The Savage Science: Sigmund Freud,Psychoanalysis, and the History of Religion

This article analyzes how Freud takes issue with the prioritization of the present over and above the historical past. Significantly, Freud's understanding of history is closely related to his interest in Christianity's historical dependence on Jewish antiquity. He emphasizes the common sources of both religions: both are shaped by the experience of guilt. Christianity, however, relegates the historical past to the realm of the “old Adam.” According to Freud, Jewish culture, by contrast, revolves around the commemoration of a “savage” (i.e. pre‐modern) past. This article thus focuses on how Freud combines his analysis of onto‐genesis (in his psychoanalytical case studies) with a discussion of phylogeny. The manifestation of psychic illness gives body to the unconscious remembrance of phylogenetic history. Thanks to religious and literary documents an irrational past has been put down in writing. According to Freud, this characterizes their historical truth value.     

Recognizing Secular Defilement: Douglas,Durkheim and Housework

Mary Douglas is generally regarded as a faithful disciple of Émile Durkheim. Yet her classic work Purity and Danger ([1966] 2002. London: Routledge) is best understood as premised upon a fundamental disagreement with Durkheim, who she accused of conflating purity with “the sacred” and impurity with “the profane”. Key to this disagreement was the theoretical status of the “busy scrubbings” of everyday housework. This disagreement has had a substantial legacy since, in turning her attention to purity and impurity in their specificity, Douglas bequeathed anthropology and sociology a theory of purity and impurity that has remained an important, perhaps even dominant, paradigm. This paradigm has been identified as an exemplar of synchronic analysis. Yet this paradigm itself is the product of a specific historical and intellectual context, little recognized today. Attending to this context holds open possibilities, which have otherwise tended to be neglected, for theorizing purity and impurity in their specificity.     

NOTES ON CAMPS,OR, COUNTERFACTUAL FÜHRERS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE JOKE

In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld's Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld's account of normalization, particularly his claim that aesthetic normalization can undermine our moral judgments regarding the Holocaust. Drawing on Sigmund Freud on jokes, and Susan Sontag on Camp aesthetics, I argue that every effort to normalize the Holocaust, especially ones that work through humor and jokes (a major topic of Rosenfeld's book), actually maintain the Holocaust's status as a series of historical events resistant to “normalization.” If “normalization” is a process through which extraordinary, or morally charged, historical events lose their moral charge, then aesthetic efforts to normalize the Holocaust actually reinscribe the special moral status that Rosenfeld believes they erase.     

KOSELLECK ON MODERNITY,HISTORIK, AND LAYERS OF TIME

In the scholarly reception of his work, Reinhart Koselleck's notion of modernity and his theory of multiple times have been cast as essentially at odds with each other. This article argues that although these positions are valid, Koselleck's writings can also accommodate an interpretation according to which the theory of multiple temporalities, or “layers of time,” provides theoretical ground for the modern understanding of time and history. Elaborating on this insight, the article shows the linkages sustaining the unity between Koselleck's formal theory of multiple times and his interpretation of modernity. To that end, I outline the main premises of the temporalization thesis that lies at the heart of Koselleck's theory of modernity, scrutinize his notion of Historik within which the framework “layers of time” belongs, and explore Niklas Olsen's and Helge Jordheim's interpretive accounts on how to conceive of the relationship between the two strands in Koselleck's thought. Ultimately, I argue that “layers of time” entails the formal conditions for historical acceleration, which is crucial for explaining the emergence of a specifically modern temporality wherein experience and expectation increasingly grow apart.     

“Who Is Reciting the Name of the Buddha?” as Gongan in Chinese Chan Buddhism

Chan Buddhism’s ambivalent relationship with language and literature is perhaps most starkly seen in its practice of gongan meditation. This practice was first instituted by the famous Linji master Dahui and involves an intense meditational focus on the “punch line” (huatou) of what is typically a story about an ancient Chan master or an enigmatic question like “why did [the legendary founder of Chan] Bodhidharma come from the West?” In the Ming dynasty, a new gongan became widely used in Chan meditation: the phrase “who is reciting the name of the Buddha?” This was a reference to the widespread practice of chanting homage to the Buddha Amitābha in hope of getting reborn into his paradise. In using this new gongan, Chan seemingly embraced oral practice in an unprecedented move and appeared to combine the other-power of Amitābha worship with the self-power of Chan meditation. Scholars have struggled to understand this development, and several have dismissed it as an example of the degeneration of Chan and its later pandering to lay people. I argue that the development of this gongan can best be seen as an attempt to reframe the practice of Buddha-recitation in a Chan meditative framework; and further explore the rationale for the practice as given by the influential Buddhist thinker Yunqi Zhuhong, who was a staunch advocate of Buddha-recitation.     

