CROSSING THE WIRES IN THE PLEASURE MACHINE: LENIN AND THE EMERGENCE OF HISTORICAL DISCONTINUITY

If it is true, as I have argued in an earlier essay, that discontinuity is not an unintended side-effect of our ambition to attain goals that are in line with our identity, but the result of our giving in to a sublime "why not?," then how can we conceive of history as a process? In this essay I will explore the thesis that my notion that the discontinuities of history spring from a dehors texte squares well with an evolutionary view of history. I will do so by giving an account of how Lenin and Trotsky brought off one of the primordial discontinuities of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution. Starting with Trotsky's remark that Lenin owed his success to his "imagination," I show that the October 1917 coup d'etat was not guided by strategy or driven by ideology, but by a series of "inspired" improvisations in which the protagonists fled forward into the unknown. Trotsky describes Lenin's "intuition of action" as the fruit of his ability to take leave of the system of complexity reduction that is stored in conventions, received wisdom, and other things we take for granted. Trotsky in effect says that Lenin's improvisations were most successful when he was so completely "possessed" by his deeds that he didn't fully know what he was doing-when, that is, he was in (as psychiatrists would say) a state of dissociation. In Lenin's inspired deeds the "latent powers of the organism" that humans have "inherited from animal ancestors" rose up, Trotsky said, and "smashed through the doors of psychic routine and-together with the highest historico-philosophical generalizations-stood up in the service of the revolution." Acting out the dehors texte, Lenin brought about one of the metamorphoses in which humanity mutates to new-though not necessarily higher or happier-levels. The essay includes some remarks on what all this might mean for the relation between history and theory in the upcoming years

Inventing the new from the old - from White's 'tropics' to Vico's 'topics'

Hayden White said a long time ago that it is important 'to understand what is fictive in all putatively realistic representations of the world, and what is realistic in all manifestly fictive ones.' In the past decades only the first half of this project has been taken up: White's own 'tropics' can be regarded as a research strategy to understand what is fictive in realistic representations of the world. In this essay I venture into the second part. My thesis is that trying to understand what is 'realistic' in fictive representations of the world much resembles the peculiar brand of topics that Giambattista Vico practised in his Scienza Nuovo. In Vico's topica the whole of history is regarded as stored in 'places' (i.e. 'institutions') that can be 'visited' on the plane of the present. On the level of language, these places can be identified as metonymies. Surprisingly, the concept of metonymy brings about a rapprochement between critical and substantive philosophy of history: in historical autopoiesis the 'new' is invented out of 'old' metonymical places. Vico's notion of inventio shows how, every now and then, people break apart from the stories they live by and start to commit deeds they hadn't even dreamt of

Rising grain prices (Historical cliches, Lev Tolstoy's 'War and Peace')

Despite the fact that Aristotle couldn't imagine that knowledge of the past could yield 'truths about life', nineteenth-century historicists believed just that: they were convinced that history, as it welled up from I the sources', revealed more about human existence than might be gleaned from what we see around us. At the time I started to study history, the belief in 'historia magistra vitae' had long evaporated. Yet, when I look back upon my student days, it was precisely a wish to learn I truths about life' that had attracted me to the discipline. Rather frustratingly, instead of truths about life, I learned that in order to become a historian I had to juggle with phrases like 'centralization', 'the emergence of the middle class, and 'rising grain prices.' It was only by reading Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace that I discovered that historical cliches are not innocuous: they may influence the way history is made. It is one of Tolstoy's grand themes in War and Peace: the interaction, or even contamination, of life and history. Tolstoy taught me that studying this interaction may be an (admittedly) roundabout way to uncover truths about life. For, according to Tolstoy, it is by becoming bound up with history that life has lost its truthfulness

The past is not a foreign country:a conversation

In this interview, Marek Tamm asks questions concerning some of the main developments and arguments in Eelco Runia's thinking about history. The following topics are discussed: the relations between history, psychology and fiction; the critique of representationalism in the contemporary philosophy of history; the presence of the past; the question of continuity, discontinuity and mutation in history; the importance of metonymy as the quintessential historical trope; the influence of Giambattista Vico on Runia's thinking; the intellectual affinities between Runia and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; and Runia's ongoing research project on Red Queen history

De pathologie van de veldslag : geschiedenis en geschiedschrijving in Tolstoj's Oorlog en vrede /

Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-256) and index.Deneckere, Git