Volume 45

ARTICLES

Eelco Runia, "Presence," History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 1-29.

For more than thirty years now, thinking about the way we, humans, account for our past has taken place under the aegis of representationalism. In its first two decades, representationalism, inaugurated by Hayden White’s Metahistory of 1973, has been remarkably successful, but by now it has lost much of its vigor and it lacks explanatory power when faced with recent phenomena such as memory, lieux de mémoire, remembrance, and trauma. It might be argued that many of the shortcomings of representationalism spring from the fact that it is exclusively geared to “transfer of meaning.” This essay posits that what may be called “presence” (“the unrepresented way the past is present in the present”) is at least as important as “meaning.” “Presence” can be dealt with by employing a “topical” view of history (in the manner of, for example, Vico) in which the whole of history is stored in “places” (that is, “institutions”) that can be “visited” on the plane of the present. Presence can be said to be stored in metonymy. Whereas metaphor is instrumental in the “transfer of meaning,” metonymy brings about a “transfer of presence.” A metonymy is a “presence in absence” not just in the sense that it presents something that isn’t there, but also in the sense that in the absence (or at least the radical inconspicuousness) that is there, the thing that isn’t there is still present. The presence of the past thus does not reside primarily in the intended story or the manifest metaphorical content of the text, but in what story and text contain in spite of the intentions of the historian. One might say that historical reality travels with historiography not as a paying passenger but as a stowaway. As a stowaway, as what is absently and unintentionally present on the plane of time, metonymy is a metaphor for discontinuity, or, rather, for the entwinement of continuity and discontinuity.

Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity," History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 30-50.

This article presents, in a programmatic way, the histoire croisée approach, its methodological implications and its empirical developments. Histoire croisée draws on the debates about comparative history, transfer studies, and connected or shared history that have been carried out in the social sciences in recent years. It invites us to reconsider the interactions between different societies or cultures, erudite disciplines or traditions (more generally, between social and cultural productions). Histoire croisée focuses on empirical intercrossings consubstantial with the object of study, as well as on the operations by which researchers themselves cross scales, categories, and viewpoints. The article first shows how this approach differs from purely comparative or transfer studies. It then develops the principles of pragmatic and reflexive induction as a major methodological principle of histoire croisée. While underlining the need and the methods of a historicization of both the objects and categories of analysis, it calls for a reconsideration of the way history can combine empirical and reflexive concerns into a dynamic and flexible approach.

Göran Blix, “Charting the ‘Transitional Period’: The Emergence of Modern Time in the Nineteenth Century," History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 51-71.

This paper seeks to chart a concept of historical experience that French Romantic writers first developed to describe their own relationship to historical time: the notion of the “transitional period.” At first, the term related strictly to the evolving periodic conception of history, one that required breaks, spaces, or zones of indeterminacy to bracket off periods imagined as organic wholes. These transitions, necessary devices in the new grammar of history, also began to attract interest on their own, conceived either as chaotic but creative times of transformation, or, more often, as slack periods of decadence that possessed no proper style but exhibited hybrid traits. Their real interest, however, lies in their reflexive application to the nineteenth century itself, by writers and historians such as Alfred de Musset, Chateaubriand, Michelet, and Renan, who in their effort to define their own period envisioned the “transitional period” as a passage between more coherent and stable historical formations. This prospective self-definition of the “age of history” from a future standpoint is very revealing; it shows not just the tension between its organic way of apprehending the past and its own self-perception, but it also opens a window on a new and paradoxical experience of time, one in which change is ceaseless and an end in itself. The paper also presents a critique of the way the term “modernity” has functioned, from Baudelaire’s initial use to the present, to occlude the experience of transition that the Romantics highlighted. By imposing on the nineteenth-century sense of the transitory a heroic period designation, the term “modernity” denies precisely the reality it describes, and sublimates a widespread temporal malaise into its contrary. The paper concludes that the peculiarly “modern” mania for naming one’s period is a function of transitional time, and that the concept coined by the Romantics still governs our contemporary experience.

