History Offstage

If “striving for truth … has its roots in justice,”  as Nietzsche wrote, what happens to justice at the “end-time of truth”? What are the consequences of the current crisis of the truth regime and truth construction for our striving for justice? Clearly, these issues deeply affect historical research and historiography, which begs the question of history’s role at this end-time. And, if so, what kind of history? How can history pursue justice for the “wretched of the earth,” the “people without history,” or the “Others” if it is no longer possible to reference the category of truth? Does it still make sense to hope for the emancipatory function of history?

This is not the first time in the history of Western thought that the system of truth on which the idea of justice is based has undergone a crisis. Ethan Kleinberg reminds us that, in the early modern age, the Hereafter gradually lost its significance as the atemporal vector that gave meaning and direction to human history. It was around this time that ghosts began to make their appearance in theater and literature. In an original approach, Kleinberg combines Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis of the onstage presence of ghosts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries  and Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of secularization. By undermining the transcendent horizon, that is, the Hereafter, which lies in an indefinite future but will undoubtedly come, “unfinished business was brought back into the world of experience and not left to be rectified in the Hereafter.” (Kleinberg) Consequently, Banquo and Hamlet’s father appear in the present as ghosts. According to Kleinberg, this was due to the loss of that transcendent future (the Hereafter), where they would have found truth and received justice. Deprived of the future and final judgement, these spirits were destined to remain trapped in a present past.

Similar to this undermining of the Hereafter, the crumbling belief in future progress over the course of the last century has led to a loss of the future horizon and thus to the intrusion of unfinished business into the present. The ghosts that Kleinberg addressed in his book Haunting History are those that inhabit Sleepy Hollow in Washington Irving’s eponymous novel. “In my reading,” Kleinberg writes, “it is the past that haunts history – a past of American Indian dispossession, of the Revolutionary War, of the unspoken atrocity that took place at Major Andre’s tree, and countless other events great and small.”  This is one of the few passages in which Kleinberg substantiates some of the ghosts he considers.

Reading these passages from Kleinberg, I could not help but think of the ghosts in the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, perhaps the most Shakespearean director of the twentieth century. Summer Interlude (1951), one of his early films, contains numerous elements that allow us to reflect with Kleinberg on the meaning of these uncomfortable revenants, but also to imagine a different ending. The opening scene of the film takes place in a theater, minutes before a dress rehearsal of the ballet Swan Lake. The first lines are spoken by the mailman who delivers a parcel for Miss Marie, the prima ballerina, followed by the doorman who accepts it: “What’s that smell?” “It smells of thick air.” The question leaves the audience in a state of apprehension as they try to imagine what the strange odor could be. A fire? A dead body? In the course of the film, however, it turns out that the smell has no physical origin. It comes out of nowhere and seems to accompany the unexpected and destabilizing return of the past, as it resurfaces with the delivery of the parcel and the attendant ghosts. The arrival of the latter, this absent presentness, as indeed Ethan himself observes with reference to more recent films, is always heralded by signals, such as a wave of sound or a blaze of lights. Ghosts are not visible in Bergman’s film, but they are there. The parcel Marie receives contains the diary of her former lover Henrik, who died in an accident thirteen years earlier during a summer interlude they spent together. “What manifests itself in the first place is a specter” : as soon as Marie opens the diary, she sees her lover’s smiling face, hovering over the pages he has written by means of double exposure. The scene is interrupted by a bell announcing the start of the dress rehearsal (giving the audience another shudder.) The afternoon is filled with premonitory signs; not only does backstage staff keep noticing the smell, but the theater itself is plunged into darkness by a short circuit. When the rehearsal is over, Coppelius, Marie’s old ballet master (now in his clown costume) forces her to look in the mirror. “Empty theaters are strange at night,” says Coppelius, “strange and somewhat ghostly. Dwarfs with humps and big heads watch you from every corner … They grow in numbers as the theater grows older.” They lead their own life. The wall of hard work behind which Marie has hidden offers no protection from the ghosts of the past. Neither does Coppelius’s summoning of these ghosts nor Marie’s perception of them, which she does not mention, dispel the sadness that has enveloped her for thirteen years. At the end of my commentary, I will return to how Marie regains her smile.

