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Rethinking HistoryThe Journal of Theory and Practice

ISSN: 1364-2529 (Print) 1470-1154 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrhi20

History set into motion again

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon

To cite this article: Zoltán Boldizsár Simon (2015) History set into motion again, RethinkingHistory, 19:4, 651-667, DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2014.936118

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2014.936118

Published online: 11 Jul 2014.

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History set into motion again

Zoltan Boldizsar Simon*

Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, University of Bielefeld,Universitatsstraße 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany

It is believed to be common knowledge that history (in the sense of thingsdone, in the sense of a collective singular) is suspended, that history isdoomed to remain motionless. What is more, we all – or at least many of us –tend to believe that this precisely is how it should be: history, if such thingexists at all, has to stand still. It is against this backdrop that I wish to point outthat there is a cultural phenomenon we should not leave unnoticed, namely,that a new quasi-substantive philosophy of history – operating with thenotions of commemoration, trauma, and the sublime – sets history intomotion again. It sets history into motion by reclaiming the monstrosities ofthe world, that is, by compensating for the rather one-sided attention paid tolanguage in the last decades; and it sets history into motion despite the respectit seriously pays to the primary suspension of history.

Keywords: suspension of history; speculation; history in motion; trauma; thesublime; commemoration; quasi-substantive philosophy of history

The suspension of history

Our time is not the time of surprising conclusions. Not because there is nothing

wondrous or unexpected left to say, but because certain conventions and common

decencies compel us to disclose practically everything right at the beginning of

our essays and articles, either in abstracts or introductory sections. This might be

one of the main reasons why many of us tend to appreciate authors who do not

seem to give a damn about prescriptions or tacit expectations, or authors whose

writings are – often deliberately – obscure. Such compensation is not without a

sense of irony, especially when we analyze rich but embarrassingly vague ideas

of intellectual heroes by precise sets of conceptual tools aimed at unambiguous

expositions, or when we propagate experimental attitudes towards writing in our

standardized texts.

In the following paragraphs, I might navigate myself into a similar – though

not exactly the same – trap by turning to a passage of Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

*Email: zoltanbsimon@gmail.com

Rethinking History, 2015

Vol. 19, No. 4, 651–667, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2014.936118

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‘Finite history’ in which he speaks about what our time might be (if not the time

of surprising conclusions). It goes as follows:

Our time is the time, or a time (this difference between articles by itself impliesa radical difference in the thinking of history) of the suspense or suspension ofhistory – in the sense both of a certain rhythm and of uneasy expectation. Historyis suspended, without movement, and we can anticipate only with uncertainty orwith anxiety what will happen if it moves forward again (if it is still possible toimagine something like a “forward movement”), or if it does not move at all.(Nancy 1993, 144)

Nancy’s words stand here not for their unquestionable authority but because

they provide the background to the claim I wish to put forward, namely, that our

time is no longer Nancy’s time, although it certainly has a lot to do with it. The

best way to explain or qualify this claim might be to turn Nancy’s claim inside out

and entertain the idea that our time is actually the time of the suspension of the

suspension of history (or the time of the suspension of suspended history).

However, before anything can be said about the suspension of the suspension

of history, it seems to be reasonable to provide a necessarily brief preliminary

sketch of Nancy’s primary suspension. Or more precisely, a preliminary sketch of

some consequences of it, given that the suspension itself – that is, the suspension

of the motion of history as things happened – is an all too familiar phenomenon.

The philosophy of history, operating with the notion of history as a collective

singular, was already demolished in various ways long before Nancy: it was

rejected as a centaur by Burkhardt, unveiled as eschatology by Lowith, and

buried as a metanarrative by Lyotard. Nancy’s essay can be regarded as a piece of

this long-existing genre, or as an aftershock of the many ‘end of history’ visions

of the last decades. But what really motivated Nancy’s argument was not the

suspension itself but the question as to in what ways and within what narrow

confines it could still be possible to talk about history – despite any putative end

of history.

The two main and closely intertwined aspects of his answer are, I think, the

binding together of the possibility of talking about history to the notion of

‘community’ and, through this, the binding of it to the future. Neither the idea

of the community nor that of the future comes as a surprise, neither in the context

of the philosophy of history nor in the context of Nancy’s work. On the one hand,

the philosophies of history of the Enlightenment and German Idealism were also

directed towards the future of a community (the entire humanity or a nation),

while, on the other, Nancy’s philosophical enterprise is deeply pervaded by these

notions.1 Nevertheless, by the suspension of history, Nancy accepts that history is

doomed to be motionless without a direction, substance, and an ultimate goal, so

that any talk about history as being bonded to his notion of community and the

future must conform this motionlessness and thus attribute a distinctive quality to

the aforementioned two aspects.

