History and Theory, Theme Issue 51 (December 2012), 114-135 Wesleyan University 2012 ISSN: 0018-2656

Back to Where Weve Never Been:

Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida on Tradition and History

Ethan Kleinberg

ABSTRACT

This paper will address the topic of tradition by exploring the ways that Martin Hei-
degger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida each looked to return to traditional texts
in order to overcome a perceived crisis or delimiting fault in the contemporary thought of
their respective presents. For Heidegger, this meant a return to the pre-Socratics of early
Greek thinking. For Levinas, it entailed a return to the sacred Jewish texts of the Talmud.
For Derrida, it was the return to texts that embodied the Western metaphysical tradition,
be it by Plato, Descartes, Rousseau, or Marx. I then want to ask whether these reflections
can be turned so as to shed light on three resilient trends in the practice of history that
I will label positivist, speculative or teleological, and constructivist. By correlating the
ways that Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida utilize and employ tradition with the his-
torical trends of positivism, speculative/teleological history, and constructivism, I hope to
produce an engagement between theorists whose concerns implicate history even though
they may not be explicitly historical, and historians who may not realize the ways that their
work coincides with the claims of these theorists.

Keywords: Karen Barad, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka, Reinhart
Koselleck, Emmanuel Levinas, historical theory, positivism, speculative history, con-
structivism

I. Introduction

Franz Kafka wrote a story about the Great Wall of China in 1917, although it was
not published until 1931. Most interpreters have, I think correctly, argued that
this story is not at all about China but about the Habsburg or Austrian Empire,
though there is certainly more at stake. Kafka draws parallels between the build-
ing of the Great Wall and of the Tower of Babel, reveals a fascination with the
endless space of the empire, and reflects on power and tradition in the fable of
the imperial message embedded in the heart of the story, where the message is
received only after the emperor is dead, and a new emperor, presumably with a
new message, has been installed. But I want to focus on one aspect of this story in
a way, perhaps forced, that will gather together many of its themes in relation to
our topic of tradition and the figures of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas,
and Jacques Derrida. I then want to ask whether these reflections can be turned so
as to shed light on three resilient trends in the practice of history that I will label
positivist, speculative or teleological, and constructivist.
 back to where weve never been 115
In Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer, Kafkas narrator begins by telling the
reader about the curious manner in which the wall was constructed:
[G]roups of about twenty workers were formed, each of which had to take on a section
of the wall, about five hundred metres long. A neighbouring group then built a wall of
similar length to meet them. But then afterwards, when the sections were fully joined,
construction was not continued on any further at the end of this thousand-metre section.
Instead the groups of workers were shipped off again to build the wall in completely dif-
ferent regions. Naturally, with this method many large gaps arose, which were filled in
only gradually and slowly, many of them not until after it had already been reported that
the building of the wall was complete. In fact, there are said to be gaps which have never
been built in at all, although thats merely an assertion which probably belongs among the
many legends which have arisen about the structure and which, for individual people at
least, are impossible to prove with their own eyes and according to their own standards,
because the structure is so immense.1

What interests me is a possibility intimated by Kafka but left unexplored. What

if, in fact, some sections of the wall were never built at all? And what if later, over
time, it came to be believed that these gaps were missing portions of the wall that
had been destroyed, decayed, or lost? And what if a later generation seeking to
understand the origins of the wall, its original intentions and meanings, decided to
pursue the reconstruction (physical or theoretical) of these sections, thus discern-
ing and recounting the properties of an original that never actually existed? On
this reading, Kafkas Great Wall story is one about our relationship with the past
and the gaps in that immense structure, gaps between points that are fixed and
available in the present, but that may be impossible for individual people to prove
with their own eyes and according to their own standards.
In these brackish ontological waters2 Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas,
and Jacques Derrida each sought to reconstruct a missing portion of the Great
Wall that is the past by the return to, and rereading of, traditional texts in order
to overcome a perceived crisis or delimiting fault in the contemporary thought of
their respective presents. For Heidegger, this meant a return to the pre-Socratics
of early Greek thinking. For Levinas, it entailed a return to the sacred Jewish
texts of the Talmud. For Derrida, it was the return to texts that embodied the
Western metaphysical tradition, be it by Plato, Descartes, Rousseau, or Marx.
What is striking about all three is that this turn back to traditional texts of the
past was not a nostalgic trip to a better time or some sort of antiquarian fetish.
Instead, they turned to these texts to employ them critically in an attempt to
rethink the present by filling in the gaps that compromised the structure of the
wall. But in this way they sought to utilize tradition unencumbered by history or
specific memory to foster a productive dialogue between the past and the present
that could redefine and even redeem contemporary thought to guide it toward a
better future. How much of this was transmission and how much invention
is a key question in this paper. Whats more, because this paper tracks the ways
that Levinas builds on and against Heidegger as well as the way Derrida builds
upon and against both Heidegger and Levinas, it thus delimits the creation of a

1. Franz Kafka, Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 129-130.
2. I owe this turn of phrase to Eelco Runia.
116 ethan kleinberg

more recent tradition whose concern is uncovering origins or examples hidden in

the past; this too will be addressed in the latter portion of the paper.
Here we must acknowledge that neither Heidegger, Levinas, nor Derrida were
historians, and their concerns were not about the role and place of history in
itself or as a discipline but the ways that we engage the world and one another as
beings for whom history is a concern. Thus we risk falling into what Dominick
LaCapra has referred to as theoreticism, which he defines as thought that oper-
ates primarily on a speculative, purely conceptual, often self-referential, level
that feeds on itself (at times to the point of tying itself in quasi-transcendental
knots) and construes history as a source of illustrations or signs, a repository of
incommensurable particularities or singularities, or a transhistorical abstraction.3
LaCapra cites Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj iek as indicative of this trend, but
one might also cast Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida in this light.
But neither should we unreflectively privilege the historical emplotment of
this chain of transmission from Heidegger to Levinas to Derrida. Such reference
to context or historical situation and connection should not serve as a cipher
that historically decodes the thought of these three figures so as to simplify it.
Instead, the difficulty of what these thinkers have to say about tradition and our
relation to and use of the past, as well as the way that their statements may appear
to be at odds with conventional historical practices, should serve to complicate
our understanding of how to engage historically with these theorists in the most
productive ways.4 Thus by correlating the ways that Heidegger, Levinas, and
Derrida utilize and employ tradition with the historical trends of positivism,
speculative/telological history, and constructivism, I hope to produce an engage-
ment between theorists whose concerns implicate history, even though they may
not be explicitly historical, and historians who may not realize the ways that their
work coincides with the claims of these theorists.

