Theme Issue 59

The Possibility of an Outside

Edited by Ulrich Timme Kragh

Cover image: White Concrete Spiral Staircase, by Mitchell Luo (4 February 2020)

+ ULRICH TIMME KRAGH, The Possibility of an Outside: Theoretical Preamble, History and Theory, Theme Issue 59 (December 2021).

+ ELÍAS J. PALTI, Deleuze’s Foucault: On the Possibility of an Outside of Knowledge/Power, History and Theory, Theme Issue 59 (December 2021).

During 1985 and 1986, Gilles Deleuze directed a seminar on Michel Foucault’s work at the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis. The course was divided into three parts, one dedicated to each of the three levels on which, according to Deleuze, Foucault’s concept of thinking unfolds: knowledge, power, and subjectivation. As I will show, Deleuze’s attempt to reconstruct Foucault’s perspective on the history of thought is highly enlightening, although, at some crucial points, it raises doubts regarding the plausibility of the hypotheses that Deleuze attributed to Foucault. In particular, in the third part, which focuses on subjectivation, it is not clear whether Deleuze was attempting to relate Foucault’s concept or to expose his own ideas on the topic. The displacements, which Deleuze introduced into Foucault’s perspective, are particularly interesting, since they are symptomatic of broader epistemological problems that philosophical thought currently faces in attempting to articulate a consistent perspective of the possibility of an “outside” of power or, in Foucault’s formulation, knowledge/power.

+ FRANK R. ANKERSMIT, Koselleck on “Histories” versus “History”; or, Historical Ontology versus Historical Epistemology, History and Theory, Theme Issue 59 (December 2021).

The theme of this journal issue deals with the opposition between what can be said to be the “inside” and the “outside” of a culture or a civilization, a question that can be approached in different ways. To begin with, one may ask whether certain anthropological constants can be discerned in all of humanity or, to take the opposite approach, whether civilizations possess certain cultural features that are unique to them. An approach focusing on certain anthropological constants gives us access to an “inside” shared by all of humanity, whereas the latter approach is part of how a civilization demarcates itself from its “outside.” How “inside” and “outside” relate to each other had best be investigated historically, since cultural and social differentiation grow historically out of the common soil of anthropological constants. This article focuses on Reinhart Koselleck’s oeuvre to illustrate this claim. Why Koselleck? To begin with, one may find in his work an “inside” defined in terms of a philosophical anthropology and a culturally defined “outside,” both of which he contrasts in an original and thought-provoking way. As I will argue, the contrast runs parallel to the one between historical ontology and historical epistemology that can be discerned in Koselleck’s writings. I will show how the dichotomy between ontology and epistemology reappears in his notion of the saddle time (Sattelzeit)—that is, the period in which Western modern historical writing was born. Prior to the saddle time, history was seen as the product of the anthropological constants of human nature, but afterward, these constants had to give way to the belief in a historical development requiring a historical epistemology to achieve historical truth. This is how the “inside” (ontology) and the “outside” (epistemology) are interwoven in Koselleck’s notion of the Sattelzeit. In sum, ontology provides an interculturally shared “inside,” whereas epistemology divides it into as many “insides” as there are different civilizations.

+ MEERA ASHAR, Thriving on the Margins of History: Engaging with the Past in the Vernacular, History and Theory, Theme Issue 59 (December 2021).

A diversity of discursive formations in the vernacular flourish on the margins of history, and even outside it. To better understand these formations, particularly in postcolonial societies such as India, I argue that it is important to eschew the sole use of the lens of veracity. I explore alternative lenses through which to more fruitfully examine historical narratives in the vernacular: the contrast between the “historical past” and the “practical past,” the complexities involved in cultural translation, and the lyrical and fictionalized nature of prior accounts of the past. I employ these alternative lenses to make sense of Gujarati author Nandśaṅkar Tuḷjāśaṅkar Mehtā’s use of the historical novel form in his pioneering historical work, Karaṇ Ghelo, Gujarātno chello Rajpūt rājā: ek vārtā (Karaṇ the Crazy, Gujarat’s Last Rajput King: A Story), the first novel written in Gujarati. Writing at a time when the demand for histories and history textbooks was burgeoning, Mehtā made the curious choice to write a vārtā, or “story”—a choice that becomes more comprehensible when seen from the alternative perspectives I propose.

+ JÖRN RÜSEN, The Horizon of History Moved by Modernity: After and Beyond Koselleck, History and Theory, Theme Issue 59 (December 2021).

This article first describes Reinhart Koselleck’s interpretation of the modernity of historical thought and then discusses the specific meaning-orientation of this thought. This description is done in a perspective that follows the question of whether modernity is only an epoch in Western history or covers general, universal history. Then, it discusses three problem areas of this conception of modernity: (1) whether there is an alternative to Koselleck’s model, (2) whether this model applies only to Western historical thought, and (3) what problems it raises. Afterward, it offers suggestions for how Koselleck’s list of “counter-concepts” can be expanded to include further provisions. Finally, it identifies and discusses the criteria of meaning that are decisive for the expanded conception of basic historical-anthropological concepts.