As for community, then, Nancy’s point of departure is the commonsense

observation that history (understood here as historical writing or any account about

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the past) has always been under the spell of community, that ‘history belonged to

community, and community to history’ and that ‘the story of a single person, or a

single family, becomes historical only insofar as it belongs to a community’

(Nancy 1993, 152).2 This community is not a community of individuals; it is

‘neither an abstract or immaterial relationship, nor a common substance. It is not a

common being; it is to be in common, or to be with each other, or to be together’

(Nancy 1993, 154). Furthermore, community as ‘being-in-common’ is also the

community of others in the sense that itsmembers are togetherwhilst retaining – or

even by virtue of – their ‘otherness.’ Finally, the last crucial point of Nancy’s I

would like to highlight is that the community is not a stable, already formed, or

given entity, but a ‘happening.’ All these characteristics taken together make up

the following – at the present stage – rather vague formula: ‘Community is the

“we” happening as the togetherness of otherness’ (Nancy 1993, 158). Things

become somewhat clearer by noting that such a ‘happening of community’ is

exactly the sense in which, according to Nancy, we might still speak about history

even after the end of history.

As for binding this concept of history to the future, this is due to the ‘happening’

character of community – that is, due to the ‘happening’ character of history.

Community as the ‘we’ happening is seemingly a community as a continuous

present (grammatically exhibited in Nancy’s books by the use of the present

continuous tense), entailing that history is neither what once had been but has

already gone, nor what once has been and is still ‘present,’ but an uncertain

potentiality of what in the future it might be. And whatever that future might be, in

Nancy’s account it always remains unrealizable. The continuous happening cannot

be something which has already happened and it cannot be a present ‘presence’

either, for the happening as it is still happening is directed toward the future. Or to

be more precise, the future is directed towards history, because history is ‘the

coming’ (Nancy 1993, 161) – not the becoming of something, but the ‘coming’ of

a future, the ‘coming’ of a presently absent presence.

Without elaborating on the Derridean connotations of a continuously deferred

‘coming’ and on the Heideggerian connotations of ‘being-in-common,’ this is the

sense in which – according to Nancy – it is still possible to talk about history in

the time of its suspension: history as the ‘we’ happening, that is, history ahead of

us, history as the coming of our future. Arguably, Nancy’s use of community in

relation to a concept of history is remarkable on its own right, but it is even more

remarkable that some new philosophies of history – which aim at the suspension

of the suspension of history – have emerged more or less paradoxically under its

aegis. This does not mean, of course, that some sort of walking dead substantive

philosophies of history have begun to roam the academic landscape. No

philosophy of history aiming at the suspension of the suspension of history can

now do without taking seriously the primary suspension. They have to proceed

without a direction, a substance and an ultimate goal; they have to proceed (just

as they actually do) as quasi-substantive philosophies of history.

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The suspension of the suspension of history

To start the story over again from a point of view within the philosophy of history:

Nancy’s time is the time when – due to the suspension of history – the philosophy

of history has suspended its activities in the speculative and substantive mode and

switched to the critical and analytical mode.3 After a while, this philosophy of

history ceased to be analytical in a strict sense,4 as the questions and operations of

analytic philosophy were exchanged for questions and operations borrowed from

its new playmate, literary theory. It remained in the critical mode though, and

proudly disregarded the ‘Mode Switch’ button on the control panel. Contrary to

this, our time is the time when more and more people feel tempted to leer at that

button, and some cannot even withstand the temptation to push it – and, in a

certain sense, there is nothing startling in such a temptation. Speculative,

substantive, or quasi-substantive philosophies of history were produced even

during the ‘prohibition era’ (Runia 2006, 4), enjoying all the advantages of their

illegality, facilitating far wider discussions and, apparently, satisfying greater

demands than critical philosophies of history could ever hope for. It has become a

conquerable domain for practically everybody – political scientist, evolutionary

biologists, economists, and so on – everyone except historians and critical

philosophers of history, who distanced themselves from these efforts in a way

similar to the Parisian intellectual elite distanced itself from Camus after his

writing of The Rebel.

However, the new philosophies of history which suspend the suspension of

history are coming from ‘official’ forums, and as they curse the ban on

speculation, sometimes they do not hesitate to make use of the continuous

existence of the outcast ‘non-official’ philosophies of history. In the view of the

new ‘official’ quasi-substantive approaches, the persistence of the ‘non-official’

ones clearly shows that what is deprived of speculation about history is not our

culture but only the disciplines of history and the philosophy of history. At least,

this is what Runia (2006, 3) – who, together with Frank Ankersmit, will enter the

stage as one of the protagonists here – points out. Runia and Ankersmit will be

concentrated on here as being responsible for suspending the suspension of history

as leading figures of an emerging discourse revolving around the notions of

presence and historical experience. However, the primary means of this secondary

suspension are not the notions of presence and historical experience themselves,

but the joint notions of commemoration (which is something other than the

familiar notion of memory in Runia’s case) and the sublime with its psychological

counterpart, trauma (in Ankersmit’s theory).5 As for commemoration, Runia

outlined his views in the form of ten theses in an article entitled ‘Burying the dead,

creating the past’ (Runia 2007)6; and, as for the sublime and trauma, although

Runia also makes use of these occasionally, they are more closely connected to

Ankersmit’s larger project as presented in his book Sublime Historical Experience

(Ankersmit 2005).

