Towards A Politicized Notion of History

This kind of goes along with some of the links I’ve been posting throughout the past couple of months, most of which stem from a lot of ruminating and critical thinking prior to writing my (completely theoretical at the moment) thesis.

In reading Hegel, Zinn and Zizek, there seems to be a common thread that unites their political (and/or philosophical) ontology in relation to history: the question of Essence vs. Notion. To put it simply, it’s not enough that historical events happen, but that there must be reasons for why they happen. I think from here, in answering the question of “why?,” we can broach it by delineating two opposing approaches: one is radical empiricism and the other deconstruction. Obviously, we can all agree that events do occur and we’re fully capable of analyzing them, but I’m unconvinced that strict empiricism or objectivist rationalism is the proper means to that end. What’s lost in the passage of time is the absolute complexity, the impenetrable in-itself of any historical event (which, in a deconstructionist sense, lacks, as a singular event, any telos in-itself), so while fragments remain (and rather abundantly in the case of more contemporary historical research), what we’re mostly left with is the Notion, the social substance constitutive of historiography and pseudo-Habermasian intersubjectivity.

Thus, in answering the “why?” of an historical event, one should exclaim, unabashedly, their ideological commitments, rather than attempting to depoliticize them in favor of how a forensic pathologist determines cause of death—this form of investigation is completely irrelevant to historical analysis, except maybe for an archivist (though I don’t know what, if any, analysis they do). This isn’t to say that we should fabricate history. Obviously, making a claim like “World War II never happened!” just sounds utterly ridiculous, but most of this is in light of the fact that there still remains a significant trace of its “historical essence,” so to speak…

In that respect, the Hegelian point mentioned a few posts ago still stands: the rewriting of history, and thus the actual shaping of history itself, is determined in the present. There is no transcendental truth to be had in historical analysis; the truth is rather the movement of its very rewriting. Thus, if we want to participate in this analysis, we should, again, be open about how we as individuals analyze history, rather than mistakenly associate the intersubjective historical discourse as a transcendental, objective truth. Moreover, I’m unconvinced by historical determinism, because I think there is some wiggle-room for the occurrence of a radical Truth-Event, in the Badiouist sense, that ostensibly shatters the ideological constellation of the present, but maybe I’ll write more on that later.