CHAPTER 2

History and Time

READING GUIDELINES

The preceding chapter was devoted to the critical side of hermeneutics, a critique consisting, on the one hand, of establishing the limits for any claim to totalization and, on the other hand, of exploring the validity claims of a historiography aware of its limitations. In its negative form, the critique was directed, in turn, against the open declaration of hubris related to the absolute knowledge of “history itself” and against the disguised, and ordinarily unrecognized, forms of the same hubris; in its positive form, it took into account some of the most fruitful internal oppositions belonging to the self-knowledge of history, such as the pair formed by the judge and the historian, or, yet again, by the tension between interpretation and objectivity on the plane of scientific history.

The chapter that follows marks the passage from critical hermeneutics to an ontological hermeneutics addressed to the historical condition considered an unsurpassable mode of being.¹ The term “hermeneutics” continues to be taken in the sense of a theory of interpretation, as this was specified in the final section of the preceding chapter. As concerns the substantive form of the verb “to be”—“being,” to which the term “hermeneutics” has been associated—it remains open to a number of acceptations, as we read in Aristotle’s well-known declaration in Metaphysics 4.2: “There are many senses in which a thing may be said to be.” I have argued elsewhere on the basis of this Aristotelian warning in exploring the resources of the interpretation that, among the various acceptations, privileges that of being as act and as power on the plane of a philosophical anthropology: it is in this way that I propose in the course of the present chapter to hold the “power to remember” (le pouvoir faire mémoire) to be one of these powers—along with the power to speak, the power to act, the power to recount, the power to be imputable with respect to one’s actions as their genuine author. Nothing more will be said about being qua being. However, we shall consider as legitimate any attempt to characterize the mode of being that we are in each case in opposition to the mode of being characterizing beings other than ourselves, whatever the ultimate relation of this being to Being may be. By adopting this manner of entry into the problem, I situate myself volens nolens in proximity to Heidegger, with a reading limited by choice to Being and Time, one of the great books of the twentieth century.² If I accept the declaration with which this book opens: “This question has today been forgotten—although our time considers itself progressive in again affirming ‘metaphysics’” (1), it is meant, as is indicated, to set my “investigation” in the wake of those of Plato and Aristotle, as I began to do in the earliest pages of this work. This obedience to the opening objurgation of Being and Time, inviting us to “a retrieve of the question of the meaning of being” (2), will not prevent this chapter from being conducted as a debate with Heidegger, which will give the present discussion a very different tone from that, more of complicity than confrontation, which will prevail in the following chapter on forgetting in the context of Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory.

Here are a few of the considerations that keep me in the proximity of the analyses of Being and Time and, at the same time, progressively involve me in controversy with them.

Let me cite first of all the attempt to distinguish the mode of being that we are in each case from the other modes of being in terms of the different manner of being-in-the-world and the overall characterization of this mode of being as care, considered in its theoretical, practical, and affective determinations. I all the more readily adopt this essential characterization as I have already presupposed it in a way by giving as the close referent to historiography social action performed in situations of uncertainty under the limitation of the production of the social bond and of the identities concerned. In this regard, it is legitimate to accept the ontological concept of ultimate reference, the Heideggerian Da-sein, characterized in a differential manner by care, in contrast to the modes of being of things that are simply given (Heidegger says vorhanden, “at hand,” objectively present) and manipulable (zuhanden, “handy”). The metaphor of the hand suggests a type of opposition presupposed by Kant when he declared persons “ends in themselves,” those beings that are not to be treated simply as means because they are as such “ends in themselves.” The moral characterization is certainly elevated by this formula to an ontological rank. One can term “existentials” the categories that, following the manner of the analytic of Da-sein, specify the mode of being underlying the corresponding mode of apprehension: existence, resoluteness, conscience, self, being with. . . . Here, we are only following Aristotle’s instructions in the Nichomachean Ethics that the method is in every instance determined by the nature of the subject to be studied. The existentials are modes of description of this sort. They are so called because they delimit existence, in the strong sense of the word, as a way of springing forth onto the stages of the world. One presupposes that it is possible to speak in a universal manner of being-human in diverse cultural situations, as is the case, for example, when reading Tacitus, Shakespeare, or Dostoyevsky, we say that we find ourselves in them. One also supposes that it is possible to distinguish the existential, as a domain appropriate to the sort of universality that Kant is held to have compared in his Critique of Judgment to the communicability of the judgment of taste, which, nevertheless, is lacking in cognitive objectivity, from the existentiell, as a receptive disposition, whether personal or communal, in the theoretical, practical, or affective order. It is sometimes difficult to maintain this distinction, as will be confirmed in the discussions conducted below on death and being-toward-death.

Permit me to express an initial reservation at this very general level of consideration. The Heideggerian discourse of care does not seem to me to make room for the very particular existential that is the flesh, the animate body, my own body, as Husserl had begun to develop this notion in his last works in line with the “Fifth Cartesian Meditation.” It seems to me to be implied in the meditation on death, on birth, and on the between, the interval separating birth and death upon which Heidegger constructed his idea of historicity. This category of the flesh implies some way of bridging the logical gulf hollowed out by the hermeneutics of Da-sein between the existentials gravitating around the center of care and the categories in which the modes of being of things objectively present or handy are related. The capacity of the analytic of Da-sein to recognize and surmount this difficulty still remains to be demonstrated.

Second consideration: I am adopting the guiding idea of Being and Time that temporality constitutes not only a major characteristic of the being that we are, but the characteristic that, more than any other, signals the relation of this being to being qua being. I have all the more reason to embrace this idea as I hold, moreover, the acceptation of being as act and as power as the one most in keeping with a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being. In addition, being and power manifestly have to do with time as it appears in Hegel’s Logic, to which Heidegger refers in his exordium. In this sense, time figures as a metacategory of the same order as care in Being and Time: care is temporal, and time is the time of care. Recognizing this status does not exclude considering many purportedly exemplary discourses in the history of the problem to be basically aporetical.³ And this, moreover, is what Heidegger does in his critique of the “vulgar” category of time. I will by no means take part in this quarrel, with regard to which I have many reservations, but will focus instead on a single problem, as limited as others inherited from the philosophical tradition, namely, the capacity for an ontology of temporality to make possible, in the existential sense of possibility, the representation of the past by history and, before that, by memory. This manner of posing the problem is framed by the considerations that follow.

Third consideration: Heidegger proposes an analysis of temporality that articulates the three temporal instances of the future, the past, and the present. As in Augustine and, in his own way, Koselleck, the past—the pastness of the past—is understandable in its distinct constitution only when paired with the future quality of the future and the present quality of the present. Positing this is absolutely decisive with respect to a not yet explicit presupposition of our entire undertaking. It is indeed remarkable that the phenomenology of memory and the epistemology of history rest unawares on a form of pseudo-self-evidence, according to which pastness is held to be immediately perceptible, in the absence of the future, in an attitude of pure retrospection. It is recognized that memory bears, not by preference but exclusively, on the past. Aristotle’s statement, which I like to repeat: “Memory is of the past,” has no need to evoke the future to give meaning and vigor to its affirmation; the present, it is true, is implied in the paradox of the absent, a paradox, we have seen, that is common to the imagination of the unreal and to the memory of the earlier. But the future is in a way bracketed in the formulating of this past. And the present itself is not thematized as such in the targeting of the earlier. Is this not, moreover, what happens when one looks for a memory, when one invests oneself in the work of memory, even in the cult of memory? Husserl, in this way, developed at length a theory of retention and of remembering, while dealing only summarily with protention, as if it were a required symmetry. The culture of memory as ars memoriae is constructed on a similar abstracting of the future. But it is especially history that is involved methodologically in this eclipsing of the future. This is why what we shall be led to say later regarding the inclusion of futureness in the apprehension of the historical past will move strongly against the prevailing flow of the clearly retrospective orientation of historical knowledge. It will be objected against this reduction of history to retrospection that the historian, as a citizen and as actor of the history that is being made, must include in his motivation as an artisan of history his own relation to the future of the city. This is true, and we will give notice of this to the historian when the time comes.⁴ It remains that the historian does not include this relation to the object of his study, to the theme that he cuts out of the elapsed past. We have observed in this regard that the investigation of the historical past implies only three temporal positions: that of the target-event, that of the events interspersed between this event and the temporal position of the historian, and finally the moment of the writing of history—three dates then, two of which are in the past, one in the present. The definition of history proposed by Marc Bloch, namely, “the science of men in time,” must not mask this internal limit of the retrospective viewpoint of history: men in time are in fact men of earlier times, having lived before the historian writes about them. There is thus a provisional legitimacy for posing the question of the referent of memory and history under the condition of abstracting from the future. The question will then be to determine whether a solution to the enigma of pastness can be found within the limits of this abstraction.

To this non-thematized abstraction characterizing the twofold plane on which it operates—that of the phenomenology of memory and that of the epistemology of history—the hermeneutics of historical being opposes placing pastness into perspective in relation to the futureness of the present and the presence of the present. On this plane the temporal constitution of the being that we are proves more fundamental than the simple reference of memory and of history to the past as such. In other words, temporality constitutes the existential precondition for the reference of memory and of history to the past.

The Heideggerian approach is all the more provocative, since, unlike Augustine, the main accent is placed on the future and not on the present. Recall the startling declarations of the author of the Confessions: there are three presents, the present of the past which is memory, the present of the future which is expectation, and the present of the present which is intuition (or attention). This threefold present is the main organizer of temporality; in it is declared the internal tear that Augustine names distentio animi and that makes of human time the inadequate replica of divine eternity, that eternal present. Under the province of care, in Heidegger, “being ahead of oneself” becomes the pole of reference for the entire analysis of temporality, with its heroic connotation of “anticipatory resoluteness.” It is a good working hypothesis to hold the relation to the future to be the one that induces the series of subsequent temporal determinations of historical experience following a unique mode of implication. As a direct result, the pastness that the historiographical operation isolates is placed into dialectical relation with the futureness that ontology promotes to the place of honor. One can, nevertheless, resist the suggestion that the orientation toward the future would be more fundamental, or, as will be stated later, more authentic and more original than the orientation toward the past and toward the present, by reason of the ontological density of being-toward-death, which will be seen to be closely tied to the dimension of the future; symmetrically, one can resist the tendency to reduce the relation to the present to being-busy: astonishment, suffering, and joy, along with initiative are notable magnitudes of the present that a theory of action and, by implication, a theory of history have to take into account.

Fourth consideration: in addition to the new manner of ordering the threefold division of temporal experience, Heidegger proposes an original hierarchical ordering of the modes of temporalization that will open unanticipated perspectives on the confrontation between philosophy and the epistemology of history. Three headings are given in Being and Time to the degrees of this internal hierarchy: temporality properly speaking—I would say, fundamental temporality—introduced by the orientation toward the future and which we will see is characterized by being-toward-death; historicity, introduced by the consideration of the interval that extends, or “stretches,” between birth and death, and in which prevails in a certain way the reference to the past privileged by history and, before it, by memory; intratemporality—or being in time—in which predominates the preoccupation that makes us dependent in the present on things that are themselves present and manipulable “alongside which” we exist in the world. As we see, a certain correlation is established between the three levels of temporalization and the prevalence, each in its turn, of the three instances of future, past, and present.

By virtue of this correlation, one can expect that the confrontation between the ontology of historical being and the epistemology of history will be concentrated on the second level, as is suggested by the term Geschichtlichkeit which is assigned to it: the word is constructed by the substantive Geschichte, “history,” by way of the adjective geschichtlich, “historical.” (I will discuss the translation of the key words in due course.) The fact that the announced confrontation can nevertheless occur on the level of fundamental temporality is what I shall confirm in a moment. But before that I want to open the discussion that will cut through all the levels of analysis. It concerns the nature of the mode of derivation that presides over the transition from one level to the next. Heidegger characterizes this mode of derivation in terms of the degree of authenticity and primordiality that he sees decreasing from one level to the next as one approaches the sphere of gravitation of the “vulgar” conception of time. What is termed authenticity here lacks any criterion of intelligibility: the authentic speaks for itself and allows itself to be recognized as such by whomever is drawn into it. It is a self-referential term in the discourse of Being and Time. Its impreciseness is unequaled, except for that striking other term of the Heideggerian vocabulary: resoluteness, a term singularly associated with “being ahead of oneself” and which contains no determination, no preferential mark concerning any project of accomplishment whatsoever; conscience as a summons of the self to itself without any indication relative to good or evil, to what is permitted or forbidden, to obligation or interdiction. From start to finish, the philosophical act, permeated with angst, emerges from nothingness and is dispersed in the shadows. Authenticity suffers from this kinship with what Merleau-Ponty calls “wild being”; this is why the discourse it produces is constantly threatened with succumbing to what Adorno denounced as the “jargon of authenticity.” The pairing of the authentic with the primordial could save it from this peril if primordiality were assigned a function other than that of reduplicating the allegation of authenticity. This would be the case, it seems to me, if by historical condition one were to understand, in accordance with what the expression suggests, an existential condition of the possibility of the entire series of discourses concerning the historical in general, in everyday life, in fiction, and in history. In this way, the twofold use of the word “history” would be justified existentially, as the set of events (facts), past, present, and to come, and as the set of discourses on these events (these facts) in testimony, narrative, explanation, and finally the historians’ representation of the past. We make history and we make histories because we are historical. This is the “because” of existential conditionality. And it is upon this notion of existential conditionality that it is important to organize an order of derivation that would not be reduced to a progressive loss of ontological density but that would be marked by increasing determination on the side of epistemology.

This proposal concerning the mode of derivation from one level of temporality to another directs the style of the confrontation proposed here between the ontology of the historical condition and the epistemology of historical knowledge and, through it, with the phenomenology of memory. The order followed will be that upon which the theory of temporality in Being and Time is constructed: temporality, historicity, intratemporality. But each section will include two parts, one concerning the analytic of time, the other the historiographical reply.

Opening the debate between philosophy and history on the level of deep temporality may seem unexpected. As we know, Heidegger has not only placed the main emphasis on the future, in contrast to the retrospective orientation of history and memory, he also placed this futureness under the sign of being-toward-death, submitting in this way the indefinite time of nature and of history to the harsh law of mortal finiteness. My thesis here is that the historian is not left speechless by this radical manner of entering into the entire problematic of temporality. For Heidegger, death affects the self in its untransferable and incommunicable solitude: to assume this destiny is to bestow the seal of authenticity on the totality of experience thus placed in the shadow of death; resoluteness, “being-ahead-of-itself,” is the figure in which care appears, confronted at the end by Da-sein’s ownmost potentiality-of-being. How could the historian have anything to say on this level where authenticity and primordiality coincide? Should the historian be the advocate of “one dies,” in which the rhetoric of the inauthentic fritters itself away? Yet it is this path that offers itself for exploration. I humbly suggest an alternative reading of the meaning of mortality, in which the reference to one’s own body requires a detour through biology and the return to the self by way of a patient appropriation of a knowledge entirely outside of the mere fact of death. This reading without pretension would pave the way for a multiple attribution of dying: to the self, to close relations, to others; and among all these others, the dead of the past, which the retrospective gaze of history embraces. Would it then not be the privilege of history to offer to these absent ones of history the pity of an offer of burial? The equation between writing and sepulcher would thus be proposed as the reply furnished by the discourse of the historian to the discourse of the philosopher (section 1: “Temporality”).

It is around the theme of Geschichtlichkeit that the debate between ontology and historiography tightens. Heidegger’s use of the term is inscribed within a semantic history inaugurated by Hegel and relayed by Dilthey and his correspondent, Count Yorck. Heidegger enters the debate by way of the critique of the Diltheyan concept of the “connectedness of life,” whose lack of ontological foundation he denounces. He marks his difference by placing the phenomenon of the “extension” between birth and death under the aegis of the more authentic experience of being-toward-death. He retains of the historiography of his own time only the ontological indigence of its guiding concepts accredited by neo-Kantianism. By opening the discussion in this way, the occasion is provided to test the sense Heidegger attaches to the derivation of temporalization from one level to another. I propose to supplement the approach in terms of ontological deficit by taking into account the resources of the existential potentiality of the historiographical approach that are contained, in my opinion, in certain strong points of the Heideggerian analysis: the distinction, on the very level of the relation to the past, between the past as what has elapsed, eluding our grasp, and the past as having-been and belonging as such to our existence as care; the idea of generational transmission, which gives to debt at once a carnal and an institutional coloration; and “repetition,” the Kierkegaardian theme par excellence, by virtue of which history appears not only as the evocation of the dead but as the theater of the living of other times (section 2: “Historicity”).

It is on the level of intratemporality—of being-in-time—that the ontology of Da-sein encounters history, no longer simply in its inaugural gesture and in its epistemic presuppositions, but in the effectivity of its work. This mode is the least authentic, for its reference to the measures of time places it in the gravitational sphere of what Heidegger considers the “vulgar” conception of time, which he credits to all the philosophers of time from Aristotle to Hegel, a conception whereby time is reduced to an anonymous series of discrete moments. Nevertheless, this mode is not stripped of all primordiality, so that Heidegger can declare it to be “co-primordial” with the preceding modes because “reckoning with time” is understood prior to any measurement, developing a remarkable categorial network that structures the relation of preoccupation connecting us to the things with which we busy ourselves. These categories—datability, what is of a public character, the rhythms of life—allow us to engage in an original debate with historical practice. This positive apprehension of the work of the historian affords me the opportunity to reread all the earlier analyses at the point where history and memory intersect. It seems to me that the ontology of the historical being who embraces its temporal condition in its threefold structure—future, past, present—is empowered to arbitrate the rival claims to hegemony in the closed space of retrospection. On the one hand, history would like to reduce memory to the status of one object among others in its field of investigation; on the other hand, collective memory opposes its resources of commemoration to the enterprise of neutralizing lived significations under the distant gaze of the historian. Under conditions of retrospection common to history and to memory the contest of priority is undecidable. It is this very undecidability that is accounted for in an ontology responsible for its epistemic counterpart. By replacing the present relation of history to the past, which once was but is no longer, against the backdrop of the great dialectic that mixes the resolute anticipation of the future, the repetition of the past as having-been, and the preoccupation with initiative and reasonable action, the ontology of our historical condition justifies the undecidable character of the relation of history to memory evoked as early as the prelude to part 2, devoted to the myth of the invention of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus (section 3: “Within-Timeness: Being-‘in’-Time”).

The last word will be left to three historians who, joining the existentiell to the existential, testify to the “uncanniness” of history, under the sign of an aporia which, once understood, will cease to be paralyzing (section 4: “The Uncanniness of History”).

§

TEMPORALITY

Being-toward-Death

It is first to Augustine that we owe the theme of the tridimensionality of the temporality assigned to the soul. Two major features, which will be reinterpreted by Heidegger, are underscored by Augustine: the original diaspora of the three dimensions, implying their impossible totalization and, corollary to this theme, the equal primordiality of the three instances. The first theme—I formerly spoke of “discordance” to translate distentio animi (in which one finds the diastasis of the Neoplatonists)⁵—is presented in the Confessions in a tone of lamentation: it is out of the “region of dissimilarity” that the soul emits its sighs. The second theme assumes in Augustine a form with which Heidegger will make a decisive break: the equal primordiality of the three temporal instances is distributed around a center which is the present. It is the present that shatters into three directions, in a way reduplicating itself each time: “there are three times, past, present, and future.” Now, “the present of past things is memory; the present of present things is direct perception [contuitus; later we will find attentio]; and the present of future things is expectation” (Confessions 11.20).⁶ To be sure, Augustine does not lack arguments: we see the past only on the basis of vestigia—images or imprints—present to the soul; the same is true for the present anticipations of things to come. It is, therefore, the problematic (and the enigma attached to it) of the presence of the absent that imposes the threefold reference to the present. One may object, however, that the vestigia, the traces, even assuming their presence has to be postulated, are not themselves viewed as belonging to the living present; it is not to them that we are attending but rather to the pastness of past things and to the futureness of things to come. It is, therefore, legitimate to suspect, as do the modern and postmodern critics of “representation,” some “metaphysics of presence” surreptitiously slipped under the instance of presence in its capacity as the present of the present, this strange reduplicated present.⁷ I plead elsewhere for a more polysemic reading of the notion of the present: the present cannot be reduced to presence in something like the optical, sensorial, or cognitive sense of the term; it is also the present of suffering and enjoyment, and all the more so, the present of initiative, as celebrated at the end of Nietzsche’s famous text referred to in the prelude to this third part of the present work.

Augustine must not be asked to solve a problem that is not his, the problem of the possible relations with historical knowledge. On the one hand, his reflections on time place him, for what follows in the history of ideas, in line with what I characterized earlier as the school of inwardness, with the difficulty that results from it of dealing in equal measure with personal memory and collective memory. On the other hand, it is theology that is asked to interpret historical time. It would then be to The City of God and to the conception of the two cities that, following Henri Marrou, himself a good historian, one would have to pose the question of a possible relation between the theology of history and historiography.⁸ And it is under the sign of what Pomian names chronosophy that the philosophical investigation of this relation between theology and historiography could be attempted. This would go beyond the boundaries of the present study.

The transition from Augustine to Heidegger is, at first glance, an easy one: it is suggested by the now well-known triad of the instances of temporality: past, present, and future. However, two major differences having to do with the respective contexts of the two thinkers hold them far apart. Augustine appears against the horizon of Christian Neoplatonism; Heidegger against that of German philosophy culminating in the neo-Kantianism of the early twentieth century. It happens that, for the schools belonging to this philosophical line, there is a problem regarding the possibility and the legitimacy of historical knowledge. In this respect, everything hangs on the passage from a critical philosophy of history, such as that offered in the preceding chapter of the present work, to an ontology of historicity or, as I prefer to say, of our historical condition. The very word “historicity” expresses the shift from the critical philosophy to the ontological philosophy of history. This change of front will be the culmination of the investigations that follow. But this critical moment is preceded by an analysis of fundamental temporality, held to be even more original; at first sight, historiography does not appear to be concerned at this level of extreme radicality. I shall state later in what unexpected way it stands as a legitimate partner even before the concept of historicity is thematized. Now, not only is this concept placed in a secondary position, but the access to the most radical level is itself interminably deferred in the text of Being and Time. First, the full sense of the philosophical place from which the question is asked must be given. This philosophical place is Da-sein, the name given to “this being which we ourselves in each case are” (6). Is it man? No, if by man we designate a being undifferentiated with regard to being; yes, if this being emerges out of its indifference and understands itself as that being who is concerned about its very being (10). This is why, along with Françoise Dastur, I am resolved to leave the term Da-sein untranslated.⁹ This manner of entering into the problematic is of the greatest importance for we who pose the question of the referent of historical knowledge: this final referent was, in the view of Bernard Lepetit, acting-in-common in the social world. The temporal scales considered and traced by historians were based upon this final referent. Acting falls from this position along with man, taken in the empirical sense of the agent and patient of this action; understood in this way, man and his action belong to the category of Vorhandensein, which signifies the pure and simple objective presence of things. Fundamental ontology proposes a regression back before this objective presence, on the condition of making the question of the meaning of being—which, according to the first sentence of Being and Time, has today been forgotten—the ultimate question. This inaugural rupture, paid for by the untranslatability of the word Da-sein, does not exclude the exercise of a function of conditionality with respect to what the human sciences call human action, social action, to the extent that the metacategory of care occupies a central position in the hermeneutical phenomenology for which Da-sein constitutes the ultimate referent.¹⁰ One must wait until chapter 6 of part 1, division 1, titled “The Prepatory Fundamental Analysis of Da-sein,” before arriving at the thematization of care as the being of Da-sein. It is noteworthy that it is in terms of an affection, rather than as a theoretical or practical instance, that care offers itself to be understood, namely, as the fundamental affection of Angst, invoked here by virtue not of its emotional character but of its potentiality for openness with respect to the ownmost being of Da-sein confronting itself. It is fundamental that this openness be the openness to the totality of what we are, more precisely to the “structural whole” of this being confronting its being. This question of totality will accompany us throughout the remainder of these reflections. The possibility of fleeing in the face of oneself is contemporaneous with the capacity of openness inherent in Angst. Section 41, “The Being of Da-sein as Care,” can be considered the matrix of this preparatory fundamental analysis. It is indeed a question here of Da-sein’s “structural whole” (Being and Time, 178). We find already sketched out here the theme of being-ahead-of-itself that announces the privilege accorded to the future in the constitution of primordial temporality. Ordinary psychology, which is also that of historians as well as of judges, can grasp of this structure of care only the shadow it casts on everydayness in the forms of taking-care-of (with regard to oneself) and of concern (for others); but “even in inauthenticity, Da-sein remains essentially ahead-of-itself, just as the entangled fleeing of Da-sein from itself still shows the constitution of a being that is concerned about its being” (180). Of importance to us is the following declaration: “For the present fundamental ontological study, which neither aspires to a thematically complete ontology of Da-sein nor even to a concrete anthropology, it must suffice to suggest how these phenomena are existentially based in care” (181). Care is thus posited as the master category of the analytic of Da-sein and endowed with a corresponding scope of meaning.¹¹

As the remainder of our analyses will progressively confirm, what is most deeply important to me is the founding capacity of the hermeneutical phenomenology of Being and Time with regard to what is called here “concrete anthropology.” The touchstone will be, to paraphrase what has just been quoted, “how these phenomena (the history of historians and the memory of ordinary people) are existentially based in care (and in the temporality of care).” My fear, to put it unabashedly, is that the hierarchical ordering of temporal instances in Being and Time—fundamental temporality, historicity, intratemporality—in terms of decreasing primordiality and of increasing inauthenticity will be an obstacle to the recognition of the resources of conditionality—and in this sense of legitimacy—that flow from the fundamental to the founded instance. Throughout the present chapter, this will be the guiding thread of my confrontation with the analytic of Da-sein.

It is especially noteworthy that the second section, titled “Da-sein and Temporality” (§45ff.), begins with a chapter that fuses two problematics: totality (“the possible being-a-whole of Da-sein,” §46) and mortality (“the existential project of an authentic being-toward-death,” §53). Everything is decided around this nexus of the vastness of total possible-being and the finitude of the horizon of mortality. Before having even begun to explore the strata of temporalization of all the registers of existence, we know that the entry into the dialectic of the instances of temporality will be by way of the future and that futureness is structurally barred by the finite horizon of death. This primacy of the future is implied in the theme of being-toward-death; this theme condenses, then, all the fullness of meaning glimpsed in the preparatory analysis of care under the heading of “being-ahead-of-itself.” After this, the narrow nexus between the potentiality of being-a-whole and mortality is offered as a sort of summit from which the movement of step-by-step constitution of the derived instances of temporalization will later proceed. It is important to be clear on the two terms of the inaugural correlation as it is formulated in the title of the first chapter of division two: “The Possible Being-a-Whole of Da-sein and Being-toward-Death” (219). It is the structure of care that, by its very openness, imposes the problematic of totality and that confers on it the modality of potentiality, of possible being, as is summed up in the expression Ganzseinkönnen (potentiality of being-a-whole, possible being-a-whole): by whole is to be understood not a closed system but integrality, and in this sense, openness. And openness always leaving room for what is “outstanding” (Ausstand, §48), hence for unfinishedness. The term “incompleteness” is important to the extent that the “toward” of being-toward-death seems to imply some destination, some course completed. Is there not some clash between opening and closing, unfulfillable integrality and an end in the form of a barrier? Is not the almost unbearable tension that emerges in language in the form of an oxymoron, the completeness of the incomplete, strangely attenuated by the promotion of being-toward-death, which, in the Heideggerian text, appears to occult the earlier theme of the potentiality for being-a-whole? In order to restore the vigor of this last expression, must one not leave to the potentiality for being its openness by not rushing to add: a whole? This apparently anodine addition conceals the possibility of all the ensuing slippages: being-a-whole, being outstanding as being in suspension, being-toward-the-end, being-toward-death; along with these slippages, the backward redefinitions: the “toward” of being-toward-death proposes a sense of possibility—“being toward a possibility” (241)—which projects itself as a possibility closed upon the open possibility of the potentiality-of-being. Care’s being-ahead-of-itself is thereby affected by its reformulation as “anticipation of possibility” (242).

So it is that death becomes “the ownmost possibility of Da-sein” (243), the ownmost, absolute, unsurmountable, certain in a nonepistemological kind of certainty, anguishing because of its indetermination. In this respect, the passage by way of the idea of the end, with its well-known polysemy, deserves to be underscored: the end that awaits Da-sein, that keeps a watch on it, precedes it, an end that is always and imminent.¹² I am not concealing my puzzlement at the conclusion of my rereading of this core chapter: have not the resources of the openness of the potentiality-for-being been closed off by the insistence on the theme of death? Is not the tension between opening and closing attenuated by the dominion exercised in fine by being-toward-death treated as being toward a possibility? Does not the Angst that places its seal upon the always imminent threat of dying mask the joy of the spark of life? In this respect, the silence of Being and Time regarding the phenomenon of birth—at least at this opening stage—is surprising. Along with Jean Greisch (Ontologie et temporalité, 283), I wish to mention the theme of “natality” (Gebürtigkeit) which, according to Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, underlies the categories of the vita activa: labor, work, action. Should not this jubilation be opposed to what does indeed seem to be an obsession of metaphysics with the problem of death, as is expressed in Plato’s Phaedo (64a) praising the “concern for dying” (meletē tou thanatou). If it is true that the banalization of dying at the level of the “they” amounts to flight, does not the anguished obsession with death amount to closing off the reserves of openness characterizing the potentiality of being? Must one not then explore the resources of the experience of the potentiality of being before its capture by being-toward-death? Must we not, then, listen to Spinoza: “Free man thinks of nothing less than of death and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life” (Ethics, part 4, prop. 67)? Does not the jubilation produced by the vow—which I take as my own—to remain alive until . . . and not for death, put into relief by contrast the existentiell, partial, and unavoidably one-sided aspect of Heideggerian resoluteness in the face of dying?

Against the backdrop of these perplexing questions, I propose to explore two paths which, each in its own fashion, prepare the way for what may be seen as a surprising dialogue between the philosopher and the historian on the subject of death.

It is first of all in contrast to the idea of death as the intimate possibility of one’s ownmost potentiality of being that I would like to suggest an alternate reading of the potentiality of dying. In place of the short-circuit that Heidegger makes between the potentiality of being and mortality, I would prefer to substitute the long detour that follows. One theme, indeed, that seems to me to be lacking in the Heideggerian analysis of care is any consideration of the relation to one’s own body, to the flesh, by virtue of which the potentiality of being adopts the form of desire in the broadest sense of the term, which includes connatus in Spinoza, appetite in Leibniz, libido in Freud, and the desire to be and the effort to exist in Jean Nabert. How does death come to be inscribed in this relation to the flesh? Here the long detour begins. I learn of death as the ineluctable destiny of the object-body; I learn of it in biology, confirmed by everyday experience; biology tells me that mortality constitutes the other half of a pair, of which sexual reproduction constitutes one half. Is this knowledge to be considered unworthy of ontology by reason of its factuality, its empirical character? Will it be relegated to the domain of Vorhandenheit or of Zuhandenheit, among the things objectively present or handy? The flesh perturbs this neat separation of modes of being. A separation which could prevail only if this objective and objectivizing knowledge of death were not internalized, appropriated, imprinted in the flesh of the living being, the being of desire that we are. Once the moment of distantiation has been superseded by the moment of appropriation, death is capable of being inscribed within self-understanding as one’s own death, as the mortal condition. But at what price? Biology teaches only a general, generic “it must be so”: because we are this sort of living being, we must die, there is for us a “having to die.” But, even internalized, appropriated, this knowledge remains heterogeneous to the desire to live, to want to live, this carnal figure of care, of the “potentiality of being-a-whole.” It is only at the end of a long work on oneself that the entirely factual necessity of dying can be converted, not to be sure into the potentiality-of-dying but into the acceptance of having to die. This is a question of a unique kind of “anticipation,” the fruit of wisdom. At the limit, at the horizon, loving death like a sister, after the manner of the poverello of Assisi, remains a gift that depends on an economy inaccessible even to an existentiell experience as singular as the apparent stoicism of a Heidegger, the economy placed by the New Testament under the term agape. If one persists in distinguishing the primordial existential from the variety of existentiell positions stemming from different cultural traditions or personal experiences, the gap remains at this primordial level between wanting to live and having to die: the latter makes death an interruption, at once ineluctable and random, of the most primordial potentiality of being.¹³ Bridging this gap through acceptance remains a task we must all engage in, and one that we face up to more or less successfully.¹⁴ But, even when it is accepted, death remains frightening, anguishing, precisely because of its radical heterogeneity in relation to our desire, and because of the cost that its reception represents. Perhaps, on this first path—the way of externality and of factuality—we have not even reached the center of intimacy from which death proceeds and that will be recognized only by following the second path.

The detour proposed by this second path is no longer the way of externality and factuality but of plurality. What is there to say about death in light of our manner of being among other humans—regarding the inter-esse that Heidegger expresses in the vocabulary of Mitsein? It is astonishing that for him the death of others is held to be an experience that does not measure up to the demand for radicality rooted in Angst and explicated on the level of discourse by the concept of being-toward-death. That inauthenticity haunts the experience of the death of others is not in doubt: the secret admission that the death that has carried off the close relation dearest to us has, in fact, spared us opens the path for a strategy of avoidance by which we hope that it will also spare us the moment of truth in the face of our own death. But the relation of the self to itself is likewise not immune from ruses just as cunning as this. What it is important to plumb instead are the resources of veracity concealed in the experience of losing a loved one, placed back into the perspective of the difficult work of reappropriation of the knowledge about death. Along the road that passes through the death of the other—another figure of the detour—we learn two things in succession: loss and mourning. As for loss, separation as rupture of communication—the deceased, someone who no longer answers—constitutes a genuine amputation of oneself to the extent that the relation with the one who has disappeared forms an integral part of one’s self-identity. The loss of the other is in a way the loss of self and as such constitutes a stage along the path of “anticipation.” The next step is that of mourning, evoked on several occasions in this book. At the end of the movement of internalization of the love object that has been lost forever, the reconciliation with this loss—in which, precisely, the work of mourning consists—begins to take shape. Are we not able to anticipate, on the horizon of this mourning of the other, the mourning that would crown the anticipated loss of our own life? Along this road of redoubled internalization, the anticipation of mourning that our close relations will have to go through at the time of our disappearance, can help us to accept our own future death as a loss with which we strive to reconcile ourselves in advance.