Western plague literature,the Irish Famine and Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond

This article places Castle Richmond, Anthony Trollope’s controversial Irish Famine novel, within the context of Western plague narratives as outlined by recent plague narrative scholars and by René Girard in his seminal 1974 essay “The Plague in Literature and Myth”. By demonstrating Castle Richmond’s conformity to a very particular cluster of attributes found in Western plague literature, this article helps expand our reading of Trollope’s novel, a work that is otherwise often seen as an incoherent failure. This article proposes that Trollope used Western plague discourse to structure and organise his response to Ireland’s Great Hunger. I contend here that we see in his novel’s construction the scaffolding of Judaic, Greco-Roman, Medieval and Renaissance plague narrative traditions, traditions that follow a predictable pattern of transgression, punishment, near social collapse, atonement achieved by expelling or sacrificing a scapegoat or scapegoats, followed by the restoration of an improved social order. This line of reasoning encapsulates Castle Richmond’s overt logical structure. Yet, this article goes on to argue that there are numerous ways in which Trollope undermines the logical “inevitability” and the “divine ordination” of the Famine which his use of Western plague discourse implies.     

Max Stirner,Hegel and the Young Hegelians: A reassessment

Max Stirner is generally considered a nihilist, anarchist, precursor to Nietzsche, existentialism and even post-structuralism. Few are the scholars who try to analyse his stands from within its Young Hegelian context without, however, taking all his references to Hegel and the Young Hegelians as expressions of his own alleged Hegelianism. This article argues in favour of a radically different reading of Stirner considering his magnum opus “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” as in part a carefully constructed parody of Hegelianism deliberately exposing its outwornness as a system of thought. Stirner's alleged Hegelianism becomes intelligible when we consider it as a formal element in his criticism of Bauer's philosophy of self-consciousness. From within this framework it becomes quite clear what Stirner meant with such notions as “ownness” and “egoism”. They were part of his radical criticism of the implicit teleology of Hegelian dialectics as it found according to him its highmark in Bauer. In short, this article puts the literature on Stirner into question and tries for the first time in 30 years to dismantle Stirner's entire undertaking in “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” by considering it first and foremost a radical criticism of Hegelianism and eventually the whole of philosophy while fully engaged in the debates of his time.     

Michel de Certeau and the Limits of Historical Representation

The polymath Michel de Certeau is traditionally seen as one of a group of French post‐structuralist thinkers who reject constructs in the social sciences in favor of the diversity of the everyday or the past. However, in this paper I will show that, as a historian, Certeau did not discard these constructs, but rather valued them as a means of doing justice to the “strangeness” of the past. The position that Certeau adopts can be seen most clearly from his theoretical debate with Paul Veyne, which is the starting point of this article. I then show how Certeau's first major historical work, The Possession at Loudun, exemplifies his theoretical position. An analysis of this work demonstrates how the historian's active reconstruction of interactions between exorcists, medical doctors, state officers, and possessed nuns helps us to perceive the complexity of the past in a way that can be seen as a microhistory avant la lettre. I will suggest that during his writing of the history of Loudun, Certeau implicitly raises more theoretical and epistemological problems, and in so doing he “practices” a theory of history. The most elusive aspect of the story at Loudun turns out to be the drama around the priest Grandier. This article demonstrates how Certeau pays tribute to Grandier by using “scientific” methods, thus showing the “limits of representation” through disciplinary means. Finally, the article explores the implications of Certeau's theory and practice of the writing of history for understanding historiography at large. The historian not only appears as a tramp who looks for remains that are forever lost to us, but is also a “scientist” who uses both models and concepts in order to put them to the test.     

Obedient children and reckless rebels: Jabotinsky's youth politics and the case for authoritarian leadership, 1931–1933

This article traces the pivotal role that ideas about “youth” and “generationhood” played in Vladimir Jabotinsky's political strategy as leader of the Union of Revisionist Zionists and its youth movement, Brit Yosef Trumpeldor (Betar). During the leadership struggle within the movement between 1931 and 1933, Jabotinsky believed that he could draw upon debates sweeping across Europe about the nature of youth, their role in politics, and the challenges of “generational conflict” in order to convince his followers that his increasingly authoritarian behavior was the only mode of leadership available to Zionist leaders in the 1930s. The article demonstrates that Jabotinsky's deliberately ambiguous and provocative constructions of “youth” and “generationhood” within the movement's party literature and in articles addressed to the Polish Jewish public, as well as the innovative ways in which he delimited “youth” from “adult” in his movement's regulations, allowed him to further embrace authoritarian measures within the movement without publicly abandoning his claim to be a firm proponent of democracy.     

