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TRAUMA, HISTORY, MEMORY, IDENTITY: WHAT REMAINS?

Oktober 4, 2016, 3:51 p.m., DOMINICK LACAPRA, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

Despite the considerable amount of work already devoted to the topic, the nexus of trauma, history, memory, and identity is still of widespread interest, and much remains to be investigated on both empirical and theoretical levels. The ongoing challenge is to approach the topic without opposing history and memory in a binary fashion but instead by inquiring into more complex and challenging relations between them, including the role of trauma and its effects. This account attempts to set out a research agenda that is multifaceted but with components that are conceptually interrelated and that call for further research and thought. In a necessarily selective manner that does not downplay the value and importance of archival research, it treats both the role of traumatic memory and memory (or memory work) that counteracts post-traumatic effects and supplements, at times serving as a corrective to, written sources. It argues for the relevance to history of a critical but nondismissive approach to the study of trauma, memory, and identity-formation, discussing significant new work as well as indicating the continued pertinence of somewhat older work in the field. One of the under-investigated issues it addresses is the role of the so-called transgenerational transmission of trauma to descendants and intimates of both survivors and perpetrators. It concludes by making explicit an issue that is fundamental to the problem of identity and identity-formation and concerning which a great deal remains to be done: the issue of critical animal studies and its historical and ethical significance. Addressing this issue would require extending one's purview beyond humans and attending to the importance of the relations between humans and other animals.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10817

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Oktober 4, 2016, 3:51 p.m., History and Theory, Allgemein.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.00006

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KARL POLANYI AND THE REALITY OF SOCIETY

Oktober 4, 2016, 3:51 p.m., MICHAEL C. BEHRENT, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

This essay reconsiders Karl Polanyi's famous thesis about the “embeddedness” of the economy through an examination of two recent books: For a New West, a collection of previously unavailable essays by Polanyi, and Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers's The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique. The guiding thread of this analysis is the claim that a constant in Polanyi's thought was his belief in what he called “the reality of society,” that is, that society exists as a social fact over and above the individuals that constitute it. The essay begins by tracing Polanyi's intellectual development, drawing primarily on the essays found in For a New West. Polanyi's quest to reconcile individual freedom with social solidarity led him first, in the years between the First and Second World Wars, to embrace liberal socialism, before his readings in anthropology persuaded him that traditional economies “embed” the economy in social relations and that the nineteenth-century liberal project of a “disembedded” economy (through the so-called free market) is a departure from this anthropological norm. The essay then examines and questions Block and Somers's claim that Polanyi maintained that the economy is always “already embedded,” arguing notably that Polanyi believed that the advent of market society entailed an economy that was actually disembedded from social relations, not merely one that was re-embedded in an alternative set of institutions.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10820

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BONDSMEN AND SLAVES: SERVILE HISTORIES IN HEGEL AND NIETZSCHE

Oktober 4, 2016, 3:51 p.m., JACOB DENZ, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

Recent readings of what is commonly known as the dialectic of master and slave have tended to focus either philosophically on concepts such as desire, reflection, and recognition or historically on the specific nature of the economic relation it evokes. In this paper I challenge that division of proper objects, arguing that Hegel's dialectic and its reception raises the question how the nature of servitude (whether that of a bondsman or that of a slave) structures not only the emergence of historical agency but also the relationship between history and philosophy. The importance of reflection in Hegel's treatment of the dialectic of lord and bondsman is both clearly stated and structural. Alexandre Kojève's reading of this dialectic makes explicit that human history originates in it, but, unlike Hegel, Kojève does not emphasize the product of the slave's labor. Judith Butler's reading of the dialectic in Hegel and Kojève locates the difference between Hegel's bondsman and Kojève's slave within the structure of servitude itself as a Foucauldian opposition between “body” and “life.” In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche differentiates between two varieties of servile work on the basis not of what is produced but instead to whom service is rendered, announcing what turns out to be a problematic familiar from both the Old and New Testaments: the impossibility of service to two masters. In a typically perspectival turn, Nietzsche shows that servitude is a condition of possibility not only of human history but also of its academic study. Self-conscious historians must thus take into account not only the dependence of their object of study upon relations of servitude but also their own place within such relations.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10816

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THE EURASIAN ORIGINS OF EMPTY TIME AND SPACE: MODERNITY AS TEMPORALITY RECONSIDERED

Oktober 4, 2016, 3:51 p.m., WILLIAM M. REDDY, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

Understood as a form of temporality, modernity is seen as consisting of empty time and space. However, careful examination of the origins of modern notions of empty time and space suggest they arose from background assumptions in wide use across Eurasia in the early modern period, and also that they arose prior to, and independent of, the emergence of the modern nation-state. Here, various Eurasian versions of astronomy and philology are examined to show that they relied on such background assumptions and could therefore be readily translated and shared across the boundaries separating quite different cosmologies.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10815

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