Must we take one additional step and receive a message of authenticity from the death of all those others who are not close relations? This is the place once again to redeploy the triad of the self, close relations, and others, as we attempted to do above with respect to the problem of the attribution of memory. I count on this redeployment to open for us the problematic of death in history, which is our target here. One moves too fast, in my opinion, when one traces back to the “they” the sum of inauthentic relations. In addition to the fact that the idea of justice, evoked in the context of the presumed duty of memory, refers to the position of a third party in interpersonal relations, the death of all these others contains a lesson that neither the relation of the self to itself nor the relation to those close to us could ever provide. Loss and mourning display, on the reputedly banal level of the “they,” unprecedented forms that contribute to our most intimate apprenticeship of death. There is, in fact, one form of death that is never encountered in a pure form, if one may call it so, except in the sphere of public existence: violent death, murder. There is no way of avoiding this new detour, which is already a detour through history, but also a detour through politics. The fear of violent death is, as we know, considered by Hobbes to be a necessary stage in the passage toward a contract to be made by all the members of a historical community in favor of a sovereign, not party to the contract. Violent death cannot be hastily numbered among those things entirely given and at hand. It signifies something essential concerning death in general and, in the final analysis, concerning our own death. The death of those close to us upon which we prefer to meditate is, in fact, an “easy” death, even if it is disfigured by the horror of agony. Even then it comes as a deliverance, an easing of pain, as the face of the deceased gives us to see, in accordance with the secret wish of the survivors. Violent death cannot be tamed so easily. In the same way, suicide, as murder turned against oneself, when it touches us, repeats the hard lesson. What lesson? That, perhaps, every death is a sort of murder. This is the intuition explored by Emmanuel Levinas in some strong pages of Totality and Infinity.¹⁵ What murder—raised to the level of a founding paradigm by the murder of Abel by his brother Cain—lays bare and what the simple disappearance, the departure, the cessation of existing in the death of close relations does not express, is the mark of nothingness, made by the intention to annihilate. Alone, the “passion for murder” exhibits this mark.¹⁶ Levinas goes straight to the ethical response that this passion provokes: the moral impossibility of annihilation is henceforth inscribed in every face. The interdiction of murder replies to a frightening possibility and is inscribed in this very possibility. But, in addition to this great lesson that inaugurates the entrance into ethics, murder, which is fundamentally death inflicted on others, is reflected in my relation to my own death. The feeling of imminence, which precedes all knowledge about death, is given to understanding as the imminence of a threat coming from an unknown point of the future. Ultima latet, repeats Levinas: “In death I am exposed to absolute violence, to murder in the night” (Totality and Infinity, 233). An unsettling malevolence of the Other advances toward me—against me: “as though murder, rather than being one of the occasions of dying, were inseparable from the essence of death, as though the approach of death remained one of the modalities of the relation with the Other” (234). Silent regarding the eventual aftermath of death (“nothingness or . . . recommencement? I do not know” [234]), Levinas is clear and firm regarding the before, which can only be a being-against-death and not a being-toward-death. Life? A project in suspension against a horizon of a “pure menace, which comes to me from an absolute alterity” (235). Fear, not of nothingness but of violence and, in this sense, “fear of the Other” (235).¹⁷ To Heideggerian being-toward-death, Levinas opposes a despite-death, an against-death, which opens a fragile space of manifestation for “goodness liberated from the egoist gravitation” (236).¹⁸

In addition to the ethical—and political—teaching that Levinas elicited from this meditation on the violence of death,¹⁹ I would like to evoke one of the figures assumed by mourning that corresponds to the loss sharpened by the “passion for murder.” This figure sets us on the path toward the coming reflections on death in history. What indeed could a peaceful, dignified vision of the threat signified by violent death be? Would this not be the presumed banality of the “one dies?” Could not this banality contain its own force of ontological attestation? This would be the case if we were able to contemplate the threat that our desire will be interrupted as an equitable equalization: just as everyone else, before me and after me, I too must die. With death ends the time of privileges. Is this not the message transmitted by the sober narrative of the death of the Patriarchs in the Torah so dear to Levinas: “He died and was gathered to his father’s kin”; “breathed his last, and was gathered to his father’s kin?”²⁰

Death in History

Is the historian condemned to remain speechless in the face of the solitary discourse of the philosopher?

The thesis of this section is that, despite Heidegger’s explicit discussions and, more particularly, despite the radical nature of the theme of fundamental temporality and of its distance from any historiographical thematic, a dialogue between the philosopher and the historian is possible at the very level established by Heidegger, that of being-toward-death.

Besides the redeployment of this theme suggested by the alternative readings proposed just above, the text of Being and Time proposes other openings in the direction of a common space of confrontation.

First opening: the great chapter on being-toward-death is followed by a meditation devoted to the theme of Gewissen (a term translated by “conscience”). This concept is immediately associated in Heidegger with that of attestation (Bezeugung). Attestation is the mode in which the concept of the potentiality-of-being-a-whole and that of being-toward-death are given to be understood. One can speak in this regard of attestation of the future, attestation of the very futureness of care in its capacity of “anticipation.” However, in truth, attestation has as its full vis-à-vis our historical condition deployed in its three temporal ecstasies. It is, moreover, possible to consider testimony, as we have encountered it in the present work, in its retrospective forms, in everyday life, in the courts or in history, as the correlate of the past of attestation bearing on the potentiality-of-being apprehended in the figure of anticipation. The role of making-possible, assigned to the metacategory of our historical condition, finds the opportunity to be actualized in the correlation between the attestation of the future and the attestation of the past. To this must be joined the attestation of the present as it concerns the “I can,” the verbal mode of all the verbs of action and passion that in Oneself as Another express the capable being: capable of speech, of action, of narrative, of imputation; this certainty of the present frames the attestation of the future and the witnessing of the past. The force of Heidegger’s text is to permit attestation to radiate out from the future of anticipation toward the past of retrospection.

Second opening: the ontology of the potentiality-of-being/potentiality-of-dying does not leave pastness in a relation of externality or of adversarial polarity, as is still the case with the concepts of the horizon of expectation and of the space of experience in Koselleck and in our own analyses; Koselleck, moreover, did not fail to underscore, as we noted earlier, the singular nature, like a de facto structure, of the “experience of history.” According to Being and Time, “anticipation” implies pastness. But in what sense of the term? Here, a decision is taken whose indirect consequences for history are immense: it is not as already elapsed and beyond reach of our will to mastery that the past is intended after-the-fact as “having been.” In this respect, the decision that is apparently merely semantic to prefer Gewesenheit—the quality of having been—to Vergangenheit—the past that has elapsed and disappeared—to express pastness has a close affinity with the movement that leads the critical philosophy of history back to the ontology of the historical condition. We have many times anticipated this priority of “having been” over the past as elapsed in the following terms: the “no longer” of the past, we have said, should not obscure the intention of historians whose gaze is directed toward the living who existed prior to becoming the “absent of history.” It is of the greatest importance that this redefinition of the past be introduced for the first time within the framework of the analysis of fundamental temporality, that of care (Being and Time, §65), before taking into account the theme of historicity and the specific problem of history. The tie between futureness and pastness is assured by a bridging concept, that of being-in-debt. Anticipatory resoluteness can only be the assumption of the debt that marks our dependence on the past in terms of heritage.²¹ In the chapter on Gewissen, the notion of debt (German, Schuld) had already been stripped of its sting of indictment, of guilt, which may seem regrettable in the case of a historical judgment on notorious crimes, such as those mentioned earlier in connection with the debates of the German historians, among others. Was Heidegger excessive in removing its moral character from the concept of debt? I think that the idea of fault must take its place at a very specific stage of historical judgment, when historical understanding is confronted with admitted wrongs; the notion of wrongs done to others then preserves the properly ethical dimension of the debt, its dimension of guilt. We shall say as much in my chapter on forgiveness. But before that, it is good to make use of a morally neutral concept of debt, one that does not express more than a heritage transmitted and assumed, and one that does not exclude a critical inventory.

This concept of heritage-debt comes to take its place under that of standing for proposed in the framework of the epistemology of historical knowledge as the guardian of the referential claim of historical discourse: that the constructions of the historian can have the ambition of being tangentially, so to speak, the reconstructions of what actually took place “as though actually having been,” according to the words of Leopold von Ranke, is what the concept of standing for means. However, we were not able to conceal the problematical character of this concept on the very level on which it was articulated. It remains as though suspended, after the fashion of a bold claim posited on the horizon of the historiographical operation. In this regard, being-in-debt constitutes the existential possibility of standing for. Whereas the notion of standing for remains dependent, in the structure of its meaning, on the deliberately retrospective perspective of historical knowledge, being-in-debt constitutes the reverse side of anticipatory resoluteness. In the following section we shall say what the historian can retain of this consideration of “anticipation” on the derivative plane of historicity where, precisely, the dialogue between the philosopher and the historian is taken up.

It is, therefore, under the sign of being-in-debt that having-been predominates in terms of ontological density over the being-no-longer of the elapsed past. A dialectic is begun between “having-been” and “elapsed” that is a great resource for the dialogue between the historian and the philosopher, and for the latter’s own work. All the same, we have to preserve the legitimacy of each of the two terms of the pair. Here, we can offer resistance to Heidegger’s analysis, for which the determination of the past as elapsed must be considered an inauthentic form of temporality, dependent upon the vulgar concept of time, the simple sum of fleeting nows.²² It is at this point that the treatment of the qualifiers “authentic” and “inauthentic” is revealed to be inadequate to the possibilizing function assigned to ontological conceptuality, rendering the dialogue between the philosopher and the historian difficult if not impossible. In this regard, this dialogue requires that justice be done to the concept of the elapsed past and that the dialectic of “having been” and “no longer” be reestablished in all its dramatic force. Certainly, there is no doubt that the “simply elapsed” bears the mark of the irrevocable and that the irrevocable, in its turn, suggests the powerlessness to change things; in this sense, the elapsed is drawn to the side of the handy and the objectively present (vorhanden and zuhanden), categories deemed inadequate to the ontological tenor of care. However, the not-at-hand, not objectively present character of the past does indeed seem to correspond in the practical sphere to absence in the cognitive sphere of representation. It is here that the coupling between being-in-debt—an ontological category—and standing for—an epistemological category—proves to be fruitful, to the extent that standing for raises to the epistemological level of the historiographical operation the enigma of the present representation of the absent past, which, as has been sufficiently repeated, constitutes the primary enigma of the mnemonic phenomenon. But Being and Time ignores the problem of memory and only touches episodically on the problem of forgetting. Later we shall consider the consequence of this omission on the plane of historicity and of the debate with historiography. One can, however, deplore this absence already in the radical analysis of care, the level on which the decision is made to oppose “having been”—more authentic—to the “elapsed” past—less authentic. The debate between the philosopher and the historian has everything to gain from re-establishing the dialectic of presence and absence, inherent in every representation of the past, whether mnemonic or historical. The intention of the past as having been comes out of this reinforced, once having-been signifies having been present, living, alive.

It is against this dialectical backdrop that the historian makes a specific contribution to the meditation on death.

How, indeed, could one ignore the simple fact that in history one is concerned with practically nothing but the dead of other times? The history of the present day forms a partial exception, inasmuch as it calls the living to its bar. However, they are summoned as surviving witnesses of events that are in the process of slipping away into the absence of time elapsed; often as inaudible witnesses, as the extraordinary events to which they bear witness appear inconceivable when measured in terms of the ordinary understanding of contemporaries. Thus they may seem further “removed” than any distant past. Sometimes the witnesses die as a result of this lack of understanding. It will be objected that this emphasis on death in history is relevant only in a history of great events that takes into account only the decisions and great passions of a few prominent individuals; in addition it will be objected that this coupling of event and structure grinds into anonymity the feature of mortality posited in the case of individuals taken one by one. Yet, to begin with, even in the perspective of a history in which structure prevails over events, the historical narrative causes the features of mortality to re-emerge on the level of entities treated as quasi characters: the death of the Mediterranean as the collective hero of sixteenth century political history confers upon death itself a magnitude proportional to that of a quasi character. In addition, the anonymous death of all these people who do no more than pass across the stage of history silently poses to meditating thought the question of the very sense of this anonymity. It is the question of “one dies” to which we earlier attempted to restore ontological density, under the twofold sign of the cruelty of violent death and the equity of death as it levels all destinies. This is indeed the death at issue in history.

But in what way and in what terms?

There are two ways of replying to this question. The first is to make the relation to death appear as one of the object-representations which the new history has chosen to inventory. There is indeed a history of death—whether in the West or elsewhere—which constitutes one of the most remarkable conquests in the domain of the history of mentalités and of representations. But, if this “new object” may seem unworthy of holding the attention of the philosopher, the same is not true of death as it is implied in the very act of doing history. Death is then mingled with representation in its role as historiographical operation. Death marks, so to speak, the absent in history. The absent in historiographical discourse. At first sight, the representation of the past as the kingdom of the dead seems to condemn history to offering to our reading no more than a theater of shadows, stirred by survivors in possession of a suspended sentence of death. One escape remains: considering the historiographical operation to be the scriptural equivalent of the social ritual of entombment, of the act of sepulcher.

Sepulcher, indeed, is not only a place set apart in our cities, the place we call a cemetery and in which we depose the remains of the living who return to dust. It is an act, the act of burying. This gesture is not punctual; it is not limited to the moment of burial. The sepulcher remains because the gesture of burying remains; its path is the very path of mourning that transforms the physical absence of the lost object into an inner presence. The sepulcher as the material place thus becomes the enduring mark of mourning, the memory-aid of the act of sepulcher.

It is this act of sepulcher that historiography transforms into writing. Michel de Certeau is the most eloquent spokesperson in this regard for the transfiguration of death in history into sepulcher by the historian.

In the first instance, as it is apprehended in L’Absent de l’histoire, death is that which history misses. We have already mentioned, at the time of the encounter between Certeau and Foucault, the suspicion addressed to the latter that he did not go as far as would have seemed to be required by “outside thinking,” “the black sun of language.”²³ This is the harsh consequence of a discourse on deviation: “the change of space in which discourse is produced has as its condition the break that the other introduces into the same” (L’Absent de l’histoire, 8), the other appearing only “as the trace of what has been” (9). History will then be this “discourse” organized around a “missing present” (9). Can the voices of the living still be heard? No: “A literature is produced on the basis of definitively silent imprints, what happened will never return and the voice is lost forever and it is death that imposes muteness on the trace” (11). This advance in the meditation on absence was necessary to give its full force to the theme of the sepulcher.²⁴ The sepulcher appears indeed to exhaust its effect in the act that “renders present in language the social act of existing today and provides a cultural point of reference for it” (159). Alone, the self-positing of the social present appears to compensate for the act that relegates the past to its absence. Absence is then no longer a state but the result of a work of history, the true machine for producing gaps, giving rise to heterology, that logos of the other. The image of the cemetery devoted to the deceased then flows naturally from the pen. It is, above all, the strong image of the definite absence of the deceased, the response to the denial of death, a denial that masks itself in the fiction of verisimilitude.

In this moment of suspension, Michelet’s discourse appears to be that of “the literary hallucination (the return, ‘resurrection’) of death” (179). The traces, however, are mute and all that is “still speaking” is the narrative of history: “It can speak of the sense of absence made possible when there is no place other than discourse” (170). The theme of the cemetery then simply outstrips that of absence: “The writing of the historian makes room for lack and it hides it; it creates these narratives of the past which are equivalent to cemeteries in cities; it exorcizes and affirms a presence of death in the midst of the living” (103).

The reversal takes place at the very heart of the cemetery theme, under the sign of the equation between writing and sepulcher. This strong tie is pronounced in a few magnificent pages of The Writing of History.²⁵ It is first in terms of place that sepulcher is evoked. This place in discourse has as its counterpart the place of the reader to whom the writing of history is addressed. The passage from sepulcher-place to sepulcher-act is effected by what Certeau calls “a literary inversion of procedures belonging to research” (100). According to him, this gesture has two aspects. On the one hand, writing, like a burial ritual, “exorcizes death by inserting it into discourse” (100), but this is also done to perfection in the portrait gallery. The fantasy of the Dance of Death, thus, seemed to be confirmed: “Writing places a population of the dead on stage—characters, mentalities, or prizes” (99). On the other hand, writing performs a “symbolic function” which “allows a society to situate itself by giving itself a past through language” (100). A dynamic relation is established in this way between two places, the place of the dead and the place of the reader.²⁶ Sepulcher-as-place becomes sepulcher-as-act: “Where research had brought about a critique of current models, writing constructs a tombeau for the dead. . . . Thus it can be said that writing makes the dead so that the living can exist elsewhere” (100–101). This “scriptural conversion” (100) leads further than simple narrativity; it plays the role of performative: “Language allows a practice to be situated in respect to its other, the past” (101). It is not merely narrativity as such which is superseded in this way, but along with it the function of alibi, of the realist illusion which pulls “producing history” to the side of “telling stories” (102); performativity assigns a place to the reader, a place that has to be filled, a “something that must be done” (101).

Echoing these strong words, Jacques Rancière analyzes the theme of the “dead king” in The Names of History. He first notes that death in history is not directly the indiscriminate death of anonymous people. It is, primarily, the death of those who bear a name; death that is an event. But it is already a death that joins a proper name to a function and lends itself to the metony-mous transfer to the institution: the death of the king is, by reason of the “excess of words,” the delegitimation of kings. Besides the ordinary death of Philip II, at what could be termed the Hobbesian crossroads of poetics and politics, the “poetics of knowledge” meets up with the violent death of Charles I of England, which metaphorically evokes the peril of death that each man encounters in the natural condition, but also the death of the political body as such. And then, moving further, there is the death of those tortured by the Inquisition: two extreme testimonies of the relation of speaking-being with death are brought together in this way, regicide and the Inquisition (The Names of History, 74); death redeemable by history in opposition to death that is unredeemable, the author notes. This is the occasion for him to connect the problematic of place, which will turn out to be the tomb, to that of the discordant and errant discourses that are related in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou and Certeau’s Mystic Fable. The historian then appears as the one who, in a variety of ways, makes the dead speak. And the democratic destitution of the figure of the king was necessary in order to recover the silent voices of the poor and the masses, and through them, common death. For the king dies just like everyone else. And it is here that Rancière joins Certeau. Unknown to Braudel, who lets himself into the king’s chambers along with the ambassadors, what matters and what Braudel was not concerned with, are “the conditions in which the writing of the knowledgeable historical narrative takes place in the democratic age, of the conditions of articulation of the threefold—scientific, narrative, and political—contract” (21). Henceforth, “the death drive inherent in the scholarly belief in history” (41) emerges not simply from the figure of the dead king alone, but from the death signified by the completed character of the historical past. It is death on a grand scale that Michelet, the Romantic historian, preceding the scientific language of the Annales, exorcizes.²⁷ This mass death attains readability and visibility at the same time as the “Republican-Romantic” paradigm of history. Death in history, I would say, is inherent in what Rancière calls “the founding narrative” (42ff.). It is death on the scale of the past as it is completed, elapsed. It is “the inclusion of death in science, not as residue but as a condition of possibility. . . . There is history because there is a past and a specific passion for the past. And there is history because there is an absence of things in words, of the denominated in names” (63). A twofold absence, then: of “‘the thing itself’ that is no longer there” and of the event that “never was—because it never was such as it was told” (63). Here we find our entire problematic of the relation of memory and history to the absence of the before, joined here by the theme of death in history. Without going as far as the distinction dear to me between the elapsed, the completed, and “having-been,” Rancière, placing himself in the wake of Michelet, ventures to speak of “the supplement of life,” contemporaneous with the “excess of words,” even “the redemption of absence” (64), which could be a theme taken from Walter Benjamin. In any event, it is the function of discourse as the place of language to offer soil and a tomb to the dead of the past: “The ground is an inscription of meaning, the tomb a passage of voices” (66). Whence we hear the voice of Certeau assigning two symmetrical places to the reader and to the dead. For one and the other, language is “death, calmed down” (74).

