Why History?

Keith Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415164160
• eBook ISBN: 9781134712359
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Why History is an introduction to the issue of history and ethics. Designed to provoke discussion, the book asks whether a good knowledge and understanding of the past is a good thing to have and if so, why. In the context of postmodern times, Why History suggests that the goal of 'learning lessons from the past' is actually learning lessons from stories written by historians and others. If the past as history has no foundation, can anything ethical be gained from history?
Why History presents liberating challenges to history and ethics, proposing that we have reached an emancipatory moment which is well beyond the 'end of history'.

Part I

On the end of metanarratives

As outlined in the main Introduction, the purpose of this Part is to examine aspects of the works of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard in such a way that they can be construed as helping to undercut metanarrative history and traditional ethics and as semi-autonomous introductions for new history readers. I also want to suggest, in passing, some of the collateral damage the overturning of metanarratives inflicts upon lower case ‘proper’ history, and to start to assess some of the opportunities that might be opened up ‘after history and ethics’. These opportunities will be put more positively here than perhaps is allowed by the idioms adopted by Derrida, Baudrillard and (to a lesser extent) Lyotard.

1

On Jacques Derrida

I begin with Derrida. This is not an easy place to start. Derrida is a phenomenally prolific writer and he has attracted literally thousands of expositors, commentators and critics (though few of these are historians). Accordingly, the enormity of the ‘Derrida industry’, the sometime difficulty of its textual productions, and the occasional presence of ‘Derrideans’ whose purism can inhibit the sort of ‘creative reading’ gone in for by, say, Richard Rorty, makes the short, popularising and appropriative approach undertaken here fraught with dangers.

Nevertheless, an approach, a style and a start has to be made somehow, and in choosing one I have been influenced by an (almost) throw-away remark by Simon Critchley in his The Ethics of Deconstruction.¹ Commenting (in parenthesis) on the ‘undecidable hesitation’ in so much of Derrida’s work, Critchley remarks how such qualifications are missing in the straightforward ‘Afterword’ of Limited Inc., which makes him go on to wonder about the status of this text and about those of its genre— interviews, transcribed debates, conversations—upon which so much of his own interpretation of Derrida actually relies. Are they, asks Critchley, ‘properly speaking deconstructionist’ or are they political or critical texts? And, whatever they are, why does Derrida put things so clearly and unambiguously in an apparently ‘non-deconstructive mode’ when he seems unable to do so (or refuses to do so) in a ‘deconstructive’ one?²

Now, Critchley’s comments seemed pertinent to me because I had also been struck when reading Derrida (and also, in fact, when reading Baudrillard and Lyotard) by how ‘transparent’ they all appeared to be in talking about what they were doing, about where they stood politically, and about what effects they hoped their writings would have when being interviewed for example, and yet how hesitant, cautious and qualificatory they were about ‘committing themselves’ in their actual texts. Accordingly, because in this book I want to put forward a popularisation of Derrida et al. so to introduce and make accessible some of their ideas to students of history, Critchley’s own use of such ‘direct’ sources seemed to help justify the way I also wanted to write about them. That is, I wanted to write about them pretty much at the level of the interview throughout. Consequently, this decision about approach and style and register taken, I then decided to base my reading of Derrida on his remarkably frank Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism, which were given in response to papers by Richard Rorty and others at a symposium held in Paris in 1993.³ Three ‘remarks’ from Derrida’s paper—which I shall quote at length (having slightly ‘contextualised’ them)—are thus used here to establish what I argue is a ‘Derridean position’, a position I then go on to develop. Derrida’s ‘three remarks’ are as follows.

First Remark. Derrida admits that the way ‘deconstruction’ can be put to work is multifarious (given that it is an empty mechanism, an always ‘unstable motif’ which can be used legitimately to ‘serve quite different political purposes’ and is in that sense ‘politically neutral’ (‘anyone can have it’)). Nevertheless, Derrida hopes that ‘as a man of the left’, deconstruction

will serve to politicise or repoliticise the left with regard to positions which are not simply academic. I hope—and if I can continue and contribute a little to this I will be very content—that the political left in universities in the United States, France and elsewhere, will gain politically by employing deconstruction… Deconstruction is hyper-politicising in following paths and codes which are clearly not traditional…that is, it permits us to think the political and think the democratic by granting us the space [to do so].⁴

Second Remark. Derrida is clear as to the workings of this ‘deconstructionist hope’:

