The ethical space of historiography

Journal of Historical Sociology

Volumn 14, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 467-480

  Jackson, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035603581     PISSN: 09521909     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-6443.00156     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge 1994) p. 15.
2. Joyce Appelby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton 1994) p. 4.
3. Arnaldo Momigliano 'The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White's Tropes.' Comparative Criticism Vol. 3 ed. E.S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981) p. 261.
4. In other words, how is history ethical?This paper is, in a way, an attempt to flesh out Michael Dintenfass' recent call for 'an ethical turn in historiographical theorizing, for reconfiguring history as a discipline of the good as well as the true.' See Michael Dintenfass, Truth's Other: Ethics, The History of the Holocaust and Historiographical Theory After the Linguistic Turn.' History and Theory 39 (1) 2000 pp. 1-20
5. Appelby et al. pp. 4-8.
6. Dintenfass, p. 19.
7. W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn trans. Michael Hulse (New York: The Harvill Press, 1998).
8. One needs to be careful to problematize the relationship between 'history' and 'historiography' reflexively. I argue from within a position put forward by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Barthes, Foucault, White and Ankersmit that 'history' is only extant textually; 'history' can only have meaning within a perspective or framework semiotically constituted. History is historiographic. I don't want to suggest that these are separable categories or distinct entities. That would be too much. For 'so intimate is the relation of word to event that the term "history" refers, as Hegel observed, both to the res gestae, the historical object, and to the historia rerum gestarum, the verbal account of these events.' See Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Rememberance: History, Heterology and the Nameless Others (Chicago: Chicago University Press 1998) p. 3. Nevertheless, historical literature is beholden to certain conceptualizations of the real in ways that fictional productions are not. One cannot make claims that offer themselves as true yet which bear no resemblance to communities' accepted procedures for adjudicating discursive claims to truth and still call these claims historical. For instance, the historical figure we accept as the referent for the signifier 'Alexander the Great' cannot also be said to have slain the referent we sign 'William Wallace'. To suggest otherwise is to make, to the extent that we use the term 'fiction', a fictional claim. The example might be trite, but the extent to which the epistemic and the ethical tasks of the historian are entwined becomes far more apparent when we consider the effect on maintaining a semantic distinction between fact and fiction by claims like: 'the Holocaust never happened.' Cataclysmic events like the Holocaust force a certain urgency upon issues of historiographic accountability because they implicate a responsibility upon everyone who participates in a modern way of life whose values (efficiency, bureaucracy, rationality, systematicity, etc.) may contain immanently the violence of genocidal expression.
9. F.R. Ankersmit, 'Historiography and Postmodernism.' History and Theory 28 (1989) 137-153.
10. 'Every story produced by a historian implies the elimination of alternative stories.' A. Momigliano, 'The Rhetoric of History… ' p. 260.
11. 'The historian's job is to discover those inscriptions that have been erased or overshadowed by the myths through which we have learned to see.' Barbara Johnson, 'Erasing Panama,' in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1987), p. 67.
12. John Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997) p. 135.
13. Wyschogrod speaks of the present as a tense infected by the promise of 'futurity': 'an impossible new time in which the future as promise cannot lose its sense of presence. A historical artifact is… a gift of the past to a present affected with futurity. What is inscribed in the gift is not only the vouloir dire of a people that has been silenced, of the dead others, but is, in addition, what giving wants to say.' An Ethics of Remembrance, p. 248.
14. E. Levinas, from Totality and Infinity as quoted in Specters of Marx p. 23.
15. E. Levinas, from Totality and Infinity as quoted in Specters of Marx p. 23.
16. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, as quoted in Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press 1988), p. 40.
17. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, as quoted in Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press 1988), p. 40.
18. ibid.
19. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 97.
20. Interestingly, justice, for Derrida, has the structure of the gift: 'This 'idea of justice' seems to be irreducible in its affirmative character, in its demands of the gift without exchange, without circulation, without recognition of gratitude, without economic circularity, without calculation and without rules, without reason and without rationality.' 'Force of Law' in Deconstructian and the Possibility of Justice ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Grey Carlson (New York: Routledge 1992), p. 25. The vulnerable moment of giving over is the momentary gesture to the singular. Its necessary reception within an economy of meaning and determination renders the gesture to the singular within an economy of debt and reciprocity.
21. Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering p. 248.
22. For considerations of ending, see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Toronto: Maxwell MacMillan 1992); Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? (London: Verso 1992), and Elizabeth D. Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crises of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
23. For considerations of ending, see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Toronto: Maxwell MacMillan 1992); Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? (London: Verso 1992), and Elizabeth D. Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crises of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
24. For considerations of ending, see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Toronto: Maxwell MacMillan 1992); Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? (London: Verso 1992), and Elizabeth D. Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crises of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
25. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 15.
26. Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1987), p. 30-1.
27. Gayatri Chakravorry Spivak, 'The Post-Modern Condition: The End of Politics?,' in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge 1990), p. 18.
28. J. Derrida, 'The Villanova Roundtable,' Deconstruction in a Nutshell, edited with commentary by John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press 1997), p. 6.
29. Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1994), p. 73.
30. Of Grammatology, p. 24.
31. Of Grammatology, p. 5.
32. Barbara Johnson, 'The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida' The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psycho-analytic Reading, ed. J.P. Muller and W. J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1988), p. 213.
33. James Atlas, 'W.G. Sebald: A Profile', The Paris Review, 151, 1999, 278-295, p. 282; see also Susan Sontag, 'A Mind in Mourning,' Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 2000, pp. 3-4.
34. James Atlas, 'W.G. Sebald: A Profile', The Paris Review, 151, 1999, 278-295, p. 282; see also Susan Sontag, 'A Mind in Mourning,' Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 2000, pp. 3-4.
35. Barbara Johnson, 'Erasing Panama' p. 67, see also Jacques Derrida, 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,' Contexts for Criticism, ed. Donald Keesey (Palo Alto: Mayfield 1987), p. 329.
36. Barbara Johnson, 'Erasing Panama' p. 67, see also Jacques Derrida, 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,' Contexts for Criticism, ed. Donald Keesey (Palo Alto: Mayfield 1987), p. 329.
37. See Tim Woods, 'Specters of History: Ethics and Postmodern Fictions of Temporality,' in Critical Ethics: Text, Theory, and Responsibility, ed. Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods (New York: St. Martin's Press 1999), pp. 105-119.
38. E. Wyschogrod, p. 32.
39. ibid., p. 33.