History and Its Limits

Human, Animal, Violence

Dominick LaCapra

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801457685
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Kritische Theorie

Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny).In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular, " even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj Zizek. In a related vein, he discusses Martin Heidegger's evocative, if not enchanting, understanding of "The Origin of the Work of Art." LaCapra subjects to critical scrutiny the sometimes internally divided way in which violence has been valorized in sacrificial, regenerative, or redemptive terms by a series of important modern intellectuals on both the far right and the far left, including Georges Sorel, the early Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, and Ernst Jünger.Violence and victimization are prominent in the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra questions prevalent anthropocentrism (evident even in theorists of the "posthuman") and the long-standing quest for a decisive criterion separating or dividing the human from the animal. LaCapra regards this attempt to fix the difference as misguided and potentially dangerous because it renders insufficiently problematic the manner in which humans treat other animals and interact with the environment.In raising the issue of desirable transformations in modernity, History and Its Limits examines the legitimacy of normative limits necessary for life in common and explores the disconcerting role of transgressive initiatives beyond limits (including limits blocking the recognition that humans are themselves animals).

CHAPTER 1

Articulating Intellectual History, Cultural History, and Critical Theory

Articulating. 1. The action of jointing or joining together. 2. Distinct sounding or utterance. 3. The making of stipulations; stipulating. Obs.

—Oxford English Dictionary

Intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory (or varieties of critical theory) are undertakings whose mutual articulation is both desirable and problematic. One issue in any proposed articulation is the role of a so-called canon, which has been a concern in intellectual history as in other areas (such as literary criticism, philosophy, or art history). Intellectual history has confronted an anticanonical animus to which it is particularly vulnerable in view of its constitution, notably its focus on “great” texts. But this animus is misplaced if it is directed at an essentialized or fixated concept of the canon itself.

The basic object of critique might well be canonization as a function of the reception and use of artifacts, notably for purposes of ideological legitimation, for example, of the nation-state, a social hierarchy, an imperial hegemony, or even an overly restricted disciplinary matrix, curriculum, or research agenda. But such a critique should not become a pretext to stigmatize certain texts or artifacts. Only a misdirected populism could lead one to dismiss the study of Plato or Freud or to believe that the sole valid approach to religion is to focus on popular practice and to omit theology. Rather, critique should be aimed at an exclusive valorization of “elite” or “high” culture as a label to categorize or corral certain artifacts, separate them from other dimensions of culture, and understand them in an invidious manner. It should also be aimed at the disavowal of the thought-provoking, critical, and possibly disconcerting potential of certain texts or artifacts because of the way they are read or deployed, for example, as school ties or rituals of initiation that assure mutual recognition and admiration in an exclusive elite or clique.

It would seem obvious that the critique of canonization should accompany the qualified valorization of texts that have a thought-provoking potential, including the way they may continue to address readers over time and be internally dialogized such that they help to provide the wherewithal to place in question their own symptomatic and ideologically dubious sides, such as racism, colonial domination, class privilege, or other forms of oppression and victimization. (Hence, for example, the phenomenon of Freud-on-Freud readings whereby Freud’s texts are drawn on in a critique of certain tendencies in them such as misogyny.) Self-deconstructive tendencies are empowering to the extent that their critically inflected repetitions and variations supplement or reinforce the type of internal dialogization and self-questioning that serves as ideology critique and wards off dogmatism or self-certainty. This may happen through valuable insistence on the role of anxiety-producing, often victimized or scapegoated, remainders and residues (prominently including the animal in the human and the way the diverse multiplicity of animals cannot be reduced to “animal” as the homogeneous binary opposite of “man” or the human).1 Texts that are self-critical in this sense are not restricted either to written artifacts or to what is termed a canon but may well include texts or artifacts that have undergone processes of canonization, often at the expense of a critical potential that a noncanonical reading may reactivate. A subject of debate that cuts across intellectual and cultural history is to what extent and in what ways texts or dimensions of texts are indeed self-critical in this sense and both inquire critically into assumptions and contest more symptomatic or even ideologically saturated tendencies (for example, those prominent in a dogmatic tract or racist editorial). To put the point another way, all texts or artifacts have their blindnesses and are symptomatic of ideological and more generally contextual forces in society and culture—but not in the same way or with the same effects, whether actual or possible. Certain texts or artifacts open the possibility of transformation or what might be termed situational transcendence in the manner in which they come to terms with problems and perform critical work or aesthetic play on contexts of production or reception.2 In this sense they are significant events in the history of language or signification that both have a complex history and can make a difference in history, including differences that come about through the way in which they may engage other events or processes.

