material in motion. . . . That this ‘Idea’ or ‘Reason’ is the True, the Eternal, the absolutely powerful essence; that it reveals itself in the World, and that in the World nothing else is revealed but this and its honor and glory—is the thesis which, as we have said, has been proved in Philosophy, and is here regarded as demonstrated.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991), 9–10. Cf. Time and Narrative, 3:193–206: “Should We Renounce Hegel?” It is true that The Philosophy of History is Hegel’s weakest work, of little weight in comparison to the Encyclopedia and to his great Logic, which remain the Himalayas to climb—and to vanquish.

14. Even within the limits of this prudent formulation, the idea of world history conceived as a leading science seems so uncertain in Kant’s eyes that he considers it not yet to have been written nor yet to have found its Kepler or its Newton.

15. Koselleck cites a letter sent to Marx by Ruge, dating from 1843: “We can continue our past only by making a clear break with it” (L’Expérience de l’histoire, 85). In The German Ideology, Marx holds that the arrival of communism will transform current history into world history but only at the price of downgrading all of previous history to the stage of prehistory.

16. The contradiction is performative in the sense that it concerns not the semantic content of the statement but the act that utters it and holds itself as such to be true and not relative.

17. According to Koselleck, J. M. Chladenius, as early as the eighteenth century, is held to have perceived the destructive effect of the idea of point of view (L’Expérience de l’histoire, 75). Koselleck notes that “Chladenius sets us a theoretical framework that has not been surpassed to this day” (76). However, it is F. Schlegel, in Über die neuere Geschichte: Vorlesungen (1810–11), who, with complete lucidity, is said to have formulated against Hegel “the aporia that appears between the fact of having aimed at truth and the recognition of its historical relativity” (79 and n. 279). More seriously, he is held to have perceived at the heart of the Hegelian project itself a deadly contradiction between the ambition of embracing “the totality of viewpoints” (an expression that can be read in Hegel himself in the introduction to his lectures on the Philosophy of History) and the philosopher’s plea on behalf of freedom, reason, right. Between totalizing and taking a position, between speculative reason and militant judgment, a subtle contradiction is held to have slipped in.

18. Hans Robert Jauss, “La ‘Modernité’ dans la tradition litéraire et la conscience d’aujourd’hui,” in Pour une esthétique de la réception, trans. C. Maillard (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 158–209.

19. The very word “modernity,” Jauss notes at the beginning of his essay “presents . . . the paradox of obviously denying at every moment by its historical recurrence the claim that it affirms” (ibid., 158). A relativity comparable to that which infected the claim of “history itself” to reflect upon itself absolutely will also strike with its full force the claim of “our” modernity to absolutely distinguish itself from all the modernities of the past. The unavoidable controversies that will afflict the discourse on modernity will be only briefly mentioned, as they represent a symptom complementary to the incapacity of the consciousness of the present totally to reflect upon itself.

20. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). The English language edition contains four of ten articles (“Past/Present,” “Antique (Ancient)/Modern,” “Memory,” and “History”) published in the Enciclopedia Einaudi (Turin, 1977–82); Einaudi later published these ten articles separately under the title Storia et memoria (Turin, 1986). In “Past/Present” (1–19), the author interrogates, in succession, psychologists (Piaget, Fraisse), linguists (Weinrich, Benveniste), anthropologists (Lévi-Strauss, Hobsbawm), and historians of history (Châtelet, Dupront, Bloch).

21. Ibid., “Antique (Ancient)/Modern,” 21–50.

22. We owe to Ernst Robert Curtius the great erudite investigation, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953). Jauss underscores the originality of medieval conceptuality, in contrast to Curtius who saw in it only the repetition of a model coming from antiquity itself (“La ‘Modernité,’” 159). In particular, the recourse to a typology constitutes a form of original enchantment. The idea of “typological overflowing” even seems to be the key to the famous equivocation contained in the praise which John of Salisbury attributes to Bernard of Chartres: “We are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.” What is more honorable, the solidity of a giant, or the perspicacious view of a dwarf?

23. On the period of the Renaissance, see Jauss, Pour une esthétique de la reception, 170–75.

24. Regarding the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, see Jauss, ibid., 175–89. The “quarrel,” Jauss notes, allows us to fix the date of the beginning of the century of the Enlightenment in France (175) (as, moreover, Diderot and d’Alembert will be happy to proclaim in the Encyclopedia), the issue being the alleged exemplarity of the Ancient models.

25. Jauss cites the 1798 Dictionnaire de l’Académie: romantic “is normally said of places, of landscapes, which remind the imagination of descriptions, poems, and novels” (Pour une esthétique de la reception, 187–97). We mentioned earlier, with Edward Casey, the role of landscapes in our consciousness of inhabited space. In the case of the Germans, it is Herder and, following him, German romanticism that elevates the Gothic to the level of poetic truth.

26. With Stendhal, Jauss notes, “romanticism is no longer the attraction of what transcends the present, the polar opposition between everyday reality and the far-off past; it is actuality, the beauty of today, which, becoming that of yesterday, will inevitably lose its vibrant appeal and will no longer be able to offer anything but a historical interest.” Romanticism is “the art of presenting to the people the literary works, which, in the present state of their habits and beliefs, are likely to provide them with the greatest possible pleasure. Classicism, on the contrary, presents to them the literature that provided the greatest possible pleasure to their grandparents” (quoted in ibid., 196).

27. Vincent Descombes, “Une question de chronologie,” in Jacques Poulain, ed., Penser au présent (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1998), 43–79.

28. “Condorcet by no means believed that there were stages of a development of the mind or incommensurable frames of reference. Any idea of relativity is foreign to him” (ibid., 61).

29. Vincent Descombes’s essay does not go beyond this conclusion: “I have tried to defend the following thesis: the notion of modernity expresses, on the part of a French writer, a (reluctantly granted) consent to be able to represent only a part of humanity. To speak of our modernity is to accept not incarnating immediately, in our language, in our institutions, in our masterpieces, the highest aspirations of humankind” (ibid., 77). To pursue this reflection further, see his Philosophie par gros temps (Paris: Minuit, 1989).

30. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

31. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 3.

32. “The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation” (ibid., 37).

33. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project,” in Hal Foster, ed. and trans., The Anti-aesthetic (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 3–15. This was Habermas’s speech delivered on the occasion of the Adorno Prize awarded by the city of Frankfurt, September 11, 1980. The author denounces the aestheticizing tendency of postmodern discourses and the danger of conservatism and of opportunism related to the abandonment of the great causes of liberal politics.

34. “Consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end” (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 65).

35. Lyotard’s most significant book is in fact The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). After an exordium without concession—“As distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments” (xi)—follows a long transition through “obligation” (107–27) in a tone reminiscent of Levinas—“Causality through freedom gives signs, never ascertainable effects, nor chains of effects” (127)—before the work concludes with a series of narrative figures placed under the title of the last chapter, “The Sign of History” (151–81). Does not the enigmatic ending of the book bring us back from the differend to litigation? And does not the litigation concern the order of discourse maintained here by the analysis of genres of discourse? The author directs this very objection to himself. “In declaring that there is a litigation, you have already passed judgment from a ‘universal’ point of view, that of the analysis of genres of discourse. The interests put into play through this point of view are not those of the narrations. You too do them a wrong” (158).

36. Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

37. Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian, trans. Anthony Shugaar (New York: Verso, 2002).

38. Ibid., 240. The circumstances of this essay are not unrelated to our discussion. The great historian develops a closely knit argument on behalf of a friend sentenced to a lengthy prison term for acts of terrorism going back eighteen years, at the time of the hot fall of 1969. The verdict was based for the most part on the confession of another defendant, who had “repented.” The paradox of the essay lies in the fact that it is the historian who strives here to refute the judge, despite the credit in principle granted by both sides in the handling of proof.

39. After quoting Lucien Febvre’s “Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France,” based upon his remarks on the role of hypothesis, Ginzburg mentions favorably Marc Bloch’s exemplary work, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, which exposed the mechanism of belief by which the kings were able to be graced with the power to cure by their touch those suffering from scrofula. Here we encounter the Ginzburg familiar with the trials for witchcraft, in which the inquisitors were able to convince the accused themselves of devilry.

40. I owe the observations that follow to Antoine Garapon, “La Justice et l’inversion morale du temps,” in Pourquoi se souvenir? (Paris: Grasset, 1999).

41. Paul Ricoeur, “The Act of Judging” and “Interpretation and/or Argumentation,” The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 109–32.

42. Wilhelm Schapp, In Geschichten verstrickt (Wiesbaden: B. Heymann, 1976).

43. Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997).

44. Chapter 2, “Solidarity through Civil Dissensus,” provides an excellent summary of these theses (ibid., 36–55). Let us retain the bold expression “poetics of legal storytelling” (3), which covers the entire undertaking.

45. Chapter 4, “Losing Perspective, Distorting History” (ibid., 79–141); chapter 8, “Making Public Memory, Publicly” (ibid., 240–92).

46. Ernst Rienhard Piper, ed., Devant l’histoire: Les documents de la controverse sur la singularité de l’extermination des Juifs par le régime nazi, trans. Brigitte Vergne-Cain et al. (Paris: Cerf, 1988). This is the second time that I have broached the historical problems relating to the Holocaust. I did this first within the epistemological framework as it applies to the problem of historical representation; the question then concerned the necessary limits involved in representation both with regard to the exposition of events, through language or otherwise, and with regard to the “realistic” scope of the representation. Here, the same facts are placed under the intersecting spotlights of axiological judgment and historiographical judgment.

