Naishtat, Historiographic Refocalization

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chapter 2
Historiographic refocalization
and change in the historicity regime
The controversy space surrounding
the representation of past and contemporary
historical catastrophes
Francisco Naishtat
1. Introduction
Reflection on history as a discipline has accompanied the practice of history at

least since the writings of ancient Greek historians. The creation of historiography
as the proper domain where reflection on the discipline (developed by historians,
philosophers, epistemologists, social scientists, and specialists in the humanities)
is a more recent phenomenon that began with the crisis of historicism at the end
of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. From that moment on, historiogra-
phy has continued its development. Today, historiography holds a recognized
place within the discipline of history, and includes the theory and epistemology of
history, the history of history, the border relationship between history and the
social and human sciences, to mention some of its better known dimensions. If
you visit any library specializing in humanities, you’ll become aware of the volume
of historiographic works written during the last decades. Shelves with works on
historiography occupy a considerable space along with other branches of history.
This field of research, however, has not developed in a linear way. Rather it has
grown alongside theoretical controversies of different magnitudes that have shak-
en the contemporary landscape of historical inquiry. Even today this conforms to
the characteristic existential profile of historiography that lives though conflicts of
ideas in a complex metatheorical battlefield.
From this point of view, the analytical tools offered by the model of controver-
sial spaces find a natural domain of application in contemporary historiography.
More than a speciality, this discipline is an agonistic space of disputes that shows
development and increasing complexity, and avoids stagnation or futile rhetoric

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Francisco Naishtat
games. Thus, when applied to historiographic controversies, the notions of com-

mon ground, refocalization, production of new meanings – notions that configure
the theoretical core of the model of controversy spaces (Nudler 2004, 2009) – allow
us to identify and delineate, in every new controversy, the common assumptions
around the focus of the dispute. By the same token, they also help us in tracing the
map of implicit assumptions as well as the group of new meanings generated in
light of controversial dialectics. Above all, this model allows us to apprehend a way
of expanding the field of historiography that neither corresponds with a linear
model of accumulated results, nor with a fragmented and compartmentalized
space, but rather with a complex net of interconnected problems that develops by
gaining in complexity, where the return of apparently forgotten subjects, such as
the return of the event and narration, are not excluded. These U-turns do incorpo-
rate, in any case, the problematic density gained in the distance, so that it will not
be possible to address them with what Tayllerand said about the monarchist repa-
triates of 1815: they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing”.
Based on the concepts of the controversy spaces model devised by Oscar
Nudler, this study will analyze three main historiographic controversies of the last
decades:
a. the controversy over the concept of long durée (long term);
b. the controversy over narrativism; and
c. the controversy over the representation of the past in the light of traumatic
events.
The last controversy, however, leads us to travel beyond the epistemological plane of
the model in question and to explore, in the realm of the double hermeneutic of
theory and agent, the existence of a correlation between a historiographic refocal-
ization – defined by the tension between memory and history – and what is called,
using a term introduced by François Hartog (2003), regime of historicity, which be-
longs to the framework in which memory has played a role in late modern society.
2. Three historiographic controversies and the model of controversy spaces
2.1 The Methodenstreit
It can be stated that the famous Methodenstreit – the dispute over method – of
German historiography and social sciences inaugurated the epistemology of his-
tory at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under the proclaimed
agreement (perhaps the explicit part of a historiographic common ground that
comprised a group of common, tacit, and less visible assumptions over the rejection

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Chapter 2. Historiographic refocalization and change in the historicity regime
of the onto-teleological metaphysics of classical historicism), the emerging histo-

riography of the era was divided between those who were in favor of reducing
history to the methods and epistemology of the natural sciences and those who
defended a clear demarcation between the latter and history, conceived as the
mother of the Geisteswissenschaften, the “Sciences of Spirit”. This controversy
pointed to a radical epistemological turn against the metaphysics of history of
classical idealism. The continuity or discontinuity of history and the natural sci-
ences that became the new focus of the dispute in history were positions not de-
fended from an onto-teleological speculation about the nature of universal history
as a process, but from an analysis of history as a discipline of knowledge. This, in
turn, gave birth to a new conceptual net, distinctive of the Methodenstreit: under-
standing (Verstehen), explanation (Erklären), idiographic (singularly oriented),
nomothetic (law-oriented), value-relationships (Wertbeziehung), historical herme-
neutic, methodological individualism. These epistemological notions are just some
of the new concepts generated in the light of the refocalization of the theory of
history in the context of the epistemological demarcation between history and the
natural sciences (Weber 1992; Aron 1986; Naishtat 1998a).
Thus, the Methodenstreit, born in the German speaking world and originated
in the controversy over the application of abstract methods in economics – which
questioned, with the emergence of Austrian marginalism, the relevance of history
for economics – , immediately acquired metahistorical implications for the status
not only of history but also of the young social and human sciences. This dispute,
however, ends in the interwar period with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the
rise of Nazism. When, in the post-war years, the opposition between explanation
and understanding in history reappeared in the epistemology and theory of histo-
ry, its cultural environment was no longer the German world but the Anglo-Saxon.
In that context, the links with the precedent Methodenstreit were usually not de-
clared, even when the focus of the dispute comprised identical contents that, nev-
ertheless, were enriched by the conceptual contributions of analytic epistemology.
Indeed, Hempel’s deductive-nomological model and the analytical philosophy of
action contributed to create here a more complex agonistic field (Collingwood
1946; Dray 1965; Hempel 1965; Rex 1977; Aron 1986; Cruz 1994; Naishtat 2009).
However, in the post-war years, the controversy around the demarcation be-
tween history and the natural sciences remained confined to the field of the epis-
temology and philosophy of history. On the other hand, professional historians
felt more attracted to a new controversy that originated before the Second World
War in French historical research and that would expand to the whole realm of
western historiography at the end of the 1960s: the controversy over the nature of
historical time, that is to say, the problem of the “long term” (longue durée) and its
problematic relationship with historical events and social change. Even though we

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Francisco Naishtat
will not discuss in depth the “histoire nouvelle” (Le Goff 2006), whose richness
and complexity goes far beyond the limits of this essay, we will begin by outlining
some relevant axes for the categories of the model of controversy spaces.
2.2 The controversy on “the long term” (longue durée)
In his article of 1958 “Longue durée” (Long term), Fernand Braudel (1982) offered
an energetic defence of the long term approach against traditional history an-
chored in the short term (i.e., the study of crises, wars and revolutions), or the
historie évènementielle – which the social historians of the new schools of the An-
nales, with a certain disdain, used to call “straight history” (l’histoire historisante).
By then, traditional history had been in retreat and losing its position in the histo-
riographic field for a long time. Of course, the history of events was still practiced
at large. There is no doubt that it had always dominated the curricula of educa-
tional institutions, and that its national and state-oriented nature gave it a constant
pre-eminence in the media and political sphere of western societies. Nevertheless,
in the battle of ideas inside the historiographic field, those who practiced historie
évènementielle had no new ideas. The few defenders of the “short term” approach
and of the centrality of events in history represented a lost cause.
By the late 50’s everything in the field of human sciences was, indeed, on the
side of the longue durée: the novel proximity of history to ethnology and anthro-
pology, and the contribution of the structural method with the subsequent rejec-
tion of the Eurocentric matrix of European national histories; the discovery of
socio-economic history, with the parallel contribution of demography and geogra-
phy, through a real revolution in the sources with new structures of data arranged
in long term series (prices, climate, earthquakes, epidemics, births, deaths, dis-
eases, daily life); the discovery of “mentalities” as a historiographic object of the
greatest importance (that is to say, the recognition, along with the collective and
conscious beliefs and desires of unconscious inertias); those long term uncon-
scious cultural structures that resist change and that the new historian will call
“mental prisons” (Vovelle 2006) in trying to make the new dimension of the col-
lective unconscious explicit. Thus, when the structural method became dominant
at the beginning of the 60’s, the forces in the dispute were uneven; it can be said
that the new historiography had already defeated the historie évènementielle. The
latter could no longer rest on the ideology of progress, nor on the unilinear causal-
ity of a central narrative plot – completely bankrupt since the consolidation of
structural anthropology – , nor in ideologies in general, whose crises led histori-
ography to focus on objects deprived of heroic implications, that is to say, on a
series of quasi-constants or quasi-invariable historical facts, suitable for research
in a long term perspective – such as death, power, madness, violence, family,

