Understanding Others

Peoples, Animals, Pasts

Dominick LaCapra

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501724916
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

To what extent do we and can we understand others—other peoples, species, times, and places? What is the role of others within ourselves, epitomized in the notion of unconscious forces? Can we come to terms with our internalized others in ways that foster mutual understanding and counteract the tendency to scapegoat, project, victimize, and indulge in prejudicial and narcissistic impulses? How do various fields or disciplines address or avoid such questions? And have these questions become particularly pressing and not in the least confined to other peoples, times, and places?

Making selective and critical use of the thought of such important figures as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Mikhail Bakhtin, in Understanding Others Dominick LaCapra investigates a series of crucial topics from the current state of deconstruction, trauma studies, and the humanities to newer fields such as animal studies and posthumanist scholarship. LaCapra adroitly brings critical historical thought into a provocative engagement with politics and our current political climate. This is LaCapra at his best, critically rethinking major currents and exploring the old and the new in combination, often suggesting what this means in the age of Trump.

Chapter 1

History, Deconstruction, and Working through the Past

For certain commentators, deconstruction is a dead issue or at least a thing of the past, rendered irrelevant in good part by the Paul de Man affair and responses to it. I would like to argue that, despite criticisms one may make of how the de Man controversy was handled by a significant number both of de Man’s supporters, alas including Derrida, and of his at times dismissive critics, there are important respects in which there are features of deconstruction, and of Derrida’s thought in particular, that remain relevant to important problems.¹ One prominent initiative I would stress as making deconstruction especially pertinent historically, ethically, and politically is its questioning of binary oppositions that are related to a quest for purity and unproblematic identity. Binaries are crucial to the workings of a scapegoat mechanism whereby anxiety and insecurity in the self or the self’s group are projected outward onto vulnerable others—others who may well be seen as the detested cause of degeneration or pollution. Scapegoating depends on decisive binary oppositions, notably between self and other, and in a feedback loop it is instrumental in generating or reinforcing such invidious oppositions. Policing, violence, and the building of real or symbolic walls may of course be employed socially and politically to underwrite and lend credence to binarism in general and scapegoating in particular.

In contrast to pure binaries, Derrida proposed a generalized trace structure and the mutual but power-laden, asymmetrical marking of putative opposites. This view is epitomized in his often misinterpreted statement “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”—There is no outside-the-text. Contrary to a prevalent misconstruction, this statement implies, in terms of a generalized trace structure, not that there is nothing of significance outside texts in the ordinary sense but instead the importance of a relational network in which there is no unproblematic, unmarked, nonimplicated, formalistic inside-the-text either. I do not read Derrida (and I do not think Derrida reads Derrida) as reinforcing an inside/outside binary by eliminating or even suspending reference or context. Instead he is inviting an attempt to rethink their relations to texts, language, and signifying practices in general. He is manifestly not making an argument for the self-referential autonomy of the text or the idea that it is sufficient for a reader (including an intellectual historian, philosopher, or literary critic) to confine research to reading a text in isolation from all other considerations, although he typically does point (at times in a contestable way, as in the de Man affair) to the complexities of at least certain texts and the way they set in motion a multiplicity of tensely related forces.

As late as 2016, a noted intellectual historian could repeat once again a misleading understanding of Derrida, which one might have thought to be thoroughly discredited, especially since he refers to my own work as supporting his understanding, even though he goes on, in a self-contradictory fashion, to discuss my efforts as focusing on “cultural context … at the expense of an understanding of the argument of the texts themselves.”² Richard Whatmore writes that Derrida “questioned the placing of texts in historical contexts. As Derrida wrote, texts functioned in the absence of their author and could be understood by the scrutiny of the text alone. This approach was famously summarized in the second part of his book De la grammatologie (1967): ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte (there is nothing outside the text)’ ” (33).³ Although one might well question this translation, which would apply rather to “Il n’y a rien hors du texte,” Whatmore may not have read closely and with sufficient understanding the texts and arguments to which he here refers. It is a non sequitur to infer from “the absence of the author” that texts could be “understood by the scrutiny of the text alone.” Instead Derrida’s famously misread statement implies the recontextualization of texts over time that accompanies rereadings and uses over which an author has no definitive control such as proprietary intentionality.⁴

Whatmore does not address the contrast between two divergent approaches to intellectual history. The Cambridge school attempts to reconstruct the thought or “conversations” of the past, on which it “eavesdrops,” by combining a study of presumably intentional meaning and the discursive context in which that meaning was elaborated and debated, especially in terms of idioms or paradigms supposedly distinctive of a past time. Quite important is a reaffirmation of philology and extensive erudition, which may even be taken not only as valuable, pertinent practices but also more problematically as the constituents of a specific, even self-sufficient historical methodology. Here one has a reformulation of the ideal of fully objective knowledge of the past in its own terms and for its own sake, although Skinner in his later works indicated that his approach might have practical value insofar as we might learn from exchanges in the past that may have been forgotten or downplayed but can still say something to us and our problems if only in terms of a contrast between that past and the challenge of the present and future. The latter perspective to some extent introduces a Benjaminian twist, which I find valuable, into a seemingly rather conventional and unilaterally objectifying frame of reference.