47. Ibid., 37ff.

48. Another protagonist in this debate, Michael Stürmer, defined the singularity of Auschwitz by the break in temporal continuity as it affected national identity. This break also has antecedents in the German past: the absence of memory’s anchorage in certainties which, in the pre-Hitler period, created “a country without a history.” For, is not everything possible in a country without a history? Not only the recent barbarism but also the current reticence to seek “the lost history” (ibid., 27). From this results the task the authors are invited to perform: exit this obsession by restoring continuity. For his part, Andreas Hillgruber, the author of Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des Europäischen Judentums (Berlin: Siedler, 1986), juxtaposes the sufferings of the Germans in the eastern part of Germany at the time of the Russian front and that of the Jews at the time of their extermination, without making explicit the “somber interaction” of the two series of events, the “destruction of the German Reich” and the “end of European Judaism.” The author thus creates a suspense that leaves the door open for a definitive judgment which the historian is not expected to formulate.

49. Jürgen Habermas, “A Kind of Settling of Damages: Apologetic Tendencies,” The New Conservatism, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 207–48.

50. It is indeed difficult for a narrative to be totally without any moral evaluation of the characters and their actions. Aristotle, in the Poetics, speaks of tragic figures as “better than us” and of comic figures as “the same as us” or “worse than us.” It is true that he banishes the inhuman from the poetic field. This makes Osiel say that, among all the literary genres, even tragedy is not suitable for the legal narrative, but solely the morality play (Mass Atrocity, 283ff.).

51. I refer to my theses on the ascription of memory to a range of subjects (see part 1, chap. 3). Later, I shall encounter a comparable problem concerning the multiple ascription of death and dying.

52. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968).

53. It is from this angle that I first encountered this problem in my articles of the 1950s, collected in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelby (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965). In the preface to the first edition, there is a discussion of “the limited truth of the historian’s history” (5); but this was in the perspective of a “philosophical history of philosophy” which was at that time the subject of my teaching. The polarity between the critique of historical knowledge and an eschatological sense of the infinitely postponed unity of the true assured the dynamic of this collection of essays, alternating between the “epistemological concern” and the “ethico-cultural concern” (11). The stakes then were metahistorical, namely, “the courage to do the history of philosophy without the philosophy of history” (7). In truth, only the first essay (from 1952), “Objectivity and Subjectivity in History” (21–40), answered to the ambitious title of the first part of the book: “Truth in the Knowledge of History.”

54. Raymond Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity, trans. George J. Irwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). His complementary thesis was titled La Philosophie critique de l’histoire: Essai sur une théorie allemande de l’histoire (Paris: Vrin, 1938). It is therefore to Raymond Aron that I owe the expression “critical philosophy of history.” There is a more recent edition of this latter work, revised and annotated by Sylvie Mesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

55. Henri-Irénée Marrou, The Meaning of History, trans. Robert J. Olson (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966).

56. In an appendix to the French edition, written in 1975, Marrou favorably salutes Certeau’s work, The Writing of History, and confronts, on the side of the skeptical school, the suspicions of Roland Barthes expressed in the theme of the “reality effect.”

57. “Like every scientific subjectivity, the historian’s subjectivity represents the triumph of a good subjectivity over a bad one” (History and Truth, 30). “The historian’s craft makes history and the historian” (ibid., 31). At that time I emphasized in succession the judgment regarding what was important, the historian’s membership in the same history, the same humanity as men of the past, and the transference into another subjectivity adopted as a sort of perspective.

58. René Rémond (in collaboration with J.-F. Sirinelli), Notre siècle, 1918–1988, the final volume of the series Histoire de France, whose overall editor is Jean Favier (Paris: Fayard, 1988).

59. Henry Rousso confirms and completes René Rémond’s analysis in The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France, trans. Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), chap. 2, “For a History of the Present,” 25–47. Following Marc Bloch, he recalls that the dialectic between the past and the present is constitutive of the profession of historian, but that “analysis of the present allows us to understand the past” (28). Did not Marc Bloch dare to write The Strange Defeat under the influence of events? With the history of the present day, politics and events return in force. The objection regarding the lack of distance pleading in favor of a necessary delay is held to be most often merely an ideological alibi varying according to circumstances. The challenge is considered to be worth taking up on behalf of a dialogue among the living, among contemporaries, and of a questioning directed precisely to the undetermined border that separates the past from the present and, finally, the archives from testimony. It is along this border that the reshaping of the past in collective representations ultimately takes place; it is also here that this obsession must be uncovered and exorcized.

60. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich; trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968; reprinted Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), sect. 1–3; G. H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). Von Wright argues on behalf of a mixed model that links together causal segments and teleological segments implied jointly by the intervention of human agents on the social as well as on the physical plane.

61. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

62. I, for my part, have called the response of narrative knowledge to the aporias of temporality a “poetics of narrative.” See Time and Narrative, vol. 3, section 2.

63. Arlette Farges, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Seuil, 1989).

64. “Such a study falls under what I have chosen to call a poetics of knowledge, a study of the set of literary procedures by which a discourse escapes literature, gives itself the status of a science and signifies this status” (The Names of History, 8). The word “knowledge” signifies the potential amplitude of the reflective operation.

65. The undecidable, of which I spoke at the end of chapter 2, between memory and history is akin to this poetic indetermination of a principle of “indiscernability” (ibid., 23).

66. We obliquely encountered this third dimension both in discussing the portrait of the king and the discourse of the praise of greatness, and in discussing the great crimes of the twentieth century that have pushed to the forefront the figure of the citizen as third party between the judge and the historian.

67. The discourse on the “dead king” opens another problematic, namely, death in history; I will return in the next chapter to Rancière’s contribution to this discussion.

68. Revisionism in general is summed up in a simple formula: “nothing happened of what was told” (The Names of History, 36). The entire problematic of “standing for” is put to the test here.

PART THREE, CHAPTER TWO

1. François Dosse places the fourth section of his book, L’Histoire (Paris: Armin Colin, 2000), under the sign of the “lacerations of time” (96–136). The author leads the reader from Aristotle and Augustine, passing by way of Husserl and Heidegger, up to the great forms of questioning symbolized by the names of Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Norbert Elias, and, finally, Michel Foucault.

2. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. This work was published in 1927 in Edmund Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Forschung, vol. 8, and simultaneously in a separate volume. I shall cite the English translation of Being and Time by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).

3. In this regard, I have nothing to change but only to add to the discussion that I proposed in volume 3 of Time and Narrative: that discussion was framed by a question, which is no longer mine here, the question of the relation between a phenomenology of lived time and a cosmology of physical time; then, history was placed under the heading of a “narrative poetics” held to render the “aporetics of time,” which initially paralyzed thought, productive.

4. François Dosse reserves for the fifth section of L’Histoire the formidable question of the crisis of telos: “From Providence to the Progress of Reason” (137–68), the road hesitates between Fortune, the divine hand, reason in history, historical materialism, losing itself in the crisis of historicism.

5. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:42–45, “Included Discordance.” The emphasis was placed at that time on the difficult—perhaps unlocatable—relation between the time of the soul and cosmic time; calendar time was proposed as one connector in the transition from one to the other. A different debate is opened here on the border of the ontology of the historical condition and the epistemology of historical knowledge.

6. And again: “If we may speak in these terms, I can see [video] three times and I admit [fateorque] that they do exist” (Augustine, Confessions 11.20).

7. One reason specific to Platonizing Christianity for privileging the present has to do with the reference of the living present to eternity conceived as a nunc stans, in other words, as an eternal present. But this eternal present is less a contribution to the constitution of the present of the soul than it serves as a counterpoint and a contrast: our present suffers from not being an eternal present; this is why it requires the dialectic of the other two instances.

8. Henri-Irénée Marrou, L’Ambivalence de l’histoire chez saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1950); La Théologie de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1968).

9. Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1998).

10. In Time and Narrative, I devoted lengthy analyses to preparatory studies concerning, on the one hand, hermeneutical phenomenology (3:61–63) and, on the other, the central position of care in the ontology of Da-sein (3:63–68).

11. Concerning the interpretation of Da-sein as care (focusing on section 41), see Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, 42–55, and Jean Greisch, Ontologie et temporalité: Esquisse d’une interprétation intégrale de «Sein und Zeit» (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 236ff.: “Although we might have the impression that with care the existential analysis had arrived at safe harbor, this is not so. Care is much more a starting point than an end-point. Thus is proclaimed the necessity . . . for a second great navigation, which occupies the second part of Sein und Zeit: the analysis of the relations between Dasein and temporality which care allows us to perceive” (241). It is the ahead-of-itself that serves as the effect of the declaration here.

12. Jean Greisch elevates to the place of honor “the recapitulative definition of the authentic possibility of being-toward-death”: “anticipation.” A more vigorous plea on behalf of an attitude in the face of death close to that articulated in Sein und Zeit can be found in Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, trans. John Llewelyn (London: Athlone, 1996).

13. One can mention in this regard the strong comments of Simone Weil on destiny and misfortune. It is always in spite of a contrary destiny that one must live and love. Simone Weil, “Malheur et joie,” Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 681–784.

14. One can reread, with the benefit of this wisdom, chapter 20 of book 1 of Montaigne’s Essays: “To philosophize is to learn how to die.” Just like the enemy that cannot be avoided, “we must learn to stand firm and to fight it. To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death. At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects.” And again: “A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint” (The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech [London: Penguin Books, 1991], 96).

15. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 232–36.

16. “The identifying of death with nothingness befits the death of the other in murder” (ibid., 232).

17. “This nothingness is an interval beyond which lurks a hostile will” (ibid., 236). Indeed we are “exposed to a foreign will” (236).

18. “The Desire into which the threatened will dissolves no longer defends the powers of a will, but, as the goodness whose meaning death cannot efface, has its center outside of itself” (ibid.).

19. Levinas concludes these somber pages by evoking “the other chance that the will seizes upon in the time left it by its being against death: the founding of institutions in which the will ensures a meaningful, but impersonal world beyond death” (ibid., 236). The discussions of justice in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), give depth to this rapid sketch of a politics of goodness in the shadow of death.

20. Genesis 35:29; 49:33. Montaigne was not unaware of this wisdom. Earlier we heard him speak of death as the enemy to which we must accustom ourselves. We must also hear him pay justice to it: “The first part of equity is equality. Who can complain of being included when all are included?” (Essays, book 1, chap. 20, 104).

21. “Anticipatory resoluteness understands Da-sein in its essential being-in-debt. This understanding means to take over being-in-debt while existing, to be the thrown ground of nullity. But to take over thrownness means to authentically be Da-sein in the way that it always already was. Taking over thrownness, however, is possible only in such a way that futural Da-sein can be its ownmost ‘how it already was,’ that is, its ‘having-been.’ Only because Da-sein in general is as I am-having-been, can it come futurally toward itself in such a way that it comes-back. Authentically futural, Da-sein is authentically having-been. Anticipation of the most extreme and ownmost possibility comes back understandingly to one’s ownmost having-been. Da-sein can be authentically having-been only because it is futural. In a way, having-been arises from the future” (Being and Time, 299, trans. modified).

22. “The concepts of ‘future,’ ‘past,’ and ‘present’ initially grew out of the inauthentic understanding of time” (ibid., 300).

23. “Michel Foucault,” in Michel de Certeau, L’Absent de l’histoire (Paris: Mame, 1973), 125–32. This outside thinking is held to direct the entire search for meaning toward this “region in which death prowls” (the expression is taken from Foucault in The Order of Things). But “to speak of the death which founds all language is not yet to confront but perhaps to evade the death that attacks discourse itself” (132).

24. One cannot too strongly emphasize the influence exerted on the general theory of history by the special history of the mystics in the work of Certeau. Surin is at the center of this history of forms of spirituality apprehended in their language (Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992]). Besides Surin, Henri Bremond’s “philosophy of saints,” to which he devotes a substantial review dating from 1966 in L’Absent de l’histoire, caught the attention of Certeau. Now this “philosophy of saints” gravitates around nocturnal sentiments such as “desolation,” “distress,” “emptiness” (“Henri Bremond, historien d’un silence,” in L’Absent de l’histoire, 73–108). What is remarkable is that, for Certeau, the past is to historical discourse what God is to mystical discourse: absent. What has elapsed is the quasi-“mystical” absent of historical discourse. Certeau indeed says: “That occurred and is no longer.” This equation is at the center of the essay, “Histoire et mystique,” first published in 1972 in the Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité (this essay is contemporaneous with the writing of “L’opération historique,” published in Faire de l’histoire). It is clearly stated at the end of the study, speaking of the relations between the historical and the mystical, that “this is the hypothesis that little by little formed an itinerary of history in the field of the spiritual literature of the seventeenth century” (L’Absent de l’histoire, 167).

25. “The Place of the Dead and the Place of the Reader,” in The Writing of History, 99–102.

26. “‘To mark’ a past is to make a place for the dead, but also to redistribute the space of possibility, to determine negatively what must be done, and consequently to use the narrativity that buries the dead as a way of establishing a place for the living” (ibid., 100).

27. Rancière quotes this beautiful passage from Michelet’s Journal, edited by Pierre Vialaneix: “We must hear words that were never spoken. . . . Only then do the dead accept the sepulcher” (quoted by Rancière, The Names of History, 62–63).

28. We also owe to Hegel, for better or for worse, the taste for abstract terms ending in -heit and -keit. In this regard, the term Geschichtlichkeit does not spoil the string of substantivized adjectives, stemming from simple substantives (Lebendigkeit, Innerlichkeit, Offenbarkeit, not to mention the astonishing Steinigkeit, designating the stoneness of stone!). L. Renthe-Fink supplies an abbreviated list of these in Geschichtlichkeit: Ihr Terminologie und begrifficher Ursprung bei Hegel, Haym, Dilthey und Yorck (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1964), 30–31.

29. The first English translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), rendered Geschichtlichkeit by “historicality.” The more recent translation by Joan Stambaugh, and the one quoted here, uses “historicity” instead.

30. I am grateful for this brief history of the usages of the term Geschichtlichkeit to Leonhard von Renthe-Fink’s Geschichtlichkeit. I would add to it the important monograph of Gerhard Bauer, Geschichtlichkeit: Wege und Irrwege eines Begriffs (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963).

31. A competing usage which has not entirely disappeared designates the factual character of a reported event, in particular, the non-legendary character of evangelical narratives. In this way, exegetes still speak today of the historicity of Jesus, especially after the debate opened by David Friedrich Strauss and the impetus of the Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, started by Albert Schweitzer at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is in this sense of the true factual character of events that the term “historicity” figures in 1872 as a neologism in the Littré Dictionnaire. It will also come to pass that a geschichtlich Christ will be opposed to a historisch Jesus!

32. Daniel Marguerat and Jean Zumstein, eds., La Mémoire et le temps: Mélanges offerts à Pierre Bonnard (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1991).

33. It is not surprising that Schleiermacher set himself up as the mediator between these two exemplary “moments.”

34. The adjective geschichte is in competition with historisch as early as the announcement of the program of a “critique of historical [historisch] reason.” See Dilthey’s 1875 essay, “Über das Studium des Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und dem Staat,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1968), 5:31–73.

35. Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. Michael Neville, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

36. Concerning the term Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences), Dilthey admits that he does not have any adequate term available; for lack of anything better, he adopts the term introduced into German in 1849 to translate the expression “moral sciences” found in John Stuart Mill’s Logic.

37. Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and John Scanlon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 101–209.

38. In her “Translator’s Notes” to the French edition, Sylvie Mesure observes: “Zusammenhang, a real cross for every translation of Dilthey, is most often translated in French by ‘ensemble’ but the word also sometimes means ‘structure,’ ‘system,’ ‘coherence,’ or ‘context.’ Bedeutungszusammenhang, ‘meaningful whole,’ designates a signifying ensemble both as a totality and in its elements.” Wilhelm Dilthey, L’Édification du monde historique dans les sciences de l’esprit, trans. Sylvie Mesure in Dilthey, Oeuvres, vol. 3 (Paris: Cerf, 1988), 27–28. In his French translation of Being and Time, E. Martineau translates Lebenszusammenhang by “enchaînement de la vie.” One can also say “connectedness of life” (Macquarrie and Robinson) or “connection of life” (Stambaugh), reserving the notion of “narrative coherence” for the level of the narrative.

39. Jean Greisch, in Ontologie et temporalité, provides two significant statements from The Formation of the Historical World: “All the categories of life and of history are forms of expression that . . . receive a universal application in the area of the human sciences. The expressions themselves come from lived experience itself” (quoted by Greisch, 353).

40. Dilthey, “Antrittsrede in der Akademie der Wissenschaften” (1887), in Gesammelte Schriften, 5:10–11. “Our century has recognized in the historical school the historicity of man and of social organizations” (11).

41. “Culture is, in the first place, the weaving together of purposeful systems. Each of these—like language, law, myth and religion, poetry, philosophy—possesses an inner lawfulness that conditions its structure, which in turn determines its development. The historical character of culture was first grasped at that time. This was the achievement of Hegel and Schleiermacher. They permeated the abstract systematic structure of culture with the consciousness of its essential historicity. The comparative method and the developmental-historical approach were applied to culture. What a circle of men were at work here!” (“Reminiscences on Historical Studies at the University of Berlin” [1903], trans. Patricia Van Tuyl, in Selected Works, vol. 4, Hermeneutics and the Study of History, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996], 387). This brief discourse nonetheless ends on a troubled note: “The historical world view liberated the human spirit from the last chains that natural science and philosophy have not yet broken. But where are the means to overcome the anarchy of opinions that then threatens to befall us? To the solution of the long series of problems that are connected with this, I have devoted my whole life. I see the goal. If I fall short along the way, then I hope my young traveling companions, my students, will follow it to the end” (389).

42. The correspondence between Dilthey and Yorck can be read in Wilhelm Dilthey, Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, 1877–1897, ed. Sigrid von der Schulenburg (Halle, 1923).

43. Section 72, which inaugurates the series of analyses concerning historicity-historicality, begins by expressing “a serious reservation”: “Has indeed the whole of Da-sein with respect to its authentic being-a-whole been captured in the fore-having of our existential analysis? It may be that the line of questioning related to the wholeness of Da-sein possesses a genuinely unequivocal character ontologically. The question itself may even have been answered with regard to being-toward-the-end. However, death is, after all, only the ‘end’ of Da-sein, and formally speaking, it is just one of the ends that embraces the totality of Da-sein” (Being and Time, 342).

44. What is aimed at here is what I called the third time of history in Time and Narrative, the time of traces, of generations, and of the great connectors between cosmic time and phenomenological time.

45. Jean Greisch underscores, in this regard, “the mixture of modesty and pretentiousness that this determination of the task presents.” And he adds: “Is it sufficient to do justice to these disciplines [the human sciences], or must one not foresee the possibility of a more positive determination of the relation between the ontology of historicity and an epistemology of the historical sciences?” (Ontologie et temporalité, 357–58). This is the proposal that I develop in the pages that follow, in line with my remarks in Time and Narrative, vol. 3, in which I spoke of an “enrichment” of the primordial by means of a “innovative derivation” of one from the other (3:73).