THE PRICE OF METAPHOR

In his critical response to our skeptical inquiry, “Does Culture Evolve?” (History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 [December 1999], 52–78), W. G. Runciman affirms that “Culture Does Evolve.” However, we find nothing in his essay that convinces us to alter our initial position. And we must confess that in composing an answer to Runciman, our first temptation was simply to urge those interested to read our original article–both as a basis for evaluating Runciman's attempted refutation of it and as a framework for reading this essay, which addresses in greater detail issues we have already raised. Runciman views the “selectionist paradigm” as a “scientific”“puzzle‐solving device” now validated by an “expanding literature” that has successfully modeled social and cultural change as “evolutionary.” All paradigms, however, including scientific ones, give rise to self‐validating “normal science.” The real issue, accordingly, is not whether explanations can be successfully manufactured on the basis of paradigmatic assumptions, but whether the paradigmatic assumptions are appropriate to the object of analysis. The selectionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems that consist of randomly varying, individual units, some of which are selected, and some not; and with society and culture thus reduced to inheritance systems, history can be reduced to “evolution.” But these reductions, which are required by the selectionist paradigm, exclude much that is essential to a satisfactory historical explanation–particularly the systemic properties of society and culture and the combination of systemic logic and contingency. Now as before, therefore, we conclude that while historical phenomena can always be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do no work, nor do they contribute anything new except a misleading vocabulary that anesthetizes history.     

东京审判法官视角下的天皇责任——以韦伯庭长为例

在二战结束后的东京A级战犯审判中,裕仁天皇虽然没有成为被告,但其战争责任问题却留在法庭的视野中。随着庭审的推进,作为东京审判庭长的威廉·韦伯对这一问题的立场从最初的“天皇不应受审”转变为“天皇应责而未责”。但韦伯将天皇归为和平主义者,未将他与28名A级被告视作一个阴谋团体,进而影响了韦伯对被告在“共同谋议”侵略问题上的判断。从韦伯庭长在天皇责任问题上的立场及其形成过程来看,一方面体现了东京审判法官在司法上的独立性,另一方面也体现出东京审判作为一场国际性的大型司法实践的复杂性。     

6. ACTES DE PRÉSENCE: PRESENCE IN FASCIST POLITICAL CULTURE1

In order to discuss the notion of presence, I explore Fascist Italy as an example of a presence‐based culture. In the first part of this paper, I focus on the doctrines of “the philosopher of fascism,” Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), in order to show that his programme of cultural awakening revolves around the notion of the “presentification of the past.” This notion formed the basis of Gentile's dialectic of the act of thought, which is the kernel of his actual idealism, or actualism. I argue that actualism should primarily be interpreted as an ontology of a historical reality; it expresses the view that reality is history. In his 1914 inaugural “L'esperienza pura e la realtà storica” (Pure Experience and Historical Reality), Gentile drew this view to its ultimate consequence by developing a view of experience that has some striking parallels with the contemporary views of presence as expounded by Gumbrecht, Runia, and Ankermit. In the second part of my paper, I discuss how Gentile and his collaborators put presence into practice in school reforms, the Enciclopedia Italiana, and in hundreds of monuments, memorials, and exhibitions. Finally, I discuss the 1932 Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, which was not only the apex of fascist culture politics, but also of the practice of presence. In this context, I argue that this practice should not be seen as a politics of historical interpretation, as Hayden White once held, but as a politics of sublime historical experience, or presence. The presence of presence in fascist political culture raises some difficult questions for all who embrace the new paradigm, questions that can only be answered if the notion of presence is somehow balanced by the critical historical method, which is the basis for a true dialogue with the past.     

HISTORY/PHILOSOPHY/SCIENCE: SOME LESSONS FOR PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Rheinberger's brief history brings into sharp profile the importance of history of science for a philosophical understanding of historical practice. Rheinberger presents thought about the nature of science by leading scientists and their interpreters over the course of the twentieth century as emphasizing increasingly the local and developmental character of their learning practices, thus making the conception of knowledge dependent upon historical experience, “historicizing epistemology.” Linking his account of thought about science to his own work on “experimental systems,” I draw extensive parallels with other work in the local history of science (the ideas of Latour, Pickering, Rouse, and others) and consider the epistemological implications both for the relation between history and philosophy of science and between history and theory more broadly. In doing so, I suggest that the long‐standing gap between the natural sciences and history as a “human science” has been significantly bridged by the insistence upon the local, mediated, indeed “historicized epistemology” of actual science.     

