Volume 55
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Kenan van de Mieroop, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Black History Month for Life: The Creation of the Post-Racial Era," History and Theory 55, no. 1 (2016), 3-24.
This article takes the Nietzschean dictum that history must “serve life” as a point of departure for an analysis of the American institution of Black History Month. Many continue to place great faith in the power of historical education to solve problems of race in America. Against this common-sense view, this article argues that the excessive historicization of the problem of racism is at least as oppressive as forgetting. The black history propagated during this month has mostly been a celebration that it is history and thus a thing of the past. The article makes the claim that it is precisely a surfeit of black history that has encouraged the view that racism is vanishing in the river of time. The constant demand to view American racism through a historical frame has led to the perception that racism is a problem that must be historically transcended rather than solved. In other words, it is through the widespread dissemination of black history during Black History Month and elsewhere that the historical category of the post-racial era has been constituted. The post-racial era is not, as is so often claimed, a denial of historical context. On the contrary, it is an assertion that the horrors of racist discrimination were once real but are now over and done with.
Hélio Rebello Cardoso, “Peirce and Foucault on Time and History: The Tasks of (Dis)continuity," History and Theory 55, no. 1 (2016), 25-38.
Some have recognized an affinity between Pragmatist thought and that of Foucault, though this affinity is typically cashed out in terms of William James and John Dewey and not Charles Sanders Peirce. This article argues that bringing Foucault and Peirce into collaboration not only shows the relevance of Peirce for Foucault, and vice versa, but also enriches the thought of both thinkers—indeed, it also reveals important implications for the theory of history more generally. Specifically, the article crosses the Peircean concept of habit and the Foucauldian concept of practice (as it operates in the arenas of discourse, power, and self), ultimately decoding them in terms of an account of time that derives from Peirce and that gives a fundamental role to discontinuity. In this way the article shows how Peirce can provide Foucault with an account of time that buttresses and grounds his genealogical approach to history, while at the same time revealing how Foucault can provide Peirce with an account of history. The synergy between the two thinkers offers a way to think about the nature of history that goes beyond what each thinker individually provided.
Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Rules of the Game in the Study of Ancient History (translated by Kenneth W. Yu)," History and Theory 55, no. 1 (2016), 39-45.
“The Rules of the Game,” expounded in ten remarkably bold theses, can easily be read as a synthetic retrospective or introduction to the formidable oeuvre of Arnaldo Momigliano. Indeed, this piece served as the opening chapter to his Introduzione bibliografica alla storia greca fino a Socrate (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975), and its subsequent reprints as an independent essay in several Italian journals and anthologies signal its importance for Momigliano. In this provocative and occasionally brilliantly witty essay, Momigliano sets forth his programmatic views on the ethos of the historian, as well as on the historical method and its applications in the study of ancient history. Here, as elsewhere, Momigliano is interested in detailing the link between ancient documents and their historical interpretations in later millennia. Ancient sources, he cautions, do not capture ancient realities transparently or completely, but are mediated documents whose historical value hinges, within certain limits, on the historian’s analytical questions, inflected as they inevitably are by different ideological commitments. For this reason, he places special emphasis on the comparative method, stressing difference rather than similarity, and advises that historians with various areas of expertise collaborate, a point underscored throughout the essay. What is more, the essay contains the salutary reminder that the historian ought to attend not only to the surviving documents but also to the conspicuous silences and lacunae in the evidence.
Margrit Pernau and Imke Rajamani, “Emotional Translations: Conceptual History beyond Language," History and Theory 55, no. 1 (2016), 46-65.
Conceptual history is a useful tool for writing the history of emotions. The investigation of how a community used emotion words at certain times and in certain places allows us to understand specific emotion knowledge without being trapped by universalism. But conceptual history is also an inadequate tool for writing the history of emotions. Its exclusive focus on language fails to capture the meanings that can be derived from emotional expressions in other media such as painting, music, architecture, film, or even food. Here emotion history can contribute to a rethinking of conceptual history, bringing the body and the senses back in. This article proposes a theoretical model to expand conceptual history beyond language by exploring three processes of emotional translation: First, how the translation between reality and its interpretation is mediated by the body and the senses. Second, how translations between different media and sign systems shape and change the meanings of concepts. Third, how concepts translate into practices that have an impact on reality. The applicability of the model is not limited to the research on concepts of emotion; the article argues that emotions have a crucial role in all processes of conceptual change. The article further suggests that historicizing concepts can best be achieved by reconstructing the relations that actors have created between elements within multimedial semantic nets. The approach will be exemplified by looking at the South Asian concept of the monsoon and the emotional translations between rain and experiences of love and romance.