46. “Thus the interpretation of the historicity of Da-sein turns out to be basically just a more concrete development of temporality” (Being and Time, 350). And later: “Authentic being-toward-death, that is, the finitude of temporality, is the concealed ground of the historicity of Da-sein” (353).

47. Time and Narrative, 3:78ff.; Jean Greisch, Ontologie et temporalité, 369–74.

48. Pierre Legendre, L’Inestimable Objet de la transmission: Essai sur le principe généalogique en Occident (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 9.

49. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, présenté par Claude Mettra (Lausanne: Rencontre, 1965, 1967).

50. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, a posthumous work first edited by T. M. Knox in 1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956) on the basis of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1936, after Collingwood was named to the chair of philosophy and metaphysics, which were revised by the author up to 1940.

51. Jean Greisch (Ontologie et temporalité, 374) opportunely compares what Heidegger calls here the “history of transmission” to what Gadamer calls “effective-history [Wirkungsgeschichte]” (Truth and Method, 267). This important paragraph of Truth and Method should not be separated from the one that precedes it, dealing with the hermeneutical signification of “temporal distance”: this is not to be understood as an empty space, a separation, but as a productive space of understanding, as a between that completes the hermeneutical circle formed together by interpretation and its vis-à-vis. The temporal distance understood in this way is the condition of “effective-history.”

52. In Oneself as Another, I underscore the rich meaning of the metaphor of “reckoning,” of “counting,” which is found in many languages at the base of the idea of imputability (“accountability” in English, Rechnungsfähigkeit in German).

53. Jean Greisch evokes the verses of the biblical Qoheleth: “For everything its season, and for every activity under heaven its time: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot” (Ecclesiastes 3:1–3). Greisch opens a discussion at this point (Ontologie et temporalité, 394–402) that cannot leave the historian indifferent: does the expression of common or public time offer a choice between two interpretations, the first emphasizing the otherness of the other, after the fashion of Levinas in Time and the Other, the second stressing the tie with spatial externality, in relation to the “places” we name along with the dates? Must one choose between these two readings? What we said above, in agreement with Edward Casey, about the “worldly” side of memory (part 1, chap. 1) argues in the second sense; what we said, on the other hand, about the threefold attribution of memory, to oneself, to close relations, and to distant others (part 1, chap. 3) argues in the first sense, in favor of a redistribution of time throughout the entire range of cases of attribution: one’s own, close relations, distant others.

54. François Dosse had the fortuitous idea of ending the great inquiry of his work, L’Histoire, with the dialogue between history and memory (“Une histoire sociale de la mémoire,” 169–93). The sixth course proposed by the author begins in “the national novel” (169ff.), attains its summit with Bergson and “the distinction between two memories,” penetrates with Halbwachs into the period of the “history/memory dissociation,” to end with the various forms of the mutual problematizing of the two great instances of retrospection. The final word is then uttered by the instance of the future: from the horizon of expectation comes the invitation to “revisit the areas of shadow,” to leave behind “rumination” for “creativity,” in short, along with Koselleck, to place memory and history once again under the banner of the “future of the past.”

55. See Christian Delacroix, “La Falaise et le rivage: Historie du ‘tournant critique,’” Espaces Temps, Les Cahiers 59–60–61 (1995): 59–61, 86–111. Under the heading of T.C. (tournant critique) the author retraces the path that we followed in the first paragraphs of the chapter “Explanation/Understanding.” His route passes by way of many authors that I have also encountered: Bernard Lepetit, the historians of the microstoria, Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of cities. The November-December 1990 issue of Annales, on “mobilities,” already confirmed this advent of the paradigm of action and of the actor by demanding that “the representations and theoretical and practical legitimations that the actors construct be taken seriously” (1273; quoted by Delacroix, 103).

56. See Being and Time, 41, 202, 269, 311–12, 314, 317, 318–19, 324, 337, 357, 374, 376, 377, 388–89; Index zu Heideggers Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1961); see also Index to the English translation under the entry, “forgetting.”

57. Bernard Lepetit, “Le présent de l’histoire,” in Les Formes de l’expérience, 273. “It is in the transformation of the value of the present that one finds the origin of the change of situation of the past” (290).

58. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

59. André Leroy-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964).

60. Le Goff follows the transition from “simple file cards,” to paraphrase Leroy-Gourhan, in the forms of “mechanical writing” and “electronic sequencing” (History and Memory, 90). In this way gigantic bibliographical files are constructed, which will prompt the concern of Yerushalmi and Nora.

61. Krzysztof Pomian, “De l’histoire, partie de la mémoire, à la mémoire, objet d’histoire,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, no. 1 (1998): 63–110.

62. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). The work is devoted to “understanding modernity’s relationship with memory” (3). The investigation is conducted in the spirit of the history of consciousness taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz and in the French Department of Stanford University, closely related to the thought of Michel de Certeau.

63. Terdiman, “The Mnemonics of Musset’s Confession,” ibid., 75–105.

64. The title of chapter 3 of The Collective Memory is “Collective Memory and Historical Memory.” In the English translation, chapter 2 is titled “Historical Memory and Collective Memory.”

65. These divisions “are imposed from outside upon every individual memory precisely because their source is not in any single one of them” (ibid., 54). This is “also true of those dates on the clockface of history” (54).

66. “The events and dates constituting the very substance of group life can be for the individual only so many external signs, which he can use as reference points only by going outside himself” (ibid.).

67. The first time the word is stated in the text it is prudently evoked as another memory, one termed “historical,” “that would be composed only of national events unfamiliar to us as children” (ibid., 57).

68. We have already encountered this question of the generational tie in connection with the Kierkegaardian concept, taken up by Heidegger, of “repetition.” At that time we discussed the institutional aspect of this filiation following P. Legendre.

69. Time and Narrative, 3:109–16.

70. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967).

71. Elsewhere I stress the fact that birth and death do not constitute personal memories but rely on the memory of close relations who are in a position to celebrate the first and suffer the loss of the second. Collective memory, and even more so historical memory, retain of these “events” only the replacement one by the other of the actors of history following the ordered sequence of the transmission of roles. From the viewpoint of the third-party historian, generations succeed one another in the civil registers.

72. “There is a break in continuity between the society reading this history and the group in the past [autrefois] who acted or witnessed the events” (The Collective Memory, 79).

73. The very expression “historical memory” is cast into doubt on several occasions (ibid., 57, 62, 68–69, 86).

74. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982).

75. In my opinion, our author’s semantic choice deserves to be extended to the discipline of historians in every cultural context. It signifies that writing and reading constitute, as we demonstrated above, the combined substantive conditions for the operation of the historian.

76. “At the very heart of this book lies an attempt to understand what seemed a paradox to me at the time—that although Judaism throughout the ages was absorbed with the meaning of history, historiography itself played at best an ancillary role among the Jews, and often no role at all; and, concomitantly, that while memory of the past was always a central component of Jewish experience, the historian was not its primary custodian” (Zakhor, xiv).

77. “Suddenly, as it were, the crucial encounter between man and the divine shifted away from the realm of nature and the cosmos to the plane of history, conceived now in terms of divine challenge and human response” (Zakhor, 8).

78. In this regard, we must be grateful to Yerushalmi for not inflating the opposition between cyclical time and linear time: if the time of history is linear, the return of the seasons, rites, and festivals is cyclical. On this point, read Arnaldo Momigliano, “Time in Ancient Historiography,” Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), 179–214. Yerushalmi is correct to note that “memory and modern historiography stand, by their very nature, in radically different relations to the past” (Zakhor, 94).

79. “The difficulty in grasping this apparent incongruity lies in a poverty of language that forces us, faute de mieux, to apply the term ‘history’ both to the sort of past with which we are concerned, and to that of Jewish tradition” (ibid., 26). Note the admission: faute de mieux.

80. One will note in particular the narratives in the form of credo, such as Deuteronomy 26:5–9, on the basis of which the great exegete Gerhard von Rad formerly articulated his theology of the traditions of ancient Israel: Old Testament Theology, 2 vols., trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper and Row, 1960–65).

81. Holy: that is to say, set apart from the rest of discourse and hence from critical appraisal.

82. This is the title of an article by Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5 (1966): 111–34, cited by Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 142 n. 14.

83. “The enterprise has become self-generating, the quest—Faustian. . . . The shadow of Funes the Memorious hovers over us all” (Zakhor, 102).

84. “The historian,” writes Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “is the physician of memory. It is his honor to heal wounds, genuine wounds. As a physician must act, regardless of medical theories, because his patient is ill, so the historian must act under a moral pressure to restore a nation’s memory, or that of mankind.” Out of Revolution (New York: W. Morrow and Company, 1938), 696; quoted by Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 93.

85. Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, La République (1984); vol. 2, La Nation (1986); vol. 3, Les France (1992) (Paris: Gallimard). English translation in three volumes, Realms of Memory, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer: vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions (1996); vol. 2, Traditions (1997); vol. 3, Symbols (1998) (New York: Columbia University Press).

86. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” Realms of Memory, 1:1–20.

87. Here, a remark on Jewish memory, for which “history was no concern” (ibid., 2), echoes Yerushalmi.

88. This echoes Halbwachs through the opposition between group memory, which is “by nature multiple yet specific; collective and plural yet individual,” and history which “belongs to everyone and to no one and therefore has a universal vocation” (ibid., 3).

89. This statement on history-memory distances Nora from Halbwachs, who drew a clear line between collective memory and historical memory.