“The third man” — David's heroes in 2 Sam 23,8–39

Abstract

The basic meaning of the word is “three”, “third”. Besides this, the word also possesses two specialized meanings, namely “chariot soldier” and “officer of high rank”. The evident discrepancy between these two meanings has occasioned considerable interest among scholars (e.g, Thenius, Elliger, Hertzberg, Margalith, Mastin, Na'aman, Schley).

In the contribution at hand it has been shown that the was a trained soldier who did not belong to the standard crew of a war chariot However, it was possible to assign him temporarily to the chariots in order to raise their effectiveness. The warriors in question could also be transported in chariots as third men, in addition to the standard crew of two. It is from this practice that the term “third man”, originated. It was also from this military élite that the king picked his chiefs and adjutants. Gradually the word came to mean not only a specially trained soldier, but also the king's adjutant. The meaning “shield bearer”, which has often been suggested for has nothing to support it.     

Globalizing a Race to Publish an Encyclopedia

In 1912, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray published a prospectus for his “Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race throughout the World.” He promised to publish what literary historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., would describe as the “Grail” for black scholars. As Murray planned his encyclopedia in the first decade of the twentieth century, persons of African descent in the United States were killed and assaulted because of their race, and racial identification was as critical an issue as it was also ambiguous. Moreover, despite its ambiguity, or perhaps, because of it, race, in 1912 and since the Naturalization Act of 1790, had everything to do with American citizenship. In Murray’s time, whether a person was identified on the one hand as “white” or “octoroon” versus an identity as “black,” “Negro,” “mulatto,” or “quadroon” influenced whether or not that person could exercise his rights as an American citizen (with her rights barely entering the question). However, race, as Murray understood with its skin color codes shading the meaning of American citizenship, was much more a social construction than it was biological evidence of a person’s hereditary origins. Formulating a strategy in support of black American citizenship, Murray developed a global interpretation of the black American experience from a pragmatically ambiguous cultural practice to compose an identity for himself, his people, and his proposed encyclopedia.     

Philology in Six Categories: A Chinese Perspective

This article serves to analyze the role and history of philology within modern Chinese humanities-based scholarship, using the work of Fu Sinian and the establishment of the Institute of History and Philology as a framework with which to observe the changing status of philology as a practice within contemporary Chinese humanities. Despite its critical function within the Western scholarship and cultural development that inspired modern Chinese scholars as well as its centrality to Fu Sinian’s groundbreaking efforts, philology has been all but ignored in recent years, and its purpose has been rendered niche and peripheral. Additionally, the ambiguity that has surrounded the term “philology” itself since its earliest days within the Chinese academic world has only intensified over time, thereby exacerbating the field’s marginalized status. The author’s goal is to call attention to the complexity and importance of philology that has been so critically overlooked in recent times by outlining six distinct yet interrelated categories of philology/philological study, ranging from a basic academic “love of words, text, and learning” to a broad life view. By providing a detailed, segmented glimpse into the otherwise vaguely-defined phenomenon of philology, its vital function as mankind’s sole means of comprehending the past is made clear, and a “return to philology” is advocated in order to preserve those specific academic fields that draw their origins from philology and avoid a collapse of scholarly humanities study as a whole.     

The Origin of the Term Plasticity in the Neurosciences: Ernesto Lugaro and Chemical Synaptic Transmission

The Italian psychiatrist Ernesto Lugaro can be regarded as responsible for introducing the term plasticity into the neurosciences as early as 1906. By this term he meant that throughout life the anatomo-functional relations between neurons can change in an adaptive fashion to enable psychic maturation, learning, and even functional recovery after brain damage. Lugaro’s concept of plasticity was strongly inspired by a neural hypothesis of learning and memory put forward in 1893 by his teacher Eugenio Tanzi. Tanzi postulated that practice and experience promote neuronal growth and shorten the minute spatial gaps between functionally associated neurons, thus facilitating their interactions. In addition to discovering the cerebellar cells known by his name and advancing profound speculations about the functions of the glia, Lugaro lucidly foresaw the chemical nature of Synaptic transmission in the central nervous system, and was the first to propose the usage of the terms “nervous conduction” and “nervous transmission” in their currently accepted meaning.