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marital infidelity or, even within the limits of the same long span, epidemic and
sexuality. In this sense, except for some important philosophical debates – such as
the Sartre-Lévi-Strauss debate following the publication of The Savage Mind in
1962 – , from the point of view of the model of controversy spaces, the longue du-
rée approach in historiography had firmly imposed itself and dominated the field
before the debate around the durée re-emerged some years later. On that occasion
it would no longer be a struggle between the old and the new schools, but rather a
new dispute between forces sharing the new common ground regarding the longue
durée and the histoire nouvelle. Thus, the most serious refocalization upon the
longue durée would no longer be a rearguard controversy between the Annales
School and the reaction of the historie évènementielle, but a dispute within the new
historiography regarding the problems raised by the historical temporality of the
longue durée and its problematical relationship with social change. Hence, the fo-
cus of the debate was no longer on the legitimacy of the longue durée and the
structures of “still time” or courte durée – part of the new common ground – , but
rather on the intrusion of the courte durée in the longue durée, that is to say, the
status of historical change and the place of the event in a model of longue durée and
“still time”.
In fact, the risk of compromising history and “throwing it out with the bath
water” became apparent when the slow times became almost still and omnipresent
historiographic times. In the heat of the debate with traditional history, the repre-
sentatives of the new history were indeed so enthusiastic about structural invari-
ants and structuring data in long series that they sometimes lost sight of the di-
mension related to historical change (Vovelle 2006: 94). The paroxysm of this
situation was reflected in a colloquium held in Göttingen in 1974 on the French
Revolution, which gathered a group of members of the Annales School. Michel
Vovelle comments that, by the end of that meeting, any participant who had paid
attention to all the dissertations could have wondered whether the French Revolu-
tion had actually taken place; not because the episodes of 1789 had been denied or
questioned, but because the model of the longue durée either gave more impor-
tance to the continuities with the Ancien Régime at the expense of changes, or
treated theses changes as part of slow processes of modernization which preceded
the revolutionary episodes; conceiving, in that manner, the latter as nothing but a
simple footnote to long term processes (Vovelle 2006: 95).
Of course, it was not the scandal of overlooking the French Revolution what
served as a warning against this tendency; it was not a corporative defence of the
historian’s profession either. In fact, the volume of work and enthusiasm that fol-
lowed the emergence of the Annales School was far from threatened; even though
Braudel, in the context of the structuralist revolution, had thought it necessary to
warn against any assimilation of the historian into the fields of anthropology,

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Francisco Naishtat
ethnology or sociology1. On the contrary, it was a certain awareness of ceding

again to structural determinism, with the resulting loss of the dimension of his-
torical change and the subsequent miss, so to speak, of the intrusion of the short
time into the long one. Leaving crisis and changes aside, any dialectical under-
standing of the two historical temporalities par excellence – the long term and the
short one – was precluded. In this context a productive tension between event and
structure took place, a tension that was to take historiography and social sciences
into a path delimited not by a comfortable reconciliation with the old school, but
by a series of new meanings which are the result of the abovementioned refocal-
ization on the question of the longue durée. In the years that followed the events
of 1968, attention to and refocalization on the tension between structure and
event introduced the necessity of getting rid of any vulgar determinism. When, in
1978, Jacques Le Goff compiled the ten articles about the histoire nouvelle – that,
at the time, offered the most accurate state of the art on the new French structural
historiography – , the idea that there was a return of the event was not taboo any-
more and, indeed, the status of events was discussed and problematized within
the Annales school sometimes reluctantly, and at other times in a celebratory
manner (Le Goff 2006: 15–16). The point in debate was no longer whether there
are relevant events worthy of historical research, but how original and “creative”
can historical events actually be when observed from the distance of the long
term. Nevertheless, the creative and disruptive dimension associated with the
event was to be somehow the crack through which the structuralist insistence on
the permanent would cede to the poststructuralist affirmation of action and the
incompleteness of structures. Meanwhile, the recovery of Saussure’s ideas con-
cerning the dialectics of language and speech – langue and parole – by the struc-
tural method, or similar ideas from Piaget’s dialectics, and even the Gödelian
mathematical results on the limits of structural languages, had already arrived to
the social and human sciences, along with Althusser’s ideas on overdetermina-
tion. As a result, the intrusion of the short time into the long one began to be ex-
plored in terms of the reciprocal influence of event and structure; a path that was
to be followed in the 80’s by Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration, the most
prominent dialectical articulation of structure and human action; one that avoids
both structuralist reductionism and idealist voluntarism (Giddens 1984).
1. P. Vilar writes: “Braudel voudrait bien se laisser séduire. Ces nouveautés vont dans son sens,
le sens de la résistance au changement. Mais il aime son métier. Temps long, l’historien veut bien.
Plus de temps du tout, il n’aurait qu’à disparaître...” (“Braudel would like to be seduced (NT: by
the structures). These novelties go in the same sense, the sense of the resistance to change. But
he adores his job. The historian can accept the long term. But the absence of time would take to
the disappearance of the historian”, Pierre Vilar, “Histoire marxiste, histoire en construction”, in
Faire de l’histoire, I, Paris, Gallimard, p. 195, cited in (Vovelle 2006: 94).

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If the return of the event gave birth to a dialectics that we can understand as a
non-reductionist relation between two different conceptual regimes of historical
time and, as a consequence, as a corresponding increase in the complexity of the
initial controversy between traditional history and histoire nouvelle – focused on
the opposition between the long and short time – , the return of narration, in turn,
appeared in the same decade as a much more basic and hostile questioning of the
scientific and objective aspirations of the new historiography of Annales on the
basis of a narrativist interpretation of history.
2.3 The controversy over narrativism
On the one hand, to the Annales School, narration per se was already a more sig-
nificant and antagonistic enemy than the mere event, as was made clear in 1978
when Jacques Le Goff published his state of the art argument in Histoire nouvelle.
After reintroducing with a certain approval the event and greeting its return, he
did not hesitate to firmly reject any concession to narrative history. He then
claimed that it would be necessary to “kill it twice”.2 On the other hand, narrativ-
ism, updated with the contributions of structural semiotics and the poststructur-
alist linguistic turn, did not avoid the conflict when, pointing to the hard core of
the historiography of the Annales, proclaimed, not without a certain provocation,
the continuity of history with rhetoric and literature.
According to the Annales School, narration is connected to the old-fashioned
and decrepit model of the Historia Magistra, that is to say, to a rhetoric based on
the epic account of the great deeds and the great biographies. It conceives history
as a monumental gallery of heroes and battles in the service of a dubious civic
cause that barely hides the bourgeois policy of national reconciliation, a policy
seeking the concealment of the subterranean oppression of society, of its games of
domination and of the marginal subjects ignored by the rhetorical forms of official
histories (such as the insane, women, the plague victims, the colonized and every
subordinate victim3). For narrativism, in turn, the objective claims of the new his-
tory were naively realistic and accepted in an uncritical fashion the positivistic
2. On the rejection of narration by Annales, Le Goff writes: “Il reste que l’histoire-récit est à
mes yeux un cadavre qu’il ne faut pas ressusciter car il faudrait le tuer une seconde fois” (Le Goff
2006: 16).
3. On narration as an epic of the victorious, Walter Benjamin once wrote: “The historical
materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called “Once upon a time” in histori-
cism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum
of history” (Benjamin 1969: 262). On Benjamin and narrativism, (Naishtat 2008). On the “small
voices” of the subordinate in the new historiography of post-colonial Studies (Guha 2001).