REVIEW ARTICLE

Anson Rabinbach, “Moments of Totalitarianism" (a review of Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Tzvetan Todorov and David Bellos; The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia by Richard Overy; Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared by Henry Rousso and Lucy B. Golsan; Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison by Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin; and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion by Slavoj Zizek), History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 72-100.

REVIEW ESSAYS

ARTICLES

FORUM: ON PRESENCE

EDITED BY EELCO RUNIA AND ELIZABETH J. BROUWER

Eelco Runia, "Spots of Time,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 305-316.
How can the subliminal, mysterious, but uncommonly powerful living-on, the presence, of the past be envisaged? In this essay I argue that presence is not brought about by stories — by, that is, the "storiness" of stories. Presence rather shows itself in how the past can force us—and enable us—to rewrite our stories about ourselves. The question then is how we acquire the experiences that can eventually force us to do so. How, and with what kind of things, does the mémoire involontaire—from which presence wells up—get filled? In order to answer this question one might turn it around to the question how we can fill the mémoire involontaire of others. A consideration of the "art of slandering" shows that the mémoire involontaire tends to get filled with things (1) that we believe are "common knowledge," that (2) are "obliquely" communicated, and that (3) are cast in metonymies. Metonymy offers a much better road to the mémoire involontaire than metaphor because metonymy is better at suggesting that what it conveys is "common knowledge." Therefore, I propose that presence resides in the metonymical region of language. Instead of being contained in the meaningful content (the "storiness") of stories, presence resides in what a story inadvertently has to be—in, that is, the things a story has to present in order to present a story. My conclusion is that as presence the past is the exact opposite of what historians think it is. It is indestructible, uncannily close, and—despite its closeness and its durability—utterly impossible to conserve in "representations" that can be taken along in the hand luggage with which we traverse time.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "Presence Achieved in Language (With Special Attention Given to the Presence of the Past) ,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 317-327.
The aim of this essay is to ask whether what it calls the "presence" of things, including things of the past, can be rendered in language, including the language of historians. In Part I the essay adumbrates what it means by presence (the spatio-temporally located existence of physical objects and events). It also proposes two ideal types: meaning-cultures (in which the interpretation of meaning is of paramount concern, so much so that the thinghood of things is often obscured), and presence-cultures (in which capturing the tangibility of things is of utmost importance). In the modern period, linguistic utterance has typically come to be used for, and to be interpreted as, the way by which meaning rather than presence is expressed, thereby creating a gap between language and presence. Thus, in Part II the essay explores ways that this gap might be bridged, examining seven instances in which presence can be "amalgamated" with language. These range from instances in which the physical dimensions of language itself are made manifest, to those through which the physicality of the things to which language refers is supposed to be made evident. Of particular note for theorists of history are those instances in which things can be made present by employing the deictic, poetic, and incantatory potential of linguistic expression. The essay concludes in Part III with a reflection on Heidegger's idea that language is the "house of being," now interpreted as the idea that language can be the medium through which the separation of humans and the (physical) things of their environment may be overcome. The hope of achieving presence in language is no less than a reconciliation of humans with their world, including—and of most interest to historians—the things and events of their past.

F. R. Ankersmit, "’Presence’ and Myth,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 328-336.
There are no dictionary meanings or authoritative discussions of "presence" that fix the significance of this word in a way that ought to be accepted by anybody using it. So we are in the welcome possession of great freedom to maneuver when using the term. In fact, the only feasible requirement for its use is that it should maximally contribute to our understanding of the humanities. When trying to satisfy this requirement I shall relate "presence" to representation. Then I focus on a variant of representation in which the past is allowed to travel to the present as a kind of "stowaway" (Runia), so that the past is literally "present" in historical representation. I appeal to Runia's notion of so-called "parallel processes" for an analysis of this variant of historical representation.