Harry Jansen, “In Search of New Times: Temporality in the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment," History and Theory 55, no. 1 (2016), 66-90.
Isaiah Berlin and other representatives of historicism have made the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment into opposite cultures. The Counter-Enlightenment is a criticism of the Enlightenment from within, so in many respects they overlap. However, with regard to perceptions of time they contradict each other. The times of the Enlightenment lean heavily toward chronology and can be labeled as “empty,” whereas the time perceptions of the Counter-Enlightenment can be called “incarnated” and are identical with historical times. As a consequence the differences between the two temporalities lead necessarily to differences in synchronization.
REVIEW ESSAYS
John E. Toews on The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory, edited by Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot, History and Theory 55, no. 1 (2016), 91-109.
Matthew Specter on Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, edited by Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, History and Theory 55, no. 1 (2016), 110-128.
Aviezer Tucker on Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus by Richard C. Carrier, History and Theory 55, no. 1 (2016), 129-140.
Branko Mitrović on Aspects of Psychologism by Tim Crane and The Objects of Thought by Tim Crane, History and Theory 55, no. 1 (2016), 141-153.
ARTICLES
Christophe Bouton, "The Critical Theory of History: Rethinking the Philosophy of History in the Light of Koselleck’s Work," History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016), 163-184.
There are many ways to consider the philosophy of history. In this article, I claim that one of the most viable approaches to the philosophy of history today is that of critical theory of history, inspired by Reinhart Koselleck. Critical theory of history is based on what I call known history, history as it has been established and expounded by historians. What it contributes—its added value, so to speak—is a reflection on the categories employed to think about historical experience at its different levels, not only as a narrative but also as a series of events: their origins, contexts, terminology, functions (theoretical or practical), and, finally, eventual relevance.
Sjoerd Griffioen, "Modernity and the Problem of its Christian Past: The Geistesgeschichten of Blumenberg, Berger, and Gauchet," History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016), 185-209.
Recent years have seen the rise of “post-secularism,” a new perspective that criticizes the dominant secularization narrative according to which “modernity” and “religion” are fundamentally antagonistic concepts. Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Gianni Vattimo are the most prominent defenders of such a post-secularist account. But though post-secularism presents itself as a necessary rectification of the secularization story, it has not been able to come up with a credible and generally accepted alternative account. In this article I will explain why, arguing that the use of “essentially contested concepts” such as “Christianity” and “modernity” rest on normative standpoints of the narrators that are incompatible with one another. To show this I will analyze the position of three older voices in the debate, namely those of Hans Blumenberg, Peter Berger, and Marcel Gauchet. These authors seem to agree in understanding the modern disenchanted worldview in relation to Christian transcendence, but I will show that beneath their similar narratives lie incompatible normative beliefs on which their use of the concepts of “Christianity” and “modernity” is founded. After having laid bare the roots of the contemporary debate by exploring these three fundamental positions, I will finally argue that we should not take their accounts as objective, historical descriptions but as what Richard Rorty has called “Geistesgeschichte”: a speculative history that is aimed at conveying a moral, in which essentially contested concepts play a constitutive role. Each author draws his own moral, and consequently each author will construct his own corresponding history. This lesson can then be applied to the contemporary debate on secularization. The value of the debate does not lie in its historical claims but in the visions of the protagonists; at the end of this article I will explain how we can capitalize on this value.
Axel Michaels, Manik Bajracharya, Niels Gutschow, Madeleine Herren, Bernd Schneidmüller, Gerald Schwelder, and Astrid Zotter, "Nepalese History in a European Experience: A Case Study in Transcultural Historiography," History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016), 210-232.
In March 2013, a group of German, Nepalese, and Swiss historians, Indologists, and an architectural historian gathered for a workshop in Nepal to develop a new approach to the understanding of South Asian historiography, especially the Nepalese chronicles from the nineteenth century. The outcome is the present collaboratively written article. It is argued that, in the past, the analysis of South Asian historiography has been preoccupied by arguments based on an understanding of history that highlights facts and events. A transcultural and multidisciplinary approach, however, would overcome the common dichotomies of factuality and fictionality, history and myth, or evidence and truth. Recognizing the specificity of South Asian historiography, the article develops an approach to bridge asymmetries and entanglements in the academic use of the past in a way that also opens up a new perspective on Western historiography. By analyzing the religious, spatial, literary, and historical, and contemporary or context-related aspects of a nineteenth-century chronicle and by using “fieldwork” as a methodological tool for studying historiography, it is proposed to understand the framing of time and the making of sequences and historical periods as an open process that results in the constant and synchronic creation of chronological spaces.
Takashi Shogimen, "On the Elusiveness of Context," History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016), 233-252 .
How can we decide the pertinent context in which a given object of historical study should be examined? This question has long puzzled historians. In the field of intellectual history, the Cambridge contextual school represented by Quentin Skinner triggered a series of methodological debates, in part relating to its opaque notion of context; critics have argued that a satisfactory answer to the question—how to recover a relevant context—has yet to be given. This article tackles why the question has continued to elude us. The article demonstrates that it is simply impossible to propose a practical set of guidelines on how to reconstruct a correct context because the identification of the relevant context is presupposed in the logical structure of inference in historical inquiries; identifying a relevant context is logically antecedent to the inquiry. In order to show this, the article deploys Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of inference. Thus the article submits that Skinner conceptualized his method as what Peirce called “abduction,” which specifically seeks authorial intention as an explanatory hypothesis. This observation entails two ramifications in relation to the notion of context. One is that context in Skinner’s methodology operates on two levels: heuristic and verificatory. Confusing the two functions of context has resulted in a futile debate over the difficulty of reconstructing context. The other ramification is that abduction always requires some sort of context in order to commence an inquiry, and that context is already known to the inquirer. Any attempt to reconstruct a context also requires yet another context to invoke, thus regressing into the search for relevant contexts ad infinitum. The elusiveness of context is thus inherent in the structure of our logical inference, which, according to Peirce, always begins with abduction.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Noël Bonneuil on The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 c by William M. Reddy, History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016), 253-269.
Paul A. Roth on Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography by Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016), 270-281.
Jurandir Malerba on Las vicisitudes de Clío (siglos XVIII–XXI): Ensayos historiográficos by Ignacio Olábarri Gortázar; Las huellas del futuro: Historiografía y cultura histórica en el siglo XX by Fernando Sánchez Marcos; and Comprender el pasado: Una historia de la escritura y el pensamiento histórico by Jaume Aurell, Catalina Balmaceda, Peter Burke, and Felipe Soza, History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016), 282-289.
Woodruff D. Smith on German Colonialism in a Global Age, edited by Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016), 290-301.
Matthew Garrett on Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, edited by Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016), 302-313.
ARTICLES
William M. Reddy, "The Eurasian Origins of Empty Time and Space: Modernity as Temporality,” History and Theory 55, no. 3 (2016), 325-356.
Understood as a form of temporality, modernity is seen as consisting of empty time and space. However, careful examination of the origins of modern notions of empty time and space suggest they arose from background assumptions in wide use across Eurasia in the early modern period, and also that they arose prior to, and independent of, the emergence of the modern nation-state. Here, various Eurasian versions of astronomy and philology are examined to show that they relied on such background assumptions and could therefore be readily translated and shared across the boundaries separating quite different cosmologies.
Jacob Denz, "Bondsmen and Slaves: Servile Histories in Hegel and Nietzsche,” History and Theory 55, no. 3 (2016), 357-374.
Recent readings of what is commonly known as the dialectic of master and slave have tended to focus either philosophically on concepts such as desire, reflection, and recognition or historically on the specific nature of the economic relation it evokes. In this paper I challenge that division of proper objects, arguing that Hegel’s dialectic and its reception raises the question how the nature of servitude (whether that of a bondsman or that of a slave) structures not only the emergence of historical agency but also the relationship between history and philosophy. The importance of reflection in Hegel’s treatment of the dialectic of lord and bondsman is both clearly stated and structural. Alexandre Kojève’s reading of this dialectic makes explicit that human history originates in it, but, unlike Hegel, Kojève does not emphasize the product of the slave’s labor. Judith Butler’s reading of the dialectic in Hegel and Kojève locates the difference between Hegel’s bondsman and Kojève’s slave within the structure of servitude itself as a Foucauldian opposition between “body” and “life.” In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche differentiates between two varieties of servile work on the basis not of what is produced but instead to whom service is rendered, announcing what turns out to be a problematic familiar from both the Old and New Testaments: the impossibility of service to two masters. In a typically perspectival turn, Nietzsche shows that servitude is a condition of possibility not only of human history but also of its academic study. Self-conscious historians must thus take into account not only the dependence of their object of study upon relations of servitude but also their own place within such relations.
Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma, History, Memory, Identity: What Remains?” History and Theory 55, no. 3 (2016), 375-400.
Despite the considerable amount of work already devoted to the topic, the nexus of trauma, history, memory, and identity is still of widespread interest, and much remains to be investigated on both empirical and theoretical levels. The ongoing challenge is to approach the topic without opposing history and memory in a binary fashion but instead by inquiring into more complex and challenging relations between them, including the role of trauma and its effects. This account attempts to set out a research agenda that is multifaceted but with components that are conceptually interrelated and that call for further research and thought. In a necessarily selective manner that does not downplay the value and importance of archival research, it treats both the role of traumatic memory and memory (or memory work) that counteracts post-traumatic effects and supplements, at times serving as a corrective to, written sources. It argues for the relevance to history of a critical but nondismissive approach to the study of trauma, memory, and identity-formation, discussing significant new work as well as indicating the continued pertinence of somewhat older work in the field. One of the under-investigated issues it addresses is the role of the so-called transgenerational transmission of trauma to descendants and intimates of both survivors and perpetrators. It concludes by making explicit an issue that is fundamental to the problem of identity and identity-formation and concerning which a great deal remains to be done: the issue of critical animal studies and its historical and ethical significance. Addressing this issue would require extending one’s purview beyond humans and attending to the importance of the relations between humans and other animals.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Tracie Matysik on Spinoza contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze by Knox Peden, History and Theory 55, no. 3 (2016), 401-417.
Joshua Kates on The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 by Mark Greif, History and Theory 55, no. 3 (2016), 418-432.
Michael Behrent on For a New West: Essays, 1919–1958 by Karl Polanyi, History and Theory 55, no. 3 (2016), 433-451.
C. J. Fuller on Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India by Nicholas B. Dirks, History and Theory 55, no. 3 (2016), 452-464.
Nitzan Lebovic on Benjamin’s Passages: Dreaming, Awakening by Alexander GelleyHistory and Theory 55, no. 3 (2016), 465-475.
Words, Things, and Beyond: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses at 50
Peter E. Gordon, “Introductory Remarks: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses at 50," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (2016), 3-6.
Béatrice Han-Pile, “Phenomenology and Anthropology in Foucault’s ‘Introduction to Binswanger’s Dream and Existence’: A Mirror Image The Order of Things?" History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (2016), 7-22.
In this article, I examine the relation between phenomenology and anthropology by placing Foucault’s first published piece, "Introduction to Binswanger’s Dream and Existence" in dialectical tension with The Order of Things. I argue that the early work, which so far hasn’t received much critical attention, is of particular interest because, whereas OT is notoriously critical of anthropological confusions in general, and of "Man" as an empirico-transcendental double in particular, IB views "existential anthropology" as a unique opportunity to establish a new and fruitful relation between transcendental forms and empirical contents. This is because IB focuses on a specific object, "Menschsein" (the "being of man"), which is neither the transcendental subject nor an empirical being (a member of the class Homo sapiens). Thus for the young Foucault, existential anthropology occupies a fertile methodological middle ground between transcendental approaches (exemplified in IB by Heideggerian phenomenology) and empirical forms of analysis (exemplified by Freudian psychoanalysis). I first interpret anthropology in the light of phenomenology and defend the view that Menschsein is neither a transcendental structure nor a concrete particular, but as the instantiation of the first in the second. I argue that for anthropology to yield the full theoretical benefits Foucault claims for it, the particular cases of Menschsein examined in existential analysis have to be regarded as exemplary. I then read phenomenology back in the light of anthropology and examine how, for Foucault, the analysis of Menschsein in dreams benefits fundamental ontology by affording us a clearer view of some of the main existentiale than the focus on everyday waking experience in Being and Time. Finally, I turn to the limits and difficulties of this early position and my reading of it, and to their consequences for Foucault’s later view.