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These works by Runia and Ankersmit will be the key texts by which I will try

to illustrate the current suspension of the suspension of history. But before getting

into them, it seems to be reasonable to say a few words about the notion of the

sublime as it is far from being the first time that it appears in relation to history.

Historical thinking made use of the notion to describe what is unconceivable

(originally in nature) by reason regarding both history understood as past events

and occurrences and history understood as historical writing. With regards to

history understood in the former sense, the sublime made its debut under Schiller

(2001), designed to oppose and deny the possibility of any substantive philosophy

of history. Schiller’s sublime was supposed to be the recognition of the

meaninglessness of history on the grounds that if the human mind was unable to

grasp the monstrosity, horror, and chaos of history (in the sense of things

happened), then nothing was left to do but to accept that it is not only seemingly

chaotic as the philosophy of history suggests but it is actually so, and there was

nothing left to do but to contemplate over ‘the sublimity of history.’

As for a more contemporary setting, in the era of narrative enchantment –

which, according to Partner (2009), might still continue in what she regards a

‘post-postmodern’ setting – it was Hayden White who came the closest to

Schiller’s sublime, even if he associated it with the chaos and meaninglessness

not of world history as such but of the past as such. On the other hand, he departed

from Schiller by elevating the sublime as a feeling emerging in us, the sublime as

the quality of our experience, into a quality of the experienced object by

attributing sublime characteristics to past reality itself. To put it in another way,

White (1987) raised the ontological stakes, as pointed out by Paul (2011, 117).

Nevertheless, the entire issue of the sublime became significant for White in its

relation to history in the sense of historical writing. Or to be more precise, in the

lack of such relation, since history as a discipline had become institutionalized

under the aegis of the beautiful (as opposed to the sublime), enabling meaning

attribution to the past but rendering the work of political imagination (which

White binds to the sublime) impossible.

Finally, while Schiller focused on the sublime in its relation to world history,

and whereas White’s interest in the sublime pointed towards the tension between

history as things happened and history as representations of them, Rigney (2001)

made use of the notion only in its relation to history in this latter sense. Rigney

sees imperfection as the organizational principle of historical writing and the

sublime as the key element of that imperfection, associating it with phenomena

that resist representation.

In order to qualify as philosophies of history which suspend the suspension of

history, Ankersmit’s and Runia’s approaches cannot turn to the sublime as

connected to historical writing as Rigney and White (partly) do. But, in order for

their philosophies of history to be possible at all, they cannot look at the whole of

history in the sense of things just happening as chaos and disorder, folly, or a sad

collection of random monstrosities. However, in order that their philosophy of

history can play off Nancy’s suspension, they cannot really talk about history in

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any other sense than in the sense of historical writing, which, as I have just

pointed out two sentences earlier, could not be enough. All in all, the idea of a

philosophy of history which is aware of its own impossibility is not the most

comfortable one might wish to work out of. Nevertheless, the main task of the

following pages will be to introduce and explain that idea as its core principles

seem to appear in new philosophies of history.

Before getting into the task, there are two things to keep in mind. The first is

that a new quasi-substantive philosophy of history – by entering the scene in the

clothes of community and under the sign of what lies before us – pays respect to

the suspension of history. And the second is that, notwithstanding all the respect

paid to the primary suspension, by the means of the sublime, trauma, and

commemoration, it nevertheless suspends the suspension of history. What is still

not clear, and what the following pages will be about, is the answer to the

question ‘How?’ which goes as follows: the new quasi-substantive philosophy of

history suspends the suspension of history by setting history into motion again.

History set into motion again

Now, if we suspend the suspension of history, even if we do so by excluding any

direction, substance or ultimate goal, that is, even if we do no not resuscitate the

cursed and buried notion of substantive philosophy of history by creating a less

daring notion of history that enables us to posit only some sort of a quasi-

substantive philosophy of history, the following question arises: Why are we

doing this and why now? To answer this question the first step would be, I think,

to recall the birth conditions of the philosophy of history – or more precisely, to

recall what the sadly neglected Odo Marquard has said about it – and compare it

to the birth conditions of the one that now wishes to suspend the suspension of

history (in the hope that comparing and contrasting the birth conditions of the two

philosophies of history might enable me to unfold the characteristics of the new

quasi-substantive philosophy of history).

In an essay entitled ‘Indicted and unburdened man in eighteenth century

philosophy’, Marquard (1989) runs the following argument: (1) in harmony with

Koselleck’s thesis of a ‘saddle period,’ new philosophies are born in the time

period between 1750 and 1850, such as philosophical anthropology,

philosophical aesthetics, and the philosophy of history; (2) the reason of their

birth is compensation; (3) this compensation is motivated by the breakdown of

Leibnizian theodicy – the burden of responsibility for all the evil of the human

world has fallen from God’s shoulders to the shoulders of humanity, and the

secularization the new philosophies brought forward resulted in humanity

standing before its own tribunal for the evils of the world and acting as the

defendant, the prosecutor, and the judge at the same time, under the pressure of

constant self-justification; (4) the new philosophies, in this way, are ‘philosophies

of man in search of unburdening’ and they serve the purpose to ‘escape into

unindictability’; (5) all these lead to a new conception and definition of man.