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Francisco Naishtat
claim of the neutrality of form, as if the historical past was already there, in flesh
and bones, in front of the historian in order to be collected and explained by the-
ory. Instead, according to this approach, it is the historian who, in a Copernican
fashion, inscribes his rhetoric and narrative in a past that is subdetermined by data
and sources – thus making explicit the conceptual and stylish mediation of the
historian.4
Who’s right? Perhaps no one is mistaken. Annales is right in criticizing the old
epic historiography of dates and battles in favor of deeper historical structures – an
issue that is in the agenda because of the proximity of history to the social and hu-
man sciences – that enable to claim for history a dimension of objectivity based on
the new building of the sources and in the scrupulosity of historiographic research,
factors that radically differentiate history from fictional novel and literature. How-
ever, narrativism, on the other hand, by focusing on history writing and its own
specificity, has illuminated an aspect of historiography that had been overlooked
in previous controversies, whose focus went from the nature of historical causality
and its relationship with the intentionality of action – with the corresponding op-
position between explanation and understanding – , to the nature of historical
time and the articulation between structure and event; a path that had never con-
sidered the writing of history as something different from a stylistic ornament
without any epistemological relevance.
The narrativist thesis states that narrative writing is ontologically intrinsic in
the way we must compose the past, that is to say, of making the past a human past.
Hence, history could not be deprived of its narrative form without also losing self-
reflection on human agency, through the humanization of time in its narrative
form. Arthur Danto was the first in pointing out the existence of what he termed
narrative sentences, the bricks with which the historiographic building is erected
and the way the past presents itself (Danto 1968). Paul Ricoeur, following Danto,
pointed out that the narrativization of time is not a superfluous stylistic caprice.
On the contrary, it is part of the human configuration of time and it is connected
to the operation through which we can understand ourselves as beings possessing
a reflective identity (the Heideggerian Selbstständigkeit of Dasein). This is what
Ricoeur incisively called narrative identity (Ricoeur 1985: 443 and 1992: VI).
Finally, Hayden White radicalized the previous theses. He stated that the tropes,
figures and structural modalities of narration, subtedermined by data, are con-
stituents of historical events. As a result, every event carries a narrative compo-
nent, present in historiographic activity, which could have been different from
what it is in diverse accounts. It is a sort of an a posteriori formalism, that is to say,
a defence of the significance and active value of the form, as in Kant, but without
4. For a brief presentation of White’s thesis, see (White 2000). Also, see (White 1987).

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the transcendental and necessary contribution of each figure or specific trope with
regards to its material data. Therefore, it is necessary to stress, contrary to the most
popularized interpretation of White’s narrativism (which falsely conceives it as
mere fictionalism bordering on metaphysical irrealism), that White does not deny
the existence of facts that are independent of the observer. Facts and evidence are
also conclusive for White. It is not a matter of denying the reality of the past. What
is denied instead is the idea that data determine by themselves the historical event;
for example, the idea that a given course of action constitutes by itself a “revolu-
tion” – something that, on the contrary, is the result of the formal composition of
historical narration.
Now, if we consider White’s proposal carefully, we can differentiate its onto-
logical position, defined by a sort of internal realism (Putnam 1975) – that is to
say, by the emphasis on the subjective (narrative) component of the historical
event – from its provocative connotation, derived from his defence of the continu-
ity between literature and history, a proposition that is not always assumed with
the same decisiveness throughout his works. What we mean is that the continuity
between literature and history does not follow from the ontological thesis of
White’s narrativism. The subjective load of the event, qua narrative construct, does
not eliminate the relevance of data, sources and historiographic evidence even
though they subdetermine the kind of event resulting from the peculiar narrative
construction. While the historian has a plus to prove in his theoretical procedure,
based on rigorously produced and empirically falsifiable data, the fictional author,
in turn, can do without these constraints and make his compositions based on the
free game of fiction.
In this sense, the narrative relativity that White gives to the event is not very far
from the “value relationship” the neo-Kantians of the Baden school – such as
Heinrich Rickert and Emil Lask – granted, at the beginning of the twentieth century,
to their historische Individuen (historical individualities). The latter makes reference
not to individuals in the sense of physical people, but precisely to events qua histo-
riographic objects. Events, according to the neo-Kantians of Baden, had Wertbezie-
hung, a value-relationship, something non-deducible from data but inscribed by the
historian on the basis of his moral interests (Rickert 1986). At this point, it could be
said that, for the neo-Kantians of Baden, value is a transcendental a priori with uni-
versal validity while, for White, narration is always contingent and rhetoric.
However, Max Weber, heir of the school of Baden, had already weakened the
claim to universal validity of the values that conform the Wertbeziehung and, with
his concept of “historical ideal type”, presented a vision where the values acting in
the selective conformation of the historical ideal type were always contingent and
particular (Weber 1990). Nonetheless, Weber never deduced from his use of ideal
types, nor from his peculiar treatment of Rickert’s Wertbeziehung, the conclusion

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Francisco Naishtat
that interpretative history was a sort of literary fiction. On the contrary, in 1904,
just one year after Rickert published Die Grenzen..., Weber published his famous
article on objectivity in the social sciences (where history is still the model par
excellence), cautious about any elimination of historical objectivity (Weber 1990).
With this brief detour, we did not mean to minimize the originality of White’s
narrativism. The latter, in fact, presupposes the linguistic turn and the emphasis on
the writing of history, two elements that were absent in the neo-Kantian school and
in Max Weber’s interpretativism. We have only tried to mitigate its fictionalism in
order to be able to foresee that the hard core of the narrativist thesis (i.e., the sub-
jective-rhetoric component of events), does not eliminate the objectivity of histori-
ography, but rather transforms it into a singular type of objectivity, different of and
irreducible to the objectivity of other sciences. From this point of view, White’s ar-
gument, more than fictionalist, is anti-reductionist, and restores the great tradition
that, from Windelband to Collingwood, defends the singularity of history. The
originality of White and the narrativists is taking the linguistic turn as a point of
departure, with a refocalization on the writing of history. Braudel himself had
warned against the assimilation of history into any other human science. Although
he promoted the complementarities and close cooperation on the borders
(Braudel 1976), he opposed any reduction of history. Consequently, the controversy
around narration, far from being a regression into the statu quo prior to the Annales
(as some interpretations have alleged [Noiriel 1996]), can be seen, with the help of
the model of controversy spaces, as an increase in the complexity of the original
controversy on the singularity of history and its irreducible character. We want to
state that this is not an isolated debate but a dispute connected, through the contro-
versy space, to the controversy on the singularity of history as such. While for White
and the narrativists, history maintains a unity from Herodotus to Braudel (in terms
of the narrativization of the past), for Annales there is a fundamental break within
historiography between the Histoire Nouvelle and the old history; a break that the
narrativists minimized, assuming it to be a mere change of the narrative style as-
sociated with a new modernist Weltanschauung that offer new forms and tropes for
the composition of the event and its particular way of being narrated.
3. The representation of the past in the light of traumatic

events and the ethical-legal turn in history
3.1 The weak flank of narration
The antinarrativist front in the historiographic controversy space does not limit
itself to the trench of the Histoire Nouvelle and the corresponding counterpoint

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between objective and subjective history. On the contrary, it implies another flank
of more recent emergence, concerned with the adequacy of narration in the repre-
sentation of contemporary traumatic events. The latter does not refer to any aes-
thetic issue but deals with a question of ethical and logical limits. Certain facts of
the 19th and 20th centuries – what we may call catastrophes or historical traumatic
events, for lack of better terms – produced a wide gap between narrative historiog-
raphy, and the historiography of memory and testimony. Consequently, there has
been a turn in contemporary historiography characterized by a refocalization
around the tension between memory and history. This counterpoint between
memory and history has remained neglected in the common ground of historio-
graphic space under an implicit consensus that states that memory does not actu-
ally belong to history but, at best, to its antechamber.
Of all contemporary catastrophes, it is the Shoah, i.e. the extermination of
Jews in Europe by the Nazi regime, which has particularly attracted historio-
graphic attention in recent years, opening up new controversies about the repre-
sentation of the traumatic past. However, the list of other extremely traumatic
events is long. If they are not comparable to the latter, they are at least equally
pertinent: the terror unleashed during the First World War by, amongst other
war crimes, the systematic use of mustard gas and other poisonous gases on the
battle field; the nuclear bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the colonial-
ist wars and crimes of the XX century; the forced disappearances of people by
state terrorism in Argentina and the Southern cone of Latin America; the mas-
sacre of Srebrenica in Bosnia during 1995; the terrorist attacks against civil pop-
ulations on a massive scale, such as the one against the Jewish society AMIA in
Buenos Aires on July the 18th, 1994; the attacks of September 11 in New York; of
March the 11th, in Madrid; and July the 7 th, 2005, in London; also, Cambodia,
Rwanda and other genocides that took place in the second half of the last cen-
tury. These episodes are certainly very different; they were the result of diverse
historical causes and took place in diverse political contexts. However they all
have one feature in common: the application of a deliberate and massive brutal-
ity that goes far beyond the use of military and political violence of conventional
war. This allows us to define these crimes as unprescribable and consider them as
crimes against humanity, a concept created by the Nuremberg Trials against the
Nazi criminals. In addition, these events belong to a past that is still present, “a
past that does not want to pass away” (die nicht vergehen will) (Nolte, 1986) and
opens, from this point of view, a new time in historiography: the history of the
present time.

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Francisco Naishtat
3.2 The notion of history in the present time and its legal matrix
The dimension of unprescribable crime against humanity – inaugurated in the

Nuremberg Trials in the immediate post-war era, and in the prosecution and
sentence of Eichmann in the 60’s in Israel – has therefore three features that intro-
duce an important novelty in historiography:
a. The traumatic past is a past “that does not want to pass”5 and, from this point
of view, a kind of present-past which cannot be referred to with the “once
upon a time” (es war Einmal) of narration that Arthur Danto defined as inher-
ent in a consummated event. The present-past character of the traumatic event
does not just imply a current state of affairs, such as a fact from everyday poli-
tics; on the contrary, its nature is determined by its legal imprescriptibility,
preventing its closure under the narrative rationalization of the “once upon a
time” formula. The reconciling mourning in the account of such facts is hence
impossible6. To narrate is, somehow, to weave the facts in order to make the
event understandable and, therefore, to rationalize it from a certain point of
view. To narrate, as Ricoeur correctly states, is to proceed to a dialectical rec-
onciliation of discordance under a regime of poetic agreement (Ricoeur 1985
and 1992). However, as the problem of the historization of the Shoah – raised
in the Historikerstreit in Germany in the mid-80’s – demonstrates, the trau-
matic event opposes the harsh testimony of mere memory to any rationaliza-
tion. Hier ist kein Warum (“Here there is no why”) seems to be the leitmotiv of
circumspection adopted by many historians and artists facing the catastrophe
of the Shoah. From this point of view, there must be a certain modification in
the role of the historian and of historiography: dealing with such facts, their
role would not be to narrate or to explain, but rather to testify.
b. Therefore, the second feature that the legally unprescribable nature gives the
traumatic event and its relationship with historiography is historiographical
juridification. Historiography is questioned as a witness in a process that does
5. Precisely, the so-called Historikerstreit or “historian’s quarrel” starts in 1986–1987 with

Ernst Nolte’s provocative theses stating that Nazism is a “past that does not want to pass” (the
article by Nolte was entitled “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will”) and that it is necessary to
stop referring to the uniqueness of that condition and understand that the Nazi regime has been
a reaction against the “soviet totalitarianism”, which was established before and accounts for its
emergence. These ideas were forcefully rejected by Habermas, who accused Nolte of pretending
to normalize the German past. See (Nolte 1986) and (Habermas 1987). Also, for a critical review
of the Historikerstreit and the subsequent controversies in Germany around Nazism and the
Shoah, see (Traverso 2005: 80–107).
6. On a psychoanalytical perspective around the impossibility of mourning in relationship
with certain traumatic events, see (Allouche 1997).

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not include its own court, the one associated with the universal history that
Hegel and Marx, after Schiller, considered the essence of the world history
(Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht –“world history is the world court”)
(Schiller 1992; Koselleck 2004: 26; Traverso 2005: 75). On the contrary, it is
questioned in a court of law instituted by the dynamics of the national and
international conformation of human rights. If the idea of history-court cor-
responded to a teleology of history which had replaced mutatis mutandis the
transcendental theodicy of the Judaic-Christian salvation by the immanent
instance associated with the secular court of history, the idea of testimony-
history moves into a vocabulary that is the complete opposite, where the cen-
tre is no longer the future but a present-past focused around the notions of
human rights, crimes against humanity, victim, executor and witness.
c. The third historiographic aspect connected with the dimension of the present-
past associated to traumatic events is a refocalization around memory vis a vis
a questioning of its traditional role as a devalued antechamber of history. That
memory was always undervalued (a perception that not even vanguardist ver-
sions of postmodern narrativism cast doubt upon) is something evident if we
recall the tacit consensus and hence the common ground shared by the op-
ponents involved in the controversy over narrativism analyzed in the previous
section. Memory is traditionally perceived as deceptive by the objectivists
while it is accused of not producing hermeneutic sense by the narrativists,
who insist on the radical contrast between chronicle and annals, on one side,
and narration on the other (Danto 1968: 112–143; White 1987: 17–41). There-
fore, its role is considered below the written document as a source of historio-
graphic data and below narration as a source of hermeneutic meaning. At best,
memory is a supplementary tool and, in this consensus, it is not pondered as
a serious part of history (Ricoeur 2006). And yet, given the historiographic
controversy around the traumatic events as events that do not pass away and
that are, in that sense, still contemporary, historians were taken to give mem-
ory a significant place, and to treat oral testimony as an important source for
its research. In that context, the crude opposition between history and memo-
ry was followed by a dialectics between them. This can be seen in the careful
research of Saul Friedländer on the extermination of the Jews in Europe dur-
ing the Nazi regime (Friedländer 1997), or the film on the Shoah by Claude
Lanzmann (Traverso 2005: 69; Lanzmann 1987) where testimony and memo-
ry of survivors plays a central role in historiography. As a result, the historian
himself has been giving a more and more important role to the testimony of
victims following Paul Celan’s dictum: “nobody bears witness for the witness”,
‘Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen’ (Celan 1971).