All that a deconstructive point of view tries to show, is that since convention, institutions and consensus are stabilizations (sometimes stabilizations of great duration, sometimes micro-stabilizations)…this means that they are stabilizations of something essentially unstable and chaotic. Thus, it becomes necessary to stabilize precisely because stability is not natural [sic]; it is because there is instability that stabilization becomes necessary. Now, this chaos and instability, which is fundamental, founding and irreducible, is at once naturally the worst against which we struggle with laws, rules, conventions, politics and provisional hegemony, but at the same time it is a chance, a chance to change, to destabilize. If there were continual stability, there would be no need for politics, and it is to the extent that stability is not natural, essential or substantial, that politics exists and ethics [morality] is possible. Chaos is at once a risk and a choice, and it is here that the possible and the impossible cross each other.⁵

Third Remark. Derrida thinks that it thus ‘follows’ that he must be against absolute notions of foundational ethics that can legislate on choice for everybody and ‘for ever and ever’, and that he must favour interminable moral decisions. He must favour the ‘undecidability of the decision’, that aporetic moment all decisions have to go through to even begin to be moral at all (or even to be a decision per se) and which would make even the most desired closures only temporary stabilisations:

Every time I decide if a position is possible, I invent the who, and I decide who decides what… That is why I would say that the transcendental subject is that which renders the decision impossible. The decision is barred when there is something like a transcendental subject. In order to take things a bit further I would say that if duty is conceived of as a simple relation between the categorical imperative and a determinable subject, then duty is [the moral aporia is] evaded. If I act in accordance with duty in the Kantian sense, I do not [morally] act and furthermore I do not act in accordance with duty… I believe that we cannot give up upon the concept of infinite responsibility…if you give up on the infinitude of responsibility [by obeying an ‘in place’ ethics/rule/code] there is no responsibility. It is because we live and act in infinitude that the responsibility with regard to the other (autrui) is irreducible. If responsibility were not infinite…[chaotic whilst awaiting the next temporary settlement] you could not have moral and political problems. There are only moral and political problems… from the moment when responsibility is not limitable… And this is why undecidability is not a moment to be traversed and overcome. Conflicts of duty—and there is only duty in conflict—are interminable and even when I take my decision and do something, undecidability is not at an end. I know that I have not done enough and it is in this way that morality continues.⁶

This interminable indeterminacy of the moral decision thus means (for Derrida, and for Levinas whom at this point in his Remarks Derrida is following) that one always keeps open the possibility of difference, of newness, of surprise, of politics, of an infinite excess of possibilities; of the ‘to come’; of the ‘perhaps’; of freedoms beyond every attempted (contingent) closure of that ‘natural chaos’ that is our lot. Derrida is thus, as he says, a quasi-transcendental thinker in the sense that he refuses ‘absolutely…a discourse that would assign me a single code, a single language game, a single context, a single situation; and I claim this right not simply out of caprice… but for ethical [moral] and political reasons’.⁷ For the notion of the quasi-transcendental, of that imagined metaphysical excess beyond all determinate discursive practices, is what keeps the promise of some ‘newness entering the world’ on the agenda. It is a newness about which Derrida has political and moral preferences and which, while not performing an impossible to accomplish closure is still the ‘best’ (the weakest, the least violent) sort of basis for living that Derrida can conceive of, the sort of basis in différance that might engender a certain type of human friendship (aimance). Derrida seems very clear on this:

Something that I learned…from Husserl in particular, is the necessity of posing transcendental questions in order not to be held in the fragility of an incompetent empiricist discourse, and thus it is in order to avoid empiricism, positivism and psycho-logism that it is endlessly necessary to renew transcendental questioning… This is not the dream of a beatifically pacific relation, but of a certain experience of friendship, perhaps unthinkable today and unthought within the [history of]…the West. This is a friendship, what I sometimes call an aimance, that excludes violence; a non-appropriative relation to the other… I am very sentimental and I believe in happiness; and I believe that this has an altogether determinate place in my work… [Yet] I do not believe that the themes of undecidability or infinite responsibility are romantic… the necessity for thinking to traverse interminably the experience of undecidability can, I think, be quite coolly demonstrated in an analysis of the [moral]… or political decision… [Consequently] I refuse to denounce the great classical discourse of emancipation. I believe that there is an enormous amount to do… Even if I would not wish to inscribe the discourse of emancipation into a teleology, a metaphysics, an eschatology, or even a classical messianism, I none the less believe that there is no [moral] political decision or gesture without what I would call a ‘Yes’ to emancipation…and even, I would add, to some messianicity…a messianic structure that belongs to all language. There is no language without the performative dimension of the promise…

Thus, continues Derrida:

when I speak of democracy to come this does not mean that democracy will be realised, and it does not refer to a future democracy, rather it means that there is an engagement with regard to democracy which consists in recognising the irreducibility of the promise when, in the messianic moment, ‘it can come’…there is the future…there is something to come…that can happen… This is not utopian, it is what takes place here and now… And from this point of view, I do not see how one can pose the question of [morality]…if one renounces the motifs of emancipation and the messianic. Emancipation is once again a vast question today and I must say that I have no tolerance for those who— deconstructionist or not—are ironical with regard to the grand discourse of emancipation. This attitude has always distressed and irritated me. I do not want to renounce this discourse.⁸