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Marquard’s notion of the philosophy of history as radicalized theodicy is

based on the passages one inevitably runs into while reading the philosophies of

history of the Enlightenment and German Idealism from Rousseau to Hegel;

passages in which it becomes clear that practically all these philosophers were

haunted by the meaninglessness of history as suggested to them by their everyday

experiences. In order to postulate a direction to events that transcends human

concerns and intentions, in order to give meaning to the ‘course of history,’ they

had to somehow subsume these everyday experiences and the follies of human

existence they had to face on a daily basis.7 This, nevertheless, could not be done

without mentioning what seemed so embarrassingly obvious, and thus they had to

include their passages recounting the folly and the evils of humanity one could

not fail to witness daily. What could be and what was done was to turn all these

things into something only seemingly foolish and evil by reducing them to the

status of ‘natural side-effects’ of the postulated course of history directed toward

a goal happier than the things actually witnessed.

What is important to keep in mind in all of this is – first – the leitmotif that

the world is not a good but a horrendous place. However, by postulating a ‘history

in motion,’ the horrendousness of the world became ‘natural’ in a certain sense,

and people could be assured that one day the world (this world, their world) will

be a nicer place. In a more or less straight way, this leads to the second thing to

keep in mind: to Marquard’s idea that this act of ‘assurance’ is no more than a

self-justificatory compensation. But does all this have anything to do with the

suspension of the suspension of history, especially if this suspension does not

entail the rehabilitation of the idea of the direction of a history in motion? The

answer I would like to give to this question is that the motifs of setting history into

motion again now, by suspending the suspension, have a lot to do with the

aforementioned two motifs: first, with the folly, horror, and monstrosity of the

world as it appears to our everyday experience and second, with the notion of

compensation.

However, such compensation – our compensation – is not related to theodicy.

The need for compensation stems from something other than from the need to

counterbalance the monstrosities of the world. On the contrary, the suspension of

the suspension of history reclaims all these horrors that have been lost with the

primary suspension because, however odd it may sound, these horrors have been

lost. We have lost them when we – in critical philosophy of history in particular

and in the humanities in general – turned our attention to language, one-sidedly,

exclusively, and (as more and more people tend to think now) rather

monomaniacally. This, of course, does not mean that we cannot see the folly

and misery surrounding us. It means only that as we have locked ourselves into

language, we have – in a way – exiled, expelled, or excommunicated all the

misery and horror of the world and lost contact to them. As a result, we were still

able to tell each other heartbreaking or fearsome stories, and we could still clothe

the chaos of the world into dramatic or tragic emplotments. But whatever we did,

we did it with the awareness that it was no more than a free play of signifiers.

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All in all, it seems to me that the suspension of the suspension of history is the

reclamation of all the monstrosities of the world that we have lost with the so-

called linguistic turn of the humanities: it is a compensation for the endless and

limitless playfulness of language.8 However, it is not only in the sense of a

reaction to the universality-claim of the linguistic turn that makes it possible to

talk about compensation concerning history set into motion again. The career of

the reclaimed monstrosities of the world does not end with the act of reclamation.

Their fate rests – this is my argument – in the hands of the notions of the

sublime, trauma, and commemoration; notions which entail both dissociation

from the past and, together with the past, dissociation from the monstrosities of

the world committed in the past. Ankersmit gives voice to this dissociation with

the formula ‘one has become what one is no longer’ (Ankersmit 2005, 333) –

which I will discuss later – and Runia with the following thesis: ‘the more we

commemorate what we did, the more we transform ourselves into people who did

not do it’ (Runia 2007, 320).

And this is the point where the echoes of Nancy’s words about community and

history as the uncertain potentiality of what the future might be (that is, history not

as something already left behind, but history as something ahead of us) can be

heard.9 Due to our dissociation from the past, whatever is left behind is not our

history, but the history of those who we are not anymore; the history of some

others who committed their monstrosities, which we (sometimes) commemorate.

And we can commemorate even if – or perhaps we can commemorate only if –

what we commemorate is not our history anymore, although it is still our past: it is

still our past, but not our history.

Such an operation means that ‘past’ committed monstrosities become

constitutive to our identity on the one hand, but, on the other, dissociation repeats

the compensatory act of the old substantive philosophy of history in its own way.

The new quasi-substantive philosophy of history, at the moment it reclaims the

monstrosities of the world lost to language, passes those monstrosities – together

with the responsibility for committing them – on to another generation right away

and unburdens us in the same way like substantive philosophies of history

unburdened humanity. Except that there is a difference that should not be

overlooked: this new unburdening has nothing to do with theodicy; not because it

does not compensate by passing the monstrosities of the world on to another

generation, but because such compensation and the way history is set into motion

again do not entail that the world will become a better place in the future. What it

suggests is rather that sooner or later we are going to commit our own

monstrosities, which exactly is our history we have ahead of us. We are going to

commit our ownmonstrosities (our history), leaving other generations to unburden

themselves by passing those monstrosities on to us, meaning that it will be another

generation which creates itself and its own sense of togetherness by admitting our

horrific deed as their past (but not as their history). We are going to be only ‘them’

for them, when they dissociate themselves from the past – from what we have

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ahead of us as our history they will create themselves as a ‘we’ which is, at the

moment, only a non-existing ‘them’ for us.

