Dominick LaCapra

Trauma, Absence, Loss

A recent conference at Yale brought together scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals working on the Holocaust or on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as well as members of the latter body. The New Haven Hotel, in which many participants stayed, had a floor that was indicated on the elevator by the initials TRC, standing for Trauma Recovery Center. At first the encounter with the acronym on the elevator created an uncanny impression, especially in recently arrived guests from South Africa. But it belatedly became evident that the TRC in the hotel had an elective affinity with the TRC at the conference. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was in its own way a trauma recovery center. Its awe-inspiring and difficult, if not impossible, project was to provide a quasi-judicial setting in which the truth was sought and some measure of justice rendered (at least retrospectively) in a larger context where former victims were now rulers who were trying to find ways and means of reconciling themselves with former rulers and at times with perpetrators of oppression. The TRC also provided a forum for the voices-often the suppressed, repressed, or uneasily accommodated voices-of certain victims who were being heard for the first time in the public sphere. Indeed, as a force in the public sphere the TRC itself was attempting to combine truth seeking in an open forum with a collective ritual, requiring the acknowledgement of blameworthy and at times criminal activity, in the interest of working through a past that had severely divided groups and caused damages to victims (including damages in-

Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts

Over the last decade, intellectual historians have increasingly felt that their field is undergoing a crisis significant enough to reopen the question of the fields nature and objectives. Whatever its presumed causes (for example, the rapid rise of social history), one beneficial effect of a sense of crisis is the pressure it places upon practitioners of a field to be more articulate about what they are doing and why they are doing it. In response to this pressure, I shall attempt to define and to defend in relatively theoretical terms the approach to the field (more specifically, to modern European intellectual history) that I have come to find most fruitful. In setting forth this approach, I shall stylize arguments to bring into prominence a number of controversial issues. In so doing, I shall at times be forced not to practice what I preach, for I shall selectively treat the texts of other historians or theorists in order to highlight problematic positions as well as possible directions for inquiry. In the course of its own history in this country, intellectual history has often patterned itself on other approaches to history, taking a framework of significant questions from somewhere else to orient and to organize its research. The desire to adapt to modes of inquiry immediately intelligible to some important set of historians, if not to all other historians, has characterized perspectives on the field that are frequently seen as competing or opposed options: the internal or intrinsic history of ideas (exemplified in the works of A. 0. Lovejoy); the extrinsic or contextual view of intellectual history (exemplified in the works of Merle Curti); and the attempted synthesis of internal and external perspectives that has most often taken the form of a narrative of men and ideas (for example, in the works of Crane Brinton or H. S. Hughes). The problems generated by these options have become increasingly evident, and I shall return to some of them. They are exacerbated by the tendency of intellectual history either to become narrowly professional and even antiquarian by applying the internal method to increasingly

Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information

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Lanzmann's "Shoah": "Here There Is No Why"

Un pur chef-doeuvre. With these words Simone de Beauvoir concludes her preface to the French edition of the text of the film Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann.1 Any discussion of the film must begin with an affirmation of its importance and of Lanzmanns achievement in making it. It is a chef-doeuvre. But no chef-doeuvre is pure. Its status is both confirmed and tested to the extent that it can withstand the closest scrutiny and the most sustained criticism. Indeed a temptation in discussing Lanzmanns remarkable film is to transfer to it the tendency to sacralize and surround with a taboo the Shoah itself. Or, less controversially, there may at least be an understandable inclination to ritualize the film and to regard its viewing as a ceremonial event with respect to which criticism pales or even seems irreverent. Without denying other possible readings or receptions of the film, I shall try to address critically the nature of Lanzmanns self-understanding as filmmaker and the way it informs at least some aspects of Shoah. This approach in no way exhausts the nature of the film or even provides a dominant manner of viewing it, but it does

The University in Ruins

Just before his untimely death, Bill Readings finished writing a book that will be a center of discussion and an object of critical dialogic exchange for some time to come. The University in Ruins contains an argument that should be considered carefully by academics, administrators, and the general public. This argument demonstrates that, while the culture wars may not be as heated as they were only a short time ago, the issues they raised are in no sense a thing of the past. Indeed the consequences of polarization and rhetorical overkill are still with us, as is the tendency of extreme ideological positions to meet in curious and unsettling ways. I would begin by noting that, in my own judgment, the contemporary academy is based on a systemic, schizoid division between a market model and a model of corporate solidarity and collegial responsibility. (Often one or the other model is invoked in ways that best serve the selfinterest of the commentator.) The market model is employed in the prevalent idea that undergraduates subsidize research and graduate education and that they are not getting their moneys worth, notably at a time when tuition is very high and has been outpacing the general rate of inflation. The market model has also played a significant role in the establishment of criteria for teaching and reward in departments and in the setting of salaries and perquisites for individuals. The idea here is that a department, to be competitive nationally, must conform to national criteria, for example, with respect to faculty that it is trying to recruit. And

History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies

In this study Dominick LaCapra addresses the ongoing concern with the application of theory - namely that of literary studies and linguistics - to contemporary historical research and analysis. History and Reading is an attempt to address the concerns of those scholars who either resist theoretical discussions or disavow the use of interdisciplinary study. LaCapra begins with an extensive discussion of the problem of reading and interpretation as it relates to the understanding of history. The focus then moves to two classic texts that serve as case studies: Alexis de Tocquevilles Old Regime and the French Revolution and Michel Foucaults Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie . lage classique (partially translated into English as Madness and Civilization). In the final chapter, LaCapra deals with the problem of rethinking and reconfiguring French studies, suggesting how this discipline could itself profit from the theoretical innovations for which it has been so important a conduit in the last few decades. LaCapra offers sensitive readings of Tocqueville and Foucault, authors who present vastly different narrative strategies and modes of analysis. Looking at these and other theorists whose work addresses the writing and understanding of history, he considers how their distinctive textual practices have transformed standard modes of interpretation and analysis. A distinguished and widely respected European historian, LaCapra offers a sophisticated consideration of how to combine textual analysis with traditional historical practices, and shows how this practice can be brought to bear on French studies and help to shape its future directions.

