The New Frontier

Preface to the Cornell Edition

To reconcile research with creation, invent new forms for embodying

knowledge, and take on the challenge of a creative history: for me, these
propositions are one and the same thing. This book aims to highlight
under what conditions they are possible in the realm of the social sciences.
I do not claim to decree norms; I am speaking in terms of opportunities.
The continued professionalization of disciplines from the nineteenth
century on has led to progress on the level of method but regression in
the areas of form, emotion, and pleasure. History—to speak just of my
own discipline—has not learned much from the modern novel, journal-
ism, photography, cinema, or the graphic novel, and this lack of interest
is not unrelated to the closure that is now threatening the social sciences,
with the increasing hyperspecialization of scholars, fascination with the
“impact factor,” and the belief that an article published in an academic
journal is more “scientific” than a documentary or museum exhibit.
One might object that a researcher is a highly trained specialist who
needs colleagues and students as readers, not laypersons. The problem is
v iii The New Frontier

that ignoring matters of form and disregarding writing are obstacles to the
very enterprise of knowledge. For without writing, knowledge is incom-
plete, an orphan from its form. All the great leaps forward in epistemology—
Herodotus, Cicero, Bayle, Michelet, Nietzsche, Foucault—were also liter-
ary revolutions. That is what leads me to say that, instead of weakening
the method of the social sciences, literature strengthens it.
How do we proceed so that research does not simply amount to ci-
tation and commentary but to creation? How do we bring imagination
and audacity together with scholarship? It would be a mistake to return
to seventeenth-century belles lettres, and an illusion to transform history
into a grand nineteenth-century novel. Hanging on to the existing hyper-
specialization would simply mean following the path of least resistance.
It is possible to get beyond both literature without method and method
without literature, in order to practice literature within a method, a form
designed for knowledge, a research text, with research inextricably tied to
the facts, to the sources attesting to those facts, and to the form in which
they are conveyed.
The idea of reconciling social science research with literary creation
can lend itself to a certain number of misunderstandings. If, for example,
we define history simplistically by the “facts” and literature by the “fic-
tion,” then the two domains may well be incompatible. If we judge his-
tory to be a serious pursuit while deeming literature to be dilettantism, we
have to consider the former as our profession while relegating the latter
to weekend hobbies. But if we consider history to be an investigation,
and historians investigators driven by a problem, we can then draw the
literary consequences of our method: using the “I” to situate one’s ap-
proach and perspective, telling the story of the investigation as well as its
“results,” going back and forth between the past and the present to which
we belong, using emotion as a tool for a better understanding, placing the
cursor at the right spot between distance and empathy, choosing the right
words, and allowing for the languages that the investigator usually does
not share with the people (living or dead) that he or she encounters.
These new rules are operators of textuality, that is to say, both cogni-
tive and literary tools that, all while increasing the rigor and the self-
reflexive character of the investigation, drive the researcher to write, in
other words, to create. The point of intersection between history and
literature is situated here. More than an academic discipline, history is
 The New Frontier ix

a voyage in time and space, an investigation based on a way of reason-

ing; without being limited to the realm of fiction, literature engages lan-
guage, with a narrative construction, a singular voice, an emotion, an
atmosphere, a rhythm, an escape to another world, as well as a canon
fashioned by institutions. Happily, these two definitions overlap: history
is a contemporary literature. The way of reasoning, which enables the
production and transmission of knowledge, is the living heart of writing,
the pulse of the text. That is how we can create new forms: social sciences
for the twenty-first century.
Since it was first published in 2014, I have presented my book at sev-
eral European, North American, and South American universities, where
it was then discussed. The debate over writing the social sciences and the
cross-fertilization of disciplines has been particularly rich in the United
States. I am not unaware of the fact that a large number of researchers,
intellectuals, and epistemologists on American campuses and throughout
the world have already reflected on a wide swath of the issues that I am fo-
cusing on so insistently. I pay them homage. However, while their thought
has enriched my work, it has also allowed me to understand what distin-
guishes my work from theirs.
It was in Writing History: Essay on Epistemology (1984) that Paul
Veyne set forth the notion that “history is a true novel.” That striking
formula recalls a crucial point: the historian tells a story; history is a nar-
rative. But why the novel? I am not sure that one could do something
new with Zola or Steinbeck. Or else one has to be capable, in the manner
of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner, of breaking with the conventions
handed down from the nineteenth century (realism, a linear narrative,
a hierarchy of heroes and secondary characters, a chain of actions pro-
ceeding by cause and effect, and so forth). But we do not have to limit lit-
erature to the novel. Poetry, theater, the essay, autobiography, testimony,
feature newspaper and magazine stories, and creative nonfiction belong to
literature, not to the genre of the novel.
In The Writing of History (1988), Michel de Certeau recalled that, con-
trary to what the partisans of scientism have repeatedly claimed, history is
written. But the title of his book suggests that it is the vocation of all his-
torians to write, which is far from what they do. Quite often, they put into
practice not writing but a technique: a set of archival sources, a patch-
work of citations, and footnotes, all arranged according to a structure laid
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out with an introduction, chapters, and a conclusion. At that point, the