Now these three ‘remarks’ are, as I say, remarkably clear statements on Derrida’s general position; I have given them at length so that they can almost be left (but not quite) to speak for themselves. For on the basis of them I will now move gradually towards Derrida’s importance for critiques of metanarrative histories seen very precisely as ‘closures’ (and the implications of this for all certaintist histories). I want also to address, via his notion of the ‘undecidability of the (moral) decision’, the development of his ideas about the openness of future times which offer in their emancipatory claims a move towards ‘the impossible to actually achieve’ but beckoning idea of Justice. These ideas are about a future beyond ‘historical closures’ in whatever case, and of new moralities beyond ethical systems, moralities that do not take responsibility (in the face of the other) away. With Derrida’s ‘remarks’ kept firmly in mind, then, let us begin by looking at Derrida’s theory of ‘natural language’, which, I think, underpins his views on language per se, binary oppositions, textuality, the historical and the political.

For I take Derrida’s talk of ‘natural actuality’ as being ‘chaotic’ to include as a constituent part of it the phenomenon of language. Consequently, I think it is possible to read Derrida as having what might be called (following his own perhaps surprising invocation of the ‘natural’) a theory of natural language which, because it is necessarily part of the ‘chaotic’, has itself this characteristic. For Derrida, then, ‘by its nature’ language is permanently unstable (chaotic) and never self-sufficient (identical to itself) in terms of words (signifiers) whilst, in larger linguistic constructions, it is never meaningful in itself outside of contexts—and you can always get another context. Thus, to start developing this by way of an example, if you take the word (the signifier) ‘iterability’ and ask somebody who has never met it before what it might mean, no knowing answer could be forthcoming. And if the person asked then went to a dictionary to look it up and the entry was effectively self-explanatory (i.e. identical to itself) so that it simply read ‘iterability=iterability’, then the person would still be no wiser. And this is because for Derrida (as for Saussure) words (signifiers) only mean something relative to other signifiers. They always need supplementing by other signifiers; they always depend on the presence of other signifiers that are different from them (that are not them). Thus, as Simon Critchley has pointed out (and I follow him intermittently for a while here), meaning only arises in so far as it is inscribed in a systematic chain of different signifiers such that this ‘play of differences’ (which is constitutive of meaning) actually is constitutive of what Derrida calls différance itself. As Critchley explains:

This is why différance is neither a word nor a concept, but rather the condition of possibility for conceptuality and words as such. Différance is the playing movement that produces the differences constitutive of words and conceptuality. There is no presence outside or before semiological difference…all languages or codes [are] constituted as and by a weave of differances. This is what Derrida means when he claims that ‘It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible’…[so that] each ‘present’ element in a linguistic system signifies in so far as it differentially refers to another element [which]…is not itself present. The sign [is thus] a ‘trace’, a past that has never been present. The present is constituted by a differential network of traces. In order for the present to be present, it must be related to something non-present, something différant.⁹

Now, this something that is ‘absent’ but the trace of which is necessary for the signifier to signify anything, is an absence not just in a spatial sense (i.e. in the sense that it doesn’t occupy the same space in the chain of signifiers as the actually ‘present’ signifier) but also in a temporal sense (in that the meaning of a signifier is always deferred until another appropriate signifier ‘arrives’), it being this space-time structure that Derrida calls ‘archi-writing’, which, as articulated in his Of Grammatology, opens up a ‘new way’ of generalising ‘writing in difference’ as the condition of possibility of language itself. Here is Critchley explaining this:

The grammatological space of a general writing, that in which experience is possible, is the space of what Derrida calls ‘le texte en général’…a limitless network of differentially ordered signs which is not preceded by any meaning, structure, or eidos, but itself constitutes each of these. It is here, upon the surface of the general text, that…deconstruction takes place.¹⁰

Now, I shall shortly develop Derrida’s idea of the ‘general text’, its connections to ‘context’, including his (in)famous phrase ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (or better still, ‘there is nothing outside con-text’). But more immediately I want to reformulate Critchley’s summary of Derrida’s position by saying that we can now see why no signifier is a meaningful island unto itself any more than any event or context or person is, and begin to see its implications. For people, like events and contexts, need other people to define themselves against; their identities come from outside themselves, and construct and deconstruct themselves in interminable tran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Living in time but outside history; living in morality but outside ethics
• Part I On the end of metanarratives
• Part II On the end of ‘proper’ history
• Part III Beyond histories and ethics
• Conclusion: Promisings
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index