The approach I have defended does not coincide with Derrida’s but draws critically and selectively from it and also from others (notably Freud and M. M. Bakhtin). Like historians in general, I recognize the value of the attempt to reconstruct the past, its discourses, and its arguments. But, like Derrida among others, I do not see this attempt as self-sufficient or unproblematic. In attempting to elucidate this issue, it is indeed important to affirm the role in historiography of truth claims, accurate assertions, and rigorous attempts to validate them. But it is too simple and even misleading to believe one can put forth a fully objective reconstruction of what occurred in the past that separates the objectified past sharply from the present. Discursive contexts are significant, but they may well be multiple, especially in the case of complex texts, and the determination of which contexts are most pertinent to a text or utterance is not a foregone conclusion. Idioms or paradigms are debatable constructs in relation to which texts or utterances are not simple instantiations but rather uses of language or signifying practices that may modify, contest, or at times have a transformative effect on putative contexts, idioms, or paradigms. Moreover, there are problems of “translation,” both literal and figurative, in rendering the past and in making it more or less understandable to groups in the present. One has here the question of what Bakhtin termed “responsive understanding” and what Derrida approached in terms of opening a reading that does not dismiss traditional methods such as contextualization but problematizes them in recognizing not the inevitability of a unilaterally projective or radically constructive presentism, but the demands of a self-implicating interchange with a nonhomogeneous past and with whatever is taken as other (such as pasts, peoples, and animals).

As Derrida insisted, increasingly in a critical exchange with the thought of Freud, language is worked over by various forces, at times escaping the intention of the author and taking texts in unanticipated directions and allowing for belated recognitions. I would add that a formulation of intention is itself often retrospective, belated, and dialogic, notably when one disagrees with an interpretation of what is being asserted or explored (for example, the meaning of “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”). A basic point about intention is that, in public discourse, including legal proceedings, if you know what you are doing and are aware of probable consequences, then your act is prima facie intentional. Intention here is not a question of internal states or acts, for example, peering into a mind or soul (including one’s own) to see what was “really” meant or wanted. Those in the Cambridge school certainly recognize unintended consequences in history, but they may not coherently relate such consequences to language use or signifying practices in the past itself but take them primarily as later acts of unilateral appropriation if not highway robbery of what exists as the proprietary domain of clear and distinct authorial intention. There may well be illegitimate attempts to evade intention and the responsibility for statements or other acts that attend it, but such attempts do not account for all the complexities that the issue of intention entails. Moreover, the texts, discourses, and practices of those in the past or, more generally, in other times and places may themselves be quite intricate, internally divided, and contested. Something similar may be said for the present, perhaps with special insistence, since (the problematic) “we” are part of that present and have sometimes intensely affective and evaluatively charged investments in what is happening in it and to us.

Here we enter the difficult terrain of the following: (1) What Freud addressed in terms of transference, bringing the mutual implication of self and others and involving a tendency to repeat. Transference (positive, negative, and ambivalent) includes but is not limited to parents and children or analysts and analysands. Moreover, transference is a relational concept not restricted to individual psychology or to the one-on-one clinical relation. I would also contend that transference is not confined to relations with people in contrast to texts or animals (for example, a text like the Bible [and many others] or an animal, especially one considered as part of the family or even as being a person). There is a crucial social dimension to the concept of transference. And, as Freud intimated, there is what might be termed a conflict-laden general economy of transference to some extent controlled in, but not confined to, the clinical relation. (2) What Bakhtin discussed as the internally dialogized, polyphonic, often conflictual, and possibly carnivalized dimension of texts and discourses (not to be confused with conventional dialogues between discrete individuals or characters often amounting to a nondialogic exchange of stereotypes, clichés, or “talking points”).⁵ (3) What Derrida investigated in terms of a trace or “textual” structure that could also be seen as a general network of differential co-implications. Deconstruction and self-deconstruction applied to internally self-questioning or “dialogized” texts and discourses that could claim unity and identity only through a problematic movement of idealization and analytic reduction.