The events which result in such a dissociation, that is, the events most

‘commemorable,’ are the ones Runia considers to be sublime events. These

include not only monstrosities, but also and mainly those ‘impossible’ acts by

which ‘we leave the beaten track and embark upon the unknown – as we did in

events like the American Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution,

the secession of the Confederation of the South, Bismarck’s unification of

Germany, the First World War, the Holocaust, and the redrawing of the map of

what used to be Yugoslavia’ (Runia 2007, 318). Nevertheless, looking at this

historical inventory, it does not seem to be extremely risky to claim that even

those events about which we tend to favor happier or nobler interpretations also

invoke the images of less happy and noble bloodbaths. But regardless of the

amount of blood spilled, these are the events that result in a shift in our

worldviews: events to which we look back as events brought forth by folks other

than us; but events that, sooner or later, we are going bring forth too. At least this

is what Runia’s thesis claims by stating that ‘every now and then we create new

pasts for ourselves by committing fresh “original sins,” by fleeing forward in

horrendous, sublime – in short, historical – “acts of people”,’ and by suggesting

that we do so when we have ‘consumed’ ‘the future that a former sublime

historical event has given us’ (Runia 2007, 323).

Having said all this, it is hard to dismiss the thought that there is a pattern

lurking behind Runia’s short allusion; a pattern of consumed futures (histories),

or more precisely, a pattern of the perpetual transformation of these consumed

futures (histories) into pasts. This pattern, however, remains rather unexplicated,

although its silhouette also appears in Runia’s (2010a, 18–20) another essay. But

suspicion has already been raised, and so I turn to Ankersmit, who invests more

into the sublime than Runia does, and who might transform this suspicion into a

corroborated belief, even if the way in which Ankersmit sets history into motion

is far less deliberate than the way Runia does. The sublime events Ankersmit

deals with provide the background of his effort to create a notion of sublime

historical experience. The creation of such experience goes hand in hand with the

creation of events that can be regarded as sublime, and what matters here and now

is the latter: the unintentional residue of the creation of sublime historical

experience, that is, a pattern of the identity shifts of the entire Western

civilization, which take place in much the same way as Runia’s perpetual

transformations of ‘we’-s into ‘them’-s.

The problem with a pattern like this – even if it concerns only Western

civilization instead of humanity as such – is that the suspension of history renders

it impossible. What is more, there is another sacrilegious aspect which can be

detected more easily in Ankersmit’s colorful enthusiasm about the sublime than

in Runia’s similar adventures. In Ankersmit’s case, through the notion of the

sublime, or more precisely through the intertwinement of the sublime and the

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notion of trauma, the identity shifts of Western civilizations not merely follow a

pattern of motion, but at the same time explain that very motion.

As to the intertwinement, Ankersmit’s position goes as follows: ‘trauma can

be seen as the psychological counterpart of the sublime, and the sublime can be

seen as the philosophical counterpart of trauma’ (Ankersmit 2005, 338). In order

to explicate this claim, he has to use the notion of trauma in the ‘right’ sense, that

is, he has to create and add his own specific reading to the other scholarly notions

of trauma. Thus, Ankersmit (2005, 325) distinguishes between a trauma that

leaves identity intact (trauma1) and a trauma that leads to a new identity

(trauma2). A strange feature of this separation is that it leaves undisturbed the

main line of contesting definitions of trauma in historical thinking. All these

different definitions seem to agree at least on one crucial feature, namely, that

whatever they regard to be traumatic resists representation – it resists any effort

to incorporate it into a narrative responsible for identity formation either on the

collective or on the personal level.10

As it stands, both of Ankersmit’s notions of trauma are compatible with other

definitions. In cases of relegating traumatic loss into the unconscious

(Ankersmit’s example), or in cases where – in relation to historical writing –

we attempt to transcend it by ‘mourning’ (as proposed by Jorn Rusen) or by

‘working through’ and ‘acting out’ (as advocated by Dominick LaCapra),11 the

common aim is to retain identity. What these suggestions would not leave intact

is not identity but life stories into which – by paying the price of separating

identity formation and the narration of life stories and so working against their

own definitions of trauma to some extent – they would incorporate traumatic

events with the help of psychological work. All this clearly works in the case of

trauma1, and oddly enough, there is an important aspect in which the case of

trauma2 does not really differ from this picture: while it promises a new identity,

in a certain respect trauma2 still leaves identity intact. The resolution of this

seeming paradox is that the identity into which – in one way or another – trauma

could be incorporated ceases to be ‘our’ identity or ‘our’ life story at the very

moment such incorporation takes place. This was already witnessed in the case of

Runia’s ideas, and I will discuss it in more detail later regarding Ankersmit,

where it will involve a crafty bypass navigating past Rusen and LaCapra.