In the current essay, “unfinished business,” the past that does not pass but remains trapped in the present, takes the form of a “wave” of ghosts. Kleinberg does not tell us how we should imagine these ghosts or how they manifest themselves in the present. He persistently eschews phenomenological descriptions and sociological analyses that would substantiate them. Describing the ghosts would domesticate them and deprive them of their restlessness and disobedience in the face of our spatial and temporal order. Like the past imagined by Eelco Runia, a past that moves us, “[y]ou can experience it, but you can’t document it.”  Hence ghosts elude the various epistemic systems, including the research and writing of history. It follows that not only the truth on which our system of knowledge is based would then reach its end point, but history, too, in the dual sense of res gestae, that is, the ensemble of historical facts concluded and buried in the past, and historia rerum gestarum, that is, the episteme and narratives through which we grasp them.

Kleinberg lays out the reasons for this crisis in the current essay, and what he recounts is a tragedy, not merely an epistemic tragedy, but one that is ontological and ultimately ethical. I use the term tragedy here in a specifically Hegelian sense. In fact, the regime of truth and the ideal of progress that historiography pursued and believed to be “just” in retrospect turned out to be partial and consequently “unjust.” Since the writing of history is a practice that is not detached from ethical and political aims, it has – precisely as a practice – inevitably made itself guilty. To me, this is the true dimension of the tragedy presented in the essay. Believing that it serves a higher ethical truth with its idea of universal progress, historiography has in fact fixed and rationalized only a partial past. Much has remained hidden, unspoken, lost, erased. Given its epistemic tools, historiography would have been unable to recognize the latent and disturbing past, and by the same token, have created conditions for this past to re-emerge – latent and unprocessed – in the present.

For Kleinberg, then, this is not simply an epistemic crisis that can be overcome by imagining new authorities and beliefs with which to reshape it. The solution he proposes, which I am now anticipating, is bold and dangerous. He basically suggests that we deprive historiography of the orientation compass it has created, and in future, entrust the task of guiding us to ghosts, to the latent past, to unfinished business. History is asked to relinquish its traditional habitus as the tamer of the past and instead become its handmaiden.

The tragedy recounted by Kleinberg in the first two chapters of this essay affects the historical discipline on all fronts. First of all, it involves the ontological belief in the object of historical knowledge, namely, the past. Crises and problems are the ontological realism on which history, in Kleinberg’s view, will continue to be based. Even the perspectivism proclaimed and adopted by the discipline, he argues, essentially reflect nothing more than naive positivism, that is, the belief that the object of knowledge, the past, while observable from different perspectives, is a stable reality. This constitutes the basis of the historians’ claim to “correct” earlier or contemporary versions by proposing their own account. But the result, says Kleinberg, is a proliferation of competing, often parallel and mutually exclusive histories. All of them, nonetheless, are founded on the same claim to truth.

Secondly, the tragedy impacts the temporal structure postulated by the philosophy of history and adopted by history between the nineteenth and the twentieth century; a structure, moreover, from which it drew its emancipatory role, but also its ruinous effects. This temporal compass has long since collapsed, and with it the belief in the emancipatory power of history, that is, the possibility of leveraging knowledge of the past to contribute to a more equitable and hence more just future. The extent to which this idea of history has excluded entire segments of humanity from our history textbooks and, with its faith in technical progress, contributed to environmental catastrophes is no secret.

Finally, the very method on which historical knowledge is based – and whose core Kleinberg identifies as “empirical verification” – does not escape a tragic fate. Faith has ebbed in the historical method as the last bastion of the historical discipline and what is shareable. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, “bad-faith actors,” as Kleinberg calls them, also make use of (or at least ape) this method (Kleinberg). As we read further on, it leaves “good-faith scholars” vulnerable: post-truthers see each historical viewpoint as “equally valid.” It should be noted here en passant that Bruno Latour went further in his diagnosis of the epistemic crisis. He argued that the criteria used to distinguish bad-faith from good-faith scholars could also be in crisis.  Secondly, Kleinberg tells us, method, metahistorical categories and temporal structure are themselves products of history. In one passage, he states that the historical method was “designed” (as indeed was ontological realism) in the nineteenth century precisely “to serve identitarian nationalism”  (Kleinberg). Here, he deconstructs the method from a historico-genealogical rather than a theoretical perspective, that is, he reveals the ontological realism on which the method was to be based.

