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Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002) 47-65



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The Pathogenesis of Medieval History

Michael Uebel


I. History's Perverse Rhythm

Know what rhythm holds man.

--Archilochos

"History," insists Paul Ricoeur, "is history only insofar as it has not attained either absolute discourse or absolute singularity, insofar as its meaning remains confused, mixed." Belonging to the "the realm of the inexact," history is in Ricoeur's view "essentially equivocal." 1 What leads Ricoeur to characterize history in this way is one of my guiding concerns, around which a series of speculations regarding the "doing" and "undoing" of history will be elaborated. Ricoeur is doubtless claiming something more profound than the now banal truth that historicism is at best an imprecise method, one that only reconstructs partially what it wants to revive fully. The confused or mixed meanings of history, it seems, have less to do with the misconstructions of historicism than with the refractory nature of historical events themselves. The events in and rhythms of history constitute together an unavoidable confusion, an indeterminacy with which the historian must first enter into a relation, in order to approach, if only to fall short of, any positive or objective understanding. Historical understanding amounts to becoming suspended in an infectious rhythm of appropriation and disappointment with respect to the real, a field of realities often paradoxically encountered in the shape of the unreal, the false, and the fantastic. 2 The medieval historian--and, through him, the modern one--has no choice but to submit to this suspension, between having and not having, produced by close encounters with phantom unreality. History demands, I will be suggesting, immersion in the fort/da--or the perverse 3 --rhythms of culture, wherein immunity to the buried structures of pathology is surrendered. 4

Knowing what rhythm holds the historian is not to conceive of history as rhythm, in the sense of an invariable series of repeatable mnemes. 5 [End Page 47] History is the provenance of the other as it appears in its difference, with the force of its irregularity. The past and present belong, as François Chatelet has it, to "the sphere of alterity":

If it is true that the past event is gone forever and that this dimension constitutes its essence, it is also true that its "pastness" differentiates it from any other event that might resemble it. The idea that there are repetitions in history . . . that there is "nothing new under the sun," and even that we can learn from the past, can be meaningful only for a mentality that is not historical. 6

The radical nature of locating history in the space of alterity should not be missed here: liberating oneself from the idea of history as repetition means that the past is not recuperable (by memory and by appeal to origin or fact). Accordingly, twelfth-century historian Walter Map defined the past as time existing outside of memory, while defining modernity (i.e., the contemporary) as the past which could be recalled by the living. The past, for many medieval historians, is not reiterable precisely because it is intractably other, residing outside the familiar protocols of the mundane. 7 The eleventh-century theologian Peter Damian, in a short treatise "On the Divine Omnipotence in Remaking What has been Destroyed and in Undoing What has been Done," 8 asserted that the past, totally receptive to God's power, can be unmade, thereby eradicating all factuality from the universe so that "what is left is sheer indeterminacy." 9 Always already under a kind of erasure, the past becomes an evacuated space ready to be filled with wonders, ghosts, and other signs of the counterfactual and pathological, as Rodolfus Glaber's Historiae (a text I turn to in the next section) attests.

An understanding of pathological alterity as the proper goal of cultural history comes, as I have suggested, only at the cost of being unavoidably implicated in the imprecise movements of invitation and interdiction with respect to the historical object. Continually playing a game of "here and there," the historian, far from being...

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