In proffering this discourse, the historian gives a response to the philosopher in the process of “having it out with” the Heideggerian theme of being-toward-death. On the one hand, the ontology of historical being contributes its full justification to this scriptural conversion by reason of which a present and a future are opened up prior to the retrospective discourse of history. In return, the historian’s own interpretation of this operation in terms of sepulcher helps to reinforce the philosopher’s attempt to oppose to the ontology of being-toward-death an ontology of being-in-the-face-of-death, against-death, in which the work of mourning would be taken into account. An ontological version and a historiographical version of the work of mourning would thus join together in a sepulcher-discourse in two voices.

HISTORICITY

The second level of temporalization in the order of derivation, Heidegger names Geschichtlichkeit. This is the level at which the philosopher is held to encounter the epistemological claims of historiography. It is also at this level, as at the following one, that the sense of the derivation of levels invoked by Heidegger is decided. To the derivation in terms of decreasing orders of primordiality and authenticity, I would like to oppose a derivation in terms of the existential condition of possibility with respect to historical knowledge. Now, this different modality of derivation can be interpreted as an increase of intelligibility as much as a diminution of ontological density.

A prior question arises: how should one translate in French (or in English) the German Geschichtlichkeit? Most of the French translators of Being and Time have opted for “historialité” in order to emphasize Heidegger’s thoroughgoing originality in the use of this borrowed term. The drawback is that it conceals Heidegger’s dependence with respect to his predecessors and prevents readers from discovering the fact that in German one and the same termcan appear in successive contexts. After all, the term Geschichte, on which the second-order abstraction is constructed (one moves from Geschichte to Geschichtlichkeit by the adjective geschichtlich, following a manner of terminological definition dear to Germans, and abundantly exploited by Hegel, his contemporaries, and successors)²⁸ does not lend itself to this skillful decoupling: Geschichte is in the final analysis the only word available, despite the attempts to oppose Geschichte to Historie and despite the ambiguities, which it is precisely philosophy’s job to clarify. Heidegger admits as much when, at the beginning of §73, he announces that “our next goal is to find the point of departure for the primordial question of the essence of history [Geschichte], that is, for the existential construction of Geschichtlichkeit” (Being and Time, 346). It is indeed the word and the notion of history that are in question under the concept of Geschichtlichkeit: the condition of historical being. This is why it seemed preferable to me to assume the same ambitions as the German language in a French translation; Heidegger’s originality can only be strengthened as a result.²⁹

The Trajectory of the Term Geschichtlichkeit

In our effort to understand better the break marked by Heidegger’s use of the term Geschichtlichkeit, it may be useful to retrace briefly the trajectory of its uses from Hegel, who acclimatized the term to its philosophical surroundings, up to the correspondence between Dilthey and Count Yorck (1877–97). It is at this final stage that Heidegger intervenes.³⁰

The word is a creation of the nineteenth century. It was in fact Hegel who imprinted on it its philosophical signification.³¹ It is in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy that the term first arises in the full force of its meaning: it concerns Ancient Greece, “in whose name alone the cultivated man of Europe (and in particular we Germans) feels at home [heimlich in seiner Heimat].” But it was the specific way in which the Greeks inhabited their cosmologies, their mythologies, their history of gods and men, that gave the Greeks themselves “this character of free and beautiful Geschichtlichkeit.” The name of Mnemosyne is associated with this “seed of reflective freedom”: just as the Greeks were “at home,” so, following them, philosophy can enjoy the same spirit of “current familiarity [Heimatlichkeit]” (quoted by Renthe-Fink, Geschichtlichkeit, 21).

Hegel uses the word in a second context, that of the “immense moment in Christianity,” with “the knowledge that Christ became a true human being” (in Michelet’s second edition of the Lectures). We owe to the Fathers of the Church the development of “the true idea of spirit in the determinate form of historicity at the same time” (quoted by Renthe-Fink, 21).

It is remarkable that it is under the twofold auspices of Greece and of Christianity that the term “historicity” made its entrance into the philosophical lexicon. With the first use—and in passing by way of Mnemosyne—we are not far from the praise the Phenomenology of Spirit bestows upon the aesthetic religiousness that imprints mnemonic inwardness (Erinnerung)—the Erinnerung of the Greeks. As for the second use, a comparable transition by memory is part of the most ancient tradition of Christianity and its establishment (“Do this in remembrance of me”).³² It remains that Hegel did not use the term “historicity” outside of these two references to two critical moments of the history of Spirit.³³ In truth, since Herder and the German Romantics, it is the term Geschichte—which Geschichtlichkeit repeats—that has carried the tone of depth and gravity that the term “historicity” will take on. It is solely the exemplarity of these two founding moments of the history of spirit that permits us retrospectively to credit the Hegelian usage of the term “historicity” with an equal founding capacity. In the final analysis, meaningful history, for Hegel, is that of Spirit. And the problem he transmits to his interpreters and to his successors is that of the tension between truth and history. How is it, the philosopher asks, that Spirit has a history? By the epochal character of the question, philosophical history has already seceded from the history of the historians. Factuality has lost all philosophical interest; it is relegated to mere narrative.

Dilthey’s work—immense, diffuse, and incomplete—constitutes the decisive link in the history of the uses of the term Geschichtlichkeit. But its occurrences are rare in comparison to the massive usage of Lebendigkeit, “living reality.” It is his correspondence with Yorck that will bring it back to the fore. On the other hand, the term Geschichte is omnipresent. It is at the heart of the project of establishing the Geisteswissenschaften (the human sciences) on an equal footing with the natural sciences.³⁴ Spirit is historical through and through.

The great matter at issue in the Introduction to the Human Sciences,³⁵ the first part of which was published in 1883—the only part completed—is the defense of the autonomy, the complete self-sufficiency, of the human sciences: “Human sciences as an independent whole alongside natural sciences” (Introduction, 77).³⁶ These sciences owe their autonomy to the unified constitution of the mind itself, apprehended in self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung). This sense of the indivisible unity of the mind continued to be reinforced as Dilthey’s publications grew. In opposition to the mechanistic views tied to the associationism then triumphant in psychology, the notion of psychical “structural coherence” (Strukturzusammenhang) is introduced as early as the opening pages of The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences.³⁷ This expression belongs to a rich semantic field assembled around the term Zusammenhang, in close connection with the term “life.”³⁸ One cannot more strongly assert the direct rootedness of scientifically oriented concepts in the very depths of life.³⁹

It is worth noting that at no point is the idea of “living structural coherence” or of “psychical structural whole”—or other renderings—ever associated in Dilthey, as it will be in Heidegger, with that of the interval between birth and death. Death is not, for him, the reference of finiteness for self-reflection. Any more than birth is. The living unity of the spirit understands itself by itself, without any other conceptual intermediary. A conceptual network is thus set into place, linking Lebendigkeit, Geschichtlichkeit, Freiheit, and Entwicklung (life, historicity, liberty, development). Now, in this sequence, the moment of historicity has no particular privilege, nor does it appear in the 1883 Introduction to the Human Sciences. It makes a furtive appearance in his “Antrittsrede in der Akademie der Wissenschaften” (“Inaugural Address to the Academy of Sciences”)⁴⁰ in 1887 and again in Dilthey’s address on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, “Rede zum 70 Geburtstag” in 1903.⁴¹ It is not by chance that, in the course of his correspondence with Yorck, Dilthey will emerge bearing a halo of religiosity far removed from theological dogmatism and prolonging the Hegelian work of rationalization and secularization (whether intentional or not) of trinitarian Christian theology.

Against this rich backdrop of reflective certainty, the correspondence with Count Paul Yorck vonWartenberg (1886–87)⁴² casts a distanced and critical regard on the very attempt to found the autonomous whole of the human sciences on the concept of life. It was left to Yorck to introduce the gap between self-reflection and any empirical project of historical science. The concept of historicity is clearly called for in the neighborhood of concepts such as vitality and inwardness (all these words in -heit and -keit!). But the preferred term is finally geschichtliche Lebendigkeit (Renthe-Fink, Geschichtlichkeit, 113). And Yorck pushes his friend even further in denouncing the spiritual poverty of the empirical historical sciences. Referring to Dilthey’s recent publication of Ideas Concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology (1894; G.W., 5:139–240), Yorck denounces the insufficiency of psychology as a human science to contend with the fullness of “historical life.” What self-reflection as a primary means of knowledge lacks, Yorck observes, is a “critical analysis” of the ontological deficit of the sciences assembled around psychology, that is to say, essentially a fundamental logic to precede and guide the sciences. Then comes Yorck’s famous sentence: Dilthey’s investigations “place too little emphasis on the genetic difference between the ontic and the historical [historisch].” This difference, foreign to Dilthey’s vocabulary, is intended to express the maximum gap between the ontological and the presumedly scientific. It is starting with this opposition that Heidegger will cast off again. Wherever this difference is lacking, historiography remains prisoner to “purely ocular determinations.” Wherever it is recognized, it can be strongly affirmed: “As I am nature, I am history.”

Yorck’s proposals came at a time when his friend was caught up in the second part of his Life of Schleiermacher, which he would never finish, and when he was also attempting to provide a sequel to the 1883 Introduction, which would remain incomplete as well. This is also the time when Dilthey was undergoing the attacks of his colleague Ebbinghaus, the spokesman for scientific psychology. Yorck calls upon Dilthey to respond by stressing ever more firmly the immediacy of the certainty attaching to self-reflection, which addresses itself directly to the structural connections of life. Lebendigkeit could not forgo this “internal coherence of life.” This, however, does not prevent the concept of historicity from being drawn to the side of an anti-dogmatic religiousness, itself termed “historical” in a nonchronological sense of the word. Dilthey’s final letter (summer 1897) contains one of his rare confessions: “Yes! the term Geschichtlichkeit is the most apt to convey the supreme task of the human sciences, which is to stand up, in self-reflection, in the name of ‘victorious spontaneous vitality,’ to the lack of spirituality of modern times”; to value, he says, “the consciousness of the supra-sensible and supra-rational nature of historicity itself” (Renthe-Fink, Geschichtlichkeit, 107). Yorck died on September 12, 1899. This ended the discussion on historicity. The term will no longer appear except in his 1903 seventieth birthday speech and in the 1911 “Vorrede.” This is no more than a terminological erasure, as Dilthey will continue to speak of the “historical world” and will claim for the human sciences “the foundation of knowledge of the world, a foundation which makes the world itself possible” (“Vorrede,” Gesammelte Schriften, 5:3–6).

Heidegger’s intervention is grafted quite precisely on this debate opened by Yorck at the very heart of Dilthey’s work. Heidegger makes this admission at the start of section 77 of Being and Time: “Our analysis of the problem of history grew out of an appropriation of Dilthey’s work. It was corroborated, and at the same time strengthened, by Count Yorck’s theses that are scattered throughout his letters to Dilthey” (Being and Time, 363). From this follows the strange redaction—one of a kind—consisting of a series of paragraphs composed for the most part of an anthology of citations. Heidegger frankly places himself with Yorck on the critical point at which “psychology,” destined to comprehend “life,” proposes to reveal “the whole fact of man” (363). How can man, in this guise, be at once the object of the human sciences and the root of these sciences? The question goes well beyond the debate concerning the border between the human sciences and the natural sciences, between understanding and explanation, well beyond the promotion of psychology as the science of reference for philosophy. It has as its stakes the understanding of historicity, as the two friends agreed. From Yorck are retained the intervention relating to Dilthey’s publication in 1894 of Ideas Concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology and the famous distinction between “ontic” and “historical.”

One may doubt that this interested recourse to Yorck’s comments and especially to his terminology—ontic in opposition to historical—facilitates an “appropriation of Dilthey’s work.” Yorck’s ontic is not Heidegger’s ontic, which is paired in a unique way with the ontological. However, to clarify this point would only blur the tracks and lead us away from the true center of Dilthey’s thought, namely, the tie between Life and History.

It is not upon this equivocation that Heidegger constructs his own interpretation of historicity but upon the lack experienced at the end of the meditation on the “equiprimordial connection of death, debt, and conscience . . . rooted in care” (341, trans. modified).⁴³ What is missing is the other “end,” namely, the “beginning,” “birth,” and, between them, the interval that Heidegger says “stretches along [Ausdehnung]” (342). And he admits that this in-between, in which Da-sein constantly holds itself, “was overlooked in our analysis of being-a-whole” (342). It is worth noting that Heidegger confronts Dilthey not over the term “historicity,” which furnishes the chapter with its title, but over the theme of the “connectedness of life,” whose systematic context we reconstructed above. In a few lines he bids farewell to the Diltheyan concept: for one thing, it is supposed to resolve itself into a succession of experiences unfolding “in time,” which would relegate it to the next level of derivation, that of within-timeness; for another, more seriously, the “ontological prejudice” guiding the characterization of the interconnection in question localizes it without reservation “in the actual now,” in the ontological region of the “objectively present” and, in so doing, places it under the sway of the vulgar concept of time, which propels the descending dialectic of temporality in its downward motion. It is impossible, Heidegger asserts, to conduct upon this basis “a genuine ontological analysis of the way Da-sein stretches along between birth and death” (343). His thesis is that the thinking of being-toward-death alone is capable of providing an ontological anchor to the idea of interval (which Dilthey never considered) under the complementary condition that birth, in its turn, be interpreted as another “end,” symmetrical to the end par excellence; Da-sein can then be said to exist “as born” just as it is said to exist as “dying.” Now what is this interval, if not care? “As care, Da-sein is the ‘Between’” (343).

Nowhere, perhaps, does one so sorely feel the absence of a reflection on the flesh, which would have allowed the designation of being-born as the condition of already being-there and not simply as an event of birth, in false symmetry to the not-yet event of death.

Despite these initial limits, the notion of stretching-along is rich with harmonics capable of nourishing the debate with the historian. Three notions suggest themselves: motivity, which expresses the qualitative and dynamic mutability of existence; permanence, which adds a temporal touch to the idea of self-constancy (an earlier analysis recognized the determination of the “who” of Da-sein); finally, “occurrence,” which reinterprets in an existential manner the previously charged word, Geschehen, by placing emphasis on the temporalizing operation attached to the idea of stretching-along. In this way, the place left vacant on the ontological plane by the Diltheyan concept of the connectedness of life is now occupied. “The question of the ‘connectedness’ of Da-sein is the ontological problem of its occurrence. To expose the structure of occurrence and the existential and temporal conditions of its possibility means to gain an ontological understanding of historicity” (344).

At the same time as a reply is given to Dilthey, “the place of the problem of history . . . [is] decided upon” (344). It is noteworthy that Heidegger does not in any way directly confront the profession of historian, but rather what he calls “the scientific and theoretical kind of treatment of the problem of history” (344). This essentially concerns attempts in the neo-Kantian tradition to conceive of history either on the basis of the place conferred upon it by its method in the architecture of knowledge, after the manner of Simmel and Rickert, both of whom are named (344), or directly on the basis of its object, the historical fact. What Heidegger considers the fundamental phenomenon of history, namely, the historicity of existence, is immediately swept away by the partisans of the dominant neo-Kantianism: Heidegger asks “how [can] history . . . become a possible object for historiography”? (344). But he scarcely moves any further in the direction we will take. The notion of derivation, taken in the sense of descending degrees of authenticity, produces only a recourse from less to more authentic. As to what makes historical knowledge possible, one is limited to the affirmation that history as science moves among the objectified modalities of the “historical” mode of being. A chain of relations of dependency is thus offered to be read backward: the object of history—the historical—historicity—its rootedness in temporality. It is essentially this regressive process that Heidegger opposes to any effort to think the objectivity of the historical fact within the framework of a theory of knowledge.

To start this return movement from the inauthentic back to the authentic, Heidegger does not balk at beginning with investigations conducted under the banner of “the vulgar concept of history” (344). What is important, with regard to this starting point, is “the exposition of the ontological problem of historicity” (345). And this can be nothing other than the revelation of “what already lies enveloped in the temporalizing of temporality” (345). Heidegger repeats: “The existential interpretation of historiography as a science aims solely at a demonstration of its ontological provenance from the historicity of Da-sein” (345). In other words: “. . . this being is not ‘temporal,’ because it ‘is in history,’ but because, on the contrary, it exists and can exist historically only because it is temporal in the ground of its being” (345).

