NE ME RACONTE PLUS D'HISTOIRES: DERRIDA AND THE PROBLEM OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

This essay reads Derrida's early work within the context of the history of philosophy as an academic field in France. Derrida was charged with instruction in the history of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, and much of his own training focused on this aspect of philosophical study. The influence of French history of philosophy can be seen in Derrida's work before Of Grammatology, especially in his unpublished lectures for a 1964 course entitled “History and Truth,” in which he analyzed the semantic richness of the word “history.” According to Derrida, “history” comprised both the ideas of change and of transmission, which allowed the writing of history at a later time. In the Western tradition, Derrida suggested, philosophers had consistently tried to reduce the idea of history as transmission, casting it simply as empirical development in order to preserve the idea that truth could be timeless. Derrida's account of the evolving opposition between history and truth within the history of philosophy led him to suggest a “history of truth” that transcended and structured the opposition. I argue that Derrida's strategies in these early lectures are critical for understanding his later and more famous deconstruction of speech and writing. Moreover, the impact of this early confrontation with the problem of history and truth helps explain the ambivalent response by historians to Derrida's analyses.     

THE FLATNESS OF HISTORICITY

This article pursues an explication of the meaning of “historicity.” This explication is in part theoretical and in part historical, passing by the German conceptual history of the term, a Romantic‐era fairy tale with bearings on the matter, and structuralist theories of history, especially Claude Lévi‐Strauss's and Louis Althusser's. The “flatness” of historicity, the article argues, emerges from the absence of layers of explanatory and semantic depth that would provide a foundation for the term. The closer the concept of historicity was tied to notions of human existence and phenomenal and aesthetic experience in the hermeneutic tradition, the more such layers appeared to emerge. The structuralist argument started out from the impulse to reject this tradition. Diverse variations of this argument rally around an understanding of the reality of the historical in both set‐theoretical and semiotic terms. They dismantle a variety of manners in which historicity can be tied to notions of the phenomenal subject and of intentionality and existence/Dasein. The article asserts that the structuralist argument, in spite of a tendency to develop its own layers of seeming profundity, has a considerable degree of rigor and establishes the plausibility of the flatness of historicity. I conclude by discussing some of the positive implications of this notion, which in particular affect the manner in which the historical and the political interlock.     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.     

THE WORDS OF HISTORY

In From History to Theory, Kerwin Lee Klein writes a history of the central terms of the discipline of theory of history, such as “historiography,” “philosophy of history,” “theory of history,” and “memory.” Klein tells us when and how these terms were used, how the usage of some (“historiography” and “philosophy of history”) declined during the twentieth century, and how other terms (“theory” and “memory”) became increasingly popular. More important, Klein also shows that the use of these words is not innocent. Using words such as “theory” or “historiography” implies certain specific ideas about what the writing of history should be like, and how theoretical reflection on the nature of history and its writing relates to the practical issues of the discipline. In the second half of his book, Klein focuses more on the concept of memory and the memory boom since the later part of the 1980s. He observes that “memory” came to be seen as a kind of “counterhistory,” a postcolonial, fragmented, and personal alternative to the traditional mainstream discourse of history. Klein does not necessarily disagree with this view, but he does warn us about unwanted side effects. More specifically, he argues that the discourse of memory is surprisingly compatible with that of extremist right‐wing groups, and should be treated with suspicion. Although Klein certainly has a point, he presents it in a rather dogmatic fashion. However, a more nuanced version of Klein's criticism of memory can be developed by building on Klein's suggestion that there is an intimate connection between memory and identity.     

1. PRÉCIS IMAGES OF HISTORY: KANT,BENJAMIN, FREEDOM,AND THE HUMAN SUBJECT

My fundamental motivation in writing Images of History was to avoid some forms of hubris and despair that trouble contemporary philosophy and to develop instead a picture of human life in historical time. According to this picture, we live amid institutional and practical inheritances we can address but can never fully stabilize and perfect. In different ways, Kant and Benjamin each accept this thought, and they each develop a picture of philosophy as historically situated, open criticism of existing practices and institutions. Each emphasizes the priority of the practical over any fixed metaphysical‐theoretical stance. I survey each of their general theories of critical historical understanding, and I pay special attention to the texts in which they each provide detailed, specific accounts of Western social‐historical development or circumstances: Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Benjamin's One‐Way Street. Where Kant's philosophical criticism is reformist, liberal, and casually dismissive of non‐Christian religion, Benjamin's is modernist, erotic, and improvisatory. Their respective images of history according to which we achieve orientation are both complementary and fundamentally opposed—not readily combinable into a consistent whole. Drawing on the work of Jonathan Lear, I end with a picture of maturity and practical self‐unity as centrally a matter of developing the skill of modulated alternation between these two orientation‐affording images.     

