The sublime dissociation of the past: Or how to be(come) what one is no longer

History and Theory

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 295-323

  Ankersmit, F R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN   (Netherlands)

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EID: 34347263148     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00170     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. But perhaps one must be a philosopher in order to be capable of this naivete. For the philosopher, with his love of distinctions, will argue that the notion of "forgetting p" does not necessarily presuppose the knowledge that p.The former merely is an operation that should be executed on p, and its meaning is, as such, independent of the knowledge that p. So there is no contradiction between the command to forget p and not-knowing that p. But in real life the notion of "forgetting p" is transparent with regard to p, so that, paradoxically, we cannot forget p unless we know that p. Of course that is the point of Dickinson's poem quoted above. As Jon Elster has shown, the distinction can be formalized in terms of the distinction between internal and external negation. If we have the proposition "S believes that p," its internal negation is "S believes not-p," whereas its external negation is "it is not true that S believes that p." If applied to for getting, the distinction is described by Elster as follows: "forgettting or indifference is an external negation, the simple absence of the awareness that x, whereas the will to forget requires the awareness of the absence of x, hence of x. Willing to forget is as if one wanted to create darkness by ligh t." See J. Elster, Psychologic politique: Veyne, Zinoviev, Tocqueville (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990), 82
2. Elster, Psychologie politique, 81.
3. For a magisterial exposition of the history of this topos, see R. Koselleck, "Historia magistra vitae: Über die Auflosung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte," in idem, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979)
4. L. von Ranke, "De historia et politices cognatione atque discrimine oratio," in idem, Sämmtliche Werke. Band 24 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1872)
5. F. Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen unci Nachtheil der Historic fur das Leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970), 12.13
6. For the view that "Basel" can be conceived of as a kind of missing link between the Enlightenment and German historicism, see L. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
7. 2 is concerned. And in this way the seeming contradiction of a forgetting and a remembering at one and the same time can be solved satisfactorily. For a further analysis of the different levels of forgetting, see Elster, Psychologic politique, 74ff
8. K. Mannheim, "Das konservative Denken," in idem, Wissenssoziologie (Neuwied am Rhein:Luchterhand, 1970), 408-509
9. Novalis (pen-name of the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg), Bliithenstaub I (Heidelberg: L. Schneider, 1953), 340
10. "Was einst Jubel und Jammer war, muss nun Erkenntnis werden" in Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Bern: Verlag Hallwag, 1947). 51
11. G. W. F. Hegel, Voriesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band II-IV (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1976), 644
12. See, for example, my "Trauma und Leiden: Eine vergessene Quelle des westlichen historischen Bewusstseins," in Westliches Geschichtsdenken: Eine interkulturetle Debatte, ed. J. Rüsen (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 127-146
13. E. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 123
14. R. Leys, "Shell-Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory," in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, ed. P. Antze and M. Lambek (New York: Routledge, 1996), 104
15. For a clinical definition of dissociation, see E. Cardena, "The Domain of Dissociation," in Dissociation: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. S. J. Lynn and J. W. Rhue (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 63- 64: "in its broadest sense, 'dissociation' simply means that two or more mental processes or contents are not associated or integrated. It is usually assumed that these dissociated elements should be integrated in conscious awareness, memory or identity." In the 1880s Pierre Janet had already lengthily commented on how traumatic experience may give rise to a dissociation (or "désagrégation" as he called if) of the memory of trauma from normal memory
16. See my "Burke and Historicism," in F. R. Ankersmit, Political Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001)
17. V. Hugo, Oeuvres Complétes. Vol. XIII. Quatre-vingt treize (Paris: J. Hetzel, n.d.),419: "he felt something coming close to what a tree must feel when it is torn from its roots." Nietzsche happened to use exactly the same metaphor when describing what he referred to as "critical history": "in that case one takes a critical look at one's past, then one attacks with a knife one's own roots, then one cruelly overrides all that demands piety and reverence"
18. (Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historic fur das Lehen, 33). From the perspective of the contrast between Nietzsche and Hegel that was dicussed above, it is of interest that Nietzsche explicitly says here that one cuts oneself loose from one's roots-and that he does not present this as something that history may force us to do. Obviously, this suggests again how much Nietzsche (unlike both the historicists and Hegel) is inclined to place the self in the position of a historical transcendental ego that is itself outside or beyond history
19. S. Freud, "Trauer und Melancholic" in idem, Studienausgabe Band II. Psychologic des Unbewussten (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer TBV, 1982), 203
20. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophic der Weltgeschichte, 647.
21. Hegel's point has been most forcefully put by Arthur Danto in his claim about what makes a historical period into what it is: "and something of the same sort is true for the historical period considered as an entity. It is a period solely from the perspective of the historian, who sees it from without; for those who lived in the period it would just be the way life was lived. And asked, afterward, what it was like to have lived then, they may answer from the outside, from the historian's perspective, From the inside there was no answer to be given; it was simply the way things were. So when the members of a period can give an answer in terms satisfactory to the historian, the period will have exposed its outward surface and in a sense be over, as a period." See A. C. Danto. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 207
22. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen üher die Philosophic der Weltgesckichte. Band I .Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1970), 165
23. H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 117
24. Louis O. Mink. Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 50-58
25. Danto, Transfiguration, 206.
26. A. C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 339
27. The notion of identity is one more striking example of how Danto's method of the indiscernibles (that he so famously and successfully applied in the case of Warhol's Brillo Box) can be used for obtaining an answer to some of the most difficult and most stubborn philosophical problems. There may be no discernible difference between the self before and after the kind of experience discussed here-and yet this enables us to clarify the notion of identity. For a discussion of the method of indiscernibles, see my "Danto on Representation. Identity, and Indiscernibles," History and Theory, Theme Issue 37: Danto and His Critics (1998), 44-71
28. V. Turner, "Myth and Symbol," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. D. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1968), IX, 576. 40.Ibid
29. And, as Hegel insists, both in the sense of historic! and in that of historia rerum gestarum. See Hegel, Vorlesungen üter die Philosophic der Weltgeschichte. Band 1, 164