historian produces not a text but a non-text, a specialist’s dissertation, in
a purely instrumental form, inert, dead to language, continually denying
its own literary character: in other words, a cardboard box stuffed with
facts, excerpts, and a few concepts.
When will we open creative writing workshops for historians and so-
ciologists? Throughout the entire twentieth century, anthropologists such
as Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, and Geertz accepted writing in the fullest
sense of the word, and Michel Leiris was both an ethnologist and a writer.
In Writing Culture (1986), James Clifford and George Marcus reflected
on “poetics” and “the making of ethnographic texts.” With others, they
criticized the rhetoric of ethnologists, their naïve realism, stylistic effects,
discourse of authority, and their ethnocentric and colonialist biases. We
can only applaud this critical enterprise.
Unfortunately, Writing Culture fixes its gaze on only one horizon: the
renewal of ethnology. James Clifford became the “ethnographers’ ethnog-
rapher,” but he could have become the ethnographer of historians or soci-
ologists, or the historian and the sociologist of ethnographers. Historians
also carry out fieldwork, “on-site investigations,” because, in their tem-
poral and geographical journeys, they interview witnesses, they question
people, they collect evidence. We can approach the past as sociologists, the
present as historians or anthropologists. There is always something sub-
versive in pluridisciplinarity, because it perturbs habits, upsets routines,
and decenters perspectives. As I have pointed out, historical writing is
often confined to a technique. With the ethnologists, the opposite is true:
criticizing the “apparatus of writing” risks resulting in unbridled, ragged
creations, fictionalized autobiography, performances, egotistical reveries,
or poetry of the self. In the end, literature has killed the social sciences.
Telling the story of one’s investigation, saying “I” in a self-reflexive
manner, and finding the right word instead of perpetuating a jargon con-
stitute both a scholarly and literary act. On this point as on others, the
contributions of gender studies have been crucial. In the introduction
to Feminism and Methodology (1987), Sandra Harding argues that the
researcher’s situation in terms of gender, race, class, educational back-
ground, values, and social power should be made explicit. “Neutrality” is
never neutral: it often takes the masculine for the universal. It looks down
at the world from lofty heights, that position of superiority and exteriority
 The New Frontier xi

typical of traditional historiography, in which the invisible voice of the

historian blends indistinguishably with that of the Past.
I think on the contrary that taking account of the researcher, and in
particular of her ties to the objects of her study, is part of the research.
The “I” places the researcher back among the other mortals that he is
studying. That makes it possible to avoid scientism looking down from
on high, relativist skepticism, and the supposed epistemological privilege
of the oppressed class. “Situated knowledge” recuses the methodological
sexism that, for males, consists of studying great men, great deeds, land-
mark dates, and institutions, and for females, the social relations of the
sexes and the place that women occupy in societies favoring men.
The way in which we look at human activities, including intellectual
pursuits, is deeply gendered: the arid gravitas of science is supposedly
“masculine,” while literature, sensitive, introspective, and psychological,
is supposedly “feminine.” That is one reason why so many university pro-
fessors refuse to “fall” into literature: Would men lose their imperium
if they consented to give birth to texts? As we see, accepting the literary
aspects of the social sciences is a way of refusing “malestream history.”
It is not possible to embody a method in a text, an investigation in a
narrative, without paying attention to language. In this sense, my book
dialogues with the linguistic turn, informed by intellectuals such as Rorty,
Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and, closer to history, Hayden White and
Dominick LaCapra. This current of thought, which is so rich that we
might speak of “linguistic turns” in the plural, pursued several agendas
throughout the 1970s and 1980s: the discursive form of all experience, the
role of rhetoric and imagination among scholars (the nineteenth-century
historians in Hayden White’s Metahistory); the “languages of class” (the
English working class in Gareth Stedman Jones’s work); the analysis of
literary texts in relation to the context of their production (Musset and
Baudelaire in Richard Terdiman’s Present Past); the wider agendas of
structuralism, New Historicism, and the philosophy of language. All of
these fundamental debates have enriched the reflection of historians.
There is a bone of contention, however: that of asserting there to be
no difference between history and fiction. To the extent that the linguis-
tic turn consists of studying language in all its forms or of recalling that
writing is a creative force belonging to the process of knowledge, you
can count me in. Historians should not mistrust writing, for writing is
x ii The New Frontier