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Francisco Naishtat
3.3 The singularity of the Shoah as refocalization

and its impact on the narrative controversy
Studies on the Shoah have appeared as such in historiography long after it actually
occurred, that is to say, only since the 80’s, in particular in Germany and in the US.
And they have given birth to a new controversy where the absolute singularity of
the Shoah becomes a focal element. This does not mean that historians of the Nazi
period ignored, before the 80’s, the extermination of the European Jews by the
Nazis; rather, though not ignored, it was not the central theme of the research on
Nazism, and it lacked the dimension of the absolute singular that it gained since
then (Traverso 2005), even though the episode was considered of the outmost im-
portance and was acknowledged as genocide. Furthermore, Nazism was predomi-
nantly considered, during the first decades of the post-war period, as a particular
German type of European fascism; this was seen as the wider, relevant plot for the
historiographical study of such a heartrending period of contemporary history.
The primacy given to the Shoah in recent historiography is therefore a turn in
western intellectual history, certainly not devoid of roots in the political context of
the last decades but analyzable, from our point of view, as historiographic refocal-
ization in the proper sense.
Today, studies of the Shoah are a historiographic discipline. In fact, in the his-
tory of Shoah historiography, within a few decades, the Holocaust goes from a
marginal position, as an episode in the history of European fascism not yet singu-
larized with a proper name, to a central historiographic place in which the extermi-
nation of the European Jews by the Nazis is named as a unique event in itself, thus
initiating the debate concerning its absolute singularity and becoming the focal
point of a new controversy. This debate both called in question again previous
historiography and had an impact on contemporary politics, generating an un-
precedented controversial refocalization around the question of the singular and
exceptional character of the catastrophe tugged at by two opposing theses: (a) as
absolute singularity, of which there can only be testimonies but about which there
can be no counterfactual reasoning nor empirical comparisons in terms of contex-
tual relativization within a wider historical process, as European fascism and anti-
Semitism; (b) as relative singularity, that is to say, as an event susceptible of contex-
tual comparison and explanation by means of causal-historical reasoning7.
This debate bursts into the field of narrativism and produces, in the narrativity
controversy, an actualization (aggiornamento), if not a refocalization, in the
7. Needless to say, singularity is not understood here in the sense of the idiographic sciences,
set forth by Windelband, that is, as opposed to the causal-nomologic sciences, but in the sense
of discontinuity: the singularity of what does not admit comparison or contextualization with
reference to a wider chain of events.

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framework of the historiographic dispute over historical exceptionality and abso-

lute singularity mentioned above. Paul Ricoeur confesses, at the beginning of the
new century, that he had overlooked the subject of memory and testimony in his
seminal works of the 80’s and 90’s, and declares that the writing of Memory, His-
tory, Forgetting was meant to fill that gap (Ricoeur 2006: 1). Memory and testi-
mony enjoy a pride of place in the latter book, giving the subject matter of trauma
(and its correlates, testimony and judgment, also absent in Time and Narrative and
Oneself as Another), an important place as well. Hayden White, on the other hand,
was driven to admit that there are certain kinds of events, that he calls “modernist
events”, of which the Shoah is the paradigmatic case, that only admit a literal de-
scription and rule out the figurative tropological representation of which any ac-
countable event is capable (White 2000). This debate is parallel to the aesthetic
discussions that took place around the construction of two famous Berlin monu-
ments to the Shoah in the last decades: Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum,
inaugurated in 1998, and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial in Honour of the Victims of
the Shoah, inaugurated in 2005. Indeed, the impossibility of representation and
narrativization appears as the central themes of both projects, opening an aes-
thetic discussion that crosses over the border of art and involves historiography
and ethics. With regards to White’s new iconoclastic stance, in terms of a literal
representation lacking all figurative component – that the American theorist sees
as the characteristic of the historization of traumatic events– it seems that it con-
tradicts his original position, in which there was a constitutive interplay between
tropology and brute fact fired by the pluralism of form and the subjective plotting
ways that were, according to the early White, always underdetermined by the brute
historical facts. If, on the contrary, from now on a class of absolute facts for which
that interplay is not valid is admitted – so that there would be an overdetermina-
tion of the form by the singular content of a unique catastrophe – then it seems
that the radical relativistic core of the original narrativist position vanishes. There
is no space for the interplay between the narrative plot and the brute fact, interplay
that was a basic claim of White’s narrativism based on the radical contingency of
the historiographic forms, and therefore on the irreducible pluralism of the narra-
tive tropes. That this stance challenges the core of White’s theses has been noticed
by Cecilia Macón and Verónica Tozzi (Macón and Tozzi 2005), who try to give
back its coherence to narrativism by defending the principle of narrativity even in
the case of “modernist events”. They argue that narration is a human form of deal-
ing with pain, trauma, and memory gaps produced by violence, and that it is the
proper form of its transmission. Yet, this argument, based on an anthropological
vision inspired in Ricoeur’s position in the 80’s, is not enough to save the narrativ-
ist stance, since it passes by the true difficulty and at the same time hides the depths
of the problems, that is to say, the brutal and violent dissolution of experience that

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Francisco Naishtat
characterizes the traumatic event as a fact that is ontologically impossible to over-

come, a fact that cannot be narratively organized to match a comforting plot in
which the epic attribution and the action and experience ascriptions are possible.
It is thus a fact that can never take the form of the subject of experience itself and
hence of the narrative identity that, here, facing the catastrophe officiates only in
the way of the es war einmal, of the “once upon a time”; that is to say, it officiates as
a mask and rhetorical self-delusion by means of a narrative tropology and a com-
forting rhetoric that has lost all of its power in the presence of the modern break
of the historical trauma. This impossibility had already been highlighted by Walter
Benjamin at the end of the 30’s, not with regards to the Nazi extermination camps,
of which he had no knowledge8, but with regards to the traumatic events of the
First World War, which he perceived as emblematic of the dissolution of experi-
ence, and hence of the explosion of narrative (Benjamin 2002). The place of narra-
tive was taken, according to the Berlin philosopher, by a form of transmission that
cannot be narrative but only that of shock (Naishtat 2008), visible in the act of re-
memoration. This kind of transmission is drawn from a dialectic between the ana-
mnesis of recalling and the disruptive awakening of the involuntary memory,
which Benjamin takes from Marcel Proust as part of an aesthetic modernism that
was, in his opinion, the diametrical opposite of narrative:
The second fortified position of historicism is evident in the idea that history is
something which can be narrated. In a materialist investigation, the epic moment
will always be blown apart in the process of construction (Benjamin 2003: 406).
Precisely, the later Hayden White underscores and agrees with the precedent anti-
narrative position of Benjamin (White 2000) insisting on the impossibility of nar-
rating certain contemporary events. This agreement is based on Benjamin’s argu-
ment of “the fall of experience”, equally central in other contemporary authors
such as Giorgio Agamben (Agamben 2007). But, in the meanwhile, the flank
opened by historical trauma in the narrativist camp is an accomplished fact.
Thus the Shoah appears as an ontological limit that bursts in the controversy
space of narrativist tropological relativism and demands – several decades after
the actual Nazi extermination – a refocalization around the category of the abso-
lute singular. Hayden White can hold to its liminal character as to a life raft and
state that literal form is precisely the limit form of the narrative variation, as a kind
of writing degree zero, but in the interim the ironist and pluralist game of the form
has been questioned in the benefit of an overdetermining intrusion of modernity,
absent in postmodernist narrativism. The absolute fact, kindred to the intrusion of
8. What Benjamin did actually conceive was the idea of progress as catastrophe, namely in his
famous Ninth Thesis on The Concept of History, through his allegorical use of Paul Klee’s paint-
ing “Angelus Novus”. See: (Benjamin 1969: 257–258).

