卡洛·金兹伯格微观史学思想述评

在当代西方史学思潮中,微观史学占有重要地位。作为微观史学的代表人物之一,卡洛.金兹伯格的微观史学思想,与西方史学的发展密不可分。卡洛.金兹伯格微观史学的具体内容,是以小群体或个人为研究对象,注重史料的特殊性和多样性,采取以记名法和推测范式为主的研究方法,以及肯定叙述是最好的表现形式等。金兹伯格微观史学研究虽然取得了很大的成绩,却也遭到了诸多的批评和质疑。     

Memory in warfare: history as a destituent narrative

Abstract

To what extent may we consider historical writing a field of political tension? Could we make a plausible conceptual distinction between a constituent and a destituent narrative? According to Carlo Ginzburg – one of the proponents of ‘microhistory’ – historical sources are ‘distorting mirrors’, which let the truth shine through in an indirect way. Consequently, the good historian is the one who manages to grasp the ‘Freudian slips’ of history and fixes them in a coherent framework. Michel Foucault’s ‘political historicism’ seems to adopt the same historiographical approach: the most reliable witnesses of the past are the victims of the dominant power and the forgotten subjects of the constituent historical narrative. It seems to the author that Walter Benjamin and Simone Weil’s warfare writings share this destituent attitude towards historical representations. As far as Benjamin is concerned, the author’s hypothesis is that between the two world wars he radically redefines his notion of memory. With the apotheosis of the Nazi regime, he starts to conceive memory of the catastrophic past as the only possible input of an authentic revolutionary action. With a similar attention to collective memory, Weil goes through European history in order to deconstruct its principal political mythologies, from Rome to the Third Reich. Her purpose is to let the stories of the defeated re-emerge in order to show the history of violence that lies beyond the official representation of the past. In both cases, the main political aim is eventually to produce a destituent narrative of Europe that could serve as a guideline in the post-war period.