not the problem but the solution. And I do think that devising “fictions
of method” (from hypotheses and counterfactual scenarios to abstract
concepts) may be conducive to a better understanding of the world. If,
however, the linguistic turn becomes a machine for war against the social
sciences, on the pretext that “everything is fiction” or that “there is no
escape from the empire of signs,” I cannot get on board. Contrary to
the way poeticians would have it, the historical text communicates with
what is outside the text, not only material evidence (ruins, coins, skeletal
remains) but also the reality to which this evidence testifies. The difference
between one of Flaubert’s novels and a book by Darnton resides less in the
literary quality of the former than in the latter’s capacity for veridiction.
That is why it is not possible to completely deconstruct the social sciences.
In the postface to his seminal article “Rethinking Chartism” (1983),
Gareth Stedman Jones concluded, opposing Saussure to Derrida, “The
historian cannot dispense with an implicit referentiality.” Would there be
one linguistic turn “for historians” and another “for literary specialists”?
The real dividing line is in fact the desire for truth that is driving us.
Truth is not slippery. Words and archives do not have an infinite number
of meanings. The notion of objectivity may well lend itself to criticism;
it nevertheless retains its value. Instead of throwing the “noble dream”
away, I prefer to make it less naïve, less biased, more self-reflexive. The
reason why postcolonial, gender, queer, women’s and men’s studies are so
important is not that they should allow each group to formulate its own
“truth,” according to its own needs and vision of things, but rather that
they provide tools for better grasping the world. History as a science will
always prevail over identity discourses. I say so as a Jew and a feminist.
My position therefore consists not of lowering the requirements for
social sciences but on the contrary raising them, by making investigations
more transparent, procedures more honest, research more audacious,
and words better adjusted, which as a result enriches critical debate. By
switching from discourse to text, we can proceed so that writing produces
a net gain in epistemology: not by a proliferation of flashy words and
metaphors, but by inventing new forms. Within the rules that constitute
the method, we are free. And no one should apologize for exercising their
liberty. A process of creation, a vibrant reflexivity, a refusal of method-
ological sexism, an independence of tone and style, a sensitivity to lan-
guage, a respect for the reader, an uninhibited use of photography, video,
 The New Frontier x iii

the graphic novel, and digital resources: that is what the future of scholar-
ship in the social sciences could be.
On the map of writing, there are two continents: novels made of fiction
and the nondescript texts of academia, both originating in the nineteenth
century. We can live happily on both of these continents—I myself have
published a novel and produced a number of scholarly books and articles—
but we can also consider this terrain to be heavily cultivated, even a bit
crowded, and it is possible to venture out into the unsettled parts of the
world. Dipesh Chakrabarty put forth the idea of “provincializing Eu-
rope.” I propose, for my part, to get out of the nineteenth century. It is my
way of dreaming of a world devoid of borders, title deeds, barbed wired
fences, and walls. There is a third continent opening up before us, that of
the creative social sciences—a pluridisciplinary investigation, a hybrid-
ization, a research text, a truth literature, a quite enjoyable intellectual
adventure.
Two of my books, A History of the Grandparents I Never Had (2016)
and Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes (Laetitia or the End of Men, 2016),
stem from just such an exploration. Their reception leads me to think that
I have not gone completely astray. And should I get lost along the way,
well . . . at least I shall have perished exploring the New Frontier. In the
meantime, I am pleased to submit this book for the consideration of my
English-speaking colleagues and readers. My warmest thanks go to my
translator, Nathan Bracher, and to Mahinder Kingra, editor in chief of
Cornell University Press, as well as to the anonymous referees who were
willing to read my book and who, with their judicious remarks, inspired
this preface.