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.

Keywords:

• Microhistory
• historical narrative
• violence
• collective memory

Notes

1. The classical references here are: Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, passim; Lovejoy, “Reflections on the History of Ideas,” passim.

2. See in particular: Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” passim; Rorty, “Historiography of Philosophy,” passim.

3. See in particular: Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, passim; Pocock, Political Thought and History, passim.

4. See in particular: Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History, passim; Koselleck, Future Past, passim. The former – it is noteworthy – has been foreworded by Hayden White, whose Tropics of Discourse was in turn prefaced by Koselleck.

5. The use of versus obviously, and by purpose, emphasizes the differences, but from the mid-1960s up to the mid-1980s the debate on the disciplinary boundaries was far from being without discord. Apart from the above-mentioned essays and articles, see for instance: Mandelbaum, “History of Ideas, Intellectual History, and the History of Philosophy,” passim; Lacapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” passim.

6. See, above all: Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, passim; Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, passim; Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 2–32.

7. See Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, passim. Another fundamental proponent of microhistory was Edoardo Grendi, though he preferred to call it ‘historical micro-analysis’. A good general introduction to this subject could be found in Woolf, “Italian Historical Writing,” passim.

8. See Chaunu, “Histoire sérielle,” passim.

9. See Barthes, “The Rustle of Language,” passim.

10. Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 8.

11. White, Tropics of Discourse, 2.

12. See Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 165–79.

13. See LaCapra, “Tropisms of Intellectual History,” passim.

14. Very similar objections to Barthes and White may be found in Traverso, Passé, mode d’emploi.

15. See Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 3.

16. Bloch, Historian’s Craft, 53.

17. See Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 137–50.

18. Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault: Volume 3, 158.

19. Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof, 25.

20. Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, 101.

21. Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 12.

22. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 2.

23. Ibid., 17.

24. Ibid., 18.

25. See in particular: Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, passim; Anderson, Imagined Communities, passim.

26. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 66.

27. Ibid., 72.

28. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 20.

29. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 249.

30. Ibid., 248.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 243.

34. Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 392 (Thesis VIII).

35. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 66.

36. Adorno and Benjamin, Correspondence, 286.

37. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 115.

38. Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 392 (Thesis IX).

39. Ibid. (Thesis VII).

40. Weil, Selected Essays, 154.

41. Ibid., 155.

42. Ibid., 168.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., 181.

45. Ibid., 89–144.

46. Ibid., 94.

47. Ibid., 96.

48. Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, 45.

49. Ibid., 51.

50. Ibid, 57.

51. Ibid., 67.

52. Weil, Selected Essays, 37.

53. Weil, Need for Roots, 219.

54. Weil, Notebooks, 505.

55. Ibid., 620. It is noteworthy that ‘Great Beast’ is in Weil a technical syntagm.

56. Weil, Selected Essays, 41.

57. Ibid.