“WITHOUT THINKERS … NO THEORIES OF THE WORLD”

Tim Crane's books Aspects of Psychologism and The Objects of Thought present a perspective on human intentionality based on internalism about mental contents. Crane understands intentionality as the defining aspect of the mental. The theory of intentionality that he formulates is similar to that of John Searle when it comes to ontological commitments, but it is also marked by a more traditional approach that retains the concept of intentional objects as its central aspect. In this review I examine the implications of Crane's internalism for the philosophy of history, by comparing his views with some well‐known arguments in favor of externalism about mental contents, such as Hilary Putnam's “Twin Earth” and Tyler Burge's “arthritis” mental experiments. Although internalism about mental contents such as Crane's is a minority view among contemporary analytic philosophers, I argue that it has significant advantages when it comes to the philosophy of history, because it is much better aligned with standard interpretive procedures in historical research. At the same time, externalism about mental contents typically results in inappropriate contextualizations and approaches that most practicing historians will find awkward. More generally, it is possible to argue that over decades, analytic philosophers’ externalist tendencies have significantly contributed to the reduced interest in their views among philosophers of history. The final section of the article reviews the implication of Crane's views on nonconceptual contents of human perception for art historiography.     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.     

TRAUMA DELEGITIMIZED: KARL LÖWITH AND THE COSMIC VIEW OF HISTORY

This article uncovers the work of trauma in Karl Löwith's historical thought. Although best known for his critique of the philosophy of history and for the conception of secularization in his 1949 book, Meaning in History, Löwith deepened his positive historical vision in several essays that he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s. From these texts emerges a unique historical orientation, which I call the “cosmic view of history.” This perspective was at once a critique of modern historical consciousness and an embodied corrective to that consciousness, one in which the catastrophes of the twentieth century were relativized and made endurable. In both the origin and structure of this historical orientation and in its textual expression in Löwith's work, trauma is a residual force that links Löwith's language, his experiences, and the postwar context. The role of trauma in Löwith's thought further reveals a process of delegitimization in which historical consciousness and historical events lose their power to determine historical meaning, thus enabling a response to and an escape from catastrophe. This article also explores the significance of this cosmic view of history for contemporary theoretical concerns related to the Anthropocene and its consequences for historical theory.     

STORY MAKES HISTORY,THEORY MAKES STORY: DEVELOPING RÜSEN'S HISTORIK IN LOGICAL AND SEMIOTIC DIRECTIONS

This essay will argue that the traditional opposition between narrative and theory in historical sciences is dissolved if we conceive of narratives as theoretical devices for understanding events in time through special concepts that abridge typical sequences of events. I shall stress, in the context of the Historical Knowledge Epistemological Square (HKES) that emerged with the scientization of history, that history is always narrative, story has a theoretical ground of itself, and scientific histories address the need for a conceptual progression in ever‐improved narratives. This will lead to identification of three major theoretical levels in historical stories: naming, plotting (or emplotment), and formalizing. We revisit Jörn Rüsen's theory of history as the best starting point, and explore to what extent it could be developed by (i) taking a deeper look into narratological knowledge, and (ii) reanalyzing logically the conceptual strata in order to bridge the overrated Forschung/Darstellung (research/exposition) divide. The corollary: we should consider (scientific) historical writing as the last step of historical research, not as the next step after research is over. This thesis will drive us to a reconsideration of the German Historik regarding the problem of interpretation and exposition. Far from alienating history from science, narrative links history positively to anthropology and biology. The crossing of our triad name‐plot‐model with Rüsen's four theoretical levels (categories‐types‐concepts‐names) points to the feasibility of expanding Rüsen's Historik in logical and semiotic directions. Story makes history, theory makes story, and historical reason may proceed.     

WRITING THE HISTORY OF SPINOZISM

In this essay I reflect on Knox Peden's Spinoza contra Phenomenology, a history of French rationalist Spinozism in the mid‐twentieth century. The book marks an important intervention in modern French and European intellectual history, depicting the importance of Baruch Spinoza's thought in the negotiation of and resistance to the phenomenology that captivated much of twentieth‐century French intellectual life. With philosophical and historical sophistication, Peden tells the story of several relatively overlooked thinkers while also providing substantially new contexts and interpretations of the well‐known Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze. While accounting for Peden's major accomplishment, my aim is also to situate his work among a number of recent works in the history of Spinozism in order to reflect on the specific methodological questions that pertain to the widely varying appropriations of Spinoza's thought since the seventeenth century. In particular, I reflect on Peden's claim that Spinoza's thought cannot provide an actionable politics, a claim that runs counter to nearly two centuries of leftist forms of Spinozism. I offer a short account of some of the ways that theorists have mobilized Spinoza's thought for political purposes, redefining “action” itself in Spinozist terms. I then conclude by reflecting on the dimensions of Spinoza's thought (and recent interpretations of it) that make it possible for such significantly different claims about its political potential to be credible.     