90. Quotations that cite roman numerals are not in the English translation, Realms of Memory, as many of the texts in that translation are edited and abridged. References are to Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, La République, and Nora’s lead article, “Entre mémoire et histoire.”

91. Second reference to Jewish memory: “The force of this phenomenon is perhaps most evident among nonpracticing Jews, many of whom have felt a need in recent years to explore memories of the Jewish past. In the Jewish tradition, whose history is its memory, to be Jewish is to remember being Jewish. If truly internalized, such a memory inexorably asserts its claim over a person’s whole being. What kind of a memory is this? In a sense, it is memory of memory itself. The psychologization of memory makes each individual feel that his or her salvation ultimately depends on discharging a debt that can never be repaid” (Realms of Memory, 1:11).

92. It is remarkable that the idea of commemoration, mentioned several times, remains caught up in the nostalgia of memory-history. It is not yet denounced as the response of memory to the dominion of history: “Without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them [the places of memory] away” (Realms of Memory, 1:7). It is on the basis of its function of refuge that commemorative memory will renew its assault on national history. The sentence from which the final article on the era of commemoration will be launched is worth quoting: “The memorial has swung over into the historical. A world that once contained our ancestors has become a world in which our relation to what made us is merely contingent. Totemic history has become critical history: it is the age of [the places of memory]. We no longer celebrate the nation, we study the nation’s celebrations” (7).

93. One hears in this the echo of the criticisms Plato levels against the “memory aid,” hupomnēsis.

94. Pierre Nora, “La Nation-mémoire,” Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 2, La Nation, book 3: 647–58.

95. Pierre Nora, “Generation,” Realms of Memory, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, 499–531.

96. “The notion of generation has thus been subverted from within in much the same way as the modern ‘mediatized’ event” (“Generation,” 508). The author refers here to his article, “Le Retour de l’événement” (in Faire de l’histoire).

97. Pierre Nora, “The Era of Commemoration,” Realms of Memory, vol. 3, Symbols, 609–37.

98. I discussed this in positive terms in the first part of the present work, in company with Edward Casey. See above, part 1, chap. 1, “A Phenomenological Sketch of Memory.”

99. Thus the tricentennial of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes is held to have done more to nourish the Protestant imagination than the national imagination, devoted to reconciliation and to forgetting the offenses imposed by the sovereign (“The Era of Commemoration,” 620).

PART THREE, CHAPTER THREE

1. J. L. Borges, “Funes the Memorius,” Ficciones, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962).

2. Harald Weinrich, Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Munich: Ch. Beck, 1997).

3. I am adopting the vocabulary of the neurosciences, which speak of mnésique (mnestic) traces with the stipulation that I am limiting the term “mnemonic” to the set of phenomena relating to the phenomenology of memory.

4. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeVevoise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

5. Straightaway, I stated the following: “My initial thesis is that these discourses represent heterogeneous perspectives, which is to say that they cannot be reduced to each other or derived from each other. In one case it is a question of neurons and their connection in a system; in the other one speaks of knowledge, action, feeling—acts or states characterized by intentions, motivations, and values. I shall therefore combat the sort of semantic amalgamation that one finds summarized in the oxymoronic formula ‘The brain thinks’” (ibid., 14).

6. The problem of some notion of an ultimate referent has been encountered several times in this work. Concerning the historiographical operation, I held that the final referent was action in common, through the formation of the social bond and afferent identities. More precisely, on the plane of the literary representation of the historian, I adopted the concept of a reading contract between the writer and the public, by which the expectations, for example, of fiction or reality are marked out, in the case of a told story. A contract of the same nature is tacitly concluded between scientists and the enlightened public.

7. In What Is Called Thinking? I raise this as the problem of a third discourse: would it be an absolute discourse, another version of the reflective discourse combated here? Or another kind of discourse, either speculative as in Spinoza or the post-Kantians, or frankly mythical, and open to multiple transpositions?

8. François Azouvi, “La formation de l’individu comme sujet corporel à partir de Descartes,” in G. Cazzaniga and C. Zarka, eds., L’individuo nel pensiero moderno, secoli 16–18 (Pisa: Università degli Studi, 1995).

9. Alain Berthoz, Le Sens du mouvement (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991); Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997); J. Geanerod, Cognitive Neuroscience of Action (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Jean-Luc Petit, “Introduction générale,” in Jean-Luc Petit, ed., Les Neurosciences et la philosophie de l’action (Paris: Vrin, 1997), 1–37. For my part, I became interested in these developments as my approach to the social phenomenon intended by the historiographical operation increasingly coordinated representation and action. At the same time one encounters a thesis dear to George Canguilhem concerning the idea of a milieu. The milieu is not the ready-made world known to lived experience, but the environment that the living being shapes by its exploring activity. See his La Connaissance de la vie.

10. D. Schacter, ed., Memory Distortions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

11. Pierre Buser, Cerveau de soi, cerveau de l’autre (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998).

12. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

13. In his book, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), chapter 1, “Intuition as Method,” Gilles Deleuze observes that, for Bergson, the recourse to intuition does not mean giving free rein to the ineffable: “Intuition is neither a feeling, an aspiration, nor a disorderly sympathy, but a fully developed method, one of the most fully developed methods in philosophy” (13). The method of division, akin to that of Plato in the Philebus, is in this respect an important element of this method: not the One in opposition to the Many, posited in the generality, but two types of multiplicity (44–45). A model of multiplicity is proposed in the method of division which outlines a spectrum to examine, opposites to identify, and a mixed nature to reconstruct. It should be noted, again with Deleuze, that the alternation between dualism and monism scattered throughout Matter and Memory depends on the sort of multiplicity considered in each case and on the sort of mixed nature constructed. This remark is important, inasmuch as the identification of false problems constitutes another of the maxims dear to Bergson and can be considered a corollary of this distinction applied to the types of multiplicity; now the problem of the union of the soul and the body seems in many respects to be one of these false problems; posing problems well remains philosophy’s primary task.

14. A little later, Bergson will observe that in order to preserve images the brain must have the power to preserve itself. “Let us admit for a moment that the past survives in the form of a memory stored in the brain; it is then necessary that the brain, in order to preserve the memory, should preserve itself. But the brain, insofar as it is an image extended in space, never occupies more than the present moment: it constitutes, with all the rest of the material universe, an ever-renewed section of universal becoming. Either, then, you must suppose that this universe dies and is born again miraculously at each moment of duration, or you must attribute to it that continuity of existence which you deny to consciousness, and make of its past a reality which endures and is prolonged into its present. So that you have gained nothing by depositing the memories in matter, and you find yourself, on the contrary, compelled to extend to the totality of the states of the material world that complete and independent survival of the past which you have just refused to psychical states” (Matter and Memory, 149).

15. See above, part 1, chap. 1, “Plato: The Present Representation of an Absent Thing.”

16. Here Bergson edges close to the regions of the unconscious visited by Freud. Speaking of the expanding rings that link together in a chain, Bergson notes: “In this epitomized form our previous psychical life exists for us even more than the external world, of which we never perceive more than a very small part, whereas, on the contrary, we use the whole of our lived experience. It is true that we possess merely a digest of it, and that our former perceptions, considered as distinct individualities, seem to us to have completely disappeared or to appear again only at the bidding of their caprice. But this semblance of complete destruction or of capricious revival is due merely to the fact that actual consciousness accepts at each moment the useful and rejects in the same breath the superfluous” (ibid., 146). As far as the relation between the Bergsonian unconscious and the Freudian unconscious is concerned, this is a question we can only touch on in the third section of this chapter. Let us note, however, that Bergson was not unaware of this problem, as this passage from The Creative Mind, referred to by Deleuze, indicates: “Even my idea of integral conservation of the past has more and more found its empirical verification in the vast collection of experiments instituted by the disciples of Freud” (The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison [Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1946], 88).

17. If one were to sum up Matter and Memory in a single phrase, one would have to say that memory “preserves itself by itself.” This declaration is found in Bergson’s The Creative Mind, 87: I became “aware of the fact that inward experience in the pure state, in giving us a ‘substance’ whose very essence is to endure and consequently to prolong continually into the present an indestructible past, would have relieved me from seeking and would even have forbidden me to seek, where recollection is preserved. It preserves itself” (quoted by Deleuze, Bergsonism, 54).

18. Deleuze underscores this feature of the regressive process required by the path in the direction of the virtual: “We place ourselves at once in the past; we leap into the past as into a proper element. In the same way that we do not perceive things in ourselves, but at the place where they are, we only grasp the past at the place where it is in itself, and not in ourselves, in our present. There is therefore a ‘past in general’ that is not the particular past of a particular present but that is like an ontological element, a past that is eternal and for all time, the condition of the ‘passage’ of every particular present. It is the past in general that makes possible all pasts. According to Bergson, we first put ourselves back into the past in general: He describes in this way the leap into ontology” (Bergsonism, 56–57). On this occasion he cautions against a psychologizing interpretation of the Bergsonian text, as Jean Hyppolite had done before him in “Du bergsonisme à l’existentialisme,” Mercure de France (July 1949), and in “Aspects divers de la mémoire chez Bergson,” Revue internationale de philosophie (October 1949). However, for Bergson, the reference to psychology remains a noble one and preserves the distinction between psychology and metaphysics, to which we shall return again.