Ewa Domanska, "The Material Presence of the Past,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 337-348.
This article deals with the material presence of the past and the recent call in the human sciences for a " things." This renewed interest in things signals a rejection of constructivism and textualism and the longing for what is "real," where "regaining" the object is conceived as a means for re-establishing contact with reality. In the context of this turn, we might wish to reconsider the (ontological) status of relics of the past and their function in mediating relations between the organic and the inorganic, between people and things, and among various kinds of things themselves for reconceptualizing the study of the past. I argue that the future will depend on whether and how various scholars interested in the past manage to modify their understanding of the material remnants of the past, that is, things as well as human, animal, and plant remains. In discussing this problem I will refer to Martin Heidegger's distinction between an object and a thing, to Bruno Latour's idea of the agency of things and object-oriented democracy, and to Don Ihde's material hermeneutics. To illustrate my argument I will focus on some examples of the ambivalent status of the disappeared person (dead or alive) in Argentina, which resists the oppositional structure of present versus absent. In this context, the disappeared body is a paradigm of the past itself, which is both continuous with the present and discontinuous from it, which simultaneously is and is not. Since there are no adequate terms to analyze the "contradictory" or anomalous status of the present-absent dichotomy, I look for them outside the binary oppositions conventionally used to conceptualize the present-absent relationship in our thinking about the past. for this purpose I employ Algirdas Julien Greimas's semiotic square.

Michael Bentley, "Past and ‘Presence’: Revisiting Historical Ontology,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 349-361.
The last thirty years have brought about a fundamental revision of historical epistemology. So intense a concentration on the nature of history as a form of inquiry has diminished attention given to the thing that history inquires into: the nature of the past itself. Too readily, that entire domain has turned into a place for dreams, as Hayden White put it: a lost world only available now through the imagination of the author and subject to aesthetic whim. The next thirty years will, I propose, be the period in which ontology returns to the center of historical theory. And nothing short of the reconceptualization of the past—indeed of time itself—must be its objective. It must achieve that objective, moreover, in establishing arguments that are congruent with what revisions of epistemology have taught us about the limits of historical knowledge and the inevitability of textual representation. This paper enters this field by discussing some of the issues involved in rethinking the place of time in historical constructions since Bergson. It demonstrates the confusions inherent in spatial reductions of temporality, which historians have done so much to entrench rather than eradicate, and argues that historians have yet to accommodate the fundamental conceptual shifts inaugurated by Heidegger. It then moves to propose a methodological doctrine to which I have given the name "chronism" and seeks to sketch the utility of such a doctrine for bringing one form of presence—that of authenticity—back into the domain of historical study. Doing so invites a number of conceptual and practical difficulties that the paper will address in its conclusions; these may disturb those who have closed their minds to anything beyond the present. Taking ontology seriously interferes both with structuralist assumptions about the nothingness of time and with some of the styles of historical representation that have become fashionable in the postmodern climate. There may be painful lessons to be learned if we are to rescue the past from its current status as a nonentity.

Rik Peters, "Actes de présence: Presence in Fascist Political Culture,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 362-374.
In order to discuss the notion of presence, I explore Fascist Italy as an example of a presence-based culture. In the first part of this paper, I focus on the doctrines of "the philosopher of fascism," Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), in order to show that his programme of cultural awakening revolves around the notion of the "presentification of the past." This notion formed the basis of Gentile's dialectic of the act of thought, which is the kernel of his actual idealism, or actualism. I argue that actualism should primarily be interpreted as an ontology of a historical reality; it expresses the view that reality is history. In his 1914 inaugural "L'esperienza pura e la realtà storica" (Pure Experience and Historical Reality), Gentile drew this view to its ultimate consequence by developing a view of experience that has some striking parallels with the contemporary views of presence as expounded by Gumbrecht, Runia, and Ankermit. In the second part of my paper, I discuss how Gentile and his collaborators put presence into practice in school reforms, the Enciclopedia Italiana, and in hundreds of monuments, memorials, and exhibitions. Finally, I discuss the 1932 Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, which was not only the apex of Fascist culture politics, but also of the practice of presence. In this context, I argue that this practice should not be seen as a politics of historical interpretation, as Hayden White once held, but as a politics of sublime historical experience, or presence. The presence of presence in Fascist political culture raises some difficult questions for all who embrace the new paradigm, questions that can only be answered if the notion of presence is somehow balanced by the critical historical method, which is the basis for a true dialogue with the past.