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evil in history, breaks into contemporary historiography and soaks through it. This
leads the narrative controversy in new and unexpected directions.
The problems raised by memory and its relation to history opened up an ex-
panding controversy space with a net of new focuses: if on the one hand memory
is related to the singularity of the event that the conventional historiographic re-
construction dispels, on the other hand it is always polyphonic and so triggers a
conflicting clash of memories that opens new horizons of problems for the histo-
rian. These have been evident in the contemporary episodes of subordinated
memories that brush official history “against the grain”, as Benjamin once wrote:
... if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The an-
swer is inevitable: with the victor. (...) A historical materialist therefore dissociates
himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against
the grain. (Benjamin 1969: 256).
The increased complexity in the historiographic focus due to the entrance of

memory, which in turn was brought about by the attention paid to the traumatic
event, is evident in the renewed interest in collective memory, which was a mar-
ginal historiographic subject before the aforementioned debates. Collective mem-
ory is placed at the centre in present day discussions, leading to a revival of old
critically important writings, such as the seminal study of the subject by Maurice
Halbwachs (Halbwachs 1950). The politics of memory, the uses of memory, the
clash of memories as well as the excess of memory and forgetting have become
familiar themes in recent historiography, displacing narration from the centre
stage position accorded to it in the last quarter of the past century.
It is apparent, however, that all of these subjects do not just proceed from the
historiographic field but belong to the epoch’s horizon and excite not only aca-
demic historians but societies as well – permanently driven by problems associated
with memory, identity, celebrations and heritages in ways that can even border
excess and lead to suspicions regarding identity manipulation. This leads us to a
demand for a critical examination of the “memory boom”, and to raise questions
regarding its relation with the contemporary historicity regime, that is to say, the
way in which our era articulates the past, the present and the future.
3.4 Historiographic refocalization and change in the historicity regime
The notion of refocalization, as it is thought within the model of controversy spac-

es, operates at the metatheoretical level in order to understand, through the dialec-
tics of their controversies, the complexity of the developments of science and
philosophy. However, since we deal with the interpretative social sciences, theo-
retical controversies do not remain isolated from social agents, as in an experimental

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Francisco Naishtat
laboratory; impermeable to the radiations of the object, in a level immune to the

intrusion of the agents’ understanding of their social reality and even of social
theories. On the contrary, theories are completely permeable to hegemonic
schemes and conditionings of the object, just like the conflict of interpretations
experienced by social agents as interpreters are permeable to social theories and
their controversies. Therefore, between theories and agents qua interpreters takes
place what Anthony Giddens called double hermeneutic: theories interpret inter-
preters that interpret theories (Giddens 1976).
This double hermeneutic finds in the subject matter of historiography a very
clear expression, since history is not just a type of knowledge of the past, but a way
of being of human beings as agents that introduce themselves in time and consti-
tute modes of articulating the temporal dimensions of the past, the present and the
future. Martin Heidegger called this ontological feature of Dasein her historicity. By
that he meant that Dasein is not just something that belongs to time along with
other entities, but a privileged entity whose proper mode of existence is that of
understanding herself in her own being (Heidegger 1996), and certainly not sub
specie aeternitatis but as history, as understanding historically displayed in time, so
that the understanding of the being of the human is the ontological apprehension
of Verstehen qua historicity. There, hermeneutics goes from the historiography of
men to the ontology of the Dasein, and defines the hermeneutic circle that is an
ontological privilege of men. Hans-Georg Gadamer finds in it the theoretical point
of departure for his own contemporary conception of philosophical hermeneutics
(Gadamer 1975).
Nevertheless, we can ask ourselves, associating – with philological caution–
Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle with Giddens’s double hermeneutic,
whether this ontological hermeneutic, exposed to changing ways of understand-
ing historical time, can be correlated with the metatheorical forms that express
themselves as historiographical refocalizations. We are referring to the interrela-
tion between the epistemological refocalizations within historiography, on the one
hand, and the ontological hermeneutic of Dasein, on the other. The study of this
subject exceeds the limits of this work and would require a widening of the model
of controversy spaces in the direction of conceptual tools that enable us to corre-
late refocalizations and their conceptual networks with the ontology of the agent
and her self-understanding as history. In the present state of the art of the contro-
versy spaces model this can only be signalled, and here we can only sketch it out as
an open and problematic question. However, we can borrow the notion of regime
of historicity that the historian François Hartog (2003) has developed to specify
heuristically some clues that would allow us to get on the track of the desired
correlation.

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Hartog defines a regime of historicity (régime d’historicité) as a logical and

cultural model or matrix in which the temporal dimensions are knotted and ar-
ticulated in a very specific manner. The primary source of inspiration for Hartog’s
development is Reinhart Koselleck’s Conceptual History and the theoretical
scheme that the German historian builds in order to characterize the breaks be-
tween: (a) the historiographic matrix of the Historia Magistra (antiquity); (b) Ju-
deo-Christian Sacred History (middle ages): (c) the Enlightenment philosophy of
history (modernity) (Koselleck 2004). Koselleck uses his concepts of space of expe-
rience (Erfahrungsraum) and horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizon) to depict
those breaks. In a very simplified manner, antiquity places hope in the origin situ-
ated in the past, and sees in its alternated recurrence, through a peculiar cyclical
conception of time, the possibility of Historia Magistra, that is, of the pedagogy
that the past introduces in the future, orienting the present on the base of history
as the teacher of life. This allowed for improvement through the imitation of illus-
trious lives and exemplar political experiences, thus honoring in the public politi-
cal realm the conditions of common existence. History, for the ancients, does not
repeat itself in exactly the same terms, and the almost infinitesimal difference
within a homogeneous cultural framework of present, past and future allows for the
projection into the future of the light of the past, that is, the prudential, practical
and political horizon that historiography provides through its illustrious examples
and its instructing rhetoric.
The middle ages, on the other hand, separate the profane and secular space of
experience, devoid of meaning, from the sacred history of heavenly salvation.
Through that move, the only possible hope is not on the side of the Mundus, con-
sidered only as transitory, but on the Messianic side of salvation. Thus, the earthly
space of experiences remains, so to speak, isolated and immune with regards to the
horizon of expectations, entirely placed in the afterlife. This abyss between an
earthly space of experiences, empty and fragmented, and a heavenly horizon of
expectations that, as universal history of salvation, represents the only source of
universal meaning, vanishes in turn with modernity, where changes will be in-
creasingly referred to the earthly world and will end up giving birth to the image
of men as makers of history, having the power to generate revolutionary changes in
their social environment. This is, according to Koselleck, the path of universal his-
tory: from a history conceived in the theological and transcendental terms of
heavenly salvation to a universal history conceived in the immanent terms of the
Enlightenment philosophy of history. Needless to say, these are all typical-ideal
constructs that do not imply pure or logically univocal historical processes.
Taking these categories as his starting point, François Hartog opposes
the modern regime of historicity, which he conceives in Koselleck’s terms, where
the future lightens the present and the past, according to the Enlightenment

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Francisco Naishtat
historiographic matrix, to a regime of historicity that Hartog calls “presentism”

(“Présentisme”) in which it is no longer the future that illuminates the present and
the past but the present that illuminates the past and the future (Hartog 2003:
113–144, 207–218; see also Rabotnikof 2007). The presentist matrix invoked by
Hartog has several socio-cultural and political features with which we have only
recently become familiar, since they are characteristic of globalization, a complex
risk society and an “end of ideologies” era. Here we can only mention them in a
disordered and allusive manner:
a. the disappearance of social revolution from the World historical horizon of
expectations;
b. the simultaneousness, contiguity and planetary clash of times, traditions and
heterogeneous cultural rhythms, with the primacy of simultaneousness over
diachrony;
c. the restructuring of world political expectations, centered around the care of
life in the face of the collateral threats of contemporary industrial and techno-
logical civilization, where the principles of responsibility (Prinzip Verantwor-
tung) and caution replace the principle of hope (Prinzip Hoffnung);
d. the inclusion of the ecological dimension right at the centre of the political
agenda, around the theme of the survival of the human species, through com-
plex ecological and geopolitical problems such as natural catastrophes and
collateral damage arising from the technological global dispositive: nuclear
energy, emissions of carbon dioxide, weather change, water shortages, etc.;
e. the touristic and commercial orientation of the notion of “historical heritage”
and the resulting presentist use of memory;
f. the primacy obtained by the notion of memory and celebration to the detri-
ment of historical deepening;
g. the presentist use of collective forgiveness with regard to past events;
In all of these dimensions Hartog perceives the dominance of presentism in the
expectations matrix, since the quality of the future is subordinated to the care for
the permanence of what we value in the present, not admitting any sacrifices if it
is not for the present itself, as a value in its own right. The usual slogan on the “end
of ideologies” and its replacement by the expectation of politics defined exclu-
sively as efficient expert intervention as required for problem solving in uncertain
contexts would illustrate this change. We are referring to what, from other
perspectives, some theorists have called biopolitics, as governability of systems
centered around the administration of life based on statistic tools on the scale of
populations (Foucault 2004).
In the arguments through which he establishes the presentist matrix, Hartog
appeals to elements that indicate loss and impoverishment, such as disappearance