However, we must admit that we have not actually moved any closer to what in the present work we have called the work of history and which Heidegger attributes to “factical Da-sein” (345); the account of the historiographical operation is put off until the next stage of the process of derivation, that of within-timeness. How indeed can history be made without calendar or clock?⁴⁴ This means that the fate of actual history is not decided on the level of historicity but on that of within-timeness. On the plane of historicity, the discussion reaches only a second-order reflection on epistemology, such as we assigned this in the preceding chapter to a critical philosophy of history. The forced referral to the following stage of derivation of the modes of temporalization provokes a flustered remark: “But since time as within-timeness also ‘stems’ from the temporality of Da-sein, historicity and within-timeness turn out to be equiprimordial. The vulgar interpretation of the temporal character of history is thus justified within its limits” (345). A certain competition is therefore underway between derivation—which a few lines earlier is called “deduction” (in quotes)—and equiprimordiality.⁴⁵

Historicity and Historiography

Taking advantage of this moment of suspension and hesitation, I would like to return to the attempt at a critical dialogue between philosophy and history, begun at the end of the first section of this chapter and broken off with the theme of the writing of history as sepulcher. I would like to draw the attention of the philosopher to the workshop of the historian. Heidegger himself proposes this by opening his discussion on the status of the science of history with a reflection on the ambiguous senses of the word “history,” in which the properly historiographical determinations of the concept are not yet in evidence. He enumerates and runs through four current acceptations of the term: the past as unavailable; the past as still acting; history as the sum of things transmitted; the authority of tradition. According to him, one finds under these four guises the Geschehen, the “occurrence,” but concealed under the appearances of the appearing and transmitted event. Something is stated here that concerns the historian in a highly constructive sense: having-been wins out over what is simply past, characterized by being removed from our grasp in our sighting of the past. We ourselves have on many occasions come into contact with this dialectic of “having-been” and “being-no-longer” and have underscored its rootedness in ordinary language and in mnemonic experience, before it is developed by historiography considered in its representative phase. Heidegger casts a sharp look at this dialectic on the occasion of a critical reflection on the notions of vestige, ruin, antiquities, and museum objects. Employing his categorization of beings, divided between the existentials (such as care, Angst, selfhood) and beings “objectively present” or “handy” (let us say, things given and manipulable), he observes that what we assemble under the idea of a trace would contain no mark of the past if we were not able to relate these indices to an environment that, although it has disappeared, nevertheless carries with it its having-been. If one can say of certain things that they come from the past, it is because Da-sein carries within itself the traces of its provenance, in form of debt and heritage: “Evidently, Da-sein can never be past, not because it is imperishable, but because it can essentially never be objectively present. Rather, if it is, it exists” (348). A dialogue with the historian can begin with this point: the philosopher’s contribution lies here in the critique directed against a treatment of the past in terms of a tool, an utensil. The limit of this critique results from the fracture established between the modes of being of the existing individual and of the thing, given and manipulable, a fissure that is repeated by the historiographical operation on the basis of the mnemonic act. We have, however, taken the epistemology of the historiographical operation as far as the enigma of the standing for of the past as having-been through the absence of the past as what has elapsed. Behind this enigma of standing for is silhouetted that of the iconic representation of the past in the act of memory. But Heidegger accords no place to memory nor to its prize, the act of recognition, to which Bergson granted the full attention it was due, as will be amply shown in the chapter that follows. It may, however, be suggested that the dialectic of presence and absence, formulated as early as the Greek problematic of the eikōn, ought to be confronted with the Heideggerian analysis of the vestige. Does not Heidegger too hastily reduce the absence characterizing the elapsed past to the unavailability of the manipulable? And in the same way, has he not thereby avoided all the difficulties tied to the representation of what is no longer but once was? Instead, Heidegger offers, to be sure, the strong idea of the subordination of the whole innerworldly historical to the primordial historical that we are as beings of care. He goes so far as to sketch out, around the “historicity” of Da-sein, the primary “historicity,” a secondary “historicity,” that of “world history”: “Tools and works, for example books, have their ‘fates’; buildings and institutions have their history. And even nature is historical. It is not historical when we speak about ‘natural history,’ but nature is historical as a countryside, as areas that have been inhabited or exploited as battlefields and cultic sites. These innerworldly beings as such are historical, and their history does not signify something ‘external’ that simply accompanies the ‘inner’ history of the ‘soul.’ We shall call these beings world-historical” (355).

But the disjunction of modes of being—with the existential on one hand, and things at hand on the other—prevents extending the movement of derivation to the point where the complete validity of the phenomenon of the trace could be recognized. The problematic of standing for, on the historical plane, and, preceding it, that of iconic representation on the mnemonic plane, seems to me to be capable of straddling this ontological discontinuity. The notion of vestige, broadened to that of trace, could then offer an opportunity for a discussion in which the veridical dimension of the mnemonic act and of the historiographical act could be taken into account. In the absence of this confrontation, Heidegger balances the stubborn reintroduction of the dependence of historicity in the context of fundamental temporality⁴⁶ only by evoking the features resulting from the dependence of historical being with regard to the world, in line with the notions of heritage and transmission analyzed previously, completed by that of being-together-with. It is in this way that fate and destiny are discussed, thanks to a certain assonance in the German words Geschichte, Schicksal (fate), and Geschick (destiny). Some may be concerned, in this regard, about the heroic overload that is imposed here by the concern with the concrete.⁴⁷

I prefer, however, to continue my search for points in Heidegger’s text upon which to begin a constructive debate.

I will retain two substantive terms: the succession of generations, borrowed from Dilthey, and repetition, received from Kierkegaard. Both of these are capable of playing the role of connector between the ontology of historical being and the epistemology of the historiographical operation.

The concept of generation is assuredly among those best suited to provide concrete density to the more general concept of transmission, even of heritage. But, here again, there lacks the carnal dimension that the concept of birth could have provided. On this basis one could have erected the entire symbolism of filiation and the whole juridical apparatus related to the idea of genealogy, through which the living being itself is instituted. “One must remember,” Pierre Legendre states directly, “that institutions are a phenomenon of life.”⁴⁸ To do so, one must also remember that humanity is to be defined as the speaking living being, which makes genealogy a structure irreducible to the functions of reproduction. In line with his concept of the “connectedness of life,” Dilthey would not have repudiated Legendre’s assertion that “life does not live and that it is a human task to institute the living”: “Producing the institutional tie is the work of genealogy, which allows us to hold the thread of life” (10). Sociologists, jurists, and psychoanalysts are not the only ones interested in “the study of the genealogical principle of the West”; historians are as well, to the extent that they consider, along with Bernard Lepetit, that the referent of history is the constitution of the social bond taken in all its dimensions, at the point of intersection of practices and representations. History too is a science of the speaking living being; the juridical normativity that governs the genealogical field is not only one of its objects, not even a “new” object, but instead a presupposition attached to the positing of its object and in this sense an existential presupposition: history encounters only speaking living beings in the process of institution. Genealogy is the institution that makes life human life. In this sense, it is a component of standing for, constitutive of historical intentionality.

The theme of repetition—originating, we have just recalled, in Kierkegaard—is, in its turn, of great fecundity regarding the ontological foundation of the historiographical enterprise in its entirety: “Resoluteness that comes back to itself and hands itself down, then becomes the repetition [Wiederholung] of a possibility of existence that has been handed down” (Being and Time, 352, trans. modified). Once again, the accent placed by Heidegger falls on the referral to a more profound foundation: “The authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been—the possibility that Da-sein may choose its heroes—is existentially grounded in anticipatory resoluteness; for in resoluteness the choice is first chosen that makes one free for the struggle to come, and the loyalty to what can be repeated” (352, trans. modified). One may well consider that the reflections sketched out open a wider field than the choice of one’s own heroes, a surprising remark, whose troubling “destiny” we know well through the period of the “historical” realization of the philosophy of the “flesh.” Infinitely more promising for us is the assertion that repeating is neither restoring after-the-fact nor reactualizing: it is “realizing anew.” It is a matter of recalling, replying to, retorting, even of revoking heritages. The creative power of repetition is contained entirely in this power of opening up the past again to the future.

Understood in this way, repetition can be considered an ontological recasting of the gesture of historiography, seized in its most fundamental intentionality. Greater still, repetition allows us to complete and to enrich the meditation proposed above under the heading of death in history. This led us to the act of sepulcher by which the historian, providing a place for the dead, makes a place for the living. A meditation on repetition authorizes a further step, following the idea that the dead of the past once were living and that history, in a certain manner, moves closer to their having-been-alive. The dead of today are yesterday’s living, who were acting and suffering.

How can the historian take this additional step, beyond entombment, as a person of retrospection?

The attempt at an answer can be placed under the double patronage of Michelet and Collingwood.

Jules Michelet will remain the visionary historian who, having perceived France, wanted to provide it with a history; but the history of France is that of an active and living being. “Before me,” he proclaims, “no one had embraced a view of it in the living unity of the natural and geographic events that constituted it. I was the first to see it as a soul and as a person. . . . To recover historical life, one must patiently follow it along all its paths, all its forms, all its elements. But one must also have an even greater passion, to remake, reconstruct the interplay of all of these, the reciprocal action of these living forces in a powerful movement that will become once again life itself.” Here the theme of resurrection emerges: “Even more complicated and frightening was my historical problem, as the resurrection of life in its totality, not in its surfaces but in its internal and profound organisms. No sage would have ever thought of it. Happily, I was not one” (1869 preface to The History of France).⁴⁹

A half-century later, Collingwood echoes Michelet with a more somber theme, that of the “reenactment” of the past in the present.⁵⁰ Following this concept, the historiographical operation appears as an un-distancing—an identification with what once was. But this is at the cost of extracting out of the physical event its “inner” face, which can be called thought. At the end of a reconstruction which mobilizes the historical imagination, the thought of the historian can be considered a means of rethinking what was once thought. In a sense, Collingwood announces Heidegger: “The past, in a natural process, is a past superseded and dead” (The Idea of History, 225). Now, in nature instants die and are replaced by others. However, the same event, known historically, “survives in the present” (225). Its survival lies in the very act of its reenactment in thought. This identity-based conception clearly misses the moment of otherness that the idea of “repetition” includes; more radically, it rests on the dissociation of occurrence and meaning on the plane of the event. Yet it is this mutual belonging as such that “repetition” captures.

One can do justice to the lyrical conception of “resurrection” and to the “idealist” conception of “reenactment” by placing the “recollection” of the horizon of expectation of people of the past under the banner of the idea of repetition. In this regard, the retrospective character of history cannot by itself be equated with the imprisonment of determinism. This would be the case if one held the opinion that the past is no longer subject to change and so, for that reason, appears to be determined. According to this opinion, the future alone can be held to be uncertain, open, and in this sense undetermined. If, in fact, the facts are ineffaceable, if one can no longer undo what has been done, nor make it so that what has happened did not occur, on the other hand, the sense of what has happened is not fixed once and for all. In addition to the fact that events of the past can be recounted and interpreted otherwise, the moral weight tied to the relation of debt with respect to the past can be increased or lightened. We shall say more about this in the epilogue, which is devoted to forgiveness. But we can even now make quite good progress in this direction by virtue of broadening and deepening the notion of debt beyond that of guilt, as Heidegger proposes: to the idea of debt belongs the character of “charge,” of “weight,” of burden. In it we find the themes of heritage and of transmission, stripped of the idea of moral lapse. To be sure, the idea of debt is not a simple corollary to the idea of trace: the trace has to be followed back; it is a pure referral of the past to the past; it signifies, it does not obligate. Inasmuch as it obligates, the debt does not exhaust itself in the idea of burden either: it relates the being affected by the past to the potentiality-of-being turned toward the future. In Koselleck’s vocabulary, it relates the space of experience to the horizon of expectation.

It is on this basis that one can speak of a rebound-effect of the future onto the past even within the retrospective viewpoint of history. The historian has the opportunity to carry herself in imagination back to a given moment of the past as having been present, and so as having been lived by people of the past as the present of their past and as the present of their future, to borrow Augustine’s formulations once more. People of the past once were, like us, subjects of initiative, of retrospection, and of prospection. The epistemological consequences of this consideration are substantial. Knowing that people of the past formulated expectations, predictions, desires, fears, and projects is to fracture historical determinism by retrospectively reintroducing contingency into history.

We link up here with one of Raymond Aron’s persistent themes in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, namely, his struggle against “the retrospective illusion of fatality” (183). He introduces this theme in connection with the historian’s recourse to unreal constructions, thereby joining with the Weberian concept of “singular causal imputation.” But he broadens this same theme through a reflection on the tie between contingency and necessity in historical causation: “We understand here by contingency both the possibility of conceiving the other event and the impossibility of deducing the event from the totality of the previous situation” (222). This general consideration on historical causation tends to relate the reaction against the retrospective illusion of fatality to a global conception of history defined by “the effort to resurrect, or more exactly the effort to put oneself back at the moment of the action in order to become the actor’s contemporary” (232).

The history of historians is therefore not condemned to the inauthentic historicity that Heidegger declares is “blind toward possibilities” (Being and Time, 357), as a historiography confined by a museographical attitude would be. Historiography also understands the past as the “return” of buried possibilities.

The idea of “repetition,” understood according to Heidegger’s expression as the “power” of the possible (360), would then be the best suited to expressing the ultimate convergence between the discourse on historicity and the discourse of history. It is with this idea that I would like to conclude the present section, according it the additional scope conferred upon it by what Heidegger calls crossing through the “history of transmission,” namely, the thickness of the interpretive processes interpolated between the present representation and the having-been of the “repeated” past.⁵¹ The theme of repetition is the point of intersection of the second and third parts of the present work.

WITHIN-TIMENESS: BEING-“IN”-TIME

Along the Path of the Inauthentic

The term “within-timeness” (Innerzeitigkeit) designates the third modality of temporalization in Being and Time (division 2, chapter 6). In truth, this is the level assigned to the history of the historians as it is factually carried out. It is indeed “in” time that events occur. “Being-in” was recognized in all its ontological legitimacy in the first part of the work. “Being-in-time” (within-timeness) is the temporal manner of being-in-the-world. In this guise, care, that fundamental structure of the being that we are, gives itself as concern. Being-in then signifies being-alongside—alongside things in the world. The way of “reckoning with time,” which sums up all our relations to time at this level, fundamentally expresses the temporal manner of being-in-the-world. And it is by an effect of leveling-off that within-timeness is pulled to the side of the vulgar concept of time as a series of separate instants offered to numerical calculation. It is therefore important to remain attentive to the positive features of this relation to time, which is still part of the ontology of historical being. In this regard, ordinary language is a good guide; it expresses our various ways of reckoning with time: having time, taking one’s time, giving one’s time, etc.⁵² The task of hermeneutics is here, according to Heidegger, to elicit the tacit existential implications of these expressions. They can be grouped together around the concern that places us in a state of dependency with regard to the things “alongside” which we live in the living present. Concern thus brings the reference to the present to the center of the analysis in the same way as being-toward-death imposes the reference to the future and historicity the reference to the past. On this point, the analyses of Augustine and Husserl, organizing time around the instance of the present, find their relevance. Concern ratifies this priority. The discourse of concern is above all a discourse centered on the living present. At the heart of the language apparatus presides the “now that . . .” on the basis of which all events are dated. One would still have to extract datability from the assignment of dates in a chronology that specifies the operation of “reckoning with time” by a “calculation” of measured intervals. Datability, in its turn, as the capacity of time to be numbered, evokes the stretching of time, the concrete figure of what above was termed extension. Finally, a feature is added marking the role of being-in-common in the reckoning with time: it is publicness, the public character of datability and of stretching. The calculation of astronomical time and of calendar time is grafted onto these scansions of the time of concern. Before quantification, there are the rhythmic measurements of day and night, of rest and sleep, of work and festivity. One can speak in this regard of a “time we take care of” (Being and Time, 380). Final touch of the existential analysis: one time can be said to be opportune, another inopportune; a time to do or not to do something.⁵³ “Significance” is held to be the most appropriate recapitulative expression from the chain of determinations of within-timeness. It, nonetheless, continues to gravitate around the now: “saying-now” (380) sums up, tacitly, the discourse of concern.

The power of this analysis lies in its not having allowed itself to be confined to traditional oppositions, such as subjective and objective. World time, it is said, is “more ‘objective’ than any possible object” and “more ‘subjective’ than any possible subject” (384).

Within-Timeness and the Dialectic of Memory and History ⁵⁴

Only once is history mentioned in the chapter in Being and Time on within-timeness, in the lines of introduction. What matters to Heidegger is the vulnerability of this temporal mode to the effects of leveling off occasioned by the vulgar concept of time. Consequently, the entire effort is focused on preserving the ties of this temporal mode to historicity and, beyond it, to the fundamental temporality of being-toward-death. I propose, nonetheless, to continue to pursue at this level the dialogue between the philosopher and the historian. Actually, in a sense what authorizes Heidegger to speak from the outset of “the incompleteness of the foregoing temporal analysis of Da-sein” is the concern with explicitly restoring its credentials to “the factical, ‘ontic-temporal’ interpretation of history” (371). Here, the adjective “factical” aims explicitly at the actual practice of history, to the extent that it, like the natural sciences, invokes the “time factor.” It is indeed the profession of historian that is at issue here. A new reflection on this profession deserved to be undertaken under the guidance of the existential analysis in which the act of “reckoning with time” is not yet caught up in “calculation.”

The basic reference to concern can serve as a beginning for this final conversation with the historian. Following the general orientation of historiography that we have preferred, the final referent of the discourse of history is social action in its capacity to produce the social bond and social identities. In this way, we bring to the fore agents capable of initiative and orientation, in situations of uncertainty, responding to constraints, norms, and institutions. The attention paid to phenomena of scale has reinforced this primacy accorded to acting in common on the twofold plane of behaviors and representations. We are therefore permitted to add to the preceding enumeration concerning, successively, death in history and historicity in history the reference to humans concerned with their acting in common. The vis-à-vis of the historian is not only the dead for whom she constructs a scriptural tomb; the historian does not only strive to resuscitate the living of the past who are no longer but who once were, but also attempts to re-present actions and passions. For my part, I explicitly relate the plea on behalf of the idea that the final referent of the historian’s representation are those formerly living, behind today’s absent of history, to the change of paradigm that, at the “critical turning point” of the Annales in the 1980s, promoted what could be called the “paradox of the actor.”⁵⁵ What history is concerned with is not only the living of the past, behind today’s dead, but the actor of history gone by, once one undertakes to “take the actors themselves seriously.” In this regard, the notions of competence and adjustment well express the historiographical equivalent of Heideggerian concern.

This general consideration will serve as an exordium for a penultimate rereading of the overall movement of the present work, not only at the point where the ideas of standing for and repetition intersected at the end of the preceding section, but, more broadly, at the point of suture between a phenomenology of memory and an epistemology of history. As has been stated, Heidegger has not a word to say about memory, although he gives several penetrating features concerning forgetting, to which we will do justice in the following chapter.⁵⁶ Now the most stubborn perplexities concerning the “factical” treatment of time by the historian have to do with the articulation of historical knowledge onto the work of memory in the present of history.⁵⁷ I would like to show that, in the attitude, in principle retrospective, common to memory and history, the priority between these two intentions of the past is undecidable. The ontology of historical being that embraces the temporal condition in its three-pronged nature—past, present, future—is empowered to legitimate this undecidable character under the condition of abstracting from the present and the future. I propose to proceed to a repetition of this situation of undecidability in view of validating it as legitimate and justified within the limits where it is recognized.