Let us take a closer look at this last quotation to highlight a key theme of this essay. It concerns the relationship between “empirical verification” and theory (or philosophy). Kleinberg suggests a reconstruction that sees method as “designed” in the modern age to serve a specific historico-philosophical idea and as serving a specific ethical and political purpose. This view of the relationship between method and theory is consistent with an implicit, albeit central, postulate of the entire essay: There is a correspondence, or rather perfect adequacy, between method, defined by Kleinberg as “empirical verification,” theory and the regime of truth within which that method operates. In other words, the crisis of the truth system inevitably goes hand in hand with the crisis of method and vice versa. In the following paragraphs, I question this postulate and reconsider Kleinberg’s philosophical proposal.

If we admit with Kleinberg that method can be reduced to “empirical verification,” then tracing this kind of evidential procedure back to a particular historical period would be almost impossible. Think of Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on the “evidential paradigm,” which tells us the inductive method of analyzing traces as evidence of past events already existed in prehistoric hunters’ venatorial techniques.  Or the far more significant argument that a method reducible to empirical verification probably never existed. This is demonstrated, moreover, by the philological-antiquarian method used since the early modern age, of which Kleinberg cites some examples at the beginning of his essay. Although it was certainly capable of error and contributed to the collapse of sacred history, fabulous hagiographies of religious orders, mythic-pagan and later religious stories about the origins of peoples, the method did not of itself create new narratives or historical meaning. Paradigmatic is Bolingbroke’s polemic and its contempt for the inability of antiquarianism to provide the action-oriented narrative for which he advocated.  Echoes of this critique are still present in Nietzsche: If history were reduced to this kind of critical-philological knowledge, it would be detrimental to life and to action.  In order to provide narratives, method always had to fall back on theory in the broadest sense (theology or philosophy). Whether it was the historischer Zusammenhang invoked by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Droysen’s ethical forces, Hegelian Vernunft, Ranke’s contest between nations (also directed by ethical forces), progress or retrogression, ethnic nationalism, or the laws of history, empiricism without these scaffolds was and still is a dead letter or a mute object. Thought, in Hegel’s words, remained history’s “most powerful epitomizer” to this day. 

Bearing this analysis in mind, instead of saying the historical method was designed to serve identitarian nationalism, one could ask how it was possible to construct linear and progressive histories that stand up to empirical scrutiny. If applied rigorously, such verification could only disprove master narratives. The real issue is that nineteenth-century historians took it upon themselves to tell the Truth – the meaning of history – left vacant by sacred history and religion. Kleinberg mentions this latter aspect in his essay. In my opinion, the tension – or aporia – at stake here is rather one between empirical verification and theory, between different degrees of certainty in history and philosophical truth. A correspondence or adequacy of method (itself a multi-layered reality) with theory, but also with regimes of truth (likewise multi-layered), never existed, at least not in historiographic practice.

This tension between empirical evidence and theory (or philosophy) has haunted any historian who seriously reflects on their discipline. It is therefore not surprising to find it a recurring theme in Reinhart Koselleck’s work. He was well aware that Chladenius and his perspectivism (Theorie der Standortbindung) had contributed to the process of relativizing historical knowledge and, consequently, the object of knowledge, that is, history as res gestae. Now, precisely because theoretical (and epistemological) reflection had made the past an object of study that could change depending on the perspective and over time,  understanding the past inevitably became intrinsically linked to and dependent on theory. Both the cause and the product of historical relativism, this constant tension between a theory of history and the sources gathered compels historians to work without cease. Work that is necessary, and indeed, as Koselleck writes, productive. 