19. Frédéric Worms, Introduction à «Matière et Mémoire» de Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 187.

20. Deleuze devotes a chapter to the question: “One or Many Durations?” (Bergsonism, 37ff.).

21. See The Voluntary and the Involuntary, 447–48.

22. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970); Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998); Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

23. This paradox is all the more astonishing as it stands apart from the series of occurrences of the term “forgetting” in Being and Time; with one exception, the term expresses inauthenticity in the practice of care. Forgetting is not primordially related to memory; as forgetfulness of being, it is constitutive of the condition of inauthenticity. It is the “retreat” in the sense of the Greek lauthanein, to which Heidegger opposes the “non-retreat” of alētheia which we translate as “truth” (201–2). In a related sense, the chapter on Gewissen (conscience) deals with the “forgetfulness of conscience” as evading the summons issuing from the depths of its ownmost potentiality-of-being. It is still in the mode of inauthenticity that forgetting, contemporary with repetition, is revealed as “backing away from one’s ownmost having-been in a way that is closed off from oneself” (312). It is noted, however, that “this forgetting is not nothing, nor is it just a failure to remember; it is rather a ‘positive,’ ecstatic mode of having-been; a mode with a character of its own” (312). One can then speak of the “power of forgetting” intertwined with “everyday moods of taking care of what is nearby” (317). With the appearance of the present incuriosity what comes before is forgotten (319). Those who lose themselves in the world of tools, must forget themselves (324). One can then employ the oxymoron in speaking of “the forgetting that awaits” (337). Forgetting, in this sense, is characteristic of the they, “blind to possibilities,” “incapable of retrieving what has been” (357). Caught up in the present of care, forgetting signifies a temporality that “does not await” (374), irresolute, “in the mode of a making present that does not await but forgets” (377). As temporality sinks down into the vulgar conception of so-called “infinite” time, this movement is punctuated by “the self-forgetful ‘representation’ of the ‘infinitude’ of public time” (389). To say that “time passes” is to forget the moments as they slip by (389). Against the backdrop of this litany of inauthenticity, the sole allusion in Being and Time to the relation of forgetting to memory stands out: “Just as expectation is possible only on the basis of awaiting, remembering is possible only on the basis of forgetting, and not the other way around. In the mode of forgottenness, having-been primarily ‘discloses’ the horizon in which Da-sein, lost in the ‘superficiality’ of what is taken care of, can remember” (312). It is not clear whether the disavowal of forgetting entails the work of memory in its Verfallen, or whether the grace of recognition of the past could raise forgetting from this entanglement, this falling-prey, and elevate it to the level of the reserve of forgetting.

24. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998); The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France, trans. Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Let us note that the expression “a past that does not pass,” a synonym of obsession, is found in the controversy of the German historians. In this sense, evoking the works of Henry Rousso here should be joined to the discussion of his German colleagues: the difference in the situations in which the French historians and the German historians work could constitute by itself a theme for historians. The works conceived on either side of the Rhine intersect at another sensitive point: the relation between the judge and the historian (“What Court of Judgment for History?” in The Haunting Past, 48–83).

25. On the history of memory, see Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, 3. The tie is made here with Pierre Nora’s notion of “places of memory.”

26. See above, part 3, chap. 1, “The Historian and the Judge.” The same sort of evidence is also included in the file of the Franco-German wars and in the file of the great criminal trials: films (The Sorrow and the Pity), plays, etc.

27. “What is borrowed from psychoanalysis is simply a metaphor, not an explanatory schema” (The Vichy Syndrome, 11).

28. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide, trans. Mary Byrd Kelly (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).

29. Immanuel Kant, “The Right to Pardon,” The Metaphysics of Morals, part 1, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. John Ladd (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), Second Part, “Public Law,” general remarks E: “The Right to Punish and the Right to Pardon.” “The right to pardon a criminal, either by mitigating or by entirely remitting the punishment, is certainly the most slippery of all the rights of the sovereign. By exercising it he can demonstrate the splendor of his majesty and yet thereby wreak injustice to a high degree” (107–8). And Kant adds: “He can make use of this right of pardon only in connection with an injury committed against himself” (108).

30. Nicole Loraux devotes an entire book to this: La Cité divisée: L’Oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes (Paris: Payot, 1997). The path the book takes is significant: it begins with a discussion of the deep connection between “sedition” (stasis) and the mythical descendants of the “Children of the Night” in the figure of Eris, Discord (“Eris: The Archaic Form of the Greek Reflection on Politics,” ibid., 119). The analysis crosses through the levels of poetry moving toward the prose of the political, assumed and proclaimed. The book ends with the “politics of reconciliation” (195ff.) and attempts to measure the price paid in terms of denial with regard to the repressed ground of Discord. For reasons of personal strategy, I will follow the inverse order, moving from the amnesty decree and the pledge of non-memory in the direction of the invincible ground of “un-forgettable” Anger and Affliction, to borrow the strong language of the author (165).

31. Thierry Wangfleteten, “L’idéal de concorde et d’unanimité: Un rêve brisé de la Renaissance,” Histoire européenne de la tolérance du XVIe au XXe siècle (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1998).

32. Stéphane Gacon, “L’oubli institutionnel,” Oublier nos crimes: L’Amnésie nationale: Une spécificité française? (Paris: Autrement, 1994), 98–111. The presentation of the grounds of the proposed law regarding the abolition of certain criminal proceedings at the time of the Dreyfus affair contains the following statement: “We ask parliament to add forgetting to clemency and to approve the legal dispositions which, while safeguarding the interests of third parties, render passions powerless to revive that most painful conflict” (101).

EPILOGUE

1. The title of this epilogue was suggested to me by Domenico Jervolino’s excellent work, L’Amore difficile (Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1995).

2. Jean Nabert, Elements for an Ethic, trans. William J. Petrek (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), book 1, “The Givens of Reflection,” chapter 1, “The Experience of Fault,” 3–15. “Feelings nourish reflection, they are its matter: they make reflection, although free, appear as a moment within the history of desire that is constitutive of our being” (4).

3. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 2, Existential Elucidation, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), part 3, “Existenz as Unconditionality in Situation; Consciousness and Action: Guilt,” 215–18.

4. Freedom and Nature, general introduction, “Abstraction of the Fault,” 20–28.

5. Immanuel Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” [1763], Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. David Walford, with Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 203–41.

6. Nabert, Elements for an Ethic, 5.

7. Jean Nabert, Essai sur le mal (Paris: Aubier, 1970).

8. Jean Améry, Par delà le crime et le châtiment: Essai pour surmonter l’insurmontable (Paris: Actes Sud, 1995).

9. Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, Ce que l’homme fait à l’homme: Essai sur le mal politique (Paris: Seuil, 1995).

10. “Does the absolutely unjustifiable exist? In this question all questions converge, and we have said nothing if it remains unanswered” (Nabert, Essai sur le mal, 142).

11. See André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

12. Paul Ricoeur, “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 249–61.

13. Nicolai Hartmann, Ethics, trans. Stanton Coit (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932).

14. Quoted by Klaus M. Kodalle, Verzeihung nach Wendezeiten? Inaugural lectures given at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, June 2, 1994 (Erlangen and Jena: Palm and Enke, 1994).

15. Jacques Derrida, “Le siècle et le pardon,” Le Monde des débats (December 1999).

16. Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage [1946] (Munich: R. Piper, 1979); The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Dial Press, 1947).

17. Article 2219 of the French Civil Code bluntly states the argument of the effect of time: “Prescription is a means of acquiring or being freed from something due to a lapse of time, and under the conditions determined by the law.” Due to a certain lapse of time? By virtue of time, one person can be robbed at a certain moment and another amnestied with respect to his original violence. G. Bautry-Lacantinerie and Albert Tissier, in their Traité théorique et pratique de Droit civil: De la prescription (Paris: Sirey, 1924), cite one of Bourdaloue’s Sermons: “I call upon your experience. Look over the houses and the families distinguished by wealth and by the abundance of goods, those who pride themselves on being the most honorably founded, those who would appear to be models of probity and religion. If you were to move back to the source of this opulence, you would find, from the beginning and in the very principle, things that would make you tremble” (25).

18. Crimes against humanity were defined by the charters of the Nuremberg and Tokyo international military tribunals on August 8, 1945 and January 12, 1946. These texts distinguish: inhuman acts committed against the entire civilian population before and during the war, including assassination, extermination, enslavement, and deportation; and persecutions for political, racial, or religious reasons. The United Nations made this notion more precise in the Convention on Genocide of December 10, 1948. The Convention on Imprescriptibility of November 26, 1968 and the resolution of December 13, 1973 recommending international cooperation for the prosecution of criminals placed the seal of international law on the notion. Similarly, the notion of crimes against humanity was included in domestic French law by the December 26, 1964 law that “recognizes” the imprescriptibility of crimes against humanity and of genocide in reference to the 1946 United Nations resolution: these crimes are declared “by their nature imprescriptible.” French jurisprudence, as expressed by a series of decisions by the Cour de cassation (the Supreme Court of Appeal) on the occasion of trials in which these accusations were brought (the Touvier and Barbie affairs) has led to recognizing as imprescriptible crimes “the inhuman acts and the persecutions which, practicing a politics of ideological hegemony in the name of the state, were committed in a systematic manner, not only against persons by reason of their membership in a racial or religious community, but also against the adversaries of this politics regardless of the form of their opposition.” One initial common element concerns the existence of a concerted plan. A second common element: the victims are persons and never goods, unlike war crimes. The definition of a crime against humanity is henceforth established by Articles 211–1 and following of the new Criminal Code of 1994. Genocide is defined therein as a crime against humanity leading to the destruction of a group, voluntarily threatening life, physical or mental integrity, or submitting the members of a group discriminated against “to conditions of existence of a nature to lead to the total or partial destruction of the group, including abortion, sterilization, separation of adults in condition to procreate, forced transfer of children.” All these criminal acts foster the rupture of equality between human beings affirmed by the first and third Articles of the International Human Rights Charter.