For now, what should be kept in mind is that it is this trauma2 only that

interests Ankersmit and what he regards as the psychological counterpart of the

sublime.

The reason why trauma and the sublime are ‘joined’ is, in Ankersmit’s view,

because both entail dissociation. In trauma2, thanks to a dissociation taking place,

we cannot actually suffer from traumatic experiences, that is, we do not feel

endangered by them. In a similar vein, in sublime experiences the horror arrives

as accompanied by joy and the entire experience is based on a dissociation from

the object of experience, depriving the world of its ‘threatening potentialities’.12

Furthermore, there is another similarity between the two notions that Ankersmit

stresses: just as traumatic experiences resist incorporation into life stories of

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identity formation (but not into life stories that leave identity intact, according to

Rusen and LaCapra), in sublime experiences the same resistance takes places as

our ‘categories of the understanding’ become bankrupt as momentarily we cannot

make sense of the world (Ankersmit 2005, 335–336). In other words, both

trauma and the sublime seem to defy sense constitution.

Now, Ankersmit’s particular interpretation of the sublime and trauma is, of

course, controvertible. However, given that I do not wish to play the role of an

intellectual goal-line technology but rather point to the phenomenon of the

violation of the ban on speculation in the philosophy of history,13 the question to

face goes as follows: what has this to do with the identity shifts of Western

civilization, and how does the intertwinement of the sublime and trauma serve as

the ground for a pattern of history constituted by perpetual identity shifts? As for

the first part of the question, the answer appears grippingly simple, even if actually

it is not that simple at all. Ankersmit (2005, 351), without much ado, self-

consciously and resolutely reveals that in his approach ‘Western civilization itself

is the subject of trauma.’ And by this, he does not mean a collective of gathered

individuals or a collective traumatic experience concerning a group of individuals.

It is literally Western civilization as such which forms Ankersmit’s subject, and

his focus is on ‘how Western civilization, as such, dealt with its greatest crisis

when it experienced the traumatizing loss of an old world because one was forced

to enter a new one’ (Ankersmit 2005, 351, emphasis in the original).

Although the answer of the second part of the above question is as short as the

first one was, the consequences of it require a more extensive exposition. The

intertwinement of the sublime and trauma provides the ground for a mechanics of

historical change, and this mechanism is what constitutes the explanatory force

regarding the pattern and motion of history. This entire mechanism, again, can be

formulated in a surprisingly simple way (without sparing the necessary

exposition), as Ankersmit puts it into one sentence while discussing Freud’s

argument on the melancholic reaction to traumatic loss. Ankersmit treats Freud’s

considerations as an analogous process to his own mechanism which goes like

this: ‘the lost object is, first, pulled within the subject in order to be, next repelled

again as a criticized object – while it will, last, forever remain part of the subject

in this guise’ (Ankersmit 2005, 341, emphasis in the original). On the level of

Western civilization and regarding its traumatic past, it means that in one way or

another the past has to be constitutive of the identity, after all, even if only

temporarily, only for the time being. The traumatic past has to become a part of

the identity in order for it to be possible to leave it (the past) behind together with

the identity of which it became constitutive. This temporary, momentary

inclusion is what I called ‘a crafty by-pass navigating past Rusen and LaCapra,’

in which the finesse is that while Rusen and LaCapra want to keep identity by

telling the right story, Ankersmit needs the right story in order to get rid of that

identity – eventually.

This identity shift has three aspects that now need the somewhat longer

exposition I promised earlier. The first aspect concerns the question of why

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Ankersmit needs the crafty bypass to tell the right story; the second concerns the

question of how this story remains constitutive even after getting rid of it; and the

third concerns the question of the creation of the past by this riddance which

hopefully results in answering the question about in what sense can we still talk

about history (that is, the opening question that Nancy posed regarding his own

time). As for the first, the necessity of telling the right story, Ankersmit relies on

Hegel’s insight that in order to be able to leave the past behind,we have to be aware

of what exactly it is we go without. Ankersmit’s example in this respect is the

conflict between Socrates and the Athenians, or more precisely, the conflict as

discussed by Hegel. The conflict involves the conviction of Socrates by the

Athenians, then – after the arguments of Socrates had made their way into their

hearts and minds – the remorse of the latter based on the fact that they had

convicted the one who irrevocably changed them. In Ankersmit’s interpretation,

this means that the remorse of the Athenians is based on the point that by

convicting Socrates, they eventually convicted themselves: by the act of

conviction, they became aware of the fact that, paradoxically, their world is the

world of the one sentenced to death, that this is their newworld or theworld of their

new lives, and not the world what sentenced Socrates to death and in whose name

they so sentenced him. In other words, by the sentencing Socrates, the Athenians

became able to comprehend and understand what they left behind, which – by the

traumatic loss of an old world – opened the way for them to enter into a new one

(Ankersmit 2005, 330–334, 341–343).