ERNST CASSIRER,MARTIN HEIDEGGER,AND THE LEGACY OF DAVOS

In 1929 Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger participated in a momentous debate in Davos, Switzerland, which is widely held to have marked an important division in twentieth‐century European thought. Peter E. Gordon's recent book, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, centers on this debate between these two philosophical adversaries. In his book Gordon examines the background of the debate, the issues that distinguished the respective positions of Cassirer and Heidegger, and the legacy of the debate for later decades. Throughout the work, Gordon concisely portrays the source of disagreement between the two adversaries in terms of a difference between Cassirer's philosophy of spontaneity and Heidegger's philosophy of receptivity, or of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), into a situation that finite human beings can never hope to master. Although it recognizes that this work provides an important contribution to our understanding of the Davos debate and to twentieth‐century European thought, this review essay subjects Gordon's manner of interpreting the distinction between Cassirer and Heidegger to critical scrutiny. Its purpose is to examine the possibility that important aspects of the debate, which do not conform to the grid imposed by Gordon's interpretation, might have been set aside in the context of his analysis.     

CONFUSING HISTORY

This compendium of fifty essays by international philosophers examines history from the point of view of its cognate disciplines, historiography and the philosophy of history. The authors often use the terms history, the past, and historiography interchangeably. Essays are grouped in four broad categories: basic problems, major fields, philosophy and sub‐fields of historiography, and classical schools and philosophers of history. The book provides useful insights, some dated by the fashion of postmodernism. The essays are largely independent of one another, and may be read in any order. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, historians, and social scientists with a theoretical bent.     

MYTH IN HISTORY,PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AS MYTH: ON THE AMBIVALENCE OF HANS BLUMENBERG'S INTERPRETATION OF ERNST CASSIRER'S THEORY OF MYTH

This essay explores the different interpretations proposed by Ernst Cassirer and Hans Blumenberg of the relation between Platonic philosophy and myth as a means of bringing to light a fundamental divergence in their respective conceptions of what precisely myth is. It attempts to show that their conceptions of myth are closely related to their respective assumptions concerning the historical significance of myth and regarding the sense of history more generally. Their divergent conceptions of myth and of history, I argue, are at the same time not simply matters of abstract speculation, but spring from fundamental presuppositions concerning myth's political significance. The present elucidation aims not only to set in relief one or another of the ways in which Cassirer or Blumenberg understood myth, nor even to present Blumenberg's critical reception of Cassirer's theories, but above all to contribute to the interpretation of the political implications of myth and of its historical potency in our contemporary epoch.     

FROM NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY TO KANT'S—AND BACK

Reflecting on Anthony Jensen's Nietzsche's Philosophy of History, this essay describes Jensen's account of the three‐stage development of Nietzsche's historiographical practices and metahistorical positions: from his early philological writings, through The Birth of Tragedy, and into the mature philosophy of history that Jensen uncovers in Toward the Genealogy of Morality and Ecce Homo, which, so Jensen argues, consists in ontological realism combined with representational anti‐realism. While Jensen notes the importance of a like‐minded readership for the success of Nietzsche's historiographical projects, the essay asks whether Nietzsche did in fact have such a readership and further emphasizes that the Genealogy and Ecce Homo are structured in such a way that they seek to create one. A similar structure is identified in Kant's “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective.” The essay concludes by reflecting on the significance of this similarity in light of the doctrines of eternal recurrence that are expressed in both Nietzsche's late writings and Kant's youthful cosmology.     

THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEMS OF LATE CRITICAL THEORY

Martin Jay's sweeping account of reason in Western philosophy provides the context for understanding the crisis that the Frankfurt School thinkers faced when they spoke of the “eclipse of reason.” In the background of the thinking of the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse is a hankering for a more substantive conception of reason that bears affinities with what Hegel called Vernunft (reason), which he contrasted with Verstand (understanding). According to Jay, the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers never quite succeeded in elaborating this substantive concept of reason and grew increasingly pessimistic in the face of the self‐destruction of reason. Habermas sought to elaborate a communicative theory of rationality that did not fall into the misleading promises of Hegelian Vernunft but could nevertheless provide a normative basis for the critique of instrumental, strategic, and systems rationality—a normative basis for critical theory. Jay presents an extremely lucid account of Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative rationality. He concludes by reviewing some of the outstanding problems and questions that have been raised about the adequacy and success of Habermas's project. I seek to do justice to the strengths and weaknesses of Jay's narrative, and I focus on a number of deep, unresolved issues that confront the future of critical theory in its attempt to develop an adequate conception of rationality. I also raise concerns about what precisely is distinctive about critical theory today.     