19. It is in this way, I believe, that one can understand the variations on this subject by Vladimir Jankélévitch. In an initial book, titled L’Imprescriptible, first published in 1956 (Paris: Seuil, 1986) at the time of the polemics over the prescription of Hitlerian crimes, he argued, by his own admission, against forgiveness. But was this really the question? In any event, that book was, in its tone, more of an imprecation than an argument, in which the other side had no voice. He was right on one point: “All the legal criteria customarily applicable to crimes of law with respect to prescription fall short here” (21): “international” crime, crime against “the human essence,” crime against “the right to exist,” are all crimes beyond all proportion; “to forget these gigantic crimes against humanity would be a new crime against the human race.” This is precisely what I am calling the de facto unforgivable. His study on Le Pardon (Paris: Aubier, 1967) takes a different tack, where the time of forgiveness is identified with the time of forgetting. This is, then, the time that wears away (“L’Usure,” 30). A third approach followed in 1971 with a title in the form of a question, Pardonner? (Paris: Pavillon, reprinted in the 1986 edition of L’Imprescriptible). Here, we read the famous exclamation: “Forgiveness! But have they ever asked us for forgiveness?” (50). “It is the distress and the destitution of the guilty that alone would give a sense to and a reason for forgiveness” (50). Here we enter into a different problematic, where in fact a certain reciprocity would be reestablished by the act of seeking forgiveness. Jankélévitch is well aware of the apparent contradiction: “Between the absolute of the law of love and the absolute of wicked freedom there exists a tear that cannot be entirely ripped apart. We have unceasingly attempted to reconcile the irrationality of evil with the all-powerfulness of love. Forgiveness is as strong as evil but evil is as strong as forgiveness” (foreword, 14–15).

20. Kodalle, who is by no means suspected of complacency with regard to cheap exoneration, is nonetheless severe toward “arrogant hypermoralism” (Verzeihung nach Wendezeiten? 36) that is paired with it. Confronting the same question after World War I, Max Weber denounced those fellow citizens who, as vanquished, indulged in self-flagellation and in hunting down the guilty: “Everyone with a manly and controlled attitude would tell the enemy: ‘We lost the war. You have won it. That is all over. Now let us discuss what conclusions must be drawn according to the objective interests that came into play and what is the main thing in view of the responsibility towards the future which above all burdens the victor.’” “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 118. Twenty-five years later, Karl Jaspers asks for even greater contrition from his fellow countrymen.

21. Cf. P. Gifford, “Socrates in Amsterdam: The Uses of Irony in ‘La Chute,’” Modern Language Review 73 (1978): 499–512.

22. Olivier Abel, “Tables du pardon: Géographie des dilemmes et parcours bibliographique,” in Le Pardon: Briser la dette et l’oubli (Paris: Autrement, 1992), 208–36.

23. Ibid., 211–16.

24. See Walter Schweidler, “Verzeihung und geschichtliche Identität, über die Grenzen der kollektiven Entschuldigung,” Salzburger Jahrbuch für Philosophie 44–45 (1999–2000).

The author discusses the public excuses of political leaders in America, Australia, Japan, as well as the South African Truth and Reconciliation commission, and even the request for forgiveness formulated by Catholic bishops and the pope himself for the Crusades and the Inquisition. What is in question here is a form of moral responsibility that implies the existence of a “moral memory” on the scale of a community, in other words, the recognition of a moral dimension in collective memory, a moral dimension that would be the source of a “historical identity” for a human community. Memory, the author says, is also something public related to moral judgment. He, too, admits the existence of moral dilemmas relating to the problematic of perplexio: the transmission of guilt in the sphere of hyperpolitical human solidarity should not, as a matter of fact, feed the attempts at exoneration of individuals on the plane of what we earlier called moral guilt. Exoneration can indeed be more surreptitious than accusation, which on its own side is in danger of exaggeration. According to Schweidler, the solidarity at issue here belongs to those duties that Kant called “imperfect,” and which would be better categorized in terms of Augustine’s ordo amoris.

25. In “Love and Justice,” in Figuring the Sacred (315–29), I opposed the logic of superabundance proper to what I termed the economy of the gift to the logic of equivalence proper to the economy of justice, with its weights and measures, even in the application of penalties. Cf. also Luc Boltanski, L’Amour et la Justice comme compétences.

26. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967). Mauss’s work is contemporary with that of Malinowski in the same field and with the work of the French sociologist Georges Davy in the sociology of law and institutions, on pledging one’s word (1922).

27. It is this language that Claude Lévi-Strauss questions in his well-known Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987): the notions received from the populations studied are not scientific notions. They do not clarify what is to be explained but are a part of it. Notions like mana represent the surplus of meaning, the free-floating signifier, which is available to man to understand the world. To move beyond mere repetition, tautology, science can see only the pure form of the relation of exchange in one of its prescientific interpretations. Our problem is quite different: it concerns the persistence of this archaic structure on the phenomenological plane of practice and of the understanding we have of the residual forms of nonmarket exchange in the age of science. There is a discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s objections in Vincent Descombes, “Les Essais sur le don,” in Les Institutions du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1996), 237–66. It is framed by a logical analysis of triadic relations and includes the exchange of gifts as a special case (giver, gift, recipient). Descombes holds that Lévi-Strauss’s reproach against Mauss for having simply taken the description offered by the participants in the gift transactions in question does not concern the legal character of the obligation presiding over the exchange. To seek the efficient cause of the obligation in an unconscious structure of mind would be to treat obligation as an explanation for which one would have given only an illusory version in terms of “mystical cement.” Unlike explanation in terms of the unconscious infrastructures of the mind, “Mauss’s Gift is written in a descriptive style that cannot help but satisfy philosophers, who, along with Peirce, hold that the relation of the gift includes the infinite and exceeds any possible reduction to brute facts, or yet again, with Wittgenstein, that the rule is not an efficient cause of conduct (a psychological or other sort of mechanism) but that it is a norm that people follow because they want to make use of it to guide themselves in life” (257). It seems to me that the question raised here is that of the relation between the logic of triadic relations (giving something to someone) and the obligation to put it to use in concrete situations of a historical nature. Our problem here then legitimately arises, the persistence of the presumed archaic nature of potlatch in the practice of nonmarket exchange in the age of science and technology.

28. From the start of the investigation conducted among contemporary populations as diverse as North-Western American tribes (from whom the term “potlatch” comes), to tribes from Melanesia, Polynesia, and Australia, the question is raised, for us the readers, regarding the persistence of traces left in our contractual relations by this archaic element in a sphere of exchange prior to the establishment of markets and of their main invention, currency properly speaking. One finds there, Mauss notes, a form of functioning underlying our morality and our economy—“we believe that in them we have discovered one of the bases of social life” (The Gift, 2). What this form of exchange between the offering and the counter-offering values is competition in munificence, excessiveness in the gift which gives rise to the gift in return. Such is the archaic form of exchange and its basis. Mauss discerns the relics of this form in ancient laws (very ancient Roman law) and ancient economies (the pledges of Germanic law). It is Mauss’s “moral conclusions” that are therefore of interest to us here: “Our morality is not solely commercial,” exclaims the moralist encouraged by the sociologist (63). He adds, “Today the ancient principles are making their influence felt upon the rigors, abstractions, and inhumanities of our codes. . . . This reaction against Roman and Saxon insensibility in our regime is a good thing” (64). And so is joining politeness to hospitality under the aegis of generosity. Note the unsettling movement of the allegedly deadly gift, as is confirmed by the double meaning of the word gift in Germanic languages: a gift on the one hand, a poison on the other. How could we fail to think in this regard of Plato’s pharmakon in the Phaedrus, which has occupied so much of our attention?

29. I will venture to say that I find something of biblical hyperbole even in the political utopia of Kant’s “perpetual peace”: a utopia that confers on every person the right to be received in a foreign country “as a guest and not as an enemy,” universal hospitality constituting in truth a political approximation of the gospel love of enemies.

30. Peter Kemp, L’Irremplaçable (Paris: Corti, 1997).

31. Sophie Pons, Aparteid: L’aveu et le pardon (Paris: Bayard, 2000), 13. The commission, composed of twenty-nine persons representing religious, political, and civic groups, contained three committees: the Committee on Human Rights Violations, whose mission was to determine the nature, the cause, and the scope of the abuses committed between 1960 and 1994, and which was granted broadened powers of investigation and summons; the Committee on Reparation and Damages, whose mission was to identify victims and to study their grievances in view of indemnification, material aid, and psychological support; the Amnesty Committee, charged with examining requests for pardon, under the condition of complete confessions proving the political motivation of the accused acts.

32. “The greatest innovation of the South Africans had to do with a principle, that of individual and conditional amnesty, in opposition to the general amnesties issued in Latin America under the pressure of the military. It was not a matter of erasing but of revealing, not of covering over crimes but, rather, of uncovering them. The former criminals were obliged to participate in rewriting national history in order to be pardoned: immunity had to be deserved, it implied public recognition of one’s crimes and the acceptance of the new democratic rules. . . . From the earliest times, it has been said that every crime deserves punishment. It is at the tip of the African continent, at the initiative of a former political politician and under the guidance of a man of the church, that a country explored a new path, that of forgiveness for those who recognize their offenses” (ibid., 17–18).

33. To the political weight of what was left unsaid must be added the teachings of contempt, the obsession with ancestral fears, the ideological, even theological, justifications of injustice, the geopolitical arguments dating from the cold war period and the whole set of motivations concerning personal and collective identity. All of this forms an immense mass to lift.

34. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

35. A step in this direction was also taken by Jankélévitch in L’Irréversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1974). The irreversible is an expression of the fact that man cannot return to the past, nor can the past return as past. The irrevocable signifies that “having been”—mainly, “having done”—cannot be annihilated: what has been done cannot be undone. This leads to two inverse impossibilities. Nostalgia, the first sentiment explored by Jankélévitch, belongs on the side of the irreversible. It is regret over what is no longer, which one would like to retain, relive. Remorse is something else: it is the desire to efface, to “unlive” (219). Remorse opposes its specifically ethical character to the aestheticizing and intensely felt character of regret. It is no less poignant for this. If “forgetting does not annihilate the irrevocable” (233), if the latter is ineffaceable, one must not count upon temporal erosion to revoke the past but upon the act that unbinds. One must then keep in mind the idea that “revocation leaves behind it an irreducible residue” (237). This is the ineluctable element of mourning. The unpardonable is touched upon here, and with it the irreparable, ultimate vestiges of “having been” and of “having committed.” The impossible undone, as Shakespeare says in Macbeth (241). At the end of this chapter Jankélévitch pronounces the phrase printed on the door of his home and placed at the start of this book: “He who has been, henceforth cannot not have been: henceforth this mysterious and profoundly obscure fact of having been is his viaticum for all eternity” (275).

36. The strict polarity between the schemata of binding and unbinding has produced an interesting exploration of its resources of articulation in new areas. François Ost applies to the temporality of law “a four-beat measure”: binding the past (memory), unbinding the past (forgiveness), binding the future (promising), unbinding the future (questioning). The time of which the law speaks “is the present, for it is in the present that the four-beat measure of time is played.” Le Temps du droit (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999), 333.

37. In Matthew 18:35, we read: “And that is how my heavenly Father will deal with you, unless you each forgive your brother from your hearts.” Or, again: “For if you forgive others the wrongs that they have done, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, then the wrongs you have done will not be forgiven by your Father” (Matthew 6:14–15). Luke 17:3: “If your brother wrongs you, reprove him; and if he repents, forgive him. Even if he wrongs you seven times in a day and comes back to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’ you are to forgive him.”

38. On this point, Hannah Arendt marks a moment of hesitation: “It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable. This is the true hallmark of those offences which, since Kant, we call ‘radical evil’ and about whose nature so little is known, even to us who have been exposed to one of their rare outbursts on the public scene. All we know is that we can neither punish nor forgive such offences and that they therefore transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their appearance. Here, where the deed itself dispossesses us of all power, we can indeed only repeat with Jesus: ‘It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea’” (The Human Condition, 241).

39. Nietzsche opens the Second Essay with a cymbal clash: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding man? That this problem has been solved to a large extent must seem all the more remarkable to anyone who appreciates the strength of the opposing force, that of forgetfulness.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 57. And how is it resolved? By the promise set over against such forgetting. Yet forgetting, for its part, is not taken to be a simple force of inertia, but rather as “an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression.” Promise-making therefore figures in Nietzsche’s genealogy as a second-order conquest, a conquest over forgetting which itself conquers the agitation of life: “That is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette” (158). Memory works through the encounter with such forgetting, not just or this or that memory, not with memory as the guardian of the past, preserving the past event, the over and done with past, but with that memory that confers on man the power to keep promises, to be constant to himself; the memory of ipseity, I would call it, a memory that, in ordaining the future on the basis of past commitments, makes man “calculable, regular, necessary,” hence “able to stand security for his own future” (158). It is against this proud background that unfolds that other “lugubrious affair”: debt, fault, guilt. See here a wonderful book, Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

40. “No other Christian church, no other religion has accorded as much importance as Catholicism to the detailed and repeated confession of sins. We continue to be marked by this incessant invitation and this formidable contribution to self-knowledge.” Jean Delumeau, L’Aveu et le pardon: Les difficultés de la confession, XIII–XVIII siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1964, 1992). One question is whether granting forgiveness at the price of confession has been more a source of security than of fear and guilt, as Delumeau pondered in the course of his works on La Peur en Occident (1978) and Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th to 18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990). “To make the sinner confess in order to receive divine forgiveness from the priest and to leave reassured: such has been the aim of the Catholic Church, especially from the time it made private confession obligatory once a year and required in addition of the faithful the detailed confession of all their ‘mortal’ sins” (L’Aveu et le pardon, 9). It is another matter to clarify the presuppositions of a system that confers the “power of the keys” to its clergy, set apart from the community of the faithful, in the triple role of “doctor,” “judge,” and “father” (27).

41. As the figure of the Anti-Christ—and the jailer of Christ, he who vanquished the three satanic temptations according to the Gospels, but who was vanquished by history—the Grand Inquisitor offers to the multitude a peaceful conscience and the remission of sins in exchange for submission: “Did we not love mankind, so meekly acknowledging their feebleness, lovingly lightening their burden, and permitting their weak nature even sin with our sanction? Why hast Thou come now to hinder us? . . . But with us all will be happy and will no more rebel nor destroy one another as under Thy freedom. . . . We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we will allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves. And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as their saviors who have taken on themselves their sins before God. And they will have no secrets from us” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamozov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 305–8.

42. “Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus of Nazareth, whose insights into this faculty can be compared in their originality and unprecedentedness with Socrates’ insights into the possibilities of thought, must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of man. The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. . . . It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their glad ‘tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us’” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 246–47).

43. Hannah Arendt’s union of the pair that forgiveness and promising form together on the basis of their relation to time is not the only possible one. As the author of The Human Condition, she chose the themes of irreversibility and unpredictability, whereas Jankélévitch chose those of irreversibility and irrevocability. Olivier Abel, in unpublished work that I had the opportunity to consult, refers to the temporal sequence constituted by the capacity to begin, to enter into an exchange, to which he joins promising, the capacity of maintaining oneself in the exchange, under the heading of the idea of justice, along with that of moving outside of the exchange, where this is forgiveness. Between these two poles, he says, stretches the interval of ethics.

44. More precisely, speaking of the conditional forgiveness explicitly requested, Derrida continues: “And who then is no longer through and through the guilty party but already an other, and better than the guilty person. To this extent, and on this condition, it is no longer the guilty person as such whom one forgives” (“Le Siècle et le pardon”). The same, I would say, but potentially other, though not an other.

45. Annick Charles-Saget, ed., Retour, repentir et constitution de soi (Paris: Vrin, 1998). The essays from the Centre A. J. Festugière of Paris-X Nanterre which are collected here deal with the interconnections between biblical repentance and the return to the Principle in Neoplatonism. The former takes root in the Hebraic Teshuvah as a return to God, to the Covenant, to the straight path, under the sign of the Law. Mark’s Gospel, in turn, evokes the baptism of repentance (metanoia) of John the Baptist (metanoia will be conversio in Latin). Christian repentance presents itself, then, less as a “return” than as an inaugural gesture. The Greek of the Septuagint and of the wisdom writings borrows from the figure of the return, of the “Turn,” of the epistropha. Plotinus’ Enneads, on the other hand, propose the purely philosophical movement of the epistrophē, which is a quest for knowledge at the same time as an affective impetus. With Proclus, the return to the Principle forms a closed circle with itself. It is only with the school of inwardness (see above, part 1, chapter 3) that the question of the contribution of returning or of repentance to the constitution of the self is posed—and, with this question, the series of paradoxes evoked here.

46. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in Religion and Rational Theology, edited by Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni, translated by George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 39–215.

47. “Granted that some supernatural cooperation is also needed to his becoming good or better, yet, whether this cooperation only consist in the diminution of obstacles or be also a positive assistance, the human being must nonetheless make himself antecedently worthy of receiving it; he must accept this aid (which is no small matter), i.e., he must incorporate this positive increase of power into his maxim: in this way alone is it possible that the good be imputed to him, and that he be acknowledged a good human being” (Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 89–90). A philosophy of religion within the boundaries of mere reason cannot allow itself to choose between the two interpretations that concern personal existentiel commitment, guided by one or another of the traditions of reading and interpretation within the framework of the Religions of the Book. The final section of the “General Observation” exhorts each person to make use of his original predisposition to good in the hope that “what does not lie within his power will be made good by cooperation from above” (95).

48. “How it is possible that a naturally evil human being should make himself into a good human being surpasses every concept of ours. For how can an evil tree bear good fruit? But, since by our previous admission a tree which was (in its predisposition) originally good did bring forth bad fruits, and since the fall from good into evil (if we seriously consider that evil originates from freedom) is no more comprehensible than the ascent from evil back to the good, then the possibility of this last cannot be disputed. For, in spite of that fall, the command that we ought to become better human beings still resounds unabated in our souls; consequently, we must also be capable of it, even if what we can do is of itself insufficient and, by virtue of it, we only make ourselves receptive to a higher assistance inscrutable to us” (ibid., 90).

49. André Breton, L’Amour fou (Paris: Gallimard, 1937).

50. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–64.

51. This would, in truth, be the case if the future could save the history of the vanquished from oblivion: everything would finally be “recalled.” At this future point, revolution and redemption would coincide.

52. Olivier Abel, “Ce que pardon vient faire dans l’histoire,” Esprit, no. 7 (1993): 60–72. Note the proximity of this problematic to Hegel’s in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which forgiveness rests on a reciprocal standing down of the parties, on each side giving up its partiality.

53. Harald Weinrich, Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Munich: Ch. Beck, 1997).

54. Marc Augé, Les Formes de l’oubli (Paris: Payot, 1998).

55. Søren Kierkegaard, “What We Learn from the Lilies in the Field and from the Birds of the Air,” Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 155–212.