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of utopias, and also to features that are elements in the increasing complexity of
problems, such as the bio-ethic precautionary principle and the principle of collec-
tive responsibility. According to the first of these principles, an experiment, an
undertaking or the use of a certain artifact that is not indispensable should be in-
hibited if there is a chance that such a practice will generate an irreparable damage
in the future that will put us in danger, even when it cannot be conclusively dem-
onstrated in the present state of knowledge that this damage will actually occur.
The second principle, in turn, states that we are not only responsible for the known
consequences of our acts but we should also take responsibility (Cruz 1999) over
the unknown collateral consequences of them if it is the case that we could antici-
pate the possibility of such effects at the time of acting (this principle is actually
embedded in U.S. criminal and tort law). These are principles inherently related to
complex problems and devices in uncertain contexts which are typical of the risk
society (Beck 1992) in which we presently live. In this society, the technological
boost of our acts needs to go hand in hand with simulations and anticipations in
which the complex elaboration and calculation of the medium and long term con-
sequences of technological experiments are evaluated. Nevertheless, these princi-
ples, originating in technological experimentation, tend to expand more and more
every day as normative criteria for political action, stimulating the refocalization
of politics around the debate on responsible politics, that is, on the normative stan-
dards of caution and social responsibility that are inherent in it. These matters have
been brought into focus by Paul Ricoeur and other moral philosophers, taking as
their starting point the alternative defended by Hans Jonas: the generalization for
our time of the Weberian distinction between Verantwortungsethik (ethics of re-
sponsibility) and Gesinnungsethik (ethics of conviction), opposing thus his princi-
ple of responsibility (Verantwortung prinzip) to Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope.9
Now, it is easy to see that these principles are the antipodes of the futurist,
revolutionary expectations of the early twentieth century since, by definition, rev-
olutionary futurism cannot proceed from the principles of precaution and respon-
sibility, at least because revolutionary utopias belong par excellence to the order of
passion and enthusiasm and do not ponder ex ante losses and gains, according to
calculations and simulations. If they did, and keeping in mind that – as Hannah
Arendt has pointed out – violence always leads to unforeseeable consequences that
overwhelm good intentions and generally result in the danger of making worse the
previous situation, no revolution would ever be undertaken. Leaving aside the in-
terpretation of revolutions as futuristic expectations, as in Marx or Bloch, or as the
9. Jonas’s principle of responsibility states: “Act in such a way that the consequences of your
acts are compatible with the permanence of a true human life on Earth!” (Jonas 1979: 36); see
also (Bloch 1995).

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Francisco Naishtat
impulse to stop the train of history in a moment of big danger, as in Benjamin,

revolutions always seem to be closer to enthusiasm than to responsible calculation
according to the precautionary principle10. In this, there is coincidence from Kant
to Benjamin, and from Weber to Arendt.
Certainly, revolutions often proceed from the perception of big threats, from
big fears that mix up with utopian expectations in the course of the historical pro-
cess. La grande peur episode that preceded the French Revolution would be an
example of the fact that revolution did not proceed according to a futurist argu-
ment but that, at least in a significant proportion, it was motivated by fear and the
presumption of a threat capable of destroying the present situation. Only after-
wards, in the course of the process, it changed its character to the benefit of a more
radical utopian horizon of expectations. However, in revolutions it is passion, con-
viction, faith or, if preferred, judgment (in the Kantian, aesthetic sense of judg-
ment), and not calculation or simulation, what seems to lead to actions.
So, Hartog’s merit is to elaborate a typical-ideal concept, presentism, that even
though it cannot be found in its pure form in contemporary social reality, it allows
to disclose and correlate a series of social and cultural attitudes that have some
elective affinities (Wahlwervandtschaften). From this point of view, we want to
highlight the elective affinity that Hartog establishes between the presentist matrix,
on the one hand, and the placing of memory in a central position in contemporary
societies, on the other hand; indeed, this is an important contribution to the cor-
relation between historiographic refocalization and regime of historicity that we
are trying to delineate. Allow us then to indicate some of the symptoms of the
presentist memory, not only extracted from Hartog but also from Paul Ricoeur’s
(2006) reflections on memory, originally published in 2000, previous to Hartog’s
10. On this topic, see Benjamin: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of history. But
perhaps it is quite otherwise, perhaps revolutions are an attempt by passengers on this train –
namely the human race – to activate the brake” (Benjamin 2003: 402). On revolutionary vio-
lence and its unforeseeable consequences, see also (Arendt 1970: 3–31). Kant had perceived long
ago that if revolutions were a matter of calculation no man would even try to undertake one,
since revolutions are for the most part a matter of enthusiasm, stemming out of a moral disposi-
tion: “The revolution of a spirited people that we have witnessed in our times may succeed or
fail. It may be so filled with misery and atrocities that any reasonable person, if he could hope,
undertaking it a second time, to carry it out successfully, would nonetheless never decide to
perform the experiment at such a cost. – Nevertheless, in the hearts of all its spectators (who
themselves are not involved in the show), I assert, this revolution meets with a degree of sympa-
thy in wish that borders on enthusiasm, a sympathy the expression of which is itself associated
with danger. This sympathy can thus have no other cause than a moral capacity in the human
race” (Kant 2006: 155). This subject is also related with the concepts of faith and decision, that
is, of decision “as craziness”. See: (Kierkegaard 2006); also (Bergson 1991).

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books, and from the reflections of Nora Rabotnikof (2007) and Enzo Traverso
(2005) that were published later and were, in part, inspired in Hartog (2003):
a. One of those symptoms is the demand for, or even the practice of, indiscrimi-
nate forgiveness with regard to past events, demands or practices in which
historical anachronism is evident. Indeed, the representation of any historical
event as the outcome of a public deliberation that ponders direct effects and
collateral consequences according to a casuistic is a fiction that results from
the tendency to understand historiography as a legal trial, expanding to his-
tory as a whole in an abusive manner the principle originated at the Nurem-
berg Trials. Just as we said with regard to revolutions, if agents were to weight
ex ante all of the possible consequences of their acts, they would have never
carried out their actions. As Arendt has correctly pointed out, history is not a
theatre play nor does it have an author, but only actors that interact within a
dense plot that always crosses one’s effects over the other’s, so that those effects
always go beyond the original intentions. The generalization for historical
events of the demand for an ex post judgment, guilt and forgiveness is, there-
fore, an anachronism that originates in a perspective over the past indebted to
the present, and in the idea that history can be ascribed as if it was the work of
a responsible agent in control of his acts. We cannot judge Robespierre, as the
liberals tried in the wake of the historiographic turn that accompanied the
celebration of the 200 anniversary of the French Revolution, in 1989, with the
eyes of the legitimate, universal Human Rights of 1945. This should not be
taken as an argument against the non-lapsable character of crimes against hu-
manity as a legal figure inaugurated by the Nuremberg Trials; on the contrary,
it distinguishes their singularity based on criteria for the demarcation between
history and memory that is not algorithmic and does not depend on the
amount of years that separate the facts. Rather it is based on the recognition of
a politic of memory (Ricoeur 2006) that presupposes a judgment and a deci-
sion. Therefore, the indiscriminate generalization of the principle of judging
history as in a legal trial, confusing history and memory and projecting the
whole of history in an imaginary scene where all facts are present simultane-
ously, as in a figure of the final judgment, is a part of the presentist memory, in
which the present is given a pride of place over history and considered the
supreme court.
b. The presentist abuse of memory and its confusion with history is also visible
in the idea according to which the absolute singularity of the Shoah from the
point of view of a politic of memory should in turn become the historiograph-
ic approach to the Shoah. This confusion, which entails the tendency (or the
risk) to turn the Shoah into something like a civil religion (Traverso 2005:

