My two cents on (or with) Kleinberg, Scott, and Wilder's "Theses on Theory and History" (2018)

See: www.theoryrevolt.com, #TheoryRevolt

When read in isolation, it is a text that makes well-known yet important points that are and should be remade once in a while; but when read in conjunction with something like Kleinberg's Haunting History, is a way more powerful one, connecting historiographic disciplinary institutions with a whole framework of "ontologic realism" that should be rethought from its base. That's immensely important.

Also wondering and extending (and definitely not in a "reviewer" tone): since we can put more than one text together in a comprehensive whole (our minds not having to be bound by "the analog ceiling"), it's not useless to think that maybe another artifacts or actions would need to result from this kind of disciplinary rethinking, retroactively refiguring the theses themselves. Certainly, independently of how good their arguments might be, manifestoes from the margins to the center of the discipline got a limited efficacy. Even more than texts/videos resulting or being stimulated from them, I'm thinking, for instance, about the possibility of highlighting what "critical history" works are already being done, so that manifestoes like this one don't have to wait to be heard. Making visible can really make a difference (since that's part of what institutions take their power from), can't it? That could provide a mutual refiguration and potentialization between the Theses and critical historians. The strength comes more from the network of texts than by them in isolation; so, what to put together with it?

The Facebook algorithm and the almost dead situation of this page make asking a question a little pointless, but still: thoughts? examples?

Books published and forthcoming in 2016

Bruno Bosteels (introduction), Kevin Olson (afterword), with essays by Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, Jacques Rancière and Pierre Bourdieu. What Is a People? (Columbia, 2016)

Manuel Cruz. On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History (Columbia, 2016)

Jacques Derrida, with an introduction by Judith Butler, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Of Grammatology, Fortieth Anniversary edition (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)

Stuart Elden. Foucault's Last Decade (Polity, 2016)

Michel Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Gerald Izenberg. Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)

Claude Lévi-Strauss. We Are All Cannibals: And Other Essays (Columbia, 2016)

William Olmsted. The Censorship Effect: Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the Formation of French Modernism (Oxford, 2016)

Kalle Pihlainen. The Work of History: Hayden White and the Politics of Narrative Construction (Routledge, 2016)

Books published in 2015

Robbert-Jan Adriaansen. The Rhythm of Eternity: The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900-1933 (Berghahn, 2015)

Jaume Aurell. Theoretical Perspectives on Historians' Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention (Routledge, 2015)

Jeremy Black. Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures (Indiana UP, 2015)

Kate Brown. Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (University Of Chicago Press, 2015)

Peter Burke. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-2014, Second Edition (Stanford, 2015)

Peter Burke, What is the History of Knowledge? (Polity, 2015)

Emily Miller Budick. The Subject of Holocaust Fiction (Indiana UP, 2015)

Judith Butler. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard, 2015)

Judith Butler. Senses of the Subject (Fordham, 2015)

Dipesh Chakrabarty. The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (University Of Chicago Press, 2015)

Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar (Eds.). Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (University Of Chicago Press, 2015)

Binne De Haan and Konstantin Mierau (Eds.). Microhistory and the Picaresque Novel: A First Exploration into Commensurable Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014)

Alexandre Dessingué and Jay M. Winter (Eds.). Beyond Memory: Silence and the Aesthetics of Remembrance (Routledge, 2015)

Robert Doran. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge, 2015)

Michel Foucault, Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). French original: La grande étrangère: À propos de littérature (EHESS, 2013) 

Michael Freeden. Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction  (Oxford, 2015)

Richard Grusin. The Nonhuman Turn (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)

Fredric Jameson. The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (Verso, 2015)

Richard Kearney (Editor) and Brian Treanor (Eds.). Carnal Hermeneutics (Fordham, 2015)

Anthony K. Jensen. Nietzsche's Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 2015)

Alison Landsberg. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (Columbia, 2015)

Moya Lloyd (Ed.). Butler and Ethics (Edinburgh, 2015)

Samuel Moyn. Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

Carla J. Mulford. Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire (Oxford, 2015)

Dmitri Nikulin (Ed.). Memory: A History (Oxford, 2015)

Vanessa Ogle. The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard, 2015)

Herman Paul. Key Issues in Historical Theory (Routledge, 2015)

J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Six. Barbarism: Triumph in the West (Cambridge, 2015)

Timothy Edward Pytell. Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning: An Emblematic 20th-century Life (Berghahn, 2015)

John Robertson. The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2015)

Ilai Rowner. The Event: Literature and Theory (University of Nebraska Press, 2015)

Paul K. Saint-Amour. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford, 2015)

Jerrold Seigel. Between Cultures: Europe and Its Others in Five Exemplary Lives (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

Peter Van Nuffelen. Orosius and the Rhetoric of History (Oxford, 2015)

Richard Whatmore. What is Intellectual History? (Polity, 2015)

Gillian Whitlock. Postcolonial Life Narrative: Testimonial Transactions (Oxford, 2015)

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft. Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

Jerome Veith. Gadamer and the Transmission of History (Indiana UP, 2015)

Books published in 2014

(Under construction)

Molly Andrews. Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life (Oxford, 2014)

Chiara Bottici. Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (Columbia, 2014)

Katrin Flikschuh and Lea Ypi (eds.). Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford, 2014).

Ryan Lizardi. Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media (Lexington, 2014)

Derek Thiess. Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography (Lexington, 2014)

James H. Williams (Ed.). (Re)Constructing Memory: School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation (Sense, 2014)

The ‘presentist condition’ of history: ‘no floor to stand on’

Image and description from Chris Lorenz's essay "Unstuck in time. Or: the sudden presence of the past". In: TILMANS, Karin, VAN VREE, Frank & WINTER, Jay (Eds.). Performing the Past. Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010.

According to the "List of Illustrations": "Image widely circulating via the Internet as ‘bathroom painted floor’; neither the original nor its maker can be tracked down".

Charles Guignon on Heidegger’s conception of history

“What is most striking about Heidegger's vision of the "history of being" in the thirties is the soteriological and apocalyptic "metanarrative" that seems to underlie it. History is seen as a monolithic "happening" that, springing from primordial origins, passes through a "dark night of the soul" of forgetfulness, yet embodies the prospects for a redemption in the final recovery of its concealed origins. Just as "futurity" is basic to human temporality, so the future is definitive of history. As Heidegger says, "History as a happening is an acting and being acted upon which, passing through the present, is determined from out of the future and takes over the past" (1M 44, my emphasis).

This conception of history was already articulated in Being and Time. There Heidegger claimed that historiography must begin by projecting "monumental" possibilities for the future to serve as a basis for formulating our sense of where history is headed as a totality. This futural moment is unavoidable, for it is only in terms of some anticipated vision of the end state of historical development that we have a basis for selecting the events that can be taken as historically relevant in formulating our account of what history is adding up to. That is, we can narrativize the confusing array of events of the past in order to find some significance in them only on the basis of some conception of the future outcome of history. The projected sense of the possible achievement of history lets us see what should be "reverently preserved" from the past as the historical record of our culture's achievements (BT 447-8). This is why Dasein must "choose its hero" if it is to identify what is worthy of being retrieved from the past (BT 437) …”

GUIGNON, Charles B.. Introduction. In: _____ (Ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Conversations with History: Hubert Dreyfus, "Meaning, Relevance, and the Limits of Technology"