History Bump

Certeau's title, L'Écriture de l'histoire, does not translate readily into English (xx).

Conley summaries the four parts of The Writing of History (xiii-xiv) and lists the "major tenets" of Certeau's work, all of which are included in this book (xiv).

Certeau's ideal historiographer will attend to the ways in which a history appropriates the past and legitimates its own work; this reveals the values of the time in which the history is written (x-xi). Unlike the chronicler, who transcribes, the historiographer translates (xxi).

It is an "obsessive" relation with death that enables the writing of history. The writing of history depends on a clear distinction between past and present; hence historians regard death as "a total social fact," even though the writing of history brings the past to life (viii). "The labor of writing is ongoing, perpetually dividing and suturing the past and present." Writers' awareness of this movement assumes allegorical proportions and "gives recognizable contour to evidence or historical fact" (ix).

Metaphor fragments the past and also makes historians' representation of it possible; hence Certeau emphasizes the role of language in historiography (ix). Histories describe events in balanced allegories, and the metaphors in which they are expressed trigger representations that are grounded in the affective (xv).

Both historians and literary analysts focus on the rhetoric of documents, deploying a rhetorical notion of the unconscious "in order to disengage how languages of the past are always in a silent dialogue with unyielding problems of mimesis" (x).

Historical representations are inevitably local, partial, limited (ix-x), yet these discursive formations determine the ideology and the limits of representation. In the study of documents, invention amounts to selection. Because selection implies an effacement that may derive from an unconscious will to repress, the "criteria of selection" are key to both literary and historical study (x). Certeau explicates this phenomenon through psychoanalytic theory, focusing on ways in which historians project their own ideology and politics onto their representations of the past as they decide what to include, why it is meaningful, and how it should be represented (xiv-xv).

Reality may be a matter of strategic selection (xvii). From Lacanian psychoanalysis, Certeau appropriates the term réel to indicate "a world of unmarked space and time that cannot be mediated by language or signs." Although events do occur in nature, historical representations of them are cultural, burdened with typologies that affect our understanding of those events. These typologies are transmitted through the language that purports to convey events (xvi-xvii). Certeau's use of the word object locates it within the realm of the réel, the focus of historians' efforts yet out of reach of historians' figurations (xviii).

Since the time of Descartes, reason has supplanted faith in the making of knowledge (xii); "official rationales" are offered for "mystical expression" (xiii), with its association with the body and its engagement with (rather than denial of) death (xviii-xix).