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Francisco Naishtat
80–93), reducing the historical fact to its commemorative character, not only
confuses memory and history but also takes advantage of the fair, general his-
toriographic rejection of the neo-fascist revisionism and negationism, to turn
the historiography of the Shoah into an absolute, commemorative fact. That
would mean that the Shoah cannot be compared, nor can it be the subject of
explanative reasoning, placed in causal-chains or politically, socially and his-
torically contextualized. Revisionism, the label under which the neo-fascists
have abused historiographic falibilism for criminal and contemptible political
purposes, practicing a cynical negation of evidence instead of the legitimate
critical historiographic revision, distorting the facts and cynically rejecting the
existence of the extermination of the European Jews by the Nazis, has led to
the confusion of negationism with the always healthy critical revisionism that,
just as much as critical falibilism with regard to the sources, must be one of the
criteria of historiographic work. This work should be always open to revision
in the face of new sources; open to new interpretations in the open-ended
context of future historiographic research. But it should also firmly reject any
kind of cynical denial of the facts or evidence. The lack of critical, historical
distance that results from the confusion of memory and history opens the
door for a compassionate narcissism of commemoration, which sterilizes re-
flection and generates the risk of not being able to apprehend what history can
teach about past catastrophes in order for them not to take place ever again.
c. Another symptom is the tendency to treat the cultural or national heritage as
an available artifact in the benefit of identity politics or regional appreciation
through tourism and the commercialization of landscapes, thus turning mem-
ory into capital and cultural industry. This tendency, as a presentist abuse of
memory, implies the exhibition of history as in a shop window and, what is
even more striking, the aesthetic stylization of the past in order to form a con-
tinuum with the immediate present which is indebted to the technological
capacity for turning the past and present into a live show through its immedi-
ate broadcasting and, in general, iconic representation. The existence of the-
matic parks that can artificially recreate the environments of any epoch as in
a movie stage has, as their underside, the representation of present itself as a
show on real time. The self alienating effect that makes the present appear as a
déjà vu and lends politics the character of a hardly concealed TV show in
which the actors overact and lack all of the vital spontaneity of a critical, dis-
ruptive politics (Huyssen 2007: 13–39), (Naishtat 2010).
d. The lack of any critical distance is, in the last instance, the common feature of
presentism in general. Only through that critical distancing can historiogra-
phy distinguish between the presentist abuse of memory and the search for
historical depth that characterizes the historian’s vocation. Memory has been

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essential for the critique of official histories, but if memory is abandoned to

itself, without the reflective turn attached to historiographic research, a clash
of irreducible memories takes place without the arbitration of historical rea-
son, leading to a fight with no holds barred between opposing identities, as it
has been seen in many examples of contemporary political history. On the
contrary, the dialectic between memory and history allows us to activate a
double hermeneutic between the two different levels, acknowledging the sin-
gularity of each one of them so that just as much as memory can at any given
time critically overturn the official history of the victorious, history can in
turn dissolve the presentist abuse of memory, making explicit the unconscious
framework of memory and restore, with the aid of distance and historiograph-
ic decentering, a critical perspective on past events.
4. Conclusion
History is an open and critical task that, like Penelope, unpicks her weave again
and again, but that, unlike Penelope, does not knit yesterday’s weave. On the con-
trary, on knitting again it gives a greater depth and complexity to the unfinished
garment. This can be perceived nowadays in the fruitful historiographic dynamic
conducted by a new generation of Israeli and Palestinian historiographers with
regards to the foundation of Israel in 1948 (Greisalmer 1993), (Pappé 2000),
(Traverso 2005: 53, 112). With the aid of distance and the rigor of a critical histo-
riography, they are taking the events of 1948 out of the epic field marked by the
memories of the two peoples and placing them in a lesser presentist, deeper level
of research, where the epic narrative is displaced in the benefit of the critical con-
struct. In this work we have adopted, thanks to the model of controversy spaces, a
complex perspective on the work of the Penelope of historiography, making ex-
plicit the contributions of refocalizations and the progress of the controversy field
due to its increased complexity. We have successively considered the refocalization
around la longue durée of the Annales School, which placed in historiographic fo-
cus the tension between the long historical term and the intrusive short term
event, and the narrative refocalization, which brought the writing of history and
the tropological constitution of the event, undetermined by the fact, into focus.
However, we have seen that, in the present, a third refocalization takes place re-
garding traumatic events and, in particular, the Shoah. The tension in focus is now
between memory and history, where the absolutely singular character of memory
is confronted with the relative and contextual singularity of history. Memory al-
ways takes place within memory frameworks that are usually tacit and unconscious.
We would like to paraphrase Wittgenstein and say: there are different memory

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Francisco Naishtat
frameworks, as there are different therapies. Presentism, however, works as if those

frameworks did not exist, allowing memory to become an absolute, without the
critical mediation that is gained through historiographic distance. We have seen
that this unmediated presentism, to the detriment of historical criticism, is an
epistemic feature of our own present that has seen the horizon of the disruptive
critic of the present time fade away along with the horizon of hope in the revolu-
tionary transformation of societies. Yet, as we have just mentioned with regards to
the new Israeli and Palestinian historiography, we can be certain that Clio, as Pe-
nelope, does not leave the past to its own dissolution and death, even when we also
know, with Benjamin, that “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the
spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be
safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious”
(Benjamin 1969: 255).
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Naishtat, Historiographic Refocalization

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John Benjamins Publishing Company

Reflection on history as a discipline has accompanied the practice of history at

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

games. Thus, when applied to historiographic controversies, the notions of com-

2. Three historiographic controversies and the model of controversy spaces

2.1 The Methodenstreit

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of the onto-teleological metaphysics of classical historicism), the emerging histo-

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2.2 The controversy on “the long term” (longue durée)

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ethnology or sociology1. On the contrary, it was a certain awareness of ceding

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2.3 The controversy over narrativism

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3. The representation of the past in the light of traumatic

3.1 The weak flank of narration

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The dimension of unprescribable crime against humanity – inaugurated in the

5. Precisely, the so-called Historikerstreit or “historian’s quarrel” starts in 1986–1987 with

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3.3 The singularity of the Shoah as refocalization

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framework of the historiographic dispute over historical exceptionality and abso-

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characterizes the traumatic event as a fact that is ontologically impossible to over-

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The increased complexity in the historiographic focus due to the entrance of

3.4 Historiographic refocalization and change in the historicity regime

The notion of refocalization, as it is thought within the model of controversy spac-

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laboratory; impermeable to the radiations of the object, in a level immune to the

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Hartog defines a regime of historicity (régime d’historicité) as a logical and

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historiographic matrix, to a regime of historicity that Hartog calls “presentism”

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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impulse to stop the train of history in a moment of big danger, as in Benjamin,

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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essential for the critique of official histories, but if memory is abandoned to

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

frameworks, as there are different therapies. Presentism, however, works as if those

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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