II. Heidegger and the Early Greeks

In the Anaximander Fragment, composed in 1946 but based on lectures given

in the 1930s, Heidegger tells us that the brief passage by Anaximander is the
oldest fragment of Western thinking.5 But it is also clear that for Heidegger, as
we stand in the twilight of the most monstrous transformation our planet has
ever undergone, the very fate of the West hangs on the recovery of this origi-
nal philosophical thought.6 In 1935, Heidegger described the crisis in these terms:
This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own
throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and
America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America
are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted orga-

3. Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2009), 30.
4. See ibid., 28.
5. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy, transl. David Far-
rell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 13.
6. Ibid., 17, 33.
 back to where weve never been 117
nization of the average man.7 By 1945, in The Rectorate 193334: Facts and
Thoughts, he had broadened the diagnosis of his age to characterize it as a uni-
versal condition of essential distress [wesentliche Not].8 Following Nietzsche,
but also Oswald Spengler, Heidegger came to see the history of Western thought
and culture as a history of decline wherein the true meaning and impact of the
category of Being had been obscured and forgotten over time, thus leading to
what he considered the current condition of nihilism best exemplified by the
worldwide domination of technology.
To Heideggers mind the descent began with the Socratics and Plato, but the
history of metaphysics had come to its conclusion with the work of Nietzsche;
now it was Heideggers task to bring Nietzsches accomplishment to a full
unfolding.9 Thus Heidegger believed that for Western thought to regain pur-
chase and meaning in the world, it required a return to its origins in order to
recover what had been forgotten, concealed, and covered over by the Western
philosophical tradition. But for such a move to work, Heidegger must argue that
this originary meaning of Being must have actually existed in the past and that
its properties as such are capable of being recovered in the present. Thus, in the
Anaximander Fragment, Heidegger writes that as something fateful, Being
itself is inherently eschatological.10 But Heidegger is quick to make clear that in
the phrase eschatology of Being we do not understand the term eschatology
as the name of a theological or philosophical discipline. Thus we should not see
this as a transcendent concept beholden to either an all-powerful God or prime
mover. Instead, Heidegger suggests that we think of eschatology of Being in a
way corresponding to the way the phenomenology of spirit is to be thought, i.e.
from within the history of Being. This is not to say that Heidegger subscribes
to Hegels teleological schematic but that in the phenomenology of spirit we can
see the way that Being moves while conserving its origins over time. This leads
Heidegger to conclude that if we think within the eschatology of Being, then we
must someday anticipate the former dawn in the dawn to come; today we must
learn to ponder this former dawn through what is imminent.11 In essence, Hei-
degger is telling us that we need to look back to this moment at the very dawn of
Western philosophy via the fragments we have available in the here and now in
order to restore or regain this original meaning or power that was lost.
Thus Heidegger does not countenance a historical, psychological, or philologi-
cal investigation into the man Anaximander of Miletus and his context but instead
to hear the fragment so that it would no longer sound like an assertion histori-

7. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, transl. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), 37.
8. Martin Heidegger, The Rectorate 193334: Facts and Thoughts in Martin Heidegger and
National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. Gnter Neske and Emil Kettering (New York: Para-
gon House, 1990), 18. See also Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, Resoluteness and Ambiguity,
Philosophical Forum 25, no. 1 (Fall 1993), 72-93. The piece by Heidegger, not published until 1983,
is largely a self-serving attempt to minimize or deny Heideggers membership in and participation
with the National Socialists as Rector of Freiburg University.
9. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 36; see also the introduction to Early Greek Think-
ing, 10.
10. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 18.
11. Ibid.
118 ethan kleinberg

cally long past. Here, Heidegger posits Being as a transhistorical category that
has been lost or covered over but that is ultimately accessible at any time. The
ontological meaning of Being is always there waiting to be revealed. To his mind,
the key to restoring meaning to our meaningless world is by reinvesting meaning
in this originary fragment via his own translation and interpretation of the early
Greeks. Here, even what is absent is something present, for as absent from the
expanse, it presents itself in unconcealment.12
The timing of Heideggers investigation into the pre-Socratics is important,
however, as it was begun in the 1930s in conjunction with Heideggers increasing
attention to Nietzsche but also his estrangement from the official National Socialist
government. Whats more, it was published in 1946 at the same time as his Let-
ter on Humanism written to Jean Beaufret in France and as he was banned from
teaching in the German university and embroiled in the first Heidegger affair in
France over the implications of Heideggers relations with the Nazi party.13 Thus
his self-proclaimed violent reading of the fragment must give us pause, especially
as the ramifications of his diagnosis of the crisis of the West shift responsibility
for acts perpetrated in the present to a structural malady in the history of Western
thought that occurred in the past. On this reading such events as the industrializa-
tion of agriculture, the atomic bomb, and the Nazi genocide of the Jews are all
part and parcel of the crisis of the West and thus ontologically interchangeable.
For Heidegger, there was nothing particular about either National Socialism or its
genocidal policies, as they were indicative of the nihilistic condition of the West
and not the specific actions of individual Germans or Germany as a whole.

III. Levinas and Talmud

It was in response to Heideggers initial decision to join the National Socialist

party in 1933and his subsequent equivocation that absolved Germany, and
himself, of specific responsibility for their actions from 1933 until 1946that
Emmanuel Levinas sought to challenge Heideggers philosophy and investiga-
tion into Being. A Lithuanian-born Jew, Levinas went to the University of Stras-
bourg and had gone to study with Heidegger at Freiburg in the late 1920s. He was
among the first to bring Heideggers work to France, but he began to distance
himself from his former teacher after Heidegger joined the Nazi party.14 One can
see this in the 1934 article Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, where
Levinas presented reason, liberalism, and the Judeo-Christian tradition as a coun-
ter to the racialist philosophy of Hitlerians, and we must assume that Heidegger
is to be included in this latter grouping.15

12. Ibid., 35.

13. Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heideggers Philosophy in France, 192761 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
14. Kleinberg, Generation Existential.
15. Emmanuel Levinas, Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, transl. Sean Hand, Critical
Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990), 63-71. This article was originally published as Quelques rfelxions
sur la philosophie de lHitlrisme in Esprit, no. 26 (November 1934), 199-208. See also Samuel
Moyn, Judaism against Paganism: Emmanuel Levinass Response to Heidegger and Nazism in the
1930s, History and Memory 10, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1998), 25-58.
 back to where weve never been 119
But Levinass emphasis began to shift during his time as a French soldier in a
German prisoner of war camp. While in captivity, Levinas began to develop his
critique and counter to Heideggers ontological philosophy, but now, segregated
with the other Jewish soldiers in a special section of the camp and made to wear
the yellow star on his uniform, this counter was predicated on Levinass develop-
ment of being-Jewish as a way to think otherwise than Heidegger.16 The seven
notebooks, written between 19401947,17 with the majority of entries written
before 1945, are filled with fragments and reflections on the role and place of
Judaism in relation to philosophy and specifically to Heideggers philosophy.
They foreshadow both later philosophical work but also what have come to be
known as his confessional or Talmudic writings. In the fifth notebook, from
1944, he states that one essential element of my philosophyand this is where
it is different from the philosophy of Heideggeris the importance of the Other.
Another element is that it follows the rhythm of Judaism.18
In the years following the war, and specifically after the news that his family
in Kovno, Lithuania had been killed in the Nazi Final Solution, Levinas expanded
his target beyond Heideggerian ontology to include a reevaluation of the entire
Western metaphysical tradition. Thus in an entry from 1946, Levinas defines his
philosophy in terms of his Judaism: My philosophy is a philosophy of the face
to face. The relation with the other without an intermediary. This is Judaism.19
In the notebooks and in his immediate postwar writings, we see a double move
by Levinas. As he began to break definitively with the philosophy of Heidegger
and to question the viability of Western philosophy, we also see an evaluation of
what it means to be a Jew under Nazi rule and then after Auschwitz. Both of these
questions, one announced and one performed, eventually led Levinas to the study
of Talmud, which completed the inversion of his prewar emphasis on the primacy
of philosophy in the investigation of religion. After the war and the Shoah, it is
the category of Being-Jewish that Levinas sees as the necessary precondition
for the study of philosophy and that is manifest in the joy of having Torah
(Simchat Torah) that Levinas announces in a note directly below the equation of
his own philosophy with Judaism.20
Thus Levinas sought to confront the ethical lapse that he saw at the heart of
the Western philosophical tradition and to counter by returning to the texts of
traditional Judaism. But this move was complicated by the fact that Levinas him-
self was trained as a philosopher and not as a Talmudic scholar. For Levinas, the
solution to this problem lay in the transcendent nature of the texts themselves. We
can see this transcendent mechanism in a text from 1979, On the Jewish Reading