Milan Babík, "Nazism as a Secular Religion,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 375-396.
This article examines the implications of Richard Steigmann-Gall's recent revisionist representation of Nazism as a Christian (Protestant) movement for the increasingly fashionable accounts of Nazism as a secular or political religion. Contrary to Steigmann-Gall's contention that Protestant Nazism undermines these accounts, I suggest that his portrayal of Nazism as a variant of Protestant millennialism is not necessarily inconsistent with the secular religion approach. A closer look at the so-called Löwith-Blumenberg debate on secularization indeed reveals that modern utopianisms containing elements of Protestant millennialism are the best candidates for the label of secularized eschatology. That Steigmann-Gall has reached exactly the opposite conclusion is primarily because his conceptual understanding of secular religion is uninformed by the secularization debate. Insofar as Steigmann-Gall extracts his model of secular religion from contemporary political religion historiography on Nazism, this article points to a larger problem: a disjunction between historians utilizing the concept, on the one hand, and philosophers and social theorists who have shaped it, on the other.

REVIEW ESSAYS

Samuel Moyn on The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust by Carolyn J. Dean and History in Transit: Experience, Identity, and Critical Theory by Dominick LaCapra, History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 397-415.

Annette Aronowicz on Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting by Harald Weinrich and Steven Rendall, History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 416-423.

Alan S. Kahan on Tocqueville Unveiled: The Historian and His Sources for the Old Regime and the Revolution by Robert T. Gannett Jr., History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 424-435.

Beryl Satter on Writing Gender History by Laura Lee Downs, History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 436-447.

Richard Eldridge on Interpretive Reasoning by Laurent Stern, History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 448-454.

Religion and History

David Gary Shaw, “Modernity between Us and Them: The Place of Religion within History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 1-9.

Constantin Fasolt, “History and Religion in the Modern Age," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 10-26.
This essay seeks to clarify the relationship between history and religion in the modern age. It proceeds in three steps. First, it draws attention to the radical asymmetry between first-person and third-person statements that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations rescued from the metaphysical exile to which it had been condemned by Descartes’s definition of the self as a thing. Second, it argues that religion is designed to alleviate the peculiarly human kind of suffering arising from this asymmetry. Third, it maintains that history relies on the same means as religion in order to achieve the same results. The turn to historical evidence performed by historians and their readers is more than just a path to knowledge. It is a religious ritual designed to make participants at home in their natural and social environments. Quite like the ritual representation of the death and resurrection of Christ in the Mass, the historical representation of the past underwrites the faith in human liberty and the hope in redemption from suffering. It helps human beings to find their bearings in the modern age without having to go to pre-industrial churches and pray in old agrarian ways. History does not conflict with the historical religions merely because it reveals them to have been founded on beliefs that cannot be supported by the evidence. History conflicts with the historical religions because it is a rival religion.

