The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility PDF
Preview The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility
K The Ethos of History L MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY Studies in Historical Cultures General Editor: Stefan Berger Founding Editor: Jörn Rüsen Bridging the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory, this series crosses the boundaries between both academic disciplines and cultural, social, political and historical contexts. In an age of rapid globalization, which tends to manifest itself on an economic and political level, locating the cultural practices involved in generating its underlying historical sense is an increasingly urgent task. For a full volume listing please see back matter. T E H HE THOS OF ISTORY Time and Responsibility Edited by Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com First published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2018 Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78533-884-7 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-885-4 ebook Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction Situating the Ethos of History 1 Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson Chapter 1. Towards a New Ethos of History? 14 Aleida Assmann Chapter 2. The Vampire, the Undead and the Anxieties of Historical Consciousness 32 Claudia Lindén and Hans Ruin Chapter 3. History, Justice and the Time of the Imprescriptible 54 Victoria Fareld Chapter 4. Narrating Pasts for Peace? A Critical Analysis of Some Recent Initiatives of Historical Reconciliation through ‘Historical Dialogue’ and ‘Shared History’ 70 Berber Bevernage Chapter 5. Psychoanalysis and the Indeterminacy of History 94 Joan W. Scott Chapter 6. Does Time Have a Gender? Queer Temporality, Anachronism and the Desire for the Past 112 Kristina Fjelkestam Chapter 7. ‘The One Who Should Die Is the One Who Shall Live’: Prophetic Temporalities in Contemporary Colonial Brazil 126 Patricia Lorenzoni vi Contents Chapter 8. Radical Time in (Post)Colonial Narratives 144 Stefan Helgesson Chapter 9. Engaged History 160 Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback Chapter 10. Speakers for the Dead: Digital Memory and the Construction of Identity 175 Alana M. Vincent Chapter 11. History Begins in the Future: On Historical Sensibility in the Age of Technology 192 Zoltán Boldizsár Simon Afterword 210 Hans Ruin Index 214 Acknowledgements We wish, fi rst of all, to express our gratitude to Hans Ruin, without whose intellectual guidance as the research leader of the ‘Time, Memory, and Rep- resentation’ initiative, this volume would never have materialized. Thanks are also due to the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, whose generous support facilitated this intellectual endeavour. As we con- ceptualized this volume, Stefan Berger’s enthusiastic reception of our initial proposal was likewise essential in facilitating its genesis. I N T R O D U C T I O N Situating the Ethos of History Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson History is no longer what it used to be. With the advent of poststructuralism in the 1970s, theorists of history would pay increasing attention to the forms, assumptions and disciplinary conditions of historiography, rather than the ‘thing itself’. This diff ered from earlier twentieth-century debates between, for example, liberal and Marxist historians who struggled over the very con- tent and truth of history – its ontology, one might say. Regardless of ideo- logical orientation, and irrespective of any pragmatic diffi culties in securing archival evidence, the actuality of history as that which ‘really happened’ – to allude to Leopold von Ranke’s famous motto – was never really questioned in those earlier exchanges. The poststructuralist turn unsettled this attachment to the real by re- framing history as a regime of knowledge and mode of representation rather than an empirical science; epistemology, not ontology, took the front seat. History could now be theorized in terms of ‘discourse’ (Foucault) or ‘meta- history’ (White), which unmoored old truth-claims. Instead of being au- thorized as the science of the past, history could be defi ned as irreducibly involved in the construction, distribution and exercise of power. Contrary to earlier varieties of ideology critique – the notion of ‘false consciousness’, after all, presupposed the possibility of truth – there was, in the most extreme versions of poststructuralist theory, nothing ‘behind’ the narrative of the past. Nothing, that is, besides the conventions of genre and the will to power that governed these conventions. The strongest thinker in this vein was Hayden White, whose mark on the fi eld is impossible to ignore. By questioning the authority that historical Notes for this section begin on page 12.
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