16. Levinas was mobilized to serve in the French army but was captured in June 1940. See Anne
Marie Lescouret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 119-128; Kleinberg, Generation
Existential, 246-248; Kleinberg, Myth of Emmanuel Levinas, in After the Deluge: New Perspec-
tives in French Intellectual and Cultural History, ed. Julian Bourg (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2004), 212-213.
17. Recently published as Emmanuel Levinas, Carnets de la captivit, collected and annotated by
Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Bernard Grasset/IMEC, 2009).
18. Ibid., 134.
19. Ibid., 186.
20. Levinas provides the Hebrew and the French, which reads la joie davoir la Thora (ibid.).
120 ethan kleinberg

of Scriptures, where Levinas refers to Rabbi Chaim of Volozhins interpretation

of a passage from the Sayings of the Fathers. In the Saying of the Fathers, the
rabbinical scholars compare the Torah to glowing coals, and Rabbi Chaim
Volozhiner interpreted this remark approximately as follows: the coals light up
by being blown on, the glow of the flame that thus comes alive depends on the
interpreters length of breath.21 Because of the transcendent, and ultimately
divine, properties of the text, Levinas himself can restore fire to the coals through
the force of his breath. The meaning remains in the coals, and what seems to
matter most is not the blowers training but his or her engagement with the coals.
Thus, as Levinas states in his introduction to Quatre lectures talmudiques of 1968
(translated into English as the introduction to Nine Talmudic Readings), Our
approach assumes that the different periods of history can communicate around
thinkable meanings, whatever the variations in the signifying material which sug-
gests them. The contemporary reference becomes clearer as Levinas continues:
For we assume the permanence and continuation of Israel and the unity of its
self-consciousness throughout the ages.22 Even in the face of the most horrible
temporal disaster such as the Holocaust, the permanence and continuation
of Israel is guaranteed. What was lost can be found. The coals still hold the fire.
But here too we must be wary of the way Levinas reconstructs the meaning of
texts lost in the past. Levinas tells us a story from the Talmudic Tractate Shabbath
about a Sadducee who saw Raba buried in study, holding his fingers beneath
his foot so tightly that blood spurted from it.23 Levinas interprets this passage
as a template for his own Talmudic methodology when he states: to rub in such
a way that blood spurts out is perhaps the way one must rub the text to arrive
at the life it conceals. Many of you are undoubtedly thinking, with good reason,
that at this very moment, I am in the process of rubbing the text to make it spurt
bloodI rise to the challenge! But Levinas also concedes and embraces the
violent nature of such a task: to the degree that it rests on the trust granted the
author, it can only consist in this violence done to words to tear from them the
secret that time and conventions have covered over with their sedimentations.24
Levinass self-proclaimed violent reading of the story of Raba becomes the very
justification for his methodology of Talmudic exegesis. In essence he has granted
himself authority based on his own reading of the Talmud.
Levinas refers to a second Moses story almost every time he discusses his
method of Talmudic interpretation.25 In this story, Moses wants to know the
future of the Torah and is transported to the academy of Rabbi Akiba. Upon
entering the school Moses is disconsolate to discover that he does not understand

21. Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, transl. Gary D. Mole
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 109 and 210, n. 8.
22. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Lectures, transl. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1994), 5.
23. Ibid., 31. Levinas examined this story from the Tractate Shabbath, 88Ia and 88b, in his Tal-
mudic reading, The Temptation of Temptation, presented at a December 1964 colloquium on The
Temptations of Judaism.
24. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Lectures, 46-47.
25. Ira F. Stone, Reading Levinas Reading Talmud (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society,
1998), 20.
 back to where weve never been 121
anything of the lessons being taught. His mood is lifted, however, when at the end
of the lesson Rabbi Akiba attributes his teachings to the teachings of Moses at
Mount Sinai. Here the eternal message is delivered within the context of temporal
change, and the authority of Rabbi Akiba is not questioned despite the incom-
prehensibility to Moses of his teachings. In Levinass presentation, it is the intel-
lectual milieu of Akiba that is incomprehensible to Moses while the teachings
are somehow constant. In these two stories, we see how Levinass emphasis on
the transcendent and the ultimately theological transmission of meaning enables
him to restore life to a tradition, his tradition, that was lost, but it also allows him
to do so in a way that conserves his own particular talents and interests. Perhaps
upon entering one of Levinass Talmudic lessons, the Gaon of Vilna, a famous
Lithuanian Talmudic master, would have had the same reaction as Moses? In
any case, Levinas forges a forced continuity based on transcendence and justi-
fied by his reading of the Talmud. Here we see the inversion of Levinass prewar
emphasis on the primacy of philosophy over religion in an effort to confront the
most troubling issues of his times and his past and to announce the possibility of
a messianic future. But this inversion also allows Levinas to conserve his philo-
sophical interests in the service of his religious discourse.

IV. Derrida and Performative Repetition

Derrida was uncomfortable with the theological or religious implications in Levi-

nass model of transcendence, but for reasons akin to those of Levinas he was
distrustful of Heideggerian ontology. In both cases Derrida sought to provide a
critique of exemplarism: the elevation of a particular people, culture, religious
doctrine, or thought to a position where it appears to have been chosen as
guardian of a truth, a law, an essence.26 Derrida takes issue with the exemplary
position of authentic Dasein in Heideggers Being and Time but also with the
exemplary and privileged status of the early Greeks in relation to the history
of metaphysics. He also questions the transcendent mechanism employed by
Levinas in his reading of Talmud where Derrida diagnoses exemplarism in the
privileged relation between an unknowable God and the specific people He has
chosen to fulfill His covenant.
Nevertheless, these two thinkers were essential to Derrida especially in terms
of the question and questioning of tradition. Throughout his career, Derrida
engaged the issue of what it means to inhabit historical time, to inherit a legacy,
to have and carry forward a tradition.27 In Archive Fever, first presented in
1994, Derrida discusses this relation with a tradition or legacy as a performative
repetition in which the interpretation of the archive can only illuminate, read
interpret, establish its object, namely a given inheritance, by inscribing itself into
it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it enough to have a rightful place