Catherine Bell, “Paradigms behind (and before) the Modern Concept of Religion," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 27-46.
This essay identifies five paradigms that are basic to understanding the historical emergence and uses of the generic idea of “religion” in the Christian cultures of Europe and America. The spread of this concept has been sufficiently thorough in recent centuries as to make religion appear to be a “social fact,” to use Durkheim’s phrase, rather than so many cultural expressions and different social practices. The supremacy of Euro-American culture—and an academy still saturated with Christian ideas—has enjoined other cultures and forms of religiosity to conform to this idea of religion; for these cultures contentment with the status quo can vie with the anxieties of influence, including “modernization.” The key paradigms discussed are the following: Christianity as the prototype; religion as the opposite of reason; the modern formulation of “world religions”; the cultural necessity of religion; and critical analysis of the Western “construction” of religion. These paradigms demonstrate the limits on theoretical variety in the field, the difficulty in making real changes in set ways of thinking, and productive foci for interdisciplinary methods of study.

Jon Butler, “Theory and God in Gotham," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 47-61.
“Theory” is all the rage among religious studies scholars generally. But with the tiniest number of exceptions, this is not true in American religious history. American history in general has not proven receptive to theoretically oriented scholarship, and American religious history may epitomize this aversion; most histories of religion in America follow the classic forms of narrative history. Yet the study of religion in modern urban America illustrates the desirability and perhaps even the inevitability of rethinking both religion and modernity. Without rethinking modernity, especially the assumption of its secularity, our histories cannot explain or even adequately describe the remarkable resilience of religion in so seemingly secular a place as Manhattan. And without rethinking religion we may not be able to comprehend its ability to thrive and to embrace uncertainty and spiritual pluralism alike.

James E. Ketelaar, “The Non-Modern Confronts the Modern: Dating the Buddha in Japan," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 62-79.
This paper examines the emergence of a distinctly “modern” style of history and some of its uses as applied to Buddhism by Buddhist scholars within the early Meiji Period (late nineteenth century) in Japan. After a discussion of the importance of “area studies” in the formation of conceptions germane to history as practiced in Japan, the paper proposes a new category of the “non-modern” as a means to counter the historiographical dominance of modern categories in the formation of the historical discipline, especially as formulated in Japanese studies. As a case study, the emergence of the discourse dealing with the quest for the historical Buddha is examined. By showing the methods and accomplishments of modernist historians, and the concomitant slippage of non-modern categories in their work, this paper sketches a method of analysis particularly applicable to the intersection of religion and history.

C. T. McIntire, “Transcending Dichotomies in History and Religion," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 80-92.
At first glance, to speak of “history and religion” presents no problem. We merely identify two items to discuss in the same study. We quickly discover, however, that since at least the twentieth century the pair “history and religion” has tended to operate as a dichotomy. Within the dominant traditions of discourse originating in Europe, over many centuries, the verbal pair “history and religion” became a dichotomy encoded as the dichotomy “secular and religious,” signifying the opposition “not religious and religious.” This dichotomy does not usually appear alone, but commonly comes associated with other dichotomies whose terms align with either history or religion. The short list of associated dichotomies includes: temporal and spiritual, natural and supernatural, reason and faith, public and private, social and personal, scientific and theological, objective and subjective, rational and emotional, and modern and medieval. The opposing parts come gendered as masculine and feminine. Usage of the dichotomies creates tensions with practitioners of virtually all religions in all regions of the world. Rigorous and consistent users of the dichotomies misunderstand the character of religions as ways of life, fail to account for the persistence and revival of religion in the twenty-first century, and overlook the intrinsic manner in which history manifests religion and religion manifests history. The defective outcomes prompt a number of constructive suggestions for transcending dichotomies in history and religion. These reflections on dichotomies refer to several varieties of Christianity, the emergence of the secular option, and the imagined triumph of Hindu dharma.

