The Phantasmal Past:Time, History, and the Recombinative Imagination Nicholas Watson The violence of the body reaches the written page only through absence, through the intermediary of documents that the historian has been able to see on the sands from which a presence has since been washed away, and through a murmur that lets us hear—but from afar—the unknown immensity that seduces and menaces our knowledge. —Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak? —W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz Pastness This essay is a sequel to an earlier one, published in 1999, which set out, by way of a meditation on Caroline Walker Bynum's great Holy Feast and Holy Fast, to imagine an alternative to the post-Enlightenment traditions of rationalist hermeneutics that dominate historical scholarship. "Desire for the Past," as the earlier essay is called, suggests that, in order to come to a more compelling understanding of what is at stake in study of the past, historians need to work with, as well as on, the models of thought and feeling they study, adapting these models for historiographic use in order to make visible the rich exchanges [End Page 1] between present and past that are an often-repressed feature of our work.1 More specifically, the earlier essay shows how premodern conceptions of affect might usefully inform the practice of historians. Medieval theories of affect belong within a hermeneutic tradition, displaced to the esoteric margins by the Enlightenment, which thinks of understanding less in rational than in empathetic terms: as the product of a quest for union with the subject of enquiry. Empathetic understanding is underwritten by a double movement of identification and repudiation between the unitary statement I am you and its silent shadow, I am not you. Considered as an empathetic endeavor, study of the past thus becomes something like the mystic's quest for union with God, and the essay ends by suggesting that close attention to the affective protocols that organize such a quest for thinkers like Julian of Norwich might allow us to understand better, and make more articulate use of, our own passionate investments in the past.2 "Desire for the Past" was intended as a thought experiment that would stand on its own as a consciously fervid contribution to the theorization of history. But questions have kept pushing their way out from the corners of the experiment, which cannot quite manage to ignore a looming issue larger than that of the individual scholar's personal investments in the past: that of contemporary culture's relationship to history itself. Where is the past? What has happened to the past? Despite the advances of historical scholarship, despite even the eruption of what the New York Times persists in calling the "medieval" specter of fundamentalism and other forms of eschatological terror into our new, so-soon-tarnished millennium, the past feels threatened, as though it were disappearing from the cultural imaginary of modernity as rapidly as the polar ice caps are melting from the planet. Not only a matter of professional concern but a challenge to the ethical identity of all historians, as well as a subject of consuming interest in its own right, the apparent vanishment of the past in our present, a phenomenon whose roots must, after all, lie in the past, urgently needs to be understood and confronted. [End Page 2] Medievalists might have a role to play here. Our lot is cast with the last centuries of what we may call the deep human past, the epoch whose spectacular...
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.