26. Jacques Derrida, Abraham, the Other in Judeities, Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Betti-
na Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 12.
27. Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of
Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 44.
122 ethan kleinberg

in it.28 Thus Derrida sees the relation with the past as a process of self-inscription
wherein one reads and interprets the archive of the past in order to create a space
for oneself in it in the present. Whereas Heidegger and Levinas each looked to
past traditions to make present that which was absent, the portions of the wall
they assumed to have eroded and been covered over time, Derrida seeks to inhabit
those traditions to make these absences explicit.
In Specters of Marx, presented in 1993, this manifestation of absence as pres-
ence occurs through the figure of the ghost. Repetition and first time: this is
perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost. What is the ghost?
What is the effectivity or the presence of the specter, that is, of what seems to
remain as ineffective, virtual, insubstantial as a simulacrum?29 The ghost or
specter is troubling precisely because it is the past come again but emptied of its
physical properties and disobedient to the rules of time and space. One cannot
control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.30 Thus, unlike
for Heidegger and Levinas, we are not witnessing an orderly and necessary, if
forced, return but are instead in the presence of something that has passed and
as such should not be present. Indeed, Derrida might characterize Heidegger
and Levinas as engaged in the work of mourning, attempting to ontologize
remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains
and by localizing the dead.31 In contrast to the search for origins and revelation
as correctives, Derrida embraces the perturbations that the past returned evoke.32
In speaking of the specter of Marx and Marxism, he asks (and the same question
could be put to Heidegger or Levinas): How would it be valid for all times? In
other words, how can it come back and present itself again, anew, as the new?
How can it be there, again, when it is no longer?33 The answer seems to rest in
what Derrida calls performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that
transforms the very thing it interprets.34 Following this logic, the inheritor of a
tradition can inscribe him or herself into the legacy of a past event even if that
event never occurred. Whats more, the inheritor will even annihilate, by watch-
ing (over) its ancestors rather than (over) certain others.35 Thus the legacy is not
solid and the past is not a foundation, though it certainly affects the present.
For Derrida, the porous and disturbing nature of the past that haunts us pro-
vokes us to question the historical ground on which we stand. On this reading,
what Derrida calls the specters of Marx and Marxism are not an origin or founda-
tion to which we can return but instead inspire us as disturbing remains that no
longer take the form of a party or of a workers international, but rather of a kind
of counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical) critique of the state of
28. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 67.
29. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, transl. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006), 10.
30. Ibid., 11.
31. Ibid., 9.
32. There is a substantial reflection on Heideggers Anaximander Fragment in Specters of Marx,
but a full discussion of his deconstruction of presence and absence in relation to justice is beyond the
scope of this paper.
33. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 61.
34. Ibid., 63.
35. Ibid., 109.
 back to where weve never been 123
international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew
this critique, and especially to radicalize it.36 Derrida calls on us to confront the
way we are haunted by the past and to recognize the ways we inscribe ourselves
in the present. Thus for Derrida, the legacy of Marx extends to a current and
ongoing analysis of laws of capital but also modes of representation and suf-
frage, the determining content of human rights, womens and childrens rights,
the current concepts of equality, liberty, especially fraternity in Marxist and
non-Marxist countries alike.37
Thus Derrida enables a reading of the past that focuses on the gaps, the places
of absence where origins are situated in the present but that as such are unstable
ground ripe for reinterpretation and reinscription. For Derrida, these absences are
still foundational, and inscribing via performative interpretation is a move every
bit as violent as Heideggers Destruktion or Levinass rubbing of the text until
it spurts blood.
It is certainly the case that each of these thinkers provides a rich template
for scholars who seek to connect the complexities of their modern present with
the rich traditions of their past. But in all three we see the ways that these links
with the past are in some ways forged. For Heidegger it is via the transhistorical
property he affords the category of Being. For Levinas, it is via the transcendent
imperative of divine revelation and election. For Derrida, it is the antifounda-
tional nature of a past that is constructed in the present even as it is built on the
ways that past continues to haunt us. The question now is whether these theo-
retical templates can be brought to bear on the practices of working historians;
as might be surmised, I believe they can, though it requires the willingness to
pursue a reading, perhaps forced, as I did with Kafkas story of the Great Wall.
To my mind, Heideggers presentation of the transhistorical quality of Being can
be seen as akin to the positivist understanding of the ontological properties of the
past; Levinass transcendent mechanism can be seen to share affinities with the
structure and claims of speculative or teleological history; and finally, Derridean
antifoundationalism can be seen to coincide with the tenets of constructivism.

V. Positivist History

It may seem brazen to suggest that strains of current historical practice could be
called positivist, but I do so, at risk of hyperbole, to make a point about the way
that some of the foundational assumptions of historical positivism still remain
embedded in the historical profession. It is certainly the case that since, at least,
the postmodern challenge and Peter Novicks That Noble Dream, precious few
historians have actively courted the positivist label.38 Even Geoffrey Elton, the
last stalwart proponent of such a position, did so under the banner of objectivity
and empiricism.39 But such a move largely serves to concede that many of the

36. Ibid., 107.

37. Ibid., 110.
38. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical
Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
39. G. R. Elton, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
124 ethan kleinberg

criticisms proffered against this mode of historical understanding have merit

all the while maintaining the basic framework and assumptions of its stance, as
noted by Alun Munslow.40 I think this maintenance runs deeper than Munslow
allows and that it can be discerned in historians on both sides of the divide as
defined by Munslow.
In a forum for the American Historical Review in 1989, David Harlan present-
ed a sustained critique of the practices of intellectual historians such as Quentin
Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, and David Hollinger in Intellectual History and the
Return of Literature. The crux of the argument was that the influence of literary
criticism and the work of theorists such as Saussure, Derrida, Barthes, and Fou-
cault had facilitated a sufficiently strong critique of the positivist view of history
as a science established on the solid foundation of objective method and rational
argument so that now, after a hundred year absence, literature has returned to
history, unfurling her circus silks of metaphor and allegory, misprision and apo-
ria, trace and sign, demanding that historians accept her own mocking presence
right at the heart of what they had once insisted was their own autonomous and
truly scientific discipline.41 In response, Hollinger presented a defense of Wis-
senschaftliche historical practice based to a large extent on the claim that histori-
ans are neither as positivistic nor as epistemologically nave as Harlan indicated,
countering that historians of the contextualist persuasion have generally been
content to labor within Wilhelm Diltheys hermeneutic circle: interpretations
are circular in that they cannot be expected to touch an Archimedean point. The
progress made is thus not of the positivist sort.42 Here, Hollinger concedes the
fallibility of the historian but not the definite nature of the object of inquiry and
remains highly skeptical of any theory that would do so. What interests me is the
way that Harlans own reply to Hollingers response, while conserving Harlans
interest in the possibilities offered by literary theory, ends up in accord with Hol-
linger on this point.
Hollinger is right: the return to literature does raise critical problems about interpretation,
about meaning and about evaluationin other words, about relativism. It is not difficult
to understand why the deconstructionists seemingly joyous affirmation of a world without
origin or truth reawakens, for many people, a dark undercurrent of dread. . . . But to assert
that there are no universal truths is not to assert that there are no particular truths.43

