On the body and passion of history and historiography

Abstract

Using Michel Foucault's notion that ‘Society Must Be Defended’ as his starting point, Sande Cohen argues that disciplinary issues within ‘historical culture’ belong to a notion of ‘war’ more than training or representation and that the discipline of history is not that effective in helping along public, intellectual life.

Keywords:

• philosophy of history
• intellectuals
• empire
• Nietzsche
• schizophrenia
• Foucault

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Keith Jenkins for the invitation to write this essay.

Notes

1. White calls for historical writing to be engaged with ‘the enigmas of human existence’ as offered by psychoanalysis and ethnology or modernist well-springs; he does not fully deal with the fact that contemporary knowledge is deeply anti-existential on purpose, by design, e.g. that the research university must render what Foucault offered as a sanitized historicism, the insistence that knowledge and truth are on the side of peace (improvement, progress), never on the side of violence and war. Thus academic history constantly recreates the conditions of its own existence, the purification of history (Foucault 2003, 168–73).

2. Let me note that Critical Inquiry, one of the most visible academic journals in the 1970s and 1980s, has in fact turned against theory, sponsoring conferences announcing the death of theory. It is deeply reactionary to turn theory back into religion, giving theory an ‘origin’ that is rigidly anti-intellectual.

3. See Reinhart Koselleck (2002, 190, 195, 197), who notes that in the German context, learning was part of bildung, which, whatever its problems, insisted on a duty to understand, there being no entitlement to one's opinions; that Nietzsche sees it coming under State control – profit and barbarism (universal pragmatics), that it helped usher in youth movements and avant-gardes, was inclusive of heritage and its questioning, or otherwise shows the ‘active mode of the consummation of the cultivated life.’

4. De Man always managed to put the uncomfortable up. Money is still taboo as a variable/agency in the arts and humanities. I note that today a ‘power-couple’ in a major research university can command $500k in salary and benefits per year; when such couples do in fact receive grants while on paid leave, they multiply their income, as happened with two of the three authors of Telling the Truth About History.

5. The quoted author, Wilentz, went on to say that the petition of the 400 was a ‘movement,’ and ‘never before have historians acting as historians had this much of an impact on a public event. We actually did something. This is real politics.’

6. My comments are based on Simon Leys' review of Spence's Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (2007).