One may also note the relation among Derrida, Freud, and Bakhtin on the issue of binary oppositions. In Derrida, binaries mutually mark one another. Indeed one of a pair of opposites is the “same” as the other but as differed and deferred, a notion that may be taken to open the question of the variable nature of distinctions that are not taken to be binaries.⁶ In Freud there is an ambivalent relation between basic concepts, which he explored notably with respect to the uncanny and the interaction of affects such as love and hate.⁷ Bakhtin argued that, in contrast to at least the aspiration of monological statements, dialogical and especially carnivalized image, language use, or practice structurally

strives to encompass and unite within itself both poles of becoming or both members of an antithesis: birth-death, youth-old age, top-bottom, face-backside, praise-abuse, affirmation-repudiation, tragic-comic and so forth, while the upper pole of a two-in-one image is reflected in the lower, after the manner of figures in playing cards. It could be expressed this way: opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, know and understand one another… . And in just this way could one define the basic principle of Dostoevsky’s art. Everything in his world lives on the very border of its opposite. Love lives on the very border of hate, knows and understands it, and hate lives on the border of love and also understands it… . Faith lives on the very border of atheism, sees itself there and understands it, and atheism lives on the border of faith and understands it… . Love for life neighbors upon a thirst for self-destruction… . Purity and chastity understand vice and sensuality.⁸

As I shall later indicate, what is crucial is not to allow the deconstruction of binary oppositions and the affirmation of a certain kind of ambivalence to eventuate in the generalization of ordinary ambiguity or equivocation and the disintegration of all distinctions, especially on ethical and political levels. Nor does the critique of absolute foundations, related to the deconstruction of binary oppositions, imply such disintegration or the idea that “anything goes.” Rather it poses problems in terms of contestable but possibly convincing and cogent distinctions and arguments instead of dogmatic beliefs.

The foregoing problems indicate the importance of self-reflexive vigilance in historians and other analysts in terms of an attempt to attend to and explicitly elucidate, insofar as possible, the affective and evaluative or “ideological” investments we have in our own discursive practices, investments that may be more or less opaque to us and not entirely controlled by intentions. These investments may even function to question our own identity and claims to autonomy. Hence one may always ask the question, Am I now sounding like, or being ventriloquized by, my parent or mentor? In ways worth investigating, emulators of Derrida, Lacan, or Foucault (among others) may at times seem to undertake or undergo stylistic identity theft, a kind of possession by the style and voice of the other. Needless to say, issues become more complex when one attends to the rhetoric of discourse and usage in all its variations from irony and parody (or self-parody) to testimonial affirmations, indications of concern, and statements of belief. A turn to psychoanalysis at its most fruitful points to an effort to address complexities of language and life with concepts and procedures that touch on dimensions of self and society often glossed over in the reconstruction of past utterances and idioms, notably when focused only on intentions and, more generally, on conscious practices.⁹ This psychoanalytic turn is evident in Derrida but resisted in the Bakhtin circle, which, at least in V. N. Volosinov’s Freudianism: A Critical Sketch,¹⁰ did not explore possible relations between a Bakhtinian orientation and Freud’s thought, but saw Freud in restricted terms, emphasizing what was taken to be Freud’s neglect of historical specificity and the role of language in culture along with his reliance on ahistorical biological reductionism (a partially valid but very limited perspective on Freud).¹¹

Trauma has a distinctive role here in its affective impact and disorientation of language and life, and its effects pose problems with respect to the disconcerting, compulsive, unintentional irruptions of the past into the present and future. It may also induce extreme confusion and the inability to make distinctions and cogent judgments. This intrusive traumatic past may be experienced, however misleadingly, as more present, pressing, and real than current circumstances. This past eludes unproblematic representation and untroubled styles. It has to be worked on and through (as well as played out in jokes, laughter, and other performative processes such as song and dance). Working on and through does not imply the achievement of closure and full identity or autonomy. It points instead to a self-implicating process in the attempt to reconstruct the past in ways that may raise questions for the present and create openings to often unpredictable but to some extent shapable futures. One aspect of this process is to move from dichotomies or fully decisive binary oppositions to more flexible and subtle distinctions or differences that exist on a spectrum from the scarcely discernible to the quite strong and at times decisive distinction that allows for decisions and judgments. I would note here that a professional advantage and disadvantage of the approach of the Cambridge school (in this respect to some extent like the New Criticism) is that, despite differences among its affiliates that may be more or less significant, it does provide a secure matrix or methodology that can be taught and learned in a rather conventional manner and enable scholars to take up research projects that promise success, at least in the eyes of those who accept its premises. The comparable advantage and disadvantage of what might be called a more dialogic and self-critical approach is that one certainly interacts with and may well learn from the practice of others, but one may not readily, if at all, provide pr...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1. History, Deconstruction, and Working through the Past
• 2. Humans, Other Animals, and the Humanities
• 3. Trauma, History, Memory, Identity: What Remains?
• 4. Frank Hamilton Cushing and His “Adventures” at Zuni
• 5. What Is History? What Is Literature?
• 6. What Use Are the Humanities?
• Index