For both Hollinger and Harlan, interpretation may not be expected to touch
an Archimedean point, but this is not to say that such a point does not exist; it
is here that the correlation with Heideggers return to the tradition of early Greek
thinking is fruitful for the way it lays bare the ramifications of this position.
Heideggers depiction of Being as a transhistorical category that has been lost
or covered over but that is ultimately accessible has resonance with an under-
40. See Alun Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies (New York: Routledge,
2000), 196-197.
41. David Harlan, Intellectual History and the Return of Literature, American Historical Review
94, no. 3 (June 1989), 581.
42. David A. Hollinger, The Return of the Prodigal: The Persistence of Historical Knowing,
American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (June 1989), 613.
43. David Harlan, Reply to David Hollinger, American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (June 1989),
625.
 back to where weve never been 125
standing of the past as an object with ontological properties that are discernible
and obtainable. Just as the ontological meaning of being is always there waiting
to be revealed, the ontological properties of the past are also available when
approached with the correct method. This is to say that the ontological properties
of the past are assumed to coincide with the rigorous historians telling. This is
thus a past with definitive properties that exists independent of the historian but
that is accessible when approached correctly and directly. On this view, sources
are viewed as mediation but, as with Heideggers Anaximander fragment, are the
conduit to reveal the actuality of the past.
To be sure, as was the case with Heideggers presentation, the past itself may
be lost, covered up, or only partially revealed, but this condition points to our own
limitations in touching the Archimedean point. Thus Richard Evans tells us in In
Defense of History that history is an empirical discipline, and it is concerned
with the content of knowledge rather than its nature. Through the sources we
use, and the methods with which we handle them, we can, if we are very careful
and thorough, approach to a reconstruction of past reality that may be partial and
provisional, and certainly will not be totally neutral, but is nevertheless true.44
Historians of this approach are interested and focused on the past as an object
with definite ontological properties to which the careful and through historian
aspires in order to present the truth.
In an interesting twist, the Spring 2012 issue of French Historical Studies was
devoted to the theme of Theorized History. The issue itself was a response to
what the editors saw to be a call to reject the theoretical texts that overturned
French historiography in the 1980s and 1990s and to instead return to the
archives devoid of such influences.45 The editors and contributors stated inten-
tion is to reject this call by instead charting a middle ground between what they
term the revolutionary theorists and the counterrevolutionary historians.
This special issue is intended to showcase scholarship that, in our view, points a way
forward out of the historiographical morass in which we find ourselves. We have titled
this issue Theorized History rather than History and Theory to emphasize our convic-
tion that, as much as many insist on the importance of theory to study of history, in the
last instance theory is an analytic tool rather than an end in itself. While all the authors in
this issue are well acquainted with a range of theoretical approaches to the study of his-
tory, they have not allowed any particular set of assumptions and concerns to color their
understanding of the past.46

The articles collected in the issue are excellent and exemplary, but what inter-
ests me is the way that the editors both acknowledge the critique of positivism
and preserve its underlying premise about the ontological property of the past.
Here again we see the strategy of practical realism that Munslow identified in
2000, now employed in the service of a theorized history but not as defense
of theory.47 The editors tell us that Resisting the idea of the past as an objec-

44. Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999), 217.
45. Paul Friedland and Mary Louise Roberts, Introduction, French Historical Studies, 35, no. 2,
Theorized History (Spring 2012), 231.
46. Ibid., 231-232.
47. Ibid., 235.
126 ethan kleinberg

tively knowable thing that awaits historical discovery, the authors recognize just
how much the past is incorporated in our present, as familiar and as strange, as
knowable and as incomprehensible, as the world in which we live,48 but they
also advocate a strategy that encourages us to ignore the more troubling aspects
of such a conclusion. At the end of the introduction the editors state that While
the following essays range widely, they share the conviction that the essence of
the past is not to be found in the discovery of some document at the bottom of
the archive box, but instead is to be ascertained through the careful juxtaposition
of documents, revealing the different ways in which historical actors made sense
of the same situation.49 At first glance this sounds about right, until one presses
into the statement that while the authors share a conviction that the essence of
the past is not to be found at the bottom of the archive box, they also presumably
maintain a conviction that the essence of the past is indeed to be found.
The assumption in the introduction is that an emphasis on history will protect
us from the harmful effects of theory, and that theory is only of use to historians
if its purpose is to enrich historical insight. That is, if it helps the historian to
get closer to the essence of the past. Seen in this light, the editors concluding
statementthat theorized history and those who practice it do not reject the
call to return to the archive. Rather [it] provides eloquent testimony to the fact
that many of us never lefttakes on a far more Rankean and positivist tone.

VI. Speculative/Teleological History

Speculative or teleological history has similarly fallen from fashion as the pos-
sibility of a goal-oriented history of progress appeared less and less tenable in the
late twentieth century. The events of history ran counter to the determined course
set out in the nineteenth century by Hegel and Marx. Here too the postmodern
challenge resonated, especially the critique of grand narratives offered by theo-
rists such as Jean-Franois Lyotard. Nevertheless, the underlying premise of a
narrative of progress in which the events of the past build toward a better future
still holds sway, though shorn of the more deterministic pronouncements that
characterized earlier Enlightenment, Hegelian, or Marxist narratives. In a 2011
piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the Jasmine Revolutions in
Tunisia and Egypt, Richard Wolin returns to Hegel, stating that the philosopher
of Jena would describe these developments as world historical, insofar as they
transform the way we think not only about Middle Eastern politics but also about
the general flow of history. Wolin continues:
Hegels Lectures on the Philosophy of History has been roundly derided as nave, since it
viewed history teleologically as progress in the consciousness of freedom. What sense
would it make to confer meaning on history given its chaos, its horrors, and its innumer-
able attendant atrocities? However, if the Jasmine Revolutions in Tunisia and now Egypt
have staying power, if they can inspire political developments in neighboring states, it
might well be time to give Hegels work a second look.50

48. Ibid., 233.

49. Ibid., 235.
50. Richard Wolin, A Fourth Wave Gathers Strength in the Middle East, Chronicle of Higher
 back to where weve never been 127
Wolins desire to view the recent uprisings in the Middle East through the lens of
a history of human progress that will ultimately culminate in the shared practice
of rationalist democracy is not without caveats, given the chaos, horrors, and
innumerable attendant atrocities of recent history that have rendered nave the
teleological view of history as progress in the consciousness of freedom. But
even so, Wolin deems it worth a recalibrated second look. In terms of looking
specifically to Hegel, Wolin may be an outlier (although the publication of Slavoj
ieks Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
may indicate a forming trend) but in regard to a recalibration of a speculative or
teleological history, he is not alone.
Levinass own recalibration was an attempt to rethink the Western philosophi-
cal tradition by referring to a transcendent and ultimately theological framework
(this is in fact the insertion of radical alterity), but what interests me here is the
way that he seeks to make sense of the post-Shoah world by ceding authority and
design to a prime mover that ultimately dictates the course of history. To be sure,
Levinass model articulates the role of choice and individual agency on this path,
but the role and place of choice is layered over the divine, creating a mixture of
telos and agency. One might argue that, despite Levinass aversion to Hegelian
thought in general, this infusion of teleology was necessary for Levinas to main-
tain his faith in the possibilities of reason and progress that the chaos, hor-
rors, and atrocities that befell the Jewish people and his own family would
otherwise render nave. We see a similar move, though from a different angle,
in the work of Marxist historians such as E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm.
For Thompson, the shift is from a more deterministic Marxist historical telos
to one that seeks to account for the role of human agency. The issue at hand is
an attempt to salvage teleological Marxist history from the historical realities of
Stalinism. But the convergence of telos and agency advocated by Thompson is
strikingly similar to the one offered by Levinas, and when one places Thompsons
The Making of the English Working Class of 1963 in conversation with Levinass
Totality and Infinity, the affinities in this regard are apparent. Both works can
be considered antitotalitarian in their attempts to articulate a methodological
approach that is not beholden to the determinist view of any totalizing system,
and both works place particular emphasis on the importance of ethics and moral
choice in the service of progress. Earlier, after he was expelled from the Com-
munist Party for his views on the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Thompson wrote
that the subordination of the moral and imaginative faculties to political and
administrative authority is wrong: the elimination of moral criteria from political
judgment is wrong.51 In The Making of the English Working Class the mixture
itself becomes clearer when he takes issue with history that tends to obscure the
agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed, by conscious
efforts, to the making of history. Likewise he disapproves of an approach that
reads history in the light of subsequent preoccupations, and not as if in fact it