Nevertheless, such transition from an old to a new world does not entail –

neither in the case of Runia nor in the case of Ankersmit – that the lost old world

and the old identity do not remain constitutive of the new world and the new

identity. This subsistence of the constitutive dimension is the second aspect of the

identity shift I would like to talk about, and this is the one emphatically exhibited

in the formula ‘one has become what one is no longer’ quoted earlier, in which

self-definition is tied to the past by dissociation and distance as some sort of a

creative negation. Using such negative self-definition bound to the past is

justified by the fact that whatever lies before us – that is, our history, according to

Runia (and Nancy) – cannot be constitutive in any determined sense (it is the

future, after all), and so cannot be included in any sort of self-definition. No doubt

that just as the distance we take from the past, our expectations about the future

are parts of our self-definition. But – following Ankersmit (2005, 324–330) – it

can be held that these are motivated by a ‘desire of being,’ while what is at work

regarding our past left behind is a ‘desire of knowledge.’ Regarding the past, we

know what we have left behind as we have become what we no longer are, while

regarding our expectations about the future (given that our history lies before us;

given that it is coming but is not here and is never here according to Nancy), no

such thing can be known. These things can be known only when our future (our

history before us) is already ‘consumed,’ when we have already committed our

own horrendous acts. And at the moment, these things could be known, they are

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already turned into a past – and they are turned into a past by some ‘them’ who

treat ‘us’ as ‘their’ past but not as their ‘history.’

This issue – the issue of, say, ‘knowing and being’ – introduces the third

aspect mentioned earlier: the creation of the past and the sense in which we can

still talk about history. In the theories of both Runia and Ankersmit, the past as

such is the product of the process they describe and explain. The pattern of the

history set into motion by this process and mechanics is this perpetual

transformation of histories (futures) into pasts and the perpetual openings of

new futures, where the transformations themselves are conducted and directed

by the sublime and the trauma, according to a self-repeating scenario. The

opening histories and the created pasts left behind are telling with respect to the

question of in what sense we can still talk about history. This sense, I think, is

the sense of a double motion of history, or the motion of two histories bound to

each other. On the one hand, there is the history lying in front of us, before us,

that is, ‘our’ history which is the perpetual ‘coming’ in Nancy’s view that

cannot be fulfilled. It is a ‘coming’ instead of a ‘becoming,’ and it is an

unfulfilled ‘coming,’ because at the moment of its potential fulfillment, at the

moment of its ‘becoming,’ it would cease to be our history – it would be

created as a past by a new-born future ‘we,’ in order to dissociate themselves

from us. On the other hand, this dissociation entails a ‘desire of knowledge,’

creating not only a past itself but also a history crafted about this past: historical

writing.

Now, history in this sense, in the sense of historical writing, was not

supposed to be motionless in the last decades: various theories of history

celebrated the endlessness of historical redescription, and a variety of

methodological innovations kept things on the move with a speed hardly ever

seen before. But the history set into motion again I would like to talk about here

– history in the sense of res gestae, in the sense of things happened – entails a

movement of history in the sense of historical writing on a much larger scale than

our daily scholarly ‘turns’ do and, more importantly, binds the two movements

together. It binds them together despite the fact that at the same time a separation

also takes place as history in the sense of res gestae, instead of looking back at

the past as historical writing does, faces towards the future. All in all, here you

have the synchronous motion of two notions of history melted into each other

and engaged in one single dance. These notions of history are just the familiar

ones, except that history as res gestae does not mean ‘things happened’ anymore;

it now means ‘things about to happen’: it means future pasts, or – to stick to

Nancy’s idea of ‘coming’ – coming pasts.

Judging whether such a motion of history is good or bad, or whether we

should welcome it by shouting ‘hooray’, regret it, or let alone, try to stop it, is not

my objective. The only thing I have tried to do in this essay was to point out that

there is a cultural phenomenon we should not leave unnoticed, namely, that a new

quasi-substantive philosophy of history – operating with the notions of

commemoration, trauma, and the sublime – can set history into motion again as it

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reclaims the monstrosities of the world. Setting history into motion again

suspends the suspension of history, but it does so in a way that, at the same time,

pays respect to that primary suspension. The dynamics of pasts left behind and

the coming of future histories (either as Nancy’s communities or as future ‘we’-s)

contradict to the suspension of history only where it is elevated into the level of

being a dynamic, only where it entails the coming of not a particular ‘we’, but the

perpetual, recurring coming of ‘we’-s. Ankersmit’s and Runia’s philosophies of

history, so to say, understand Nancy regarding the question of in what sense it is

possible to talk about history by excluding substantive philosophies of history.

But, in the next moment, whatever they have understood, they transform it into a

pattern by a bold operation. Even though such transformation necessarily entails

overshooting the mark sometimes (Ankersmit’s community, Western civiliza-

tions as such, has not really so much to do with Nancy’s community), what both

Ankersmit and Runia can regard as a pattern running through the past is only

history in the sense of historical writing, while they reserve the other sense of

history for what is not yet, for what is about to happen, motivated by a ‘desire of

being.’ Thus, in the final analysis, the history set into motion again (and the

new quasi-substantive philosophy of history) is no other than the playing off

of the substantive philosophy of history and the suspension of history against

each other.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Nancy (1991a, 1991b, 2000). For an interpretation of Nancy as aphilosopher ‘of the future,’ see Hutchens (2005).