That said, I would like to emphasize that – again in Koselleck’s interpretation – Chladenius was able to hold firm the difference between “partisanship” (Parteilichkeit), that is, the tendentiousness that prompted the production of a particular version of history, and perspectivism (Standortbindung), that is, the conditions of knowability of the past that make all knowledge relative and variable. In the 1970s, when Koselleck wrote on this topic, he could still claim the validity of the theoretical framework that distinguished between the “perspectivist mode of forming judgments” (perspektivische Urteilsbildung) and “partisanship” (Parteilichkeit).  Despite the relativistic “strudel” Kleinberg mentions with reference to Koselleck, the latter held fast to this distinction. The debate on historical skepticism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – which, to my knowledge, Koselleck had not addressed systematically – demonstrates admirably that reflection on this distinction was in fact tantamount to an objection to Pierre Bayle’s exemplary assertion of partisanship in all of history. According to Bayle, each nation prepared meat (the res gestae) with a sauce to suit the national taste. Chladenius’s Theorie der Standortbindung was also a theoretical response to skepticism and its generalized accusation of tendentiousness throughout human history.

To conclude, not only has empiricism gradually come to see the need to interpret different theories and produce arguments and/or narratives, but theory likewise became fundamental to the struggle against skepticism. Returning to Koselleck, yes, he admitted the historical dimension of theory (such as the metahistorical categories cited by Kleinberg himself), but did consider its function in the practice of historical research to be diminished. The productive tension with theory saved history from being reduced to mere antiquarianism, on the one hand, or relapsing into the philosophy of history, on the other. After all, Koselleck considered the philosophy of history – rightly or wrongly – to be the condition that made the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century possible. The historian’s task is thus one of vigilant and untiring work on his or her own categories and theory, which are necessarily temporalized. It involves the willingness to constantly rethink and correct historical interrogation and the historian’s theoretical apparatus. 

Kleinberg, however, sees the solution adopted by Koselleck as no longer viable or even desirable. His cardinal concern, which is crystal-clear from the very first lines, is not the “salvation” of historical knowledge per se but ethical and political action in the present and, therefore, the realization of a society that is more just because it is more equitable. This entails an indictment of the entire modern historiographical project, held partially responsible for ongoing injustices, and at the same time, the elaboration of what is, in my opinion, a new philosophy of history.  I use the term philosophy of history here in the specific sense of an ontological meditation on ways of being/not being from the past (not its reification) and on the temporality that is needed to guide and enable human action.

Kleinberg suggests reframing the co-presence of past and present by reversing the temporal vector and letting the past in its latent nature meet us in the present.  Whether it reappears in the form of ghosts (as in Haunting History) or – as in the essay published here for the first time – a “Surge,” this past emerges in unexpected forms, times, and places. We can neither predict nor dominate it. As hauntological thinker Jacques Derrida  wrote, we must learn to live with these ghosts. Imagining a past resurfacing at unpredictable times and in unforeseen ways would seem to be Kleinberg’s strategy to disempower the prescriptive, future-oriented, and decisionist vocation to manage the past, regardless of whether it comes from good- or bad-faith actors or from the left or the right. In this case, however, there is a danger that a past thus imagined escapes our predictive control completely and its outcomes might not be to our liking.

As early as 2013, Kleinberg had begun to rethink the past as “the forces that press upon us but that are not accessible,”  as offering no comfort, but troubling us instead. Inspired by Derrida, Kleinberg developed the idea that the past is of a porous nature, devoid of physical properties and yet latently present, gnoseologically elusive and yet capable of challenging our historical categories and narratives, something that is unimaginable, and yet has happened. One could even say that the ghostly past now haunting us is all of the past that has failed to find entry into the historical narrative. In Kleinberg’s words, “[h]istory, as conventionally conceived, is precisely the repression of differences in an attempt to generate a singular intelligible narrative that necessarily overwrites those aspects that confuse, confound, or contradict that narrative.”  Just as Derrida employed the idea of différance to counter these forms of repression, Kleinberg suggests trying to “imagine doing history with différance in mind.”  In addition to providing a better understanding of his argument, Haunting History gives us a vague glimpse of pasts that are hidden, forgotten, or lost in – notably American – history books and continue to haunt us, chief among them the ghost of the “violent dispossession of Native Americans.” 