Education, February 8, 2011. http://chronicle.com/article/A-Fourth-Wave-Gathers-Strength/126302/

(accessed November 13, 2012)..
51. E. P. Thompson, Through the Smoke of Budapest, The Reasoner (1956), 3.
128 ethan kleinberg

occurred.52 Although he preserves his Marxist analysis of historical phenomena,

Thompsons understanding of class-formation owes as much to agency as to
conditioning. Here I want to point out another coincidence between Levinas and
Thompson in their shared suspicions and critique of ahumanist structuralism as in
the work of Louis Althusser. The point is that both thinkers strive to preserve the
importance of humanist moral agency but place it on a speculative or teleological
framework that is the actual historical mover and guarantor of rational progress.
In 1997, Hobsbawm published a collection of essays entitled On History
wherein he laments the crisis of regression and degeneration that he deems to
characterize our current historical condition. To regain a course of progress,
Hobsbawm looks to the tradition of Enlightenment values as the only potential
corrective:
I believe that one of the few things that stands between us and an accelerated descent into
darkness is the set of values inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This is
not a fashionable view at this moment, when the Enlightenment can be dismissed as any-
thing from superficial to a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intel-
lectual foundation for Western imperialism. It may or may not be all that, but it is also the
only foundation for all the aspirations to build societies for all human beings to live any-
where on this Earth, and for the assertion and defense of their human rights as persons.53

In this essay, Hobsbawm acknowledges and concedes the limitations of dialecti-

cal materialism but preserves the hope that a return to the values of the Enlight-
enment can serve as a bulwark against the descent into darkness. This is, as
for Thompson and Levinas, a precarious telos, as recent historical developments
have made abundantly clear, and one that is no longer overtly deterministic given
the events of recent history and the necessity of individual actors to employ the
sort of moral reasoning requisite to achieve its end. Nonetheless, it employs the
transcendent mechanism of an extrahistorical mover guiding us toward our goal
even as, strangely enough, it acknowledges the limits of such a force.
In a recent piece for Perspectives on History, William Cronon, the President
of the American Historical Association, weighed in on teleological history in
Two Cheers for the Whig Interpretation of History.54 Cronon begins by rehears-
ing the argument of Herbert Butterfields The Whig Interpretation of History of
1931, where in Butterfields lexicon, the uncapitalized noun whig and the
even looser adjective whiggish become universal descriptors for all progressive
narratives.55 Cronon then concludes that thanks in part to Butterfield, we now
recognize such narratives as teleological, and we rightly suspect them of doing
violence to the past by understanding and judging it with reference to anachronis-
tic values in the present, however dear those values may be to our own hearts.56

52. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 12.
53. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (New York: The New Press, 1997), 254.
54. William Cronon, Two Cheers for the Whig Interpretation of History, Perspectives on His-
tory: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association 50, no. 6 (September 2012). http://
www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1209/Two-Cheers-for-the-Whig-Interpretation-of-His-
tory.cfm (accessed November 13, 2012).
55. Ibid. See Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons,
1951).
56. Cronon, Two Cheers for the Whig Interpretation of History.
 back to where weve never been 129
We have seen how Levinas obviates the criticism of anachronism by claiming
that transcendent ideas or values can communicate through different periods of
history . . . whatever the variations in signifying material which suggests them
as in the story of Moses at the academy of Rabbi Akiba. Cronon does not suggest
such a route, but what is of interest is that despite acknowledging Butterfields
criticisms, in the end he was to preserve the emphasis on progress, and thus telos,
inherent in whig history. The ambiguously partial praise I offer is not just for
The Whig Interpretation of History but also for the unitalicized (and lowercased)
whig interpretation(s) of history that the book criticizes.57
To do so, Cronon seeks to demonstrate that Butterfields chief concern was
actually oversimplified narratives[Butterfield] called them abridgements
that achieve drama and apparent moral clarity by interpreting past events in
light of present politics.58 Thus the problem for Cronon is not the teleological
aspect of whiggish history but the problem of oversimplification. Whats more,
because nonhistorians often do want to know how history relates to their own
lives, there is no evading their demand for narratives that show how the pres-
ent did indeed emerge from the past. Thus for historians to communicate with
nonhistorians, they must employ a teleological narrative of progress but they
need not commit the worst sins of whiggishness when they do so. The characters
in their stories need not wear white hats or black hats, and will feel more richly
human for being understood on their own terms. Even when such characters are
viewed as agents of progressive change, they need not be treated as if they were
comrades in arms. Cronons return to teleological (I would even say speculative)
history lies largely unacknowledged in this piece, as the emphasis lies squarely
on whether the historical work is sufficiently complex and not on whether it pres-
ents a teleological narrative of progress. But as a result the underlying assump-
tions of a narrative of progress lie underexamined as do the ramifications for the
actual writing of such a history. Whereas Levinas acknowledges the extrahistori-
cal motor at work, and the Marxist historians attempt to recalibrate the ramifica-
tions of historical determinism, Cronon presumes that the underlying premise of a
transcendent mover guiding us toward a defined end has been soundly dismissed
even as it undergirds his own prescriptions.

