Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. All history is local: modernism and the question of memory in a global Ireland
- Part I THE EROTICS OF MEMORY
- 1 Lethal histories: memory-work and the text of the past
- 2 A Pisgah sight of history: critical authority and the promise of memory
- 3 A reservation under the name of Joyce: Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia and the symptom
- Part II THE SPECTACLES OF HISTORY
- Afterword. The ends of memory and the ex-sistence of Ireland
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - A Pisgah sight of history: critical authority and the promise of memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. All history is local: modernism and the question of memory in a global Ireland
- Part I THE EROTICS OF MEMORY
- 1 Lethal histories: memory-work and the text of the past
- 2 A Pisgah sight of history: critical authority and the promise of memory
- 3 A reservation under the name of Joyce: Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia and the symptom
- Part II THE SPECTACLES OF HISTORY
- Afterword. The ends of memory and the ex-sistence of Ireland
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Concealed in the submission to the rules of a task and the regularity of objectively imposed exigencies there is a possibility for an eroticization of history – a quickening and quickened passion, I might almost say, love itself.
Michel de Certeau The Writing of HistoryWithin a normative, “common-sense” approach to the question of history, the problem of historical knowledge cannot be disengaged from the fundamentally paradoxical notion of the human subject on which it is predicated. On one hand, discursive convention links the idea of time and the bodies, consciousnesses, or “selves” which occupy it to a profoundly spatial concept of presence. Locked within their accustomed “here and now,” subjects experience the passage of time, or history, as “what happens.” It is time that is the prime mover in this conceptual system; the subject itself is confined, within its spatial moment of presence, as a locus of identity and sameness within the diachronic movement of time. In this sense, subjectivity is (temporally speaking) the site of a radical paralysis of consciousness: while the moment the subject occupies moves with time, subjectivity remains whole and inviolate; presence itself is nothing more nor less than the concept of a space in and beyond which the subject literally cannot move.
On the other hand, linguistic convention also suggests that historical knowledge enables, and indeed necessitates, precisely that movement of the subject that it has rendered impossible: we speak of past, present, and future as “places” that are not only discrete and contiguous, but also ideally accessible to the faculties of memory and, to a somewhat lesser extent, prognostication.
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- Information
- Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory , pp. 39 - 65Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002