In the current essay, Kleinberg presents the past we encounter in terms of Emmanuel Levinas’s Total Other; an Other that is not us, that is inaccessible, but affects our history. The moment we try to determine or explain it with causal logic and verify it with our evidence system, it is trapped in rational, restrictive, and constrictive knowledge, evading a possible encounter in the process. To paraphrase Levinas, it is an Other on Other’s own side, incommensurable with the Other on our side because it transcends our finite abilities to conceive it. In his latest book, devoted indeed to Levinas, Kleinberg makes visible the aporia that emerges when one seeks to understand Levinas as a philosopher in the tradition of Western thought, but also to do him justice as a believer and profound interpreter of the Talmud, as an advocate of a transcendent and inaccessible truth. Kleinberg chooses an approach that involves two narratives presented in two parallel columns running throughout the book. They speak of two pasts (the two Levinases, the Talmudist and the philosopher) that respond to two utterly different logics. One column reports Levinas’s talmudic-metaphysical reflections on a past-present detached from temporality; the other column describes the linear and chronological development of his thought according to the canons of intellectual history. These two pasts co-exist in the book and run parallel. Graphically, they never touch. Interpreting Walter Benjamin, the former concerns the sphere of truth (transcendent and inaccessible), while the latter is about knowledge as a form of possession. A knowledge that has, however, burdened itself improperly with a commitment to truth, and thus with the pretension to make claims that endure or unfold over time. But the very moment history takes on this burden, it becomes violence. Consequently, Ethan Kleinberg thinks of the “Surge” as analogous with the Total Other, as a set of possible pasts, silenced by traditional historiography: “These are the histories that need to be heard, not as parallel histories which are interpretatively distinct and methodologically homogenous, but as histories that create an intersection of multiple and conflicting logics of how we encounter, account for, and recount the past” (Kleinberg). Achim Landwehr rightly states that in his book on Levinas, Kleinberg describes vividly “what it can look like when different understandings of time collide, when other temporalities meet and when time is encountered as Other”. 

This begs the question whether or not Kleinberg, in his current essay, has chosen to employ two conflicting logics: traditional intellectual history with which Kleinberg offers a short genealogy of historical method, on the one hand, and transcendent-metaphysical logic with which he proposes to rethink the past in terms of hauntology, on the other. But unlike in Kleinberg’s book on Levinas, these two logics do not run parallel without touching each other. On the contrary, the current essay uses the historico-genealogical reconstruction of the dawn of the historical method to corroborate the need for a metaphysical turn that simultaneously denounces the historico-genealogical way of doing historiography. Isn’t Kleinberg entangled in contradictions here? But the question now is even more fundamental: How can we imagine a new theory that is not based on a critique of past theories reconstructed with the traditional historico-genealogical method? 

Returning to the question of how to implement différance in historiography: How do we imagine history books with historical entries “at different levels, in different time dimensions”  that may even be incommensurable with each other? Books in which, to argue with Kleinberg’s example of Native Americans, the narrative supported by archaeological records of how the Arctic and North America were populated across the Bering Straits sits alongside the oral tradition of Native American communities that reject the idea of immigration in favor of an “emergence” and “a transformation from an ancient, prehuman time” that occurred precisely on American soil? If it is possible at the theoretical, academic, or even school level to live with this wave and imagine multi-column works, how then should we react when these ghosts begin to demand justice and do so on the basis of what Kleinberg calls “competing logics of time and ways of organizing the past”?

Once again, the issue of Native American dispossession is an excellent example. The activist and anthropologist Hugh Brody pointed out, for instance, the incommensurability of the Canadian legal system and the divination practices of the Dunne-za, an Athabascan-speaking group, when it comes to land claims and, consequently, to questions pertaining to the rules of evidential verification, witness authority and historical “truth.” How do we deal with the stories reported by the Dunne-za elders, who claim they travel in dreams “along the trails of time” and witness the arrangements settlers made with their ancestors at the living moment they occurred?  Again, what is to be done when Indigenous groups make claims on the basis of an alleged collective identity, whereby “descent is tacitly assumed to represent the bedrock of collective identity”?  How do we accept the idea of collective identity so abhorred by “our” historiography for its ability, according to Amartya Sen’s formula, to kill? 