VII. Constructivist History

The Derridean understanding of the past in the terms inhabiting a tradition

or performative repetition has much in common with the constructivist
understanding of history wherein our conception of the past is predicated on an
imaginative narrative constructed in the present. Of course, one problem with
discussing a tradition of constructivist historical writing is that, practically speak-
ing, most historians do not self-identify as contructivist, and thus the realm of
constructivism is that of the critic or historical theorist. Thus the best place to
look to engage this tradition is not in works of history per se but in recent works
of historical criticism that attempt to assess the current state of this trend. Two
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
130 ethan kleinberg

such volumes are Manifestos for History, edited by Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan,
and Alun Munslow, and Re-Figuring Hayden White, edited by Frank Ankersmit,
Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner.59
It makes sense to start with the volume on White because, as Richard Vann
states, even though historians who read him may find little that assists them in
the practice of their everyday craft . . . nobody looking back at what was avail-
able to the reflective historian in 1973 [the publication year of Whites Methis-
tory] can miss the great sea change which White, more than anyone else, has
created.60 In other words, the extent to which current historians with positivist or
speculative/teleological proclivities must address and make concessions to criti-
cisms on the nature of objectivity, author involvement, and the role of narrative
structure in the practice of history is a direct result of Hayden White. White thus
holds a singular position in the dissemination and authority of the constructiv-
ist understanding of history, as the 2009 edited volume devoted to his work and
legacy suggests. In The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, Munslow
(who in the introduction signals the publication of Metahistory as a moment of
revelation in his own trajectory as well as a guiding interpretive framework for
the book) presents Whites major contributions to the study of history in these
terms. White maintains history is as much the product of historical imagination
as discovery in the archive, and it follows history does not correspond to a pre-
existing, or given, narrative/story. There is no intrinsic meaning to the past; this
is provided by the historian.61
In the introduction to Re-Figuring Hayden White, Hans Kellner highlights
one aspect of Whites thought that brings him into close proximity to Derrida on
the topic of tradition. If a generation fails to find any figures adequate to their
legitimate needs and desires in the models that the existing culture offers it, they
will turn away from their historical culture and create another by choosing a dif-
ferent past.62 This is very much like the process of self-inscription that we saw
in Derrida, wherein one reads and interprets the archive of the past in order to
create a space for oneself in it in the present. Whats more, it preserves the gesture
by which the inheritor will even annihilate some ancestors by choosing to watch
over others instead.63 In both cases the issue is not so much whether events in the
past really happened so much as the way we choose to insert ourselves into the
traditions of the past based on the narratives we construct in the present.
In Manifestos for History, two of the three editors signal in the introduction
that this work is in line with their own constructivist agenda, either keeping with
or building upon White. Corroborating the claim made in his Companion to His-

59. Manifestos for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2007); Re-Figuring Hayden White, ed. Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
60. Richard T. Vann, The Reception of Hayden White, History and Theory 37, no. 2 (May
1998), 161.
61. Munslow, Routledge Companion, ix, 225. I recognize that this is an older assumption about
White and constructivism, but I think it useful to press into one aspect of this constructivist tradition.
62. Hans Kellner, Introduction in Ankersmit, Domanska, and Kellner, eds. Re-Figuring Hayden
White, 4.
63. See Derrida, Specters of Marx, 109.
 back to where weve never been 131
torical Studies, Munslow is presented as originally a socio-economic, empirical
historian who made an intellectual journey from that original position to one
where he has increasingly experimented with ways of presenting/representing
the before now as the acts of imagination they so obviously are at the expense
of empirical/epistemological fashionings.64 Jenkinss position, though based on
the work of White and adjacent to that of Munslow, is more radical than either:
Jenkins has developed a post-modern position on history where he argues that
history should now be read as a post-empirical, post-epistemological aesthetic
discourse bringing to an end epistemologically striving histories/historians.65
The ramifications of this constructivist position pushed to its edgeand this is
further than White or Munslow seem willing to gois quite simply the end of
history at least as written and understood in its current incarnation.
For no matter how ingeniously constructed the past has been in modernist (and other)
historical/ethical practices, it is now clear that in and for itself there is nothing definitive
for us to get out of it other than that which we have put into it. That in and for itself the
past contains nothing of obvious significance. That left on its own it has no discoverable
point. . . . It is clear that the past doesnt exist historically outside of historians textual,
constructive appropriations, so that, being made by them, it has no independence to resist
their interpretative will, not least at the level of meaning.66

In one respect this is the logical extension of a position that views the past
as entirely constructed in the present and lacking any inherent properties, but
Jenkins also argues that we can now think about letting history and ethics go
because postmodern thinking has provided all the intellectual resources we now
need to think in future orientated, emancipatory and democratizing ways.67 This
goes further than Munslow or White, and I would argue further than Derrida as
well, though it is predicated on the same logic that sees history and tradition as a
product of the present.
One point worth noting is that while in the examples of positivist and specu-
lative/teleological history the practice asserted manages to conceal, obscure, or
deny the theoretical underpinnings of that practice, in these volumes on con-
structivist history the theory asserted about the constructed nature of historical
reality is often undercut or at odds with the actual historical practice of the con-
tributors. This is especially the case for the section on Practice in Re-Figuring
Hayden White that strains to find an instance of practical application.68 In this
section, the closest is Vernica Tozzis Figuring the Malvinas War Experience
where Tozzi argues that a pragmatist reading of Whites Figural Realism can
help guide analysis of multiple realistic representations of the same historical
phenomena, in this case, Argentinas Malvinas War from 19761983. The essays
by Vann and Domanska serve as histories of Hayden White, and Judith Butlers
contribution draws on White to explore the figural realism of Primo Levi.

64. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow, Introduction in Jenkins, Morgan, and Mun-
slow, eds., Manifestos for History, 3.
65. Ibid., 2.
66. Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 3.
67. Ibid., 2.
68. See Ankersmit, Domanska, and Kellner, eds., Re-Figuring Hayden White, Part Four: Practice.
132 ethan kleinberg

Herman Pauls recent intellectual history of Hayden White is indicative of this

disconnect between constructivist theory and historical practice. Although Pauls
work is deeply informative and instructive as a work of history, it is not particu-
larly beholden to Whites methodology or criticisms of the historical profession
despite Pauls fidelity to White in his exegesis of Whites theoretical statements.
Indeed, one could read Pauls emphasis on intellectual biography and narrative
continuity as an attempt to bring White back into the fold of more traditional
historians by emphasizing the areas where his historical methodology coincides
with theirs, such as Whites work on the papal schism of 1130.69 Thus one asser-
tion by Paul is particularly telling:
Whites views on professional historiography were always part of a broader philosophy, in
which existential attitudes toward the past, the uses and abuses of traditions, the paralyzing
effects of bourgeois modes of realism, and the moral dimensions of historical knowledge
were at least equally important themes. In other words, White was not primarily interested
in the historical profession per se, but in what it means to live in a historical world, to ori-
ent oneself in the present, and to envision a morally responsible future.70

In Pauls narrative, White is an existentialist thinker: a modernist thinker rather

than a structuralist or poststructuralist one, and this is to say a postmodernist one.
But even so we arrive back at a position that, as for Derrida, is deeply committed
to the way history is constructed in the present. Whats more, if Pauls assertion
that White was not primarily interested in the historical profession per se is on
target, then we also arrive back at the divide between theoreticism and his-
toricism as articulated by LaCapra. This can be crudely described as a schism
between historians and historical theorists or critics. On this reading, White
may dominate discussion of historical theory and constructivism (whether one
agrees with his basic premises or not), but, as one review of Pauls book states,
his influence on the actual practice of history and historical writing has been
virtually zero.71 Certainly the same thing can be said about the work of Jacques
Derrida and deconstruction.72

VIII. Conclusion

The Heideggerian/positivist and Levinasian/speculative approaches operate on

the assumption that the past is really there either as an entity in itself or as held by
an extrahistorical mover making history in each case an act of recovery, whereas
the Derridean/constructivist approach assumes it to be gone, thus making history
an act of imagination and invention. Each of these models works if one is will-
ing to assume the authors respective assumptions about the transmission and