I will consider together two intersecting and competing developments. On the one hand, there is a claim to dissolve the field of memory into that of history in the name of the development of a history of memory, considered one of its privileged objects; on the other, there is a resistance of memory to such a dissolution in the name of its capacity to historicize itself under a variety of cultural figures. A passage to the limit, the opposite of the preceding one, is traced out in the form of the revolt of collective memory against what appears as an attempt to seize its cult of memory.

MEMORY, JUST A PROVINCE OF HISTORY?

This diminutio capitis is encouraged by the belated development of a history of memory. Nothing indeed prevented casting memory among the “new” objects of history, alongside the body, cooking, death, sex, festivals, and, why not more recently, mentalités. The work by Le Goff titled History and Memory is exemplary in this regard.⁵⁸ The history of memory, it is stated, is part of a “history of history” (xix), hence an enterprise with a reflexive turn. The history of memory is the first chapter of this double history, and, as such, memory is still recognized as the “raw material of history,” “the living source from which historians can draw” (xi). The historical discipline “nourishes memory in turn, and enters into the great dialectical process of memory and forgetting experienced by individuals and societies” (xi). But the tone continues to be marked by mistrust with regard to an excessive praise of memory: “To privilege memory excessively is to sink into the unconquerable flow of time” (xii). The status of memory in the history of history is inseparable from a reflection on the pair past/present which belongs to a separate issue, inasmuch as the opposition determined by this pair is not neutral but underlies or expresses a system of values, like the pairs ancient/modern and progress/reaction. What is peculiar to a history of memory is the history of the modes of its transmission. The historian’s enterprise here is similar to that of Leroy-Gourhan in Le Geste et la parole.⁵⁹ Thus one passes successively in the periodic divisions of the history of memory from societies without writing where memory takes wing, passing from oral to written cultures, from Prehistory to Antiquity, then to the balance between oral and written in the Medieval period, then to the progress of written memory from the sixteenth century to our own day, concluding with “the contemporary upheavals affecting memory.”⁶⁰

In the wake of the history of memory, the temptation to strip memory of its function as matrix with regard to history begins to take shape. This is the sort of risk that Krzysztof Pomian takes, without succumbing to it, in his essay titled “De l’histoire, partie de la mémoire, à la mémoire, objet d’histoire.”⁶¹ The title appears to announce a voyage of no return. In fact, what is taken into account here is a specific culture of memory, one stemming from the past of Christian, and more precisely Catholic, Europe. The history of this figure is traced from its apogee to its decline following a well-known narrative mode. It is not, however, the univocal interpretation announced by the title that prevails at the end of the course, but the acceptance of a more dialectical relation between history and collective memory, without recognizing for all this the features of memory and forgetting that remain least sensitive to the variations resulting from a history of the cultural investments of memory.

At the beginning of the article, memory is quickly characterized as event-like in nature. Nothing emerges here of the subtleties of the relation between the absence of the past and its representation in the present, nor of the difficulties tied to the truth claims of memory in its declarative stage. Memory appears to be caught from the outset in the nets of a transcendent authority, where the problems of credibility are held to be already resolved. At this initial stage collective memory “remains imbricated in the totality of representations that concern the beyond” (“De l’histoire,” 73). The idea of an “identification of the ancient past with the beyond” (73) thus plays the role of archetype for the stage that is superseded today. In it, the religious sphere holds captive the resources that would serve to problematize testimony. The representations that transport the imaginary toward a beyond, continually presented in the liturgy, have already filled in the gaps of the fiduciary relationship upon which the testimony is established. This is why the history of the relation of history to memory will never be more than the autonomization of history with regard to memory, a “fissure . . . between the past and the beyond and, similarly, between collective memory and religious belief” (75). This autonomization reaps the benefits of the major episodes of communication related to the emergence of writing and, even more dramatically, to the birth of printing, then of the commercial diffusion of printed works. The significant moments of this emancipation of history in the course of the twentieth century are well known: the Annales phase, the growing role of a chronology that owes nothing to remembering, the introduction of new rhetorical requirements into discourse, the establishment of a continuous narration, an appeal to the invisibility of motivations capable of being rationalized, in opposition to any recourse to providence, destiny, fortune, or chance. Arguments on behalf of the credibility of written documents henceforth break with the fiduciary status of memory authorized from above. In this way, the apparently diriment opposition between the singularity of events or works, put forward by hermeneutics, and the repetition of items, in accordance with serial history, can be neutralized. In both cases, history deals with “what was not an object of apprehension on the part of contemporaries” (102). Recourse is made on both sides to “extramemorial paths.” Their objects alone differ: on the one side, literary and artistic works, on the other, enumerable entities, as we see in economics, in demography, or in sociology. In all of these ways, the notion of source is freed entirely from that of testimony, in the intentional sense of the term. To this variety of documents is added the notion of vestige borrowed from geological stratigraphy; the broadening of the familiar notions of source, document, trace is thus shown to be temporal, spatial, and thematic—the latter determination taking into account the differentiation between political, economic, social, and cultural history. In this way a past is constructed that no one is able to remember. It is for a history such as this, bound up with a “viewpoint free of all egocentrism,” that history has ceased to be “part of memory” and that memory has become “part of history.”

Once it has been identified with one of the cultural historically dated figures, Pomian’s plea for a history liberated from the yoke of memory is not lacking in power, if we accept the unilateral approach of the author: “The relations between memory and history will be approached here from a historical perspective” (60). In the same stroke, the potential resources of memory that would allow one to employ this term in a less culturally determined sense are ignored. This omission seems to me to result from the initial postulation of a kinship in principle between memory and perception, a kinship hinging, it seems, on the phenomenon of eyewitness testimony. The witness is presumed to have seen something. But the problematic of the presence of the absent in the representation of the past, as well as the primarily fiduciary character of even eyewitness testimony (I was there, so believe me or don’t believe me) are thus lost from sight from the start. In the matter of the collective character of memory, what is also lost from sight is the fundamental consciousness of belonging to a group capable of designating itself in the first person plural and of fashioning its identity at the price of the illusions and violence we are familiar with. Above all, what permeates the essay is a visceral distrust with regard to the Medieval memory, for which Le Goff has manifested so much sympathy.

The essay, however, does not follow this tendency without correcting its unilateral character by a series of small adjustments. Numerous observations plead in favor of the idea, not of substituting history for memory, but of continuously reworking the relation between history and collective memory. For example, “the redistribution of the memory of the elites” is credited to humanism (83). In the same way, the “collective memory of the literate” is mentioned (85). Printing is said to have given rise to numerous “renewals of collective memory” (88) tied to the elevation of the near and distant past to the level of an object of study. The crisis opened by the Reformation is also said to have produced within the heart of Christianity a “war of memories” (92). Even the “divorce between history and memory” (93) under the double form of a “rupture of literary and artistic memory and of a rupture of juridical and political memory” amounts to the construction of a “new memory” (94). Finally, the cognitive emancipation with respect to memory (93–97) is said to lead to the temporal, spatial, and thematic broadening of “the collective memories of Europeans” (103). What is actually produced in the course outlined by Pomian’s essay, besides overturning the relations between history and memory as summed up in the title, is a system of gaps in which the differences between history and memory are “maximum where it is a matter of a very distant past, the past of nature, and reduced to the minimum where the past is close to history in every respect” (107). This play of differences confirms that the fact of becoming an object of history is still something that happens to memory, whose representative constitution, in my opinion, makes these gaps possible in principle. In this regard, the tone of the final pages of the essay becomes more didactic: “Between history and memory, there is no impermeable partition” (109). A “new memory” is mentioned “which is superimposed on an even more ancient oral memory” (108). I interpret this softening of the vigorous thesis that propels the essay in the following way: it is the concern with preserving the formative role of history with regard to the civic sense, and more precisely with regard to the national sense, hence to the identity projected by the collective consciousness, that has reined in the polemical impulse arising from the major opposition between scholarly history and a memory framed by religion in Christian Europe.

MEMORY, IN CHARGE OF HISTORY?

Let us now listen to the plea from the other side. It is also permissible to conceive of a history that would make use of the imaginative variations coming from a cultural history of memory and forgetting as revelatory of the mnemonic potentialities that everydayness conceals. One could speak in this regard of the “historicizing of memory,” the benefit of which would accrue to memory.

I have chosen as an example of this type of historicizing of memory the study proposed by Richard Terdiman, a literary critic, of what he names the “memory crisis” and which he sees arising out of literature over the course of “the long nineteenth century.”⁶² A correlation is proposed between the epochal consciousness that Baudelaire characterized by the term “modernity” and this “memory crisis.” This correlation pairs a concept belonging to the periodization of history (“the long nineteenth century”) and specific figures of the mnemonic operation (figures of crisis). It is in this pairing that the historicizing of memory consists. Far from ratifying the thesis criticized above of the subordination of memory to history as its object, this phenomenon reinforces the opposite thesis, according to which memory is found to be revealed to itself in its depth by the movement of history. Moreover, far from holding the crisis of memory to be the mere dissolution of the relation between the past and the present, the works that afford it written expression assign to it at the same time a remarkable intelligibility tied to the very delimitation of these cultural configurations. This is held to be modernity’s gift to phenomenology—hermeneutics casting between the historical phenomenon and the mnemonic phenomenon the bridge of a semiotics of the representations of the past. The enigma of the representation of the past in the present would therefore be deepened and elucidated along with its cultural determination.

In choosing to comment on Musset’s Confession d’un enfant du siècle and on the poem “The Swan” taken from the section “Parisian Tableaux” in Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, Terdiman has taken as his object a textual space appropriate to the correlation between historical crisis and mnemonic crisis. The passage from one crisis to the other is made possible by the fact that, on the one hand, what we term the revolutions of the nineteenth century are at one and the same time events that actually took place and accounts concerning these events, in short transmitted narratives, and that, on the other hand, literature constitutes a verbal, rhetorical, and poetic laboratory with unbelievable power of elucidation, discrimination, even theorization. The historical recounted and the mnemonic experienced intersect in language.

So these are particular cultural configurations of the mnemonic phenomenon that the history of modern times brings to light. And these are the figures of crisis. The paradox is that these figures that seem to favor the dissolution of the tie by virtue of which the past persists in the present are intelligible figures by reason of the opportunities of conceptualization opened by the poetics of crisis. The multiple variations of this discourse of crisis can be referred back to the everywhere prevalent theme of loss. In this regard, the discourse of modernity forms a contrast, in a summarily binary typology, with the discourse of total reminiscence that we read in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and to which Goethean calm provided a vibrant echo. In contrast, we find expressed here: the despair of what disappears, the powerlessness to collect memories and to fix memory in the archives, the excess of the presence of a past that continues to haunt the present and, paradoxically, the lack of presence of a past forever irrevocable, the headlong flight of the past and the frozenness of the present, the incapacity to forget and the powerlessness to remember at a distance from the event. In short, the superimposition of the ineffaceable on the irrevocable. Even more subtle is the break in the dialogicality proper to a shared memory, in the poignant experience of solitude. In the face of these literary texts of extreme subtlety, one must learn the docility of reading and the ruses of a sinuous dialectic.

For example, it is not a matter of indifference that it is through a detheologized transgression of the literary theme of confession, received from Augustine and Rousseau, and through the avowed reversal of its therapeutic project, that a “child of the century” was able to admit the well-named “mal du siècle” and in this way construe the epochal in the singular form, which confers a new performative efficacity on confession.⁶³

As regards the poem “Le Cyne” (“The Swan”), the homonymy of a single word—le cyne and le signe (sign)—from the very title, invites the reader to seek out the ruses hidden in the games of representation intended to signify loss. For it is indeed loss that reigns at the heart of what Terdiman calls the “mnemonics of dispossession.” The reader will not fail to compare this interpretation of Baudelaire’s “Le Cyne,” in which the accent is deliberately placed on the phenomenon of the historicization of memory, to that of Jean Starobinski mentioned earlier (in part 1, chap. 2, nn. 29, 31). By means of this comparison, I propose relating Terdiman’s “mnemonics of dispossession” to what, according to Starobinski, could be called the mnemonics of melancholy. It is indeed along the fragile line separating mourning from melancholy that the poem targets the memory crisis.

What the literature of the memory crisis produced by the horror of history finally lays bare is the problematical nature of the past’s manner of persevering in the present; this feature, we have repeatedly stated, results from the fact that the reference to absence is constitutive of the mode of presence of memories. In this sense, loss can reveal itself to be inherent in the work of remembering. However, this reference to absence would not be a source of puzzlement if absence were always compensated by the sort of presence proper to anamnesis, when the latter culminates in the living experience of recognition, the emblem of happy memory. What in the memory crisis makes this a crisis is the obliteration of the intuitive side of representation and the threat that is joined to it of losing what can be called the attestation of what-has-occurred, without which memory would be indistinguishable from fiction. The nostalgic dimension of the mal du siècle, of spleen, nevertheless stems from the resistance of this irreducible attestation in the face of its own destruction. Musset and Baudelaire, one after the other, admit to this irreducibility: “To write the story of one’s life, one must first have lived; therefore, it is not mine which I write,” Musset declares. “I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old,” confesses the poet of the “irreparable.”

What is it, in the final analysis, that allows us to attribute this process of historicizing memory to memory rather than to history? It is the need to complete the eidetics of memory with an examination of the imaginative variations privileged by the course of history. This eidetics finally reaches only a capacity, a power to do, the power to remember, as is authorized in the approach to memory in its exercise (part 1, chapter 2). In this regard, the mnemonic potentialities are of the same order as those examined in Oneself as Another under the headings of “I can”—act, speak, narrate, and hold myself capable of moral imputation. All of these potentialities designate the aptitudes of what I call capable being. Like the other capacities, it belongs to that mode of certainty that deserves the name of attestation, which is at once irrefutable in terms of cognitive proof and subjected to suspicion by virtue of its character of belief. The phenomenology of testimony led the analysis of attestation to the threshold of doing history. Having said this, these potentialities, whose invariant core eidetics claims to reach, remain undetermined with respect to their historical realization. Phenomenology must elevate itself here to the level of a hermeneutics that takes into account the limited cultural figures that constitute as it were the historical text of memory. This mediation by history is made possible in its principle by the declarative character of memory. In addition, it is rendered more urgent by the problematical character of the central mnemonic phenomenon, namely, the enigma of a present representation of the absent past. It becomes legitimate to suppose that it is always in historically limited cultural forms that the capacity to remember (faire mémoire) can be apprehended. On the other hand, inasmuch as these cultural determinations are in each case limited, they are conceptually identifiable. The “memory crisis”—as the “mnemonics of dispossession” according to Terdiman—constitutes one of these crystalizations taken into account jointly by literary history and by phenomenology conceived as hermeneutics. The process of historicizing memory, invoked on behalf of a hermeneutical phenomenology of memory, thus proves to be strictly symmetrical to the process by which history exerts its corrective function of truth with respect to a memory that continues to exert its matrical function with regard to history.

The unending debate between the rival claims of history and memory to cover the totality of the field opened up behind the present by the representation of the past does not, therefore, end in a paralyzing aporia. To be sure, in the conditions of retrospection common to memory and to history the conflict remains undecidable. But we know why this is so, once the relation of the past to the present of the historian is set against the backdrop of the great dialectic that mixes resolute anticipation, the repetition of the past, and present concern. Framed in this way, the history of memory and the historicization of memory can confront one another in an open dialectic that preserves them from that passage to the limit, from that hubris, that would result from, on the one hand, history’s claim to reduce memory to the level of one of its objects, and on the other hand, the claim of collective memory to subjugate history by means of the abuses of memory that the commemorations imposed by political powers or by pressure groups can turn into.

This open dialectic offers a reasonable response to the ironic question posed as early as the prelude to part 2, whether the pharmakon of the invention of history, after the model of the invention of writing, is poison or remedy. The initial question, falsely naïve, is now “repeated” in the mode of phronesis, of prudent consciousness.

It is toward the instruction of this prudent consciousness that the testimonies of three historians who have inscribed this dialectic at the heart of the profession of historian will contribute.

THE UNCANNINESS OF HISTORY

Unheimlichkeit is the name Freud gives to the painful feeling experienced in dreams revolving around the theme of pierced eyes, decapitation, and castration. It is the term that is fortuitously translated by the “uncanny” in English and by “inquiétante étrangeté” in French.

I am adopting it at the moment of elevating testimony one last time to the rank of existential weight characterizing the theoretical stakes at issue under the themes articulated in the chapter headings above, successively, of “death in history,” “historicity and historiography,” and “the dialectic of memory and history.”

Maurice Halbwachs: Memory Fractured by History

Readers of The Collective Memory have perhaps not always taken full measure of the rupture that breaks off the development of the work with the unexpected introduction of the distinction between collective memory and historical memory.⁶⁴ Did not the principal dividing line for which the author fought above pass between individual memory and collective memory, those “two types of memory”—“remembrances . . . organized in two ways” (50)? And yet the difference is strongly marked: between individual memory and collective memory the connection is intimate, immanent, the two types of memory interpenetrate one another. This is the major thesis of the work. The same thing is not true of history inasmuch as it is not assigned to what is going to become “historical” memory. The author places himself back in the situation of schoolboy learning history. This educational situation is typical. History is first learned by memorizing dates, facts, names, striking events, important persons, holidays to celebrate. It is essentially a narrative taught within the framework of a nation. At this stage of discovery, itself remembered after the fact, history is perceived, mainly by the student, as “external” and dead. The negative mark placed on the facts mentioned consists in the student’s not being able to witness them. It is the province of hearsay and of didactic reading. The feeling of externality is reinforced by the calendrical framework of the events taught: at this age one learns to read the calendar as one learns to read the clock.⁶⁵ Insisting on this concept of externality assuredly has a polemical aspect, but it touches on a difficulty that is familiar to us since Plato’s Phaedrus. The rest of this chapter is devoted to the progressive disappearance of the gap between the history taught in school and the experience of memory, a gap that is itself reconstructed after the fact. “Thus we can link the various phases of our life to national events only after the fact” (54). But, in the beginning, a certain violence coming from outside presses in on memory.⁶⁶ The discovery of what is called historical memory consists in a genuine acculturation to externality.⁶⁷ This acculturation is that of a gradual familiarization with the unfamiliar, with the uncanniness of the historical past.

This familiarization consists of an initiation process, moving through the concentric circles formed by the family nucleus, school chums, friendships, familial social relationships, and, above all, the discovery of the historical past by means of the memory of ancestors. The transgenerational tie constitutes, in this regard, the backbone of the chapter “Collective Memory and Historical Memory”: through the ancestral memory flows “the confused din that is like the backwash of history” (62, trans. modified). As the family elders become uninterested in contemporary events, they interest the succeeding generations in the framework of their own childhood.

I would like to focus once more on this phenomenon of transgenerational memory which secretly structures Maurice Halbwachs’s chapter.⁶⁸ It is this phenomenon that assures the transition from learned history to living memory. In Time and Narrative I referred to this phenomenon under the title of “The Succession of Generations,” and I listed it among the procedures for inserting lived time within the vastness of cosmic time.⁶⁹ To tell the truth, this is not yet on the order of a historiographical procedure like calendar time and archives. It is instead an intense experience that contributes to widening the circle of close relations by opening it in the direction of a past, which, even while belonging to those of our elders who are still living, places us in communication with the experiences of a generation other than our own. The notion of generation that is key here offers the twofold sense of the contemporaneousness of the “same” generation to which belong beings of different ages, and the succession of generations, in the sense of the replacement of one generation by another. As children we learn how to situate ourselves in this twofold relation, which is well summed up in Alfred Schutz’s expression of the threefold reign of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.⁷⁰ This expression signals the transition between an interpersonal bond in the form of “us” and an anonymous relation. The bond of filiation which serves both as a breach and a suture testifies to this. It is at once a carnal tie anchored in biology, the result of sexual reproduction and the constant replacement of the dead by the living, and a social bond highly codified by the system of kinship proper to the society to which we belong. Between the biological and the social is interposed the affective and juridical sentiment of adoption which raises the raw fact of engendering to the symbolic level of filiation, in the strongest sense of the word.⁷¹ It is this multifaceted carnal tie that tends to be erased in the notion of the succession of generations. Maurice Halbwachs, in his quasi-autobiographical text written in the first person, underscores the role of narratives received from the mouth of family elders in widening the temporal horizon, central to the notion of historical memory. Supported by the narrative of ancestors, the bond of filiation comes to be grafted on the immense genealogical tree whose roots are lost in the soil of history. And, when the narrative of ancestors falls silent in its turn, the anonymity of the generational bond wins out over what is still the carnal dimension of the bond of filiation. Nothing then remains except the abstract notion of the succession of generations: anonymity has caused living memory to spill over into history.

One cannot say, however, that the testimony of Maurice Halbwachs ends in a disavowal of collective memory. The very term sanctions the relative success of integrating history into an enlarged individual and collective memory. On the one hand, the history taught in school, made up of memorized dates and facts, is animated by currents of thought and experience, becoming what the same sociologist had earlier considered to be the “social frameworks of memory.” On the other, personal as well as collective memory is enriched by the historical past that progressively becomes our own. Taking over from listening to the words of the “old people,” reading gives a dimension to the notion of the traces of the past that is at once public and private. The discovery of monuments of the past provides the opportunity for discovering “those islands of the past” (66), while cities visited retain their “original appearance” (66). In this way, little by little, the historical memory is integrated into living memory. The enigmatic character that obscured the narratives of the distant past fades just as the lacunae of our own memories are filled and their darkness dissipates. On the horizon stands out the wish for an integral memory that holds together individual memory, collective memory, and historical memory, a wish that extracts from Halbwachs this exclamation worthy of Bergson (and Freud): “We forget nothing” (75).

Has history finally melted into memory? And has memory broadened itself to the scale of historical memory? Maurice Halbwachs’s ultimate reservations are significant in this respect. At first sight, they testify to a malaise on the borders of this historical discipline and to a debate over the objectives of the partitioning of disciplines. This is true, but, more deeply, the crisis reaches the very point where historical memory runs alongside collective memory. In the first place, the primary reference of historical memory continues to be the nation; yet, between the individual and the nation there are many other groups, in particular, professional groups. Next, a secret discordance, which will be amplified by our other two witnesses, persists between collective memory and historical memory, which makes Halbwachs say: “In general history starts only when tradition ends” (78, trans. modified). The role of writing, which has become for us the axis around which the historiographical operation revolves, is considered by the author to be the principle of distancing characterizing “a coherent narrative” in which history is written down. The distancing in time is thus consecrated by the distancing of writing. In this regard, I would like to underscore the recurrent recourse in Halbwachs’s text to the adverb “autrefois” (formerly, in the past), which I prefer to oppose to “auparavant” (before, previously) applied to memory.⁷² In the final pages of the chapter, the opposition between the procedures of scholarly history and the exercise of collective memory turns into an indictment, a challenge addressed to colleagues as close as Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.

Two distinctive features of history are held to be irreducible. To the continuity of living memory is first opposed the discontinuity introduced by the work of periodization proper to historical knowledge—a discontinuity that underscores the past as over and done with, no longer in existence: “History, however, gives the impression that everything . . . is transformed from one period to another” (80). In this way, history concerns itself especially with differences and oppositions. It then belongs to the collective memory, mainly at the time of great upheavals, to support new social institutions “with everything transferrable from tradition” (82). It is quite precisely this wish, this expectation, that the crisis of historical consciousness evoked by our other two authors will question once more. Second distinctive feature: there are several collective memories. However, “history is unitary, and it can be said that there is only one history” (83). To be sure, the nation remains the major reference of historical memory, as we have said, and historical research continues to distinguish between the history of France, the history of Germany, the history of Italy. But what is sighted by means of “successive summations” is a total tableau, in which “no fact will be subordinated to any other fact, since every fact is as interesting as any other and merits as much to be brought forth and recorded” (83). This tableau, in which “all . . . is on the same level” (84), suggests the view of impartiality, theorized by Thomas Nagel. The manifestation of this on the part of the historian is “the natural orientation of the historical mind” in the direction of universal history, which can be presented as “the universal memory of the human species” (84). Is not Polumnia the muse of history? But there can be no question of reliving a past such as this which has become external to the groups themselves.

In this way, Maurice Halbwachs’s text traces a curve: from history taught in school, external to the child’s memory, we move to a historical memory that, ideally, melts into the collective memory which, by the exchange, is augmented, and we end in fine with a universal history concerned with differences between periods and encompassing differences of mentalité under a gaze directed from nowhere. Does history, reconsidered in this way, still merit the name of “historical memory”?⁷³ Are not memory and history condemned to a forced cohabitation?

Yerushalmi: “Historiography and Its Discontents”

If Herodotus was the father of history, the fathers of meaning in history were the Jews.

§ Yerushalmi, Zakhor

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s book has the virtue, displayed by many works written by Jewish thinkers, of providing access to a universal problem through the exception constituted by the singularity of Jewish existence.⁷⁴ This is the case with the tension that spans the century between Jewish memory and the writing of history, historiography. This book thus arrives at the right time in my own discourse on history, just when the accent is placed on the distancing constitutive of the historical perspective in relation to memory, even—or especially, it would have to be said—in the form of collective memory. In this sense, this book accompanies the step outside of memory discussed by Maurice Halbwachs, whom Yerushalmi, moreover, invokes with gratitude. Also significant is the use of the term “historiography” to designate historical knowledge, a term which is too often employed in French to designate, according to the French translator of Yerushalmi’s book, a reflective discipline, namely, “the analysis of the methods and interpretations of historians of the past” (Zakhor, 5, in the French translation).⁷⁵ The singularity of the Jewish experience lies in the secular indifference to the historiographical treatment of a culture itself eminently charged with history. It is this singularity that seems to me to be revealing with respect to the resistance that any and all memory can oppose to this treatment. In this sense, it exposes the crisis that, in a general manner, history as historiography produces at the very heart of memory. Whether personal or collective, memory refers back by definition to the past that continues to be living by virtue of the transmission from generation to generation; this is the source of a resistance of memory to its historiographical treatment. The threat of being uprooted lies herein; did not Halbwachs say: “History starts only when tradition ends”? There are several ways in which tradition ends depending on the manner in which the distantiation of the historian affects memory, whether it consolidates it, corrects it, displaces it, contests it, interrupts it, destroys it. The chart of the effects of distantiation is complex. And it is here that cultural specificities are asserted and that the singularity of the Jews appears the most instructive for everyone.⁷⁶ The critical point consists in the fact that the declarative memory, the memory that utters itself, in making itself a narrative, charges itself with interpretations immanent to the narrative. One can speak in this regard of a sense of history, which can be conveyed by literary genres unrelated to the concern to explain historical events. So it is at the very heart of verbal, discursive, literary experience that the distantiation of the historian operates. Here too the case of Jewish memory is at once singular and exemplary. It must not, in fact, be thought that, foreign to historiography, memory is reduced to oral tradition. Nothing could be further from the case with respect to “so literate and obstinately bookish a people” (Zakhor, xv); the example of Jewish culture, broadly speaking up to the Enlightenment, is that of a memory charged with meaning but not with historiographical meaning. The call to remember—the famous Zakhor—hammered home time after time in the Bible (Deut. 6:10–12; 8:11–18) is well known to us, as was said above; but the injunction directed to the transmission of narratives and laws is addressed here, through close relations, to the entire people summoned under the collective name of Israel. The barrier between the close and the distant is abolished; all those summoned are close relations. “Remember, Israel,” says the Shema. The result of this injunction is that “even when not commanded, remembrance is always pivotal” (5). The fact is that this injunction by no means designates the obligation to provide “an actual recording of historical events” (5)—this is what has first to be acknowledged and understood. What is surprising is that, unlike the dominant conceptions of history among the Greeks, “it was ancient Israel that first assigned a decisive significance to history” (8).⁷⁷ The expression “God of the fathers” is the first to testify to the “historical” character of biblical revelation.⁷⁸ If we focus a moment on this admission, we can ask whether the belated recognition of the historical character of biblical faith is not already a reconstruction stemming from historiography seeking its antecedents, better yet, a soil in which it is rooted, which is not only earlier but also foreign. It is through an effect of strangeness such as this that we employ the word history, even more so when we speak of the sense of history in the absence of historiography.⁷⁹ To be sure, a close exegesis of the biblical vocabulary of memory, placed within the language of the covenant, an exegesis completed by a careful work of correlation between rites of the great festivals and the narratives,⁸⁰ lends to this reconstruction of the Hebraic meaning of history a preciseness and a faithfulness, making it comparable to reenactment, so dear to Collingwood. The place of the narrative alongside the laws—and even before them, its place in the canonical composition of the Torah—attests to this concern for the meaning of history. But, when the difference between, on the one hand, poetry and legend and, on the other, scholarly history is unrecognized, it also happens that the meaning of history ignores historiography. It is we who, equipped with the historio-critical method, ask ourselves whether this or that narrative constitutes “a genuine account of historical events.” It is therefore under the guidance of a retrospective gaze that we can say with Yerushalmi: “We have learned, in effect, that meaning in history, memory of the past, and the writing of history are by no means to be equated . . . [and that] neither meaning nor memory ultimately depends on [historiography]” (14–15). The sealing of the canon, ratified by the public reading in the synagogue of the narratives of the Pentateuch and the passages taken each week from the prophets, have given to the biblical corpus, completed by the Talmud and the Midrash, the authority of Holy Scripture.⁸¹ On the basis of this authority, for which the rabbis have been the guardians and the guarantors, was to result the indifference, even the resistance, of the Jewish communities of the Middle Ages (and beyond) to a historiographical treatment of their own history and of their own sufferings. To this must be added the subsequent speculations of the Sages, who will frankly distance themselves from any attention to a sense of history still immanent in the narratives and rites of the biblical epoch.

It is not our purpose to reconstruct, following Yerushalmi, the stages of this confrontation between memory, the meaning of history, and historiography. However, the author’s concluding reflections are of great importance to us, once Jewish singularity is revealed to be exemplary with regard to what the author himself calls “historiography and its discontents” (77), discontents to which the final four lectures that make up the book Zakhor are devoted. The discontent proper to the “professional Jewish historian” (81), which Yerushalmi declares himself to be, is exemplary in that the very project of a Wissenschaft des Judentums, born in Germany around 1820, is not confined to the emergence of a scientific methodology but implies a radical critique of the theological sense adhering to the Jewish memory and amounts to adopting a historicist ideology that underscores the historicity of all things. The vertical relation between the living eternity of the divine plan and the temporal vicissitudes of the chosen people, which was the very principle of the biblical and Talmudic meaning of history, cedes its place to a horizontal relation of causal connections and validations by history of all the strong convictions of the tradition. More than others, pious Jews resent the “burden of history.”⁸²

What is exemplary here is the correlation between historiography and secularization, that is to say, for Jews, “assimilation from without and collapse from within” (85). For a providential conception of history is substituted the notion of a secular Jewish history which would unfold on the same plane of reality as any other history.

Thus, in the example of the destiny of the Jewish people, the problem is posed for us concerning the relations between a historiography separated from the collective memory and what remains in it of nonhistoricized traditions. The range of solutions, referred to above, must now be opened. Inasmuch as in the Jewish culture “group memory . . . never depended on historians in the first place” (94), the question of the rebound effect of history on all memory is posed. Historiography, Yerushalmi notes, reflecting on this for all of us, “represents, not an attempt at a restoration of memory, but a truly new kind of recollection” (94). Extending the argument further, Yerushalmi asks whether it is, in any case, a reasonable project to want to save everything of the past. Does not the very idea of forgetting nothing reflect the madness of the person with total recall, the famous Funes el memorioso (“Funes the Memorious”) of Borges’s Ficciones? Paradoxically, the delirium of being exhaustive proves to be contrary to the very project of doing history.⁸³ Curiously, Yerushalmi joins Nietzsche’s exclamation in the “Second Unfashionable Observation”: “There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of ‘historical sense,’ that injures and finally destroys the living thing” (quoted in Zakhor, 145, n. 33). The author’s perplexity remains undiminished. On the one hand, he hears the optimistic words of Rosenstock-Huessy regarding the therapeutic function of history.⁸⁴ On the other, he lends an ear to the antihistoricist words of Gershom Scholem and Franz Rosenzweig. Caught between two warring sides—“Today Jewry lives a bifurcated life” (99)—Yerushalmi assumes the “discontents” of the “professional Jewish historian.” These discontents are perhaps our own, all of us, the bastard children of Jewish memory and of the secularized history of the nineteenth century.

Pierre Nora: Strange Places of Memory

Pierre Nora is the inventor of the “places of memory.”⁸⁵ This notion is the cornerstone of the vast collection of articles collected by Nora and published beginning in 1984 under the auspices of this term. In order to discover its uncanniness, one must retrace the entire course of these masterful essays from 1984 up to 1992, the date of publication of volume 3 of Les Lieux de mémoire. The assured tone of the first article, titled “Between Memory and History,”⁸⁶ is replaced by one of irritation, occasioned by the confiscation of this theme by the passion of commemoration, against which the author had voiced his opposition in the name of national history. This great shift, from the first to the last essay, reveals the element of strangeness that the notion perhaps contained from the beginning.

(a) From the very start, the 1984 article “Between Memory and History” announced at one and the same time a rupture, a loss, and the emergence of a new phenomenon. The rupture is between memory and history. The loss is that of what is called “memory-history.” The new phenomenon is the stage of a “memory seized by history.” The tone is that of a historian who takes a position with respect to the time in which he articulates this threefold announcement. This concerns not an event but a situation. And it is against the backdrop of this situation that one must speak, for the first time, of places of memory. Let us take up each of these points beginning with the last one, temporarily bracketing the scattered allusions to the theme of places of memory.

The judgment of the historian is likened to that of the philosopher Karl Jaspers ruling on “the spiritual situation of our time.” This situation is approached by the historian as something like a confluence of circumstances, the symptoms of which have to be deciphered with a steadiness that justifies the firmness of the position taken. The memory referred to at the beginning is not the general capacity phenomenology investigates, but a cultural configuration of the same order as the one Terdiman discussed above; and history is not the objective operation that epistemology deals with, but the second-order reflection for which the term “historiography” is so often reserved in France, in the sense of the history of history. This is why its place is indeed at the end of a chapter devoted to the historical condition but apprehended within the limits of the historical present.

First theme, then: for an “integrated memory,” the past adhered continuously to the present; this was “true memory.” Our own, “which is nothing but history, a matter of sifting and sorting” has lost the “close fit between history and memory” (Realms of Memory, 1:2). “With the appearance of the ‘trace,’ of distance and mediation, however, we leave the realm of true memory and enter that of history” (2).⁸⁷ Memory is a phenomenon that is always actual, a living tie with the eternal present, “history a representation of the past” (3). “Memory is absolute, while history is always relative” (3). “History divests the lived past of its legitimacy” (3).⁸⁸

Second theme: the loss of memory-history. “Memory is constantly on our lips because it no longer exists” (ibid., 1). Torn away, terminated, completed, a past definitively dead: so many words that express disappearance. The signs: the end of peasants; the end of society-memories (church, school, family, state); the end of ideology-memories linking the projected future to a remembered past—and, on the other hand, the appearance of a “history of history,” of a “historiographical consciousness” (3). It “lays bare the subversion from within of memory-history by critical history” in which “history begins to write its own history” (4). In France especially “history is iconoclastic and irreverent.” This is the effect of the “lack of identification with memory” (4). A related theme, which will increase its scope in a later article by Nora, becomes more explicit: the loss of reference to the nation, to the nation-state. This was a form of symbiosis characteristic of the spirit of the Third Republic (marked on the professional level by the birth of the Revue historique in 1876), which implies a definition of lost memory as itself already opening, beyond its intimateness and its internal continuity, onto the being in common of the nation-state. Whence the strange notion of memory-history, around which gravitates the first part of this article, which bears the heading “The End of Memory-History” (1–7). The memory lost was not an individual memory, nor a simple collective memory, but was already a memory shaped in the mold of the sacred: “History was holy because the nation was holy. The nation became the vehicle that allowed French memory to remain standing on its sanctified foundation” (5).⁸⁹ “The memory-nation was thus the last incarnation of memory-history” (6). Through the nation, memory-history therefore covers the same space of meaning as memory.

Third theme: out of the rupture between history and memory, through assuming the loss of memory-history, a new figure emerges, that of “memory grasped by history” (8). Three features of this new figure are sketched out. First the reign of the archive. This new memory is an “archival” memory, a “paper memory,” Leibniz would say (8). We recognize in this “obsession with the archive” (8) the great mutation taken to the extreme by the myth of the invention of writing in the Phaedrus: the victory of the scriptural at the very heart of the memorial. Superstition and respect of the trace: “The sacred has invested itself in the trace which is its negation” (9, trans. modified). The sentiment of loss, as in the Platonic myth, becomes the counterpart of that institutionalization of memory. “The imperative of the age is . . . to fill archives” (9). It is somewhat in a tone of imprecation that Nora exclaims “archive as much as you like: something will always be left out” (9), states that the archive “is no longer a more or less intentional record of actual memory but a deliberate and calculated compilation of lost memory” (10), and writes of the “‘ terroristic’ effect of historicized memory” (10). This is truly the tone of Plato’s Phaedrus, but also the recovered tone of Halbwachs, so insistently does Nora underscore the constraint imposed from outside on this memory. It is noteworthy that to this materialization of memory is added the praise of patrimony (1980: the year of patrimony), which in Nora’s subsequent essays will be shown to produce corrosive effects regarding the idea of places of memory as contemporaneous with memory seized by history and not in rebellion with respect to history. He nevertheless underscores the dilation “to the bounds of the uncertain” (“Entre mémoire et histoire,” xxvii) of “property transmitted by the ancestors [of] the cultural patrimony of a country”—in short, “from a very restrictive conception of historical monuments, we have moved, very abruptly, with the convention on sites, to a conception which, in theory, might well leave nothing out” (xxvii–xxviii).⁹⁰ As early as 1984, Nora’s reader could understand the threat of an inverse reduction of the places of memory to topographical sites delivered over to commemorations. Second feature, second symptom: Nora sees in the “preoccupation with individual psychology” (Realms of Memory, 1:10–11) the price to be paid for the historical metamorphosis of memory. This would not involve, according to him, a direct survival of “true memory” but a cultural product compensating for the historicization of memory. To this conversion we owe Bergson, Freud, and Proust. More than anything else, we owe to it the famous duty of memory that in the first place is imposed on each of us: “When memory ceases to be omnipresent, it ceases to be present at all unless some isolated individual decides to assume responsibility for it” (11).⁹¹

Final sign, final symptom of the metamorphosis of memory seized by history: after memory-archive, memory-distance. This was actually the first theme, the rupture between history and memory; it is now taken up again under the sign of discontinuity: we have moved from “a firmly rooted past to a past that we experience as a radical break in continuity” (12). There is perhaps an echo in this theme of the Foucault of The Archeology of Knowledge, militating against the ideology of memorial continuity. Nora calls it: “the cult of continuity” (12).

It is against the backdrop of this new situation that the notion of the places of memory appears. It is understood that this is not solely nor even mainly a matter of topographical places but of external marks, as in Plato’s Phaedrus, from which social behaviors can draw support for their everyday transactions. Thus, the first places named in this article are the republican calendar—external grid of social time—and the flag—national emblem offered to all. Such are all the symbolic objects of our memory—the Tricolor, the Archives, libraries, dictionaries, museums, just as much as commemorations, holidays, the Pantheon or the Arc of Triumph, the Larousse dictionary, and the Mur des Fédérés. All these symbolic objects of memory are offered as the basic instruments of historical work. The places of memory are, I would say, inscriptions, in the broad sense given to this term in our meditations on writing and space. The openness of this term must be underscored from the start, for its flattening out into territorial localities, by virtue of the patrimonial metamorphosis of national identity, will permit the cooption of this theme by the spirit of commemoration, deplored in the 1992 article. At the beginning, due to its scope, the notion of places of memory is not meant for the service of memory but of history: “Lieux de mémoire exist because there are no longer any milieux de mémoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience”—such is the frank declaration welcoming the arrival of this notion (1). To be sure, it is in such places “in which memory is crystalized, in which it finds refuge” (1), but this is a memory in tatters, whose ruin is not, it is true, so complete that the reference to memory can be erased from it. The sentiment of continuity is simply “residual” there. The places of memory are “fundamentally vestiges” (6).⁹² The subsequent shifts in the notion will start from this initial equivocation. The function of the place is drawn from the rupture and loss we have discussed: “If we still dwelled among our memories, there would be no need to consecrate sites employing them” (2).⁹³ Nevertheless, from the perspective of critical history, the residual character of memory inspires the statement that “ultimately, a society living wholly under the sign of history would not need to attach its memory to specific sites anymore than traditional societies do” (3). Because the places remain places of memory not of history. The moment of the places of history is the moment when “the life has not entirely gone out of [the old symbols]” (7).

Something remains to be said about the places of memory under the new dominion of memory grasped by history. “Realms of Memory: Another History”: this is announced in an assured tone in the third section of the 1984 article (14–20). The essay concludes, in fact, on a conciliatory note. The places of memory are granted remarkable efficacity, the capacity to produce “another history.” They draw this power from the fact that they partake of the orders of both memory and history. On the one hand, “a will to remember must be present initially. . . . Without an intent to remember, lieux de mémoire would be lieux d’histoire” (14–15). But it is not stated whether this memory is the lost memory of memory-history, whose loss was initially deplored, or the memory that takes refuge in the arcana of individual psychology and its appeal to duty. On the other hand, history has to present itself as an enlightened, corrected memory. But nothing is said regarding what becomes of the project of desacralizing history.

This ability to place the two factors in interaction, to the point of their “reciprocal overdetermination,” results from the complex structure of the places of memory which incorporates three senses of the word: material, symbolic, and functional. The first anchors the places of memory in realities that can be said to be already given and manipulable; the second is the work of the imagination, and it assures the crystalizing of memories and their transmission; the third leads back to ritual, which history nevertheless attempts to dismiss, as we see in the case of founding events or spectacles, and with places of refuge and other sanctuaries. Nora evokes on this occasion the notion of generation, to which a later article will be devoted and which is supposed to contain all three meanings together. The tone becomes almost lyrical in speaking of this spiral of the collective and the individual, of the prosaic and the sacred, of the immutable and the mobile—and of these “Möbius strips, endless rounds,” which enclose “the maximum possible meaning with the fewest possible signs” (15). Under the cover of patrimony, favorably mentioned, the evil of patrimonialization is not yet perceived in its tendency to reduce the place of memory to a topographical site and to deliver the cult of memory over to the abuses of commemoration.

(b) The first article of 1984 on the places of memory was to be followed by several other interventions by Nora at strategic points of the great work he was directing. In the essay “La Nation-mémoire,”⁹⁴ published in the series of some forty texts dealing with the nation, the recomposition inspired by these punctual clarifications takes as its guiding theme the development of “national memory.” Four types are proposed, marking out a broadly drawn chronology: founding memory, contemporaneous with the feudal monarchy and the period of defining and affirming the state; state-memory, “absorbed in the image of its own representation” (the very one Louis Marin characterized above through the “portrait of the king”); national-memory, the memory of the nation becoming conscious of itself as a nation, to which Michelet bears witness—he “who transcends all places of memory because of all of them he is the geometrical center and the common denominator, the soul of these places of memory” (649); citizen-memory, finally, for which Alain is the “quintessential paragon” (650). But it is stated that the fifth type retrospectively gives a sense to what is, after all, a rather disappointing series: the type that is our own, “a patrimony-memory” (650).

For our investigation into the fate of the idea of places of memory in Nora’s texts, this moment of analysis is decisive: it marks an internal reversal of the very notion of place of memory. The definition is concise: “By patrimony-memory one must not be satisfied with understanding the sudden widening of the notion and its recent and problematic dilation to include all the objects that testify to the national past but, much more profoundly, the transformation into a common good and a collective heritage of the traditional stakes of memory itself” (650). Much more will be said about this in Nora’s final essay, placed at the end of volume 3, Les France, of Les Lieux de mémoire; only its mark on the dialectic of memory and history is emphasized here. Concerning this patrimonial transformation, it is simply stated that it “carries the renewal that is everywhere underway in the historical approach to France through memory, an approach whose centrality the work comprising Les Lieux de mémoire would like to confirm” (651). Henceforth, the feeling of belonging to the nation “in the manner of a renewed sensibility of national singularity” wins out over the mediations and oppositions involved in identifying the nation with the state: “It is the hour of a patrimony-memory and of a new union between France and a nation without nationalism” (652). Erasing the tie between the nation and the state has as its corollary the promotion of memory, to which alone “the nation owes its unitary acceptation, maintains its relevance and its legitimacy” (653). By thus abstaining from a detour by way of the state, memory claims also to abstain from a detour by way of history, a foundation in France of a piece with the constitution of the nation-state: “With regard to this national sedimentation of memory, which is knotted around the state, a history that unfolds entirely within the horizon of the nation-state is no longer able to account for it” (654). Henceforth, “‘France’ is its own memory or it is not” (655).

At the conclusion of this brief essay a certain acquiescence prevails regarding the emergence of patrimony-memory, held to characterize the fifth type of national memory, and of its corollary, “dropping the nationalistic, gallocentric, imperial, and universalist version of the nation” (657). It is, nevertheless, not certain that the final word has been uttered, so undetermined is the notion of patrimony, and so little recognition has been paid to its harmfulness with respect to the very idea of a place of memory.

(c) The essay “La Génération,”⁹⁵ added to the first book, Conflits et partages, of the third volume, Les France, of Les Lieux de mémoire (931–71), in its title and in its theme, hardly seems to announce any progress in the analysis of the idea of the place of memory and, more precisely, in its transformation in contact with the idea of patrimony. However, this is not the case. With the idea of generation, a purely horizontal view of the social bond prevails; one generation replaces another through continuous substitution. In particular, the idea of generation marks the demotion of the descending generation in the name of the ascending generation: “The past is no longer the law: this is the very essence of the phenomenon” (“Generation,” Realms of Memory, 1:502). This “symbolic rupture” assures the preeminence of horizontal identity over all forms of vertical solidarity. Despite the aporias a theoretical definition of the phenomenon runs into—and which the author surveys—one type of belonging, generational solidarity, imposes itself, and along with it a remarkable question: “As the pace of change increases, how and why has the horizontal identification of individuals of roughly the same age been able to supplant all forms of vertical identification?” (509). It is not enough to retrace the stages of the “historical construction of the model” (511), although the passage from the biologically oriented notion of the replacement of the dead by the living to that of generation understood as a singular historical formation affords the opportunity to highlight the history of memory: “In every country, it seems, one generation has served as a model and pattern for all subsequent generations” (511). In this way, Musset forged the poetic formula of the “children of the century” that we encountered earlier with Terdiman. In France, in particular, the axes of politics and literature, of power and words, have been intertwined in the generational panoply. It is in this atmosphere that history was promoted as a discipline, with its grand cyclical periodicity which May 1968 would come to concelebrate. It remains to be explained why the history of France has lent itself to being governed by the impulse of generations. What is then offered is the notion of the place of memory and its mixture of memory and history, sounding the note of generational subversion: “Generations have always been mixtures of memory and history, but the amount and role of each in the mix appear to have shifted over time” (522). The inversion consists in the fact that the notion of generation, constructed retrospectively and, as such, permeated with history, slips away into its “effect of remembering” (522), as we see in the time of Péguy and Barrès. First imposed from outside, it is then violently internalized (the reader perceives an echo of Halbwachs’s considerations here regarding the formation of what he called “historical memory”). What is more, inhabited by history, generational memory finds itself “crushed by history’s weight” (524) (it is now the accent of Nietzsche in the 1872 essay placed here as prelude). Remembering, then, quickly veers off into commemoration, with its obsession of a finite, completed history: “At the inception of a generation there is a sense of lack, something in the nature of a mourning” (525) (where we cross paths with Henry Rousso and the obsession with the Vichy syndrome). “It was this intrinsically mythological and commemorative historical celebration that moved the idea of generation out of history and into memory” (525) (this section is titled “Immersed in Memory,” 522–31). One is indeed in pure memory here, memory which mocks history and abolishes duration to make itself a present without history: the past is then, according to a remark by François Furet, “immemorialized” in order better to “memorialize” the present.

At this point, Nora the historian resists: the article “Generation” concludes without making any accommodation to the reign of commemoration, with a plea in favor of a “split historical personality” (528)—split into its “memorial rumination” (528) and the evocation of the grand world history within which France is called to situate its moderate power. To the one-dimensional version imposed by generational mythology, the historian—or doubtless rather the citizen in the historian—opposes a “dividing line . . . between that which belongs exclusively under the head of generational memory and that which belongs exclusively to historical memory” (530).

What has become of the idea of the place of memory in all this? In a sense, despite the efforts of the historian, it has become sacralized, as it were, as a result of commemoration.⁹⁶ It has not yet been stated, however, that the tie perceived in the preceding essay between the idea of the place of memory and the patrimonial transformation of national identity announces the subtle perversion of this idea. What indeed remains to be discussed is the patrimonial conquest of the idea of the place of memory—its capture in space after its capture in the present.

(d) The 1992 article “L’Ère de la commémoration,” which appeared at the end of volume 3, Les France, book 3, De l’archive à l’emblème (975–1012),⁹⁷ comes full circle six years after the impressive appearance of the article “Between Memory and History.” It comes full circle on a tone of deep regret: “The destiny of these Lieux de mémoire has been a strange one. The work was intended, by virtue of its conception, method, and even title, to be a counter-commemorative type of history, but commemoration has overtaken it” (“The Era of Commemoration,” Realms of Memory, 3:609). The intention had been “to make commemoration itself one of [the] primacy specimens for dissection” (609), but the hunger for commemoration assimilated the attempt to master the phenomenon. Everything occurred as though, by virtue of France’s exit from the stage of world history, the publication of Les Lieux de mémoire had come to reinforce the commemorative obsession. All that is left is for the historian to reply that he is trying to “understand why this co-optation has taken place” (609).

In fact, it is commemoration itself that has been metamorphosized,⁹⁸ as is evidenced more by the self-celebration of May 1968 than by the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The Revolution had invented a classical model of national commemoration. It is this model that disintegrated and was subverted: whereas the earlier articles contain scattered remarks on the decline of the model of national identity centered on the nation-state, “the dissolution of the unifying framework of the nation-state has exploded the traditional system that was its concentrated symbolic expression. There is no commemorative super-ego: the canon has vanished” (614). A battle of memories occupies the stage: the cultural and the local, destroyers of the national, saturate the media.⁹⁹

Returning with a vengeance is the theme of the patrimonial touched upon several times in the earlier articles. “From the National to the Patrimonial” (621)—this section heading in “Generation” identifies the secret of the metamorphosis marked by narratives of commemorations in the preceding pages. The end of the peasant world is one occasion for this; the emergence of France from the orbit of the war, the death of the man of the 18th of June are others; then, the success of the year of Patrimony (1980), consecrating the regionalization of collective memory. The metamorphosis is underway that leads from history to the remembered, and then on to the commemorated, making the era of commemoration the culmination of this series of inversions. History has ceased to be “verified memory” (626), in symbiosis with national history. “Commemoration has freed itself from its traditionally assigned place, but the epoch as a whole has become commemorative” (627). Even the publication of the collection Faire de l’histoire edited by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora in 1973, elevating memory to the level of a new object of history through the work of Goubert, Duby, and Lacouture, was to contribute against its will to this subversion of history by memory. The surge of memorial commemoration was so strong that even the Left in France was to succumb to it with François Mitterand at the Panthéon in 1981. But it is the promotion of patrimony and its crystallization into the “historical monument” with its spectacular topography and its archeological nostalgia that marks the signature of the epoch as the “era of commemoration”: the “patrimonializable” has become infinite (631). The misinterpretation of the very notion of place of memory is now in place: from a symbolic instrument, whose heuristic interest was to render “place” immaterial, the notion has fallen prey to patrimonial-type commemorations: “The meaning of patrimoine has shifted from inherited property to the possessions that make us who we are” (635). At the same time, national history and, with it, history as myth have made way for national memory, that recent idea. “Memorial nation” in the place of what was “historical nation” (636)—the subversion is profound. The past is no longer the guarantor of the future: this is the principal reason for promoting memory as a dynamic field and as the sole promise of continuity. In place of the solidarity of the past and the future, the solidarity of the present and memory have been substituted. “A new concern with ‘identity’ resulted from the emergence of this historicized present” (635). For the former purely administrative or police use of the term has been substituted a memorial use: “France as a person needed a history. France as identity is merely preparing for the future by deciphering its memory” (635). Bitterness.

Was the notion of place of memory in the final analysis, then, poorly chosen? A shadow passes over the term and its “apparent paradox of linking two words, one of which creates distance while the other creates intimacy” (636). The historian does not however wish to succumb to regret or nostalgia, but prefers the proud rejoinder: “By justifying the joining together of objects of different kinds, the term makes it possible to reassemble the shattered national whole. And this perhaps justifies the ambition of these volumes: to define, within the virtually unbroken chain of histories of France, one moment in the French contemplation of France” (636).

By taking up one’s pen in this way, by giving a written representation of the subversion of the “historical nation” by “national memory,” the citizen-historian engages in resistance. Not without issuing a challenge to one’s time: speaking in the future perfect, the historian evokes the moment when “another way of living together” will be set into place and when “the need to exhume these landmarks and explore these lieux will have disappeared” (637). Then—the inverse announcement to that with which the introduction to Les Lieux de mémoire opened several years earlier—“the era of commemoration will be over for good. The tyranny of memory will have endured for only a moment—but it was our moment” (637).

Until then, let me say, nonetheless, the “uncanniness” of history still prevails, even as it attempts to understand the reasons why it is contested by commemorative memory.