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Hearing the Voices of the Dead Wyschogrod, Megill, and the Heterological Historian J O H N D . C A P U T O 1. In response to a question put to Jacques Derrida by Elizabeth Clark, one of America’s leading historians of early Christianity, about the relevance of deconstruction for history, Derrida said what we would expect him to say, that historians must constantly question their assumptions about history and stay open to other concepts of history and of historiography, and that is where deconstruction can help. But the first thing he said was unexpected: ‘‘I dream of being a historian.’’ He expressed his feeling that, in a way, ever since Of Grammatology, ‘‘I was just doing history.’’ That was not a bit of whimsy on his part or an attempt to please his questioner. When the audience chuckled, he added, ‘‘Really, I dream of this.’’1 For the ‘‘messianic’’ structure of deconstruction does not only mean that it is turned always and already to the to-come, the arrivants, but it also means that deconstruction is a logic of haunting, or of being haunted, that it is constantly ‘‘spooked’’ by the revenants, the ghosts of the dead who give us no peace. It should not be forgotten that when Derrida spoke of the messianic , he often mentioned Walter Benjamin, for whom the Messiah is not something coming. On the contrary, we ourselves are the messianic figures; we today occupy the messianic place. We are the ones for whom the dead were waiting, the ones who are supposed to redeem them. Deconstruction is ‘‘hauntology,’’ a way of worrying about the dead, of being spooked, of hearing the voiceless voices of the past. 161 Derrida’s dream is perfectly serious, and the reason for this, in my view, is that the historian of whom Derrida is dreaming is the same one of whom Edith Wyschogrod is dreaming when she speaks of the ‘‘heterological ’’ historian in An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology and the Nameless Others. By this expression, coined by one of the founding figures of a field that we today tend to call ‘‘religion and postmodernism,’’ who has helped to shape the very space in which we all work, Wyschogrod means the historian as one who responds to the claim that is laid upon her by the past, by the dead, whose silences speak volumes to us, demanding not to be left in peace, demanding our attention, our retention, our memory, our devotion, whose voicelessness calls out to us and begs our response. The historian, to advert to the theme of this, lives under the influence of the dead and her work flows from it. We do history because we live always and already under the influence of history. History for her is thus an eros, driven by a ‘‘double passion, an eros for the past and an ardor for the others in whose name there is a felt urgency to speak.’’2 The dead address us from the past but they are unable to speak for themselves. The historian is one who brings that-which-was to words in the light of this double passion, promising the dead that she will tell the truth, driven by a kind of historical necrophilia. The dead are not simply dead; rather, they lay claim to us from across the ages, interrupting our complacency with ourselves and with the regime of the present. So the work of the historian is shot through from the start with an ethical obligation, one that is analogous to the structure of our responsibility to the other in Levinas , whose work was first brought to the attention of the Anglophone world by Edith Wyschogrod some thirty years ago. When we speak about the other, and remember the other’s name, Wyschogrod holds that this act is to be treated as an ‘‘ethical placeholder’’ for the other’s unnameable transcendence,3 and this above all when others have been the victim of an attempt to violently erase the memory of them. The historian writes in and from the present where the present, our present , is the time of the ‘‘cataclysm,’’ the age of bureaucratic and technologically engineered mass exterminations,4 and she promises the murdered the truth. The historian’s work is situated from the start in the space of ethics, weighed upon by the immemorial press of the dead other before writing even begins. Historical writing is ‘‘always already implicated in a prediscursive ethics before...

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