69. Herman Paul, Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,
2011), chapter 1, Humanist History: The Italian White.
70. Ibid., 11.
71. Adam Timmins, Review of Herman Paul, Hayden White: The Historical Inagination,
in Review in History (review no. 1149) http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1149 (accessed
November 13, 2012). I dont entirely agree with Timminss assertion, though I would agree that there
is very little evidence that Whites work has had a direct influence on historical practice and writing.
72. See my Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision, History and Theory,
46, no. 4 (December 2007), 133-143.
 back to where weve never been 133
recuperation of events past or forgotten. Of course, my own work and interest in
deconstruction and the writing of history might give warrant to the claim that I
too fall into the constructivist tradition, and the imaginative use of the work of
Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida to critique current trends in history would seem
to substantiate that claim. Then again, the strategy employed to trace this tradition
offered in the first part of the paper could also be read as an attempt at historical
recovery. But, in the terms of Kafkas story, I am not advocating for an approach
intent on recovering those pieces of the wall that still remain or one that seeks to
construct new pieces in the gaps. Instead, I am suggesting that historians should
be guided by a more perplexing Derridean proposition.
We need to think of the past as something that both is and isnt, as present
and absent at the same time, as something and nothing entangled in a seemingly
impossible way where the iterative position of the historian is woven into the past
and the present such that it also presses upon the future. I mean this both in the
sense that David Carr provides when he talks about narratives as our precognitive
structure, but I also mean this literally in that the past haunts us like a ghost.73
In a neighboring field, the physicist and philosopher Karen Barad has marshaled
recent empirical research in quantum physics to tease out the ramifications of this
hauntological claim. Specifically, she turns to an experiment that seeks to deter-
mine whether light behaves as a wave or a particle by means of a device known
as a two slit or which slit detector. For Barad, the
result is nothing less than astonishing. What this experiment tells us is that whether or
not an entity goes through the apparatus as a wave or a particle can be determined after it
has already gone through the apparatus, that is, after it has already gone through as either
a wave (through both slits at once) or a particle (through one slit or the other)! In other
words, it is not merely that the past behavior of some given entity has changed, as it were,
but that the entities very identity has been changed! Its past identity, its ontology, is never
fixed, it is always open to future reworkings!74

The past is not created in the present because at one point it was clearly there, but
it also disqualifies the idea of a stable past with a fixed and permanently acces-
sible nature.
Barad goes on to say that it is not that the experimenter changes a past that
has already been present. Rather, the point is that the past was never simply there
to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold; the past and the
future are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of
spacetimemattering.75 I wont speculate on the workings of spacetimematter-
ing as a term, and I think Barad may be too close to the constructivist approach
unless one keeps the focus on the way that the past was never simply there. To
return to Kafka, writing about the construction of the Great Wall, he tells us,
Naturally, with this method many large gaps arose, which were filled in only
gradually and slowly, many of them not until after it had already been reported
that the building of the wall was complete. Here one can see the iterative entan-

73. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
74. Karen Barad, Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/conti-
nuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come, Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (2010), 260.
75. Ibid., 260-261.
134 ethan kleinberg

glement of the historian in the construction of a part that has always already been
taken to be part of the completed whole, and this may also be instructive as to the
larger entanglement of individuals and groups within the traditions they inhabit.
But how do we make sense of these multiply heterogeneous iterations, of
a past, present, and future, not in a relation of linear unfolding, but threaded
through one another in a nonlinear enfolding of spacetimemattering, a topology
that defies any suggestion of a smooth continuous manifold?76 Here I think that
recent work on Reinhart Kosellecks theory of multiple temporalities is par-
ticularly instructive. Helge Jordheim presents Koselleck as offering a radically
different theory of overlapping temporal structures and layers, synchronicities
and non-synchronicites.77 Jordheims emphasis is on the issue of periodization
in Koselleck, but I want to focus on the overlapping temporal structures and the
friction between these structures that exposes what Koselleck calls Ungleich
zeitigkeiten, noncontemporaneity or non-synchronicity.78 The phenomenon
of Ungleichzeitigkeiten occurs at moments when elements of a later time are
introduced as contemporaneous with the event depicted or represented.79 What is
fascinating is that for Koselleck, this moment of disjuncture where time is out of
joint points to the coincidence and noncoincidence of the historical telling with
the historical event. This grinding of gears when multiple temporalities overlap
exposes the way that historical accounts tend to freeze the events depicted even
as the event is continuously reworked and altered by the telling itself. Koselleck
presents this specifically in relation to his methodology of Begriffsgeschichte, or
Concept History, and the ways that the sociohistorical relevance of (historical)
results increases precisely because attention is directed in a rigorously diachronic
manner to the persistence or change of a concept.80 By focusing on the concept
(and especially the ways that concepts are reoccupied, Umbesetzung), one steps
in and out of the present and unsettles the assumptions inherent in the historical
investigation. In this way, the method of Begriffgeschichte breaks free of the
nave circular movement from word to thing and back.81
But I think that Kosellecks notion of reoccupation can be pushed further if
we think of it as a means to understand what Derrida refers to as inhabiting a
tradition. Whats more, one could align the disjunction of nonsimultaneity with
the Derridean aporia in order to negotiate the constitutive dissymmetry of a past
that is and is not. This is hauntology as a theory of multiple temporalities and
multiple pasts that all converge, or at least could converge, on the present.82 This
of course would require a fundamentally different understanding of the nature

76. Ibid., 244.

77. Helge Jordheim, Against Periodization: Kosellecks Theory of Multiple Temporalities, His-
tory and Theory 51, no. 2 (May 2012), 151-171.
78. See Modernity and the Planes of Historicity in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004).
79. Jordheim, Against Periodization, 159.
80. Koselleck, Futures Past, 82.
81. Ibid., 86.
82. It was both striking and surprising that in his recent History and Theory lecture, Martin Jay
unequivocally affirmed that the nature of the past was hauntological in the Derridean sense and that
the majority of historians recognized this. Martin Jay, Intentionality and Irony: The Missed Encoun-
ter of Quentin Skinner and Hayden White, History and Theory, forthcoming.
 back to where weve never been 135
of the properties of the past and our relationship to it. Like the Great Wall, the
past is actually there, and it is also constructed, and we do get entangled with it
when writing history. One can no longer deny the role and place of the material
past in the writing of history nor can one merely pay lip service to the ramifica-
tions of constructing an account of that past in the present. This is to say that
we should not revert to those traditions predicated on either the revelation of
presence or absence because all of them operate by negotiating between the gaps
and the finished portions of the Great Wall. But these gaps can never be simply
or certainly understood as the missing original keystones to provide us with a
more meaningful understanding of the event or as places of invention where we
construct a past to serve our present. The past is and is not, it comes and goes, and
the pieces we do have are shot through with the nonsynchronicity of prior histori-
cal tellings. In fact, there are said to be gaps which have never been built in at
all, although thats merely an assertion which probably belongs among the many
legends which have arisen about the structure and which, for individual people
at least, are impossible to prove with their own eyes and according to their own
standards, because the structure is so immense. What is certain is that when we
seek to engage with the past, be it in terms of tradition or history, we are going
back to where weve never been.

Wesleyan University