HRC Seminar Series

This paper uses works of fiction and of history to argue for a deconstructive approach to the past. If the past has an ontology, it is a latent ontology that is activated when one does history. Here, it is the presence of past possibles that condition our possible pasts. What I mean by this is that our knowledge of the past is conditioned by what presents itself to us both in terms of its remains and in terms of our reception. The limits of what we are willing to accept as “past possibles” conditions what we are willing to accept as possible pasts. That which lies beyond this realm appears to us as simply impossible, like a ghost. But the ghost is only impossible insofar as it is a remainder of a different time and place and its untimely presence disturbs us. It is when what lies latent appears, returns, that history is haunted. Like the ghost, the past is a revenant brought to the present by the historian. It visits us but does not belong to our time or place. Derrida links the ghost to the trace and to différance and I see history as linked to différance. The past as history is in this sense crossed out, present and absent. I use the bar/strike through and not the X to demonstrate the present/absent nature of the past event but also to signify the way we are “barred” from actually having that past event in the present. This indicates to me the ontological-epistemological entanglement of history with the past. By revealing the play of différance, deconstruction unhinges the past from the “as it really happened,” and returns it to the realm of possibilities: past possibles and possible pasts.

Ethan Kleinberg is the Director of Wesleyan University’s Centre for the Humanities and executive editor of History & Theory. He is the author of Generation Existential: Martin Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927-61 (2005), and is in the process of completing his second book, The Myth of Emmanuel Levinas. His current research interests include European intellectual history, critical theory, educational structures, post-colonialism, and the philosophy of history.

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