Mark S. Cladis, “Modernity in Religion: A Response to Constantin Fasolts ‘History and Religion in the Modern Age,’" History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 93-103.
Contrary to Constantin Fasolt, I argue that it is no longer useful to think of religion as an anomaly in the modern age. Here is Fasolt’s main argument: humankind suffers from a radical rift between the self and the world. The chief function of religion is to mitigate or cope with this fracture by means of dogmas and rituals that reconcile the self to the world. In the past, religion successfully fulfilled this job. But in modernity, it fails to, and it fails because religion is no longer plausible. Historical, confessional religions, then, are no longer doing what they are supposed to do; yet the need for religion is still very much with us. Fasolt’s account would be a tragic tale, if not for his claim that there is a new religion for the modern age, a religion that fulfills the true reconciling function of religion. That new religion is the reading and writing of history. Indeed, for Fasolt, reading history is religiously redemptive, and writing history is a sacred act. The historian, it turns out, is the priest in modernity. In my response, I challenge both Fasolt’s remedy (history as religiously redemptive) and its justification (the fall of historical religions). Indeed, I reject both his romantic view of past religion as the peaceful reconciler, as well as his pessimistic view of present religion as the maker of “enemies” among modern people. In the end, I argue that the way Fasolt employs his categories—“alienation,” “salvation,” “religion,” “history”—is too vague to do much useful work. They are significant categories and they deserve our attention. But in my view, the story Fasolt tells is both too grim (on human alienation) and too cheerful (on historian as modern savior).

David Gordon White, “Digging Wells while Houses Burn? Writing Histories of Hinduism in a Time of Identity Politics," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 104-131.
Over the past fifty years, a number of approaches to the recovery of the multiple pasts of Hinduism have held the field. These include that of the discipline of History of Religions as it is constituted in North America as well as those of the Hindu nationalists, the col and post-colonial historians, and the Subaltern Studies School. None of these approaches have proven satisfactory because, for methodological or ideological reasons, none have adequately addressed human agency or historical change in their accounts of the pasts out of which modern-day Hinduism has emerged. The Hindu nationalist historians hark back to an extended Vedic golden age in which religious practice remained unchanged until the corruptions spawned by the Turkish invasions of the eleventh century. Many Western indologists and historians of religion specializing in Hinduism never leave the unalterable ideal worlds of the scriptures they interpret to investigate the changing real-world contexts out of which those texts emerged. The colonial and postcolonial historians focus on the past two hundred years as the period in which all of the categories through which India continues to interpret itself—including Hinduism—were imposed upon it from without. Adducing examples of Hindu practitioners and thinkers from the colonial period, subaltern theorists and others argue that historical thought is itself alien to the authentic Indian mind. This article suggests a number of interpretive strategies for retrieving the multiple Hinduisms of the past and of the medieval period in particular as that time out of which most modern-day practices of Hinduism emerged. These include an increased emphasis on non-scriptural sources and a focus on regional traditions.

Brad S. Gregory, “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 132-149.
The rejection of confessional commitments in the study of religion in favor of social-scientific or humanistic theories of religion has produced not unbiased accounts, but reductionist explanations of religious belief and practice with embedded secular biases that preclude the understanding of religious believer-practitioners. These biases derive from assumptions of undemonstrable, dogmatic, metaphysical naturalism or its functional equivalent, an epistemological skepticism about all truth claims of revealed religions. Because such assumptions are so widespread among scholars today, they are not often explicitly articulated. They were overtly asserted by Emile Durkheim in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), however, and are implicit in the claims of two other thinkers influential in the study of early modern Christianity in recent years, namely Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault. The use of such theories in the history of religion yields secular confessional history, parallel to traditional religious confessional history only with different embedded metaphysical beliefs. If scholars want to understand religious persons such that the latter would recognize themselves in what is said about them, rather than impose their own metaphysical convictions on them, then they should reject metaphysically biased reductionist theories of religion no less than confessional religious assumptions in the practice of their scholarship. Instead, a study of religion guided not by theories but by the question, “What did it mean to them?” and which is particularized in metaphysically neutral ways offers a third alternative that avoids confessional history, whether religious or secular. When carried out consistently for multiple traditions, such an approach can reconstruct disagreements that point beyond description to historical explanation of change over time.

Cover image: Tabātabāei House in Kashan, Iran, by Mostafa Meraji (23 May 2019)

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2006

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