History in its partiality

History does not cease to be an empirical science of “facts” because it has reformed its methods and techniques, or because it has substituted a comprehensive structuralism for causalism, atomism and naturalism, or because it has become more attentive to cultural totalities. Its pretension to founding normativity on a better understood factuality does not become more legitimate, but only increases its powers of philosophical seduction. A confusion of value and existence, and more generally, of all types of realities and all types of idealities is sheltered beneath the equivocal category of the historical. (Derrida, “Genesis and Structure” in Writing and Difference, p161)

The mechanics that authenticates history is not only simply a system binded by normativity in the veil of factivity. We do believe in history because history seems to be responsible for recording (technicality) fact through media, publication, memory, imaginary artifact. However it is not the fact or merely fact to make one believe in what is being recorded in history or the logics of history itself.  Paradoxically, I am thinking that it is the very idea of alibi in the contrary to being as witness which makes history “historical”. Historicity presupposes alibi in future perfect: one could have been there or one should have junction with its language or simply one who have escaped from being “part” of the history. History negates all possible validity of being- in-the-event: as a witness, victim, observer or simply as gaze-in-a-machine. This is precisely the scenario of an escaped assassinate in the plot: those who escaped is the only one who can speak the whole truth. Derrida says that is the seduction of factivity that validates history, but the problematic is that fact itself is not at the location, is always in fugitive. Even the most powerful media machine maintained by CNN can not matter all aspects of an event even thought they do intent to play the transparent part of reporting fact. History itself is partial, fragmentary and has to be retold retroactively. Paradoxically, those who have been to the event will not be regarded as a substantial object (it simply does not allow to exist) within the discourse of the history. Even though one was made part of it but he will never be the witness, for witness can only exist as an onmipresent gaze that is panoramic and pluripotential. Many years ago in China, lot of people have been to the very location of the history in the TAM Square, but no one is validated and no history is being retold in the way it is supposed to be.

The ontological link between history and its own validity, for some reasons we believe, lies on the being as being. Being in the site is at the core of the event which “is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language connected to it, etc.” It is “a fragment of being” that makes history possible. (Badiou, “The Event as Trans-Being” in Theoretical Writing, p 98) If the philosophical seduction is a kind of paternal abuse in psychoanalytic sense, history has spatialized her desire upon the philosophical intrusion (seduction) and initiated the primal narcissism in philosophy thinking himself as the valid path to truth. It is philosophy himself trapped in the self indulgence of truth. Of course philosophy have never given up his inborn desire to seek support from his paternal relations with history, the domain that was supported by factivity of not being there.

Filed under: Badiou, Derrida, psychoanalysis, the Real , Deconstruction, History, philosophy