History and Psychoanalysis

one reductionist (or vulgar Freudian) dimension from Freuds own texts and then to apply it to the interpretation of those texts without countering or at least qualifying it with other tendencies also active in Freud. The very understanding of reality, politics, society, and history operative in such critiques is often precritical. In any event, this type of approach may not question the extent to which Freuds texts intimate how these concepts may be reworked in ways that at least resist symptomatic replication of some of the most dubious and destructive forces in modern history. To make these points is not to eliminate the complex problem of determining a texts relation to hegemonic or dominant discourses. Nor is it to subscribe to an indiscriminate pluralism or a displaced, talk-show variant of dialogism (equal time for all voices ). It is rather to insist upon a careful and self-critical investigation of both the possible divided movements in certain texts and the question of their specific relation to larger discourses and practices. It is also to raise the question of the implications of psychoanalysis for ones own protocols of inquiry and criticism. One may begin an inquiry into the exchange between psychoanalysis and history with the issue of the relation between history and historiography-or, to change the terms somewhat, between the historical process and its representation in the historians account of it. This relation is complicated by two factors: one finds repetition on both sides of the equation, and the relation is mediated by various traces of the past (memories, documents, texts, monuments, icons, and so forth) through which the historian reconstructs the historical process in his or her account. The historian repeats an already repetitive historical process-a process that variably combines repetition with change. I shall later try to indicate how psychoanalysis construes temporality as a process of repetition with change on all levels, from the drives to the attempt of the analyst to control repetition (both through its limited enactment in the analytic situation and through the effort to work through repetition in transference). Historians have traditionally accepted the Aristotelian stabilization of repetition/change by confiding in the binary opposition between the universal and the particular, between intemporal synchrony and changing diachrony. In this decisive gesture, repetition is idealized and fixated on an ahistorical level while history is identified with a dissociated, equally idealized and fixated concept of change. This binary allows for a neat separation, if not isolation, of philosophy and history (with poetry as a rather unstable mediator or supplement between the two). The reductive stabilization of potentially uncontrollable repetitive processes is necessary and inevitable. But it may be both contested and effected through more problematic distinctions that themselves hold out the possibility of a different articulation of relations allowing for a significant 226 Dominick LaCapra History and Psychoanalysis measure of responsible control. In Freud temporality is understood both in stabilizing terms (the quest for a primal origin or scene, the elaboration of stages of development, the construction of linear narratives) and in more disconcerting ways. The mechanisms of dream-work-particularly displacement, condensation, and staging (or considerations of representability)--indicate the role of nonlinear, repetitive temporality. (Secondary revision is itself a stabilizing form closer to processes prevalent in waking life, notably in the daydream, but dream-work itself cannot be entirely confined to literal states of sleep.) Deferred action (Nachtraglichkeit) is of course the most patent form of repetitive temporality, and while its significance is heightened in Freuds later work through his insistence upon the repetition compulsion, it plays an important role throughout his career. For Freud a traumatic influx of excitation-an overwhelming rupture which the subject cannot effectively bind-is brought about not through an original event in isolation but through repetition: an event becomes traumatic retrospectively when it is recalled by a later event. In the trauma one thus has a conjunction of repetition and change. As Freud put it as early as the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895): Here we have the case of a memory arousing an affect which it did not arouse as an experience, because in the meantime the changes [brought about] by puberty had made possible a different understanding of what was remembered.... We invariably find that a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action [nachtriiglich].4 The later event, seemingly trivial in itself, may recall the earlier one in only the most indirect manner. (Here the event that triggers a trauma through deferred action resembles the insignificant event in the forward repetition of displacement,5 and the often remote linkage between significant and insignificant events signals the difficulties of tracking figurative processes in a new rhetoric.) Jacques Lacan has referred displacement to the trope of metonymy (understood as the mechanism of desire), and he has correlated condensation with metaphor. This initial step in the development of a new rhetoric (whose end is not yet in sight) provides valuable insight into temporal processes as well as into the attempt to represent them. Metonymy constitutes a time line of different, serial events which one tries to integrate through a metaphoric concordance of beginning and end. For Lacan this effort can never fully succeed, for desire (unlike need) cannot be satisfied, although the quest for satisfaction (the prototypical que^te de labsolu) motivates utopian yearning (including the yearning for full narrative closure and theoretical totalization). The further implication for 4. Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London,

Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre

This is a privilege coveted by every society whatever its beliefs its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility of unhitching, which consists-Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations!-in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and corltinues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat. [CLAUDE IJVI-STRAUSS]I

Culture and Ideology: From Geertz to Marx

The culture concept to which I adhere has neither multiple referents nor, so far as I can see, any unusual ambiguity; it denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System

Is Everyone a Mentalite Case? Transference and the "Culture" Concept

There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable -a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown . . . This is the dreams navel, the spot [or place: Stellel where it reaches down into [or straddles: aufsitzt -with no implication that it touches bottom] the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings [or are interminable: ohne Abschluss]; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network [or netlike entanglement: netzartige Verstrickung-with a stronger connotation that one may lose ones way in its trap-like folds] of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its myceleum. -Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams