The pathogenesis of medieval history.

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

I. History's Perverse Rhythm

Know what rhythm holds man.

--Archilochos

"History," insists Paul Ricoeur, "is history only insofar as it has not attained either absolute discourse or absolute singularity, insofar as its meaning remains confused, mixed." Belonging to the "the realm of the inexact," history is in Ricoeur's view "essentially equivocal." (1) What leads Ricoeur to characterize history in this way is one of my guiding concerns, around which a series of speculations regarding the "doing" and "undoing" of history will be elaborated. Ricoeur is doubtless claiming something more profound than the now banal truth that historicism is at best an imprecise method, one that only reconstructs partially what it wants to revive fully. The confused or mixed meanings of history, it seems, have less to do with the misconstructions of historicism than with the refractory nature of historical events themselves. The events in and rhythms of history constitute together an unavoidable confusion, an indeterminacy with which the historian must first enter into a relation, in order to approach, if only to fall short of, any positive or objective understanding. Historical understanding amounts to becoming suspended in an infectious rhythm of appropriation and disappointment with respect to the real, a field of realities often paradoxically encountered in the shape of the unreal, the false, and the fantastic. (2) The medieval historian--and, through him, the modern one--has no choice but to submit to this suspension, between having and not having, produced by close encounters with phantom unreality. History demands, I will be suggesting, immersion in the fort/da--or the perverse (3)--rhythms of culture, wherein immunity to the buried structures of pathology is surrendered. (4)

Knowing what rhythm holds the historian is not to conceive of history as rhythm, in the sense of an invariable series of repeatable mnemes. (5) History is the provenance of the other as it appears in its difference, with the force of its irregularity: The past and present belong, as Francois Chatelet has it, to "the sphere of alterity":

If it is true that the past event is gone forever and that this dimension

constitutes its essence, it is also true that its "pastness"

differentiates it from any other event that might resemble it. The idea

that there are repetitions in history ... that there is "nothing new under

the sun," and even that we can learn from the past, can be meaningful only

for a mentality that is not historical. (6)

The radical nature of locating history in the space of alterity should not be missed here: liberating oneself from the idea of history as repetition means that the past is not recuperable (by memory and by appeal to origin or fact). Accordingly, twelfth-century historian Walter Map defined the past as time existing outside of memory, while defining modernity (i.e., the contemporary) as the past which could be recalled by the living. The past, for many medieval historians, is not reiterable precisely because it is intractably other, residing outside the familiar protocols of the mundane. (7) The eleventh-century theologian Peter Damian, in a short treatise "On the Divine Omnipotence in Remaking What has been Destroyed and in Undoing What has been Done," (8) asserted that the past, totally receptive to God's power, can be unmade, thereby eradicating all factuality from the universe so that "what is left is sheer indeterminacy." (9) Always already under a kind of erasure, the past becomes an evacuated space ready to be filled with wonders, ghosts, and other signs of the counterfactual and pathological, as Rodolfus Glaber's Historiae (a text I turn to in the next section) attests.

An understanding of pathological alterity as the proper goal of cultural history comes, as I have suggested, only at the cost of being unavoidably implicated in the imprecise movements of invitation and interdiction with respect to the historical object. Continually playing a game of "here and there," the historian, far from being installed in a position of symbolic mastery (as Lacan has stressed in his reading of Freud's fort/da game), (10) can only subject herself to a kind of alienation: the more intensely one tries to find oneself in the historical other, the more one discovers oneself as a lost part, a missing--Lacan would say "dismembered"--piece of the master language of the past. If historicism aims to remedy this dislocation or dismemberment through a kind of suture, described by Louise Fradenburg as a thread binding the fort to the da, or the living subject to dead elements of the past, then not only does the "game" of making the absent present (and vice versa) produce, according to Fradenburg, "a gestural meaning" announcing our attachment to the particulars of the past, (11) but it also, more perversely, signals the simultaneous alienation of the subject and what Lacan calls the "murder" of the (historical) object, the "thing" itself. (12) The rhythm of fort/da demands submission to the violence of this loss, installing in the subject new affectivities, positive (e.g., interest and joy) and negative (e.g., melancholy and shame), contributing to the production of perverse tendencies (e.g., historicism becomes fetishism).

Reading history perversely or, more precisely, reading from the position of the perverse is not merely reading against the grain (13) but reaching "beyond memory," in order to submit to the ghostly and indeterminate remnants at the edge of what medieval culture deemed worth remembering (14) To characterize historicism as perversion is to point not to the content of the historical fantasy of reconstruction, but to how the ambiguous situation of a coming to knowledge takes place only under the constant and, as Freud reminds us, traumatic pressure to forget: "when the fetish is instituted some process occurs which reminds one of the stopping of memory in traumatic amnesia." (15) At precisely the moment of its traumatic appearance the past can be grasped as a singularly resonant intensity, an object of resolutely personal value. Historical interpretation should be thus understood within the terms of a specific symptomatology, that is, a constellation of perverse relations to the past (at once fetishistic and masochistic) reflecting the traumatic appearance of the historical image itself, forever "flash[ing] up at a moment of danger," as Walter Benjamin puts it, as well as the exceptional possibilities for self-(re)creation each image holds out. (16)

The fetish resides, then, at the limits of identity, between fixation and letting go. In psychoanalytic terms it poses the dilemma of clinging or "going-in-search," two urges defined by Imre Hermann as the very sign of perverse knowledge. (17) The implications of the fetish's liminal structure are profound, for it ensures that "history is always ambivalent: the locus that it carves for the past is equally a fashion of making a place for the future." (18) The historical fetish is bound, because of rather than in spite of its compulsive repetition, to an imagined future, to utopianism. In this way, the fetishization of the orient in the Middle Ages as exemplified by a range of texts, from crusade histories to the literature of marvels and the Letter of Prester John, is not the consequence of an intractable orientalism. Rather, it is orientalism that is the consequence of urgent technologies of the imaginary, among which the utopic impulse must be included. As a compromise-formation, utopia replicates the fetish in its logic, suspending its fantasizing reader between knowing and not knowing, between having and not having, and, in this way, it stages the possible (e.g., pax christiana and victory over the infidels). (19) The two texts to which I will turn, Glaber's Historiae sui temporis and a Prester John narrative, are both utopic in the sense that they make use of the uncanny reanimation of the dead to objectify, rather than resolve, the gulf between self and other, past and future, and fantasy and the everyday.

II. The Phantom Dead

Only the conscious horror of destruction creates the correct relationship

with the dead: unity with them because we, like them, are

victims of the same condition.

--Horkheimer and Adorno, "On the Theory of Ghosts" (20)

Writing...

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