LaCapra, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language

LaCapra, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

“Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts”

LaCapra promises to explore a “dialogical relation between the historian or the historical text and the ‘object’ of study [which] raises the question of the role of selection, judgement, stylization, irony, parody, self-parody, and polemic in the historian’s own use of language—in brief, the question of how the historian’s use of language is mediated by critical factors that cannot be reduced to factual predication or direct authorial assertion about historical ‘reality’.” (25) He brings forward his main argument, that the context—that is, the surrounding reality—is itself modelled (in many respects) after texts, and therefore “social and individual life may fruitfully be seen on the analogy of the text and as involved in textual processes that are often more complicated than the historical imagination is willing to allow.” (26) This, in his view, transforms the dialogue with the past (of which we have only textual relics) into a hermeneutic affair and into a process of dialogue.

“What I take to be especially valuable in the approaches to textuality developed by Heidegger and Derrida is critical inquiry that tries to avoid a somnambulistic replication of the excesses of a historical tradition by rehabilitating what is submerged or repressed in it and entering the submerged or repressed elements in a more even-handed ‘contest’ with tendencies that are damaging in their original forms.” (29)

Criticises Lovejoy’s and similar approaches to intellectual history (history of mentalities, e.g.) as something which doesn’t address the question how ideas/mentalities/structures exist materially (in texts), as well as misses the question of ‘lost’ or even ‘repressed’ possibilities in history (cf. Koselleck). Suggests to study intellectual history as history of texts and consequently to reassess the relationship between text and context, a problem which he divides into six ‘subfields’:

He starts with 1. the relation between the author’s intentions and the text. “In any case, to believe that authorial intentions fully control the meaning or functioning of texts (for example, their serious or ironic quality) is to assume a predominantly normative position that is out of touch with important dimensions of language se and reader response.” (38)

2. The relation between the author’s life and the text. He responds that “a problem common to a written text and a lived ‘text’ may be worked or played out differently in each, and these differential relations pose important problems for interpretation.” (39)

3. The relation of society to the text. LaCapra challenges the idea that social structures, ideologies (Marxism) or even discursive practices which stich political institutions together (Foucault). “The question [is] how precisely the discursive practice, deep structure, or ideology—even the prejudice—is situated in the text other than in terms of instantiation or simple reflection.” (42) Instead, he offers that Derrida’s approach to deconstruction of (any) text, since Derrida treats context as an overall historical movement of a text (historical dimension of a text). “The larger question raised in Derrida’s analysis is that of relating long and intricate traditions, such as the history of metaphysics, the specific period or time (including some delimited structural or epistemological definition of it), and the specific text. The attempt to delineate the mode of interaction among them requires an interpretation of this text in all its subtlety, and it indicates the importance for historical understanding of a notion of repetition with variations over time.” (44)

“Any text reaches us overlaid and even overburdened by interpretations to which we are consciously or unconsciously indebted… We as interpreters are situated in a sedimented layering of readings that demand excavation.” (45) Suggests that a study of critical response (later interpretations) to texts is the best approach to study the relation of society to the text—therefore, one needs to read texts in their context which is textualized social response.

4. The relation of culture to texts.

An importance to engage in a dialogical relation with texts.

5. The relation of a text to the corpus of a writer.

“The notion of context provided by other texts is itself apparently textual in nature… [which] raises the problem of the relationship between a text and the texts of other writers as well as other texts of the same writer.” (55)

6. The relation between modes of discourse and texts.

“What should be taken as a problem for inquiry is the nature of the relationships among various analytically defined distinction’s in the actual functioning of language, including the use of language by theorists attempting to define and defend analytic distionctions or oppositions in their conceptual purity.” (57)

In conclusion, LaCapra discusses the distinction “between intellectual history as a reconstruction of the past and intellectual history as a dialogue or conversation with the past.” (61)

“I would argue for a more ‘performative’ notion of reading and interpretation in which an attempt is made to ‘take on’ the great texts and to attain a level of understanding and perhaps of language use that contends with them. This notion, which valorizes the virtuoso performance in reading, is easily abused when it becomes a license or reducing the (62-63) text to little more than a trampoline for one’s own creative leaps or political demands. Certainly, the act of interpretation has political dimensions… In some relevant sense, interpretation is a form of political intervention that engages the historian in a critical process that relates past, present, and future through complex modes of interaction involving both continuities and discontinuities. But it is misleading to pose the problem of understanding in terms of either of two extremes: the purely documentary representation of the past and the ‘presentist’ quest for liberation from the ‘burden’ of history through unrestrained fictionalizing and mythologizing…. A significant text involves, among other things, creative art, and tits interpretation is, among other things, a performing art.”