Jean-Claude Monod, “Vanishing Point: Les mots et les choses, History, and Diagnosis," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (2016), 23-34.
A difficult point in The Order of Things lies in the historical situation of the archaeologist himself, especially when he speaks about the present. Is it possible to have an adequate view of the episteme in which you stand? Is not the very concept of episteme that of an unconscious determination of the space of knowledge, so that it would be an illusion to claim to be able to "objectify" one's own epistemological situation? And from what point of view can a part of this situation be considered "backward"? This article tries to show that the idea of the "death of man" can be read on two levels: first, it is possible to reconstruct the argument of an appearance and disappearance of man in the space of knowledge from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century; but then, one has to discuss the way Foucault combined his history of knowledge with a philosophical polemics against some contemporary figures. And we can wonder if Foucault's diagnosis has lost any relevance for the present.
Nancy Partner, “Foucault’s Iconic Afterlife: The Posthumous Reach of Words and Things," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (2016), 35-53.
The lasting influence of Michel Foucault's work is both instantly recognizable in that his very name can be invoked as a noun or adjective ("Foucauldian") as a critical stance or attitude without further elaboration, and yet his signature concepts have been flattened, stretched, exaggerated, and thinned as they have been applied by his most enthusiastic followers. Although Foucault has entered the canon of philosophers, he also became iconic, most notably with the typographic icon, power/knowledge, a (possibly unwanted) achievement of recognition and compression virtually unknown to other philosophers. In this essay, I consider the Foucault of the philosophical canon, and I trace some of the main routes of the iconic Foucault into acceptance or nonacceptance by the academic disciplines, notably history, political science, and anthropology, and numerous other unexpected venues where variants of Foucault's ideas have found surprising homes. I also contemplate the meaning of the status of "iconicity" as it has been analyzed by sociologists, and the possibility that iconic misreadings of Foucault's concepts have been extraordinarily "good to think with" by his critics.
Gary Gutting, “The Politics of The Order of Things: Foucault, Sartre, and Deleuze," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (2016), 54-65.
Foucault's histories are typically aimed at what he regarded as intolerable political consequences of knowledge-based disciplines such as psychiatry and medicine. But The Order of Things is hard to fit into this pattern. What are the intolerable political consequences of the metaphysical and epistemological "humanism" the book attacks? To answer this question, I discuss Foucault's attitude toward Sartre and Deleuze, neither mentioned in The Order of Things but both of central importance for understanding its political significance. My conclusion is that the book fails as a political critique of Sartre (and political humanism in general) and instead expresses Foucault's personal ethical preference for Deleuzian limit-experiences.
THE SIXTH ANNUAL HISTORY AND THEORY LECTURE:
Vincent Descombe, “The Order of Things: An Archeology of What?" History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (2016), 66-81.
Foucault’s Les mots et les choses has been translated as The Order of Things. The title of the book, both in French and in English, would remain enigmatic without the subtitle: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. But which disciplines are the human sciences to be accounted for by the archaeologist? To this question, there seem to be three possible answers. According to Foucault, such sciences as biology, political economy, and linguistics are indeed scientific disciplines that study human beings, but they are not human sciences. On the other hand, psychology and sociology do count as human sciences, although they are not really genuine sciences. As to structural disciplines (Lacanian psychoanalysis, Lévi-Straussian anthropology, structural linguistics), Foucault does not see them as successful human sciences, since he calls them “counter-human sciences." In other words, the situation of human sciences seems to be messy from the point of view of a philosopher defending the possibility of radical reflection against psychologism and more generally anthropologism. Foucault rejects Merleau-Ponty’s claim to have found a way out of anthropologism through the so-called phenomenological reduction. Then one can read Foucault’s archaeology of human sciences as an attempt to offer an alternative way for radical thinking. His archaeology turns out to be an archaeology of ourselves insofar as it applies to archaeologists themselves whatever knowledge they have gained of their object, the discontinuous “systems of thought” succeeding one another in history. The success of such an archaeology of ourselves will rest on the interpretation of what Foucault has rightly called the “return of language” at the center of our intellectual concerns.
Frédéric Worms, “Unexpected and Vital Controversies: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses in Its Philosophical Moment and in Ours,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (2016), 82-92.
