History is a science of ghosts—just ask Michelet. Or Hegel, for that matter. But the problem with adopting the vocabulary of Derrida’s Specters of Marx (for example, like Ethan Kleinberg does) is that one feels like Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, seeing ghosts all the time. Not untrue, but unsatisfying. It took very little time for the signature line of the movie, “I see dead people”, to become the subject of mockery and spoofs. But the example of Specters, and other texts like Archive Fever, Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, are important because in certain respects, Derrida looks like an intellectual historian. Certainly, an unconventional one, but one nevertheless. This is why Dominick LaCapra, Allan Megill, John Toews, Joan Wallach Scott, Carolyn Steedman and others identify his work as not only possessing ‘relevance’, but in certain ways possessing some kind of kinship to their own.
But for many historians, Derrida was, or is, simply a name that elicits the fears that we mentioned above; incursion, invasion, contamination, a fear that marks itself as an obsession with disciplinary boundaries and distinctions between history and literature, truth and fiction, and so on. In a very real sense, therefore, this essay addresses the community of historians. A community, according to Augustine, is defined by its common objects of love; in this case, rubrics of evidence and inference, the significance of the past in total, and as discrete events, the experience of archival work, past historians held in esteem, and so on.[1] To the degree that Derrida is an object of love—and hate—for historians, Derrida’s name therefore possesses a ‘portability’, that sees the citations of his work move around the discipline, lumped from debate to debate, as it marks out the boundaries of acceptable history.
Derrida’s name travels, therefore from an initial rapprochement with intellectual history, (which remains the closest trajectory with Derrida’s work in the disciplinary imagination), through sporadic engagements with feminist historiography. Despite a constant common perception of Derrida’s association with debates over the nature of historiographic narratives – here the supposed literary sense of Derrida’s work threw many into confusion – this substantial issue for historiography produced little material for engagement with Derrida until it lighted upon questions of the ethical and political significance of Derrida’s work.
[1] Cf. The introductory section of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ and Derrida’s description of philosophy as a community ‘of the question’, a community both interested in the status of questioning, marked by the task of questioning, and thus a community that loves the question to the point of it putting itself under question, Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (1978)., 79-81.
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