2. Indeed, the case is so regarding even historical approaches that were born out of adissatisfaction with the neglect of the individual level, such as microhistory. SeeMagnusson and Szijarto (2013).

3. The speculative/critical and the substantive/analytical distinctions were introducedby William Walsh and Arthur Danto, respectively. See Walsh (1960, 9–28) andDanto (1985, 1–16).

4. Cf. Danto (1995).5. There is nothing in the notions of presence and historical experience themselves

which would inevitably lead to the direction I discuss in this essay. The road leadingto the suspension of the suspension of history entails a stress on the ontologicaldimensions one attributes to the notions of presence and historical experience.However, by stressing the aesthetic dimensions of these notions, another road can betaken; a road that leads to the renewal of the philosophy of historiography, or, in abroader sense, considering non-academic forms as well, to the renewal of thephilosophy of historical representation. While in this essay I do not wish to take anyof these roads and only intend to register a remarkable phenomenon, the latter wouldbe the road I have already taken (see Simon 2013). Finally, one last remark: takingany of these roads does not entail the complete rejection of theoretical insightsassociated with the lingustic turn; what they entail is rather a challenge only to theabsolutism of language.

6. Certain aspects and elements of the theory that unfolds in this article can also betracked in Runia’s other essays. Apart from his already mentioned texts, see Runia(2010a, 2010b).

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7. In my brief and sketchy treatment of the philosophy of history of the Enlightenment

and German Idealism, I am indebted to the interpretations of Miklos (2011).8. There are two things I would like to mention in relation to this assertion. The first is

that Keith Jenkins, while reading and commenting upon an earlier version of this

essay – for which I am very grateful – remarked that while I answer the ‘Why are we

doing this?’ question, despite claiming so I do not really answer the related ‘Why

now?’ question. I have to concede that he may be right: I do not explicitly discuss the

issue. Nevertheless, I think that I give at least an implied answer, however vague it

might be. It goes like this: if history is set into motion again as a compensation for the

limitless playfulness of language and for the one-sided attention paid to it, then such

compensation can take place only after experiencing a heyday of that exclusive

attention paid to language. In other words, my implied and vague answer to the ‘Why

now?’ question is that because this is the time that we have just experienced that

exclusivity of attention, and because it is in doing so that we have become aware of

its narrow confines. The second thing I would like to mention in relation to the

assertion in the main text is that such compensation does not overrule or supersede

whatever it compensates for. Consequently, no Derrida, Foucault, or any other

intellectual hero of the last decades is to blame for anything for which the secondary

suspension compensates, since this compensation does not challenge practically any

system of ideas. What it might challenge is only the totality and universality claims

of such systems of ideas.9. In fact, Runia (2007, 319) also does not hesitate to claim explicitly that ‘history really

is before us’ (emphasis in the original).10. Cf. Rusen (2004), LaCapra (2007), and Roth (2012).11. In addition to the previous note, see Rusen (2003) and LaCapra (2009).12. Ankersmit makes use of the notion of sublime following Kant and Burke (but not

Schiller) and disregarding contemporary interpretations of it. For a discussion of the

sublime regarding historical writing which engages with its contemporary

interpretations, see Kellner (2009).13. In reading my submission both referees of the journal – whose suggestions I am

thankful – pointed out that my supposedly neutral attitude toward the phenomenon I

describe might not be possible or even desirable. As for the question whether it

would be possible, I wholeheartedly agree with the referees that it is not.

Nevertheless, I still did not wish to take sides in the question in the sense that I do not

wish to position myself neither in the camp of those who are enthusiastic about such a

quasi-substantive philosophy nor in the camp of those who think that history does

(and/or must) stand still. Everyone is free to read a position into my essay, and it is

also not out of the question that subconsciously I have already taken sides. However,

at the moment, and at least consciously, I just cannot decide whether the suspension

of the suspension of history is desirable or not, and until I cannot do so, I do not wish

to disclose anything, simply because I do not have anything to disclose of which I am

aware. The best I can do is to say that my attitude toward the prospect of setting

history into motion is just as ambiguous as Nancy’s, in the same way as Referee 1

explained in their report: just like Nancy, we can be anxious about both the

movement and the non-movement of history. The only thing that seems to be clear

(to answer a question of Referee 1) is that the way in which Ankersmit and Runia set

history into motion is, in my reading, definitely non-progressive, which might

diminish the anxiety concerning the prospect of the movement of history.

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Notes on contributor

Zoltan Boldizsar Simon is a doctoral research associate at the Bielfeld Graduate School inHistory and Sociology. Reflections on the historical-theoretical ‘developments’ of the lastdecades are the prerequisite of his project of building a characteristically aesthetic theoryof history revolving around a peculiar notion of historical experience. An outline of thisproject can be read in the Journal of the Philosophy of History (2013).

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