These assertions have a number of consequences. First, there should be an important role for noncanonical and noncanonizing readings of canonical texts in intellectual and cultural history. Noncanonical readings are sensitive to processes whereby texts question themselves, as well as overly restrictive interpretations of them, and are not reducible to their symptomatic, ideologically reinforcing tendencies, however important these may be (for example, in terms of reconstructing collective mentalités). Such readings may provide a basis for the critical (not simply empirical) analysis of the way texts are received and deployed in society and politics. They are also attentive to rhetorical, poetic, and performative aspects of texts that do not deny but complicate constative or documentary functions that provide at least rear windows on past empirical reality. Hence they bring out the intricacy of texts and disclose the limits of synoptic readings that are typically adjusted to a restricted contextual understanding that, at the limit, both oversimplifies the problem of contextualization and tries to interpret or explain all texts only as documents that are seen predominantly as objectified symptoms or direct expressions of contexts.3 For the narrowly historicizing contextualist, contextualization is unproblematically identified with historical understanding in a manner that marginalizes or obviates the ways texts interact with contexts and require responsive understanding, including forms of affective involvement on the part of the inquirer with respect to the “object” of inquiry. Context can even at times become the analog for the tunnel-visioned historicist of the realtor’s familiar and familiarizing slogan: “Location, location, location!”

Second, these theoretical assertions create a space for a practice of intellectual history that allows for close reading of texts, especially texts that have a thought-provoking potential for rethinking problems that, however differently, preoccupy readers over time. Closely and critically reading such texts is part of an education that is not restricted to information processing or objectification of the other. Still, it is dubious to find in close reading per se an “ethic,” and it is tempting to see close reading, when it achieves quasi-transcendental status, as a form of barely displaced sectarian piety. But this implication is in no sense a necessary feature of close reading, which should be alert to its own limitations, especially when it is fixated on a delimited canon. Indeed, close reading should open onto the problem of how to include and address artifacts and sociocultural processes appearing in non-Western traditions.4 Such an opening implies an awareness of one’s limitations, may indicate a need for reeducation, and heightens both the importance and the difficulty of raising pointed questions, especially questions addressing the unexamined assumptions of an approach, profession, or process. Practice in reading texts that are critical and self-critical is crucial to education that is supposed to be critical or, in one possibly “recuperable” sense of the term, “liberal.” Intellectual history (and it is not alone here) may offer the possibility of seeking out these texts or artifacts and reading them together, without preestablished national, generic, or disciplinary constraints and in ways that may raise questions about certain boundaries, notably when boundaries become overly rigid. It may also explore the often subtle and overlooked interaction between critical, symptomatic, and less classifiable, perhaps undecidable and uncanny—or at times grotesque and humorous—dimensions of texts and of cultural processes more generally. It may even intimate more desirable institutional configurations, including the organization of departments or programs.5

The orientation I am proposing would point toward a discipline or subdiscipline that is flexible in its approach to problems and addresses the question of reading together texts from different genres or areas of culture as well as different cultures in ways that may help to elaborate a critical frame of reference. It would expand the range (but not the proprietary claims) of intellectual history and even interrogate its boundaries with respect to cultural history and critical theory as well as other humanistic disciplines, prominently including those concerned with aesthetic and philosophical issues. I hope it would help to create an intellectual orientation, forma mentis, or mentalité that is able to address complex issues with an awareness of the interaction between past and present and the way it can be directed toward an openness to possible futures. Such an orientation attests to the value of forms of questioning and exploratory thought that counteract hardening of the conceptual categories and further self-critical understanding but that may not result in the kind of circumscribed theses, clear-cut answers, delimited results, or Q.E.D. experiences often sought by historians and social scientists. (As a former colleague of mine asserted in an interesting metaphor, historians want to pin things down—an approach that is sometimes necessary and sometimes overly confining or even misleading.)

If undertaken in a certain manner and not autonomized, the study of how things are received can at times further the goals of critical historical understanding, especially when it points to aspects of texts, or ways of reading, rereading, and responding to them, that may not be obvious from an initial reading, one’s own response, or an exclusive focus on authorial intention.6 In this sense varieties of reception may be related to an engagement both with the past and with other cultures that may contribute to the attempt to think through important problems such as the varied relations between sacralizing and secularizing processes or between the traumatic and what may possibly counteract it. This engagement may have implications for the present and future by posing questions to, or even placing in question, the reader or inquirer, for example, by situating genealogically what one takes to be radically innovative (say, aspects of trauma studies or the putative “return” of religion, which never seems to have gone away), by bringing out how the seemingly contestatory or uncanny is commonplace in its historical context or has been adapted to dubious uses (for example, antisemitic or scapegoating dimensions of carnival and the carnivalesque), or by signaling unpredictable readings or adaptations of what may have been intended differently at the time of writing (say, Pierre Menard’s reading of the Quixote, or Jorge Luis Borges’s reading of Menard).7

