History, Violence, Responsibility

Abstract

Since post-structuralist theory has criticized representational historiography, the ethical and political responsibility of the historian has been scrutinized anew. This essay investigates the responsibility of the professional historian in particular, with regard to possible responses to what we might come to see as the 'victims' of modern history. Focusing on a Derridian account of the formation of subjectivity in history and its inevitable violence, I argue that a deconstructive notion of historical time may help to articulate the historian's political and ethical responsibility in the present and for the future. For if every attempt to represent 'the' past adequately is constructed in the present and written from an essentially open future, the historian must take responsibility for the political consequences of her or his work in the present. However, Derrida's notion of responsibility, as an always already openness of the subject to what is other than itself, fails to distinguish between the 'originary' violence which necessarily afflicts every relation to history and the victimization in the past, and its more or less violent suppression in the present, which the historian is asked to expose. Thus, turning to Walter Benjamin's writing on history, I argue that a responsible response to the victims of the past requires, as much as possible, to distinguish between various senses of violence, distinctions which in turn demand the projection of determinate horizons of political change. A notion of the historian's responsibility would, thus, not be exhausted in the relation to the past, but demand the struggle against discourses and institutions which occlude the recognition of past victimization in the present and which might contribute to such victimization in the future.

Keywords:

• Historiography Responsibility Derrida Benjamin Subjectivity History