An explicit controversy stirred by Foucault’s announcement of the "death of man" in Les mots et les choses had a side effect: it hid another kind of controversy between allies and friends, that is between Foucault and contemporaries of the new moment he was opening, among whom were Canguilhem, Deleuze, and Derrida. These internal and unexpected controversies are the very life of the "60s" moment in French philosophy. It so happens that they also all dealt with the question of life, thus leading to the heart of our moment today.
Julian Bourg, “Nature and the Irruptive Violence of History,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (2016), 93-111.
Historical thinking has long defined itself in part through opposition to the natural, in spite of periodic critical efforts to bridge the gap. Deeper in Western traditions of historical reflection are traces of modes of thought through which the distance between human history and nature writ large tends to collapse. Two thinkers not often placed in dialogue—Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin—both unearthed aspects of this subterranean current. Foucault’s The Order of Things maps different moments of Benjamin’s trajectory: Renaissance resemblance and the metaphysics of language, classical taxonomy and the baroque “mourning-play,” and modern history and commodity culture in the nineteenth century. Violence appears periodically as the irruptive and disruptive force that conditions the natural-historical and thus an anthropocentric history that derives from it: from post-Edenic Babel to geological cataclysm and corporeal transience to the Marquis de Sade, Karl Marx, capitalism, and total war. Without in any way succumbing to naturalism, that inverse of subject-centered instrumental reasoning, both Foucault and Benjamin considered the import of the natural-historical for the eventual articulation of contemporary historical thinking and in doing so contributed to the regeneration of natural history as a mode of thought.
Ahmed Ragab, “Monsters and Patients: An Archeology of Medicine, Islam, and Modernity,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (2016), 112-130.
Foucault’s analysis of the history of evolutionary thought in Les Mots et les choses introduces monsters as incomplete beings that form important steps on the evolutionary ladder toward the terminal species. Monsters represent attempts by nature to achieve the perfection of the terminal species and are, therefore, significant for naturalists to construct the details of the natural continuum. Despite their incompleteness, monsters underwrite the natural continuum and evidence the grounding of this continuum in reality. To a great extent, the continuum of nature, proposed by Foucault, resembles a continuum of civilization through which the history of the world and the history of colonization were often seen. The non-European emerged as the monster that showcased the deeper history of the more-perfect European. In the same way that monsters were written into natural history as intermediary and incomplete beings, losing in the process their uniqueness as independent species, the colonized were written into the (new) World History as objects of colonization, modernization, and development and as the living fossils of a bygone European past. This new history was not only created for European consumption but was also an important part of European-style education in the colony shaping colonial and postcolonial identities and perceptions of self and other. This article uses Foucauldian monsters to understand the making of historical narratives about the precolonial past in nineteenth-century Egypt, where one of the earliest European-style medical schools in Africa and Asia was built in the early nineteenth century. In this school and surrounding emerging educational system, narratives about science, modernity, and religion produced new histories that came to form colonial subjects. Finally, the article asks about a postcolonial/post-monstrous epistemology, what it might look like and whether and how it can emerge from the postcolonial condition.
Laura Stark, “Out of Their Depths: 'Moral Kinds' and the Interpretation of Evidence in Foucault’s Modern Episteme,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (2016), 131-147.
The Order of Things Order is uniquely relevant to historians because it is about the contradictions of writing history in the present day, and because it makes claims absent from other books often seen as similar, such as Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For Order, the present-day modern episteme is characterized by unconscious elements that connect Man through time. These unconscious elements are only vaguely discernible to himself and are deformed in the process of representation, that is by putting experience into words. At the same time, history-writing presumes to pull these unconscious elements out of the depths of human experience, time, and space. These assumptions create contradictions for historians in the present day and warrant particular interpretations of evidence that override alternative plausible interpretations. The inescapable contradictions of writing history in the modern episteme are most apparent in histories of what philosopher Ian Hacking calls “moral kinds,” as shown by an extended analysis of a recent history article on medical experimentation on prisoners. The overarching aim of this essay is to identify stronger, weaker, and usefully plausible interpretations of historical evidence—and, inspired by Foucault, to extend the imaginative possibilities for writing history.
Cover image: Black Panther Convention, Lincoln Memorial, by Thomas J. O’Halloran and Warren K. Leffler (19 June 1970)
