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ABSTRACT
In this interview, Marek Tamm asks questions concerning some of the main developments and arguments in Eelco Runia’s thinking about history. The following topics are discussed: the relations between history, psychology and fiction; the critique of representationalism in the contemporary philosophy of history; the presence of the past; the question of continuity, discontinuity and mutation in history; the importance of metonymy as the quintessential historical trope; the influence of Giambattista Vico on Runia’s thinking; the intellectual affinities between Runia and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; and Runia’s ongoing research project on Red Queen history.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. I notice that in the footnote of one of your articles, you point out that your ‘approach may be called psychohistorical in Lucien Febvre’s sense that in order to understand history one should acquaint oneself with the outillage mental of its subjects’ (Runia Citation2010a, 4, fn, 6).
2. Compare this to another definition: ‘subconscious persistence of an unacknowledged past can be called “presence” – which I like to define as “the unrepresented way the past is present in the here and now”’ (Runia Citation2010c, 232).
3. I say ‘modern’ because for Freud himself countertransference was still entirely negative – not a source of information, but something to avoid.
4. Cf. Runia (Citation2010b): ‘If there is one single issue that deserves to shape the discussions about the relation of history and theory in the upcoming years it is, I think, how to circumvent the blind spot that makes it so difficult to say sensible things about how, in history as well as in historiography, the new – the exhilarating, frightening, sinful, sublimely new – comes about.’
5. Not the least of Vico’s many qualities is that he makes it abundantly clear that in order to understand an author you shouldn’t just follow his line of argument but have to really reinvent him – as I tried to do in answering this question.
6. The conference titled ‘Presence’ took place at the University of Groningen on 1–2 December 2005 and its proceedings were published in History and Theory 45 (3), 2006.
7. In Production of Presence he in fact writes about ‘how close to actual artistic practice some of our academic activities can be’ (Gumbrecht Citation2004, 96).
8. I’m basing this on the description of the lecture, given under the same title at the Centre for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, on 17 November 2014. See http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/blog/red-queen-history (accessed on 30 November 2018).
9. Or, as he says elsewhere, the ‘plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what the computer engineer call “programs”) – for the governing of behavior’ (Geertz Citation1973, 44).
10. I do not define these in terms of morality: morality is just the upper stratum of the structure that regulates and prescribes life.
11. Śvetāśvatara Upanisad II: 9, in Upanisads (Citation1996, 253–256). The various forms of yoga (the name has the same root as yoke) all are first and foremost disciplines.
12. They are, in fact, the subject of evolutionary psychology. Fathoming these early stages was, of course, Giambattista Vico’s grand project in the Scienza Nuova.
13. See, for example, Martin (Citation1989) and Rose (Citation1992).
14. This is what has been called ‘the axial transformation’. See, for example, Bellah (Citation2011).
15. See, for example, Fredriksen (Citation2012).
16. This doesn’t mean however that increased competitiveness is a sufficient, or even necessary, motivation for ‘conversion’ to a mode of self-regulation. In fact, I hypothesize that this is the exception rather than the rule.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Eelco Runia
Eelco Runia is is a Dutch writer. He was, until 2018, chair of the Centre for Metahistory at Groningen University in the Netherlands. His novels and essayistic work on the making and writing of history address the question of how and why humans habitually disrupt their lives by saddling themselves with accomplished facts of their own making. He studied psychology and history and wrote a dissertation about Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. His most recent book – Genadezesjes: Brieven uit de moderne universiteit (2019) – analyzes the demise of the university.
Marek Tamm
Marek Tamm is Professor of Cultural History at the School of Humanities in Tallinn University, Estonia. His primary research fields are cultural history of medieval Europe, theory and history of historiography, and cultural memory studies. He has recently published Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (ed. with Laurent Olivier, 2019), Debating New Approaches to History (ed. with Peter Burke, 2018), and Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory (2015).