A concern with intention as well as context becomes most accentuated when one believes a text has been misread. Heidegger’s own 1933–34 Nazi-inflected readings and uses, if not distortions, of Heidegger, notably his Being and Time of 1927, are paradigmatic of these problems, for they show how a text that is for many (including myself) one of the basic contributions to modern thought could be adapted to ideological purposes in a manner that may be argued to be, in certain respects, plausible and, in other respects, called into question on the basis of a reading of Being and Time itself. For example, one might argue that the desire for a hero and some movement that would utterly transform and redeem Western civilization plays an important role in Being and Time, and one might even contend that there is an implicit antisemitic coding in the critique of Gerede, or idle chatter, stereotypically associated with Jews as well as other denigrated groups. One might also argue that Being and Time is rather unguardedly open to the rhetoric of conservative revolution (including the notion of a turn away from authenticity and even the loss of some golden age) as well as to Christian motifs (such as fallenness, readily coordinated with notions of loss, degeneration, or decline)—rhetoric and motifs that might abet a blanket condemnation of existing civilization and an apocalyptic desire for total change. But Being and Time would seem to resist or even repel the simplistic idea of a return to a golden age as well as the idea that Hitler and the Nazis could be seen as the forces furthering desirable transformation, for such ideas fly in the face of an understanding of Dasein (“Being there,” which includes but also transforms the understanding of human being) as an open, self-questioning being, especially in light of the Nazis’ militant intolerance and virulent antisemitism that were manifest in 1933–34 and later became a basis of a genocidal policy and practice.8 A different way of raising this question, more in a post-Kehre vein (or in terms of the later Heidegger, after his putative “turn” from Dasein to Sein or Being), is to ask whether Gelassenheit, or letting Being be by openly attending to its call, can be identified with obeying the commands, or even being attuned to the voice, of the Führer (as Göring seemed to imply when he asserted that Hitler was his conscience).

A source of the appeal of cultural history (as well as of cultural studies in general) is that its texts (in the broad sense) are not limited to any traditional canon and have an obvious relation to larger social and political processes as well as experiential concerns. They include phenomena or artifacts from various levels or dimensions of culture and society that are not texts in a conventional sense but do involve signifying practices. Moreover, cultural history gives prominence to such issues as gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, colonialism, postcolonialism, and, more recently, species and the human-animal relation—issues that connect with sociopolitical concerns and that have sometimes been marginalized in intellectual history. One reason for the importance of the turn to cultural history is that it expands the scope and revises the understanding of signifying practices to be investigated. It raises the question of the relation of canonical texts to larger signifying practices in society and culture—carnival and carnivalization to give one obvious and much discussed example but also discourses and practices of exclusionary categorization, victimization, traumatization, racialization, gendering, and stereotyping in general.9 It may also go in a more psychoanalytic direction and relate texts and signifying practices to collective phantasms, affects, compulsions, and posttraumatic symptoms.10 Indeed, what has been especially prominent in the recent past is the movement of intellectual history toward cultural history. This shift or turn parallels that in literary and aesthetic studies toward cultural studies, often combined with an interest in history and historicization. The proliferation in the academy of various cultural “studies” has of course been remarkable in the past generation—gender studies, a revitalized American studies, various “ethnic” studies, French studies, German studies, religious studies, visual studies, postcolonial studies, disability studies, queer studies, trauma studies (mea culpa), memory studies (mea culpa), critical animal studies (mea maxima culpa), and so on.

The inclusion of literature in a larger conception of culture breeds opposition on various fronts (both conservative and theoretically “radical” or at times puristic if not dogmatic). Yet it also opens the way to cooperation as well as informed debate between historians and colleagues in other disciplines. And it may suggest a conception of the aesthetic or the literary as a specific dimension of artifacts that is especially pronounced in works of art but whose specificity cannot be conclusively defined, demonstrated, or made into a secure object of knowledge.11

Despite what I would see as the generally fruitful effects of the turn of intellectual history toward cultural history or perhaps their vis-à-vis, I would put forward a few caveats. Cultural history, especially under a hermeneutic impetus that has also marked an important segment of intellectual history, often sees itself as a history of meaning (or ideas) in context—an approach that often is more or less domesticating or “territorializing.” Keith Michael Baker expressed the view and the assumptions still shared by many colleagues when he wrote in 1982: “The intellectual historian analyzing a text, concept, or movement of ideas, has the same problem as the historian faced with any other historical phenomenon, namely to reconstitute the context (or, more usually, the plurality of contexts) in which that phenomenon takes on meaning as human action.”12 But why does a plurality of contexts accompany a homogenization of historians and a nonrecognition of a plurality of historical approaches wit...