The Latest Catastrophe by Henry Rousso;

Author:Henry Rousso; [Rousso, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226165370
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-05-12T05:00:00+00:00

Contemporary history was almost absent from that movement. It developed in parallel fashion, however, in niche publishing and print journalism, since a demand and even a nascent economic market existed there as well. Not surprisingly, it was the so-called sensitive periods and subjects that attracted growing numbers of readers, a sign that the cultural dimension and the identity question were far from the only explanations for that renewed interest in the past. It can even be said that there was a rift between the public’s expectation of a history of twentieth-century “battles” and the overt contempt by most historians in the dominant current for that form of history, a rift somewhat reminiscent of the situation in the late nineteenth century. No doubt there was also—already—a kind of fascination with the century’s violence, even a form of voyeurism, which was openly expressed during the so-called retro wave in the ambiguous success of Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter (1974). The phenomenon endured, however, and even intensified in the following decades, affecting both the generations marked by the major catastrophes of the twentieth century and later generations, whose members had been spared to a greater degree but who suffered from the aftereffects. It is therefore likely that the phenomenon is not merely conjunctural. The events of 1968 also played a role, creating an increasingly marked demand for a history that was less deferential, more critical of the gray zones and other taboos, real or proclaimed, of recent history. An inquiry into the lethal dimension of the twentieth century therefore took shape in the 1970s and continued to expand. In my view, this was very different from the attraction to medieval or modern history or even to the legacy of the French Revolution, which would preoccupy the French people during the bicentennial in 1989. That inquiry did not belong to the order of positivity, of traditions revived and reclaimed, of an exemplary history that ought to guide the present and the future, but rather to the order of negativity: the past took the form of a burden that had to be assessed so that it could be faced or possibly escaped. Contrary to a certain doxa formulated in the wake of Nora’s reflections on the “era of commemoration” at the end of Lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory), or of Hartog’s discussion of the question of presentism, I do not think we can understand the regime of historicity in effect since the 1980s without taking into account the strong tension, which varies by time and place, between the positive and negative poles. The obsessive presence of the past in which we live does not stem solely from a loss of tradition, an ill-considered rupture with the past, an almost Promethean unconsciousness that would confine postmodern and even “post-postmodern” societies to a perpetual present and thus make us consume history the way we consume high technology. It stems as well, perhaps even more, from the pressing need to free oneself from the weight of

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