+ ULRICH TIMME KRAGH, The Refraction of White: The Primary Colors of Hayden White’s Tropological Theory of Discourse, History and Theory, Theme Issue 59 (December 2021).

There has been sustained discussion of the narrativist approach in the Western tradition of theory of history, and it has focused especially on the work of Hayden White. While the reception of White’s work in the non-West has resulted in multiple translations of his oeuvre into Chinese and other languages, there has, as of yet, been no attempt to apply his tropological theory of discourse in a detailed study of non-Western historiography. Any such future endeavor would require assessing the extent to which White’s theory is culturally specific to the inside of the Western cultural tradition and determining which elements may be applicable to the outside of non-Western discourse. In this vein, the article pries open a possibility for an outside in the narrativist study of history. It establishes a European family tree of White’s tropological theory of discourse by first tracing its acknowledged intellectual ancestry to Peter Ramus’s rhetorical reductionism and Giambattista Vico’s poetic logic. It then extends the genealogy of White’s tetragrammatical analysis further back into a European ancestry by identifying its roots in the patristic and medieval exegetical traditions of the four senses of scripture and the four words of Saint Paul. The analysis reveals that White’s narrativist method of tropology belongs to a particular refraction of mythic consciousness having an identifiable beginning, middle, and end in the Western cultural tradition. Any methodological step beyond this consciousness would require reading the tropological spectrum of another cultural lineage of myth.

+ FIONA JENKINS, Whoever Are Histories For? Pluralization, Border Thinking, and Potential Histories, History and Theory, Theme Issue 59 (December 2021).

How are contemporary philosophies of history articulated in resistance to the long legacies of colonial rule and practice that continue to shape presuppositions of knowledge? By foregrounding the performative dimension of modes of historical narration, this article considers how practices of engagement with alterity can be conceptualized as constituting new spaces of encounter. The “whoever” invoked in this article’s title is presented as a site of indeterminate identity, the futural antidote to an epistemic regime, and the addressee of a question that is as much about what we might become as what we have been. Exploring versions of this figure in the work of Walter Mignolo, Ariella Azoulay, and Judith Butler, the article demonstrates how these theorists all problematize the presumptive universality of the West, and the historically established status quo that underpins it, without adopting in its stead a naive or merely fragmented account of difference. Each approach to the politics of knowledge considered here suggests a way of capturing the significance of the performative and mediated space of separation and relatedness between “same” and “other” as potential sites for decolonizing history, and each seeks to activate the interference and disturbance of the “exteriorities” at once produced and repressed as aspects of the institution of a “center” or “origin.” The theorists I discuss variably describe such exteriorities via the resources of “border thinking” (Mignolo), “potential history” (Azoulay), and the “exilic” (Butler) and provide means not only to acknowledge histories of oppression but to imagine a transformative politics premised on these vital interventions.

+ CHARLES LOCK, Thinking on Location: An Essay in the Vulnerability of the Subject, History and Theory, Theme Issue 59 (December 2021).

This essay addresses problems of how and what we know in an attempt to distinguish what’s inside from what’s outside and to figure out whether acts of knowing can be plotted on either side of any boundary that might claim to separate inside from outside. Moving beyond the familiar dialectics derived from Hegel’s theory of history, the essay reflects on the author’s experience as a teacher of English literature “abroad” who has tried to disclaim any privileged access to the interpretation of texts written in English. It was possible to maintain a status as outsider when teaching texts written across the postcolonial world, but such a position was not sustainable when teaching literature by authors from the First Nations of North America. Throughout, various theoretical alternatives are posited, from Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s “outsidedness” to Alain Badiou’s pursuit (following Saint Paul) of “universal singularity.” None of these theories seems adequate, and the essay’s argument finds itself circling around the intractable. That figure of “circling around” would suggest that the outside had been attained, but one can always think of a theme, a context, or a relation in which the subject would find itself again inhabiting the inside. Structuring the argument is the notion of place and location and the Viconian yearning for the strictly geometrical representation of history, and thence of entities in fixed places, and of constant spatial relations between entities—and of metonymy as the figure by whose suppression, alone, space and time have been enabled to persist in their Kantian sovereignty as the a priori categories that ground all our knowing.

+ EWA DOMAŃSKA, Prefigurative Humanities, History and Theory, Theme Issue 59 (December 2021).

In this article, I propose that a future-oriented project of prefigurative humanities will provide a much-needed framework for fostering alternative ways of approaching the past beyond history. I consider whether such future-oriented humanities, which are guided by the idea of critical hope and epistemic justice (understood as the inclusion of knowledges created in “epistemic peripheries”), might provide critical tools for imagining different scenarios of the future, as manifested in realistic and responsible utopias. The prototypes of such utopias might be found in art, film, literature, and history as well as in real, everyday life. Following Ruth Levitas’s approach to utopia and Ariella Azoulay’s project of potential history, I also consider how utopia might function not only as a goal but as a method to revive more positive thinking about the future.