THE “THEORETICAL REVOLUTION” IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY: FROM THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS TO THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL LANGUAGES

This article intends to clarify what distinguishes the so‐called new “politico‐intellectual history” from the old “history of political ideas.” What differentiates the two has not been fully perceived even by some of the authors who initiated this transformation. One fundamental reason for this is that the transformation has not been a consistent process deriving from one single source, but is rather the result of converging developments emanating from three different sources (the Cambridge School, the German school of conceptual history or Begriffsgeschichte, and French politico‐conceptual history). This article proposes that the development of a new theoretical horizon that effectively leads us beyond the frameworks of the old history of political ideas demands that we overcome the insularity of these traditions and combine their respective contributions. The result of this combination is an approach to politico‐intellectual history that is not completely coincident with any of the three schools. What I will call a history of political languages entails a specific perspective on the temporality of discourses; this involves a view of why the meaning of concepts changes over time, and is the source of the contingency that stains political languages.     

WHAT TYPE OF HISTORIAN? CONCEPTUAL HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF CONCEPTS: A COMPLEX LEGACY AND A RECENT CONTRIBUTION

Javier Fernández Sebastián's edited collections of essays, Political Concepts and Time, is both a critical homage to the monumental work of Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) and an important contribution to the methodology of history‐writing. Centered on the polysemic nature of concepts, which are read as “‘vehicles for thought’” studied in their pragmatic and communicative applications in society, Political Concepts and Time provides a stimulating analysis of the role, weight, and future of conceptual history. Its thirteen essays offer an account of problems, questions, and debates on the interplay of words and concepts, meaning and historical change, context and discourse. They endeavor to clarify the complicated and perennially unresolved relationship between theory and practice. In order to do so, Fernández Sebastián has assembled a scholarly composite and broadly international group of specialists from a variety of disciplines and research fields. With the intellectual legacy of Koselleck's Begriffsgeschichte looming large, this book rethinks the ways in which not just historians but also social scientists and philosophers study the past as the expression of contingent, ever‐changing, and revocable semantic units shaping the culturally plural worlds we inhabit. Informed by the idea that history is porous, Political Concepts and Time also deals with the perhaps obvious but no less challenging issue of our approach to time as everyday experience and through its representation(s). Together with exploring the volume's specific historical topics, this essay will highlight some of its limitations and, above all, will respond to its criticism of intellectual history. The following pages will thus argue the case for the latter methodological perspective by reflecting on the type of historian it delineates. Claiming that in their investigation of past meanings intellectual historians make use of creative imagination, the essay will suggest that this model of history‐writing leads to a better understanding of multiple sources and that it might ultimately help overcome some of the inconsistencies and often simplistic divisions between various branches of the historiographical tree. In particular, a small proposal to reconcile conceptual and intellectual history will be advanced.     

HISTORY AND THE MANIFEST IMAGE: HAYDEN WHITE AS A PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY1

To claim that Hayden White has yet to be read seriously as a philosopher of history might seem false on the face of it. But do tropes and the rest provide any epistemic rationale for differing representations of historical events found in histories? As an explanation of White's influence on philosophy of history, such a proffered emphasis only generates a puzzle with regard to taking White seriously, and not an answer to the question of why his efforts should be worthy of any philosophical attention at all. For what makes his emphasis on narrative structure and its associated tropes of philosophical relevance? What, it may well be asked, did (or could) any theory that draws its categories from a stock provided by literary criticism contribute to explicating problems with regard to the warranting of claims about knowledge, explanation, or causation that represent those concerns that philosophy typically brings to this field? Robert Doran's anthologizing of previously uncollected pieces, ranging as they do over a literal half‐century of White's published work, offers an opportunity to identify explicitly those philosophical themes and arguments that regularly and prominently feature there. Moreover, White's essays in this volume demonstrate a credible knowledge of and interest in mainstream analytic philosophers of his era and also reveal White as deeply influenced by or well acquainted with other important philosophers of history. White thus invites a reading of his work as philosophy, and this volume presents the opportunity for accepting it as such.     

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.     

POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE TWO SITES OF HISTORICITY

This essay examines the two sites of historicity, namely history‐writing and historical agency, and their interrelationship. I borrow the idea of “sites of historicity” from historian Michel‐Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). For the purpose of analyzing how the relationship between the two sites changes with time and context, using Trouillot's theoretical lens, I examine the philosophies of history of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. By citing instances from these two philosophers, I claim that with the rise of nineteenth‐century colonialism, the two sites of historicity became discursively related in a specific way, whereby historical agency came to be predicated on history‐writing. Hence, in contrast to Kant's work, in Hegel's philosophy of history the relationship between the two sites of historicity acquired a decidedly colonialist form. As a result of this predication of historical agency on history‐writing, the alleged lack of historiography of certain cultures began to be considered as a token of their lack of political ability. The essay ends with the suggestion that the postcolonial thinkers and commentators who deal with historiography should challenge the foregoing predication, as it continues to inform contemporary thought concerning historiography.