To conclude, if the theorist can – and must – learn to live with these contradictory logics, aporias and the “Surge” of ghosts, society will be constantly driven to act and to choose a logic, an approach and a narrative on which to base its decisions. Without decision there can be no social action, and without action, no justice on earth. This is precisely the tragic dimension of aporia. The fact that every decision implies a determinatio, and that each determination – as Derrida teaches (and Leibniz, Benjamin and Adorno before him) – is a negation that supplants the Other and leads to oblivion. In this sense, justice and the truth in which it is rooted are no longer of this world, but instead swept away into a future that will never come.

Kleinberg’s anti-decisionist (and anti-determinist) proposal is the imagination of a new compass, the “Surge,” which I call the chronoanarcoid (re-) emergence of unaccomplished business, the past as presence in absentia. To this indeterminate and out-of-control “Surge,” Kleinberg ascribes the responsibility to call “for a moral imperative in the present and for the future” (Kleinberg). Obviously, delegating a call for a moral imperative to the “Surge” is risky. We may not like the past that emerges and the imperative it dictates.

I prefer a different method of escaping the determinism of the past and its pendant, namely, decisionism in terms of the future. It does not involve a new metaphysics of the relationship between past, present, and future, but instead argues for redescribing what we call the “historical method.” That is why I recommend abandoning the belief that historical “method” is a consensual monolith that is inextricably bound up in a regime of truth and “designed” for specific purposes, as Kleinberg suggests (Kleinberg). What we call “the” method is diffused in a set of heuristic and interpretive rules and practices that are constantly adapted, forced, disregarded, challenged for inadequacy, improved, or even betrayed. This not despite, but very much because of the unrelenting (aporetic) tension between theoretical demands and empirical evidence.

If we think of the body of methodological practices in these terms, then, in agreement with Kleinberg, this body remains a historical product. At the same time, it is recognized as the fluid outcome of collective and intergenerational work that consequently eludes decisionism, that is, individuals’ claims to determine for all and sundry what “the” method is or should be.  Considered in an intergenerational and long-term perspective, methodological tools may turn out to be the interim outcome of mini-acts pushing in different and thus in no specific directions. Only under these conditions can future history and historiography break free from all forms of determinism with regard to the past and individual decisionism in relation to the future, and remain truly open. Similar to Kleinberg’s anti-decisionist proposal that we may not like the past that emerges, we may also dislike the future evolution of the rules of writing and reflecting on history. The difference is that Kleinberg’s proposal attempts to imagine an instance that would serve as a compass, while the idea of methodical practices subject to constant micro-negotiation and micro-contentions has, in itself, no direction. Be that as it may, this is the price to be paid if we are to welcome a historiography that renounces the claim to a predetermined future direction as a regulative principle for the present.

And, finally, back to Summer Interlude and its (happy) ending. Although Coppelius’s words capture Marie’s state of mind perfectly and give voice to the ghosts that inhabit her, they are not decisive enough. When the old ballet master leaves the scene, Marie is still sad. Only by sharing her ghosts with her partner David, with whom she has so far failed to form a genuine bond, will she succeed in banishing them. How does she do this? Not by telling her story, but the story. Marie tells her partner nothing about Henrik’s tragic end. She simply hands him Henrik’s diary and asks him to read it. The material relic that has unexpectedly resurfaced from the past, foreshadowed and accompanied by the smell of thick air, becomes the medium that makes it possible to share the past. How David interprets the diary entries, which end just before Henrik’s tragic death, is not shown. This relic from the past allows Marie to now live with her lover’s specter. As Derrida wrote with reference to Marx’s Manifesto: “What manifests itself in the first place is a specter […], as powerful as it is unreal, a hallucination or simulacrum that is virtually more actual than what is so blithely called a living presence.”  Having entrusted David with the diary, Marie’s expression turns to one of joy for the first time in thirteen years as she exclaims: “I’m actually happy!”

In this sense, I am taking up the challenge of Ethan Kleinberg’s thought-provoking and demanding essay and turning it into a question both to him and to ourselves: How do we – as scholars and historians – write history with différance in mind if we want to act in communities, if we want something to share, to contest, to inherit, in a word, something to matter? What do we share, and how do we share it?