Introduction

Abstract

Speaking at the end of his life — a life lived in and through the events of the twentieth century — the contemporary historian Tony Judt reflected that he felt that ‘writing a narrative history of my own times … was the only way to make sense of them’ (2012: 397). This seemingly innocuous comment is perhaps a rather strange statement for a historian to make, particularly when confronted with the complexity and intensity of the recent past — a past which we are in many ways still living. For Marxist and post-positivist historians since Braudel have tended to ‘displace the event’ as the locus of historical action and investigation (Rancière 1994: 11), rejecting narrative as a representational mode of thought which simply reaffirms an illusory ‘belief in “real events”’ and the ‘delusory seductiveness of storytelling’ (White 1994: xiv). By focusing instead on significant passages of time, cultural shifts, political tendencies and economic innovations, historians have sought to move beyond ‘the scandal of the event’ and ‘the impropriety of an expression’ (Rancière 1994: 30) that threatened to subjectify history as figure, image and speech rather than the scientifically objective interpretation of social change and material relations.

To bring about the consolidation of experience with history, which is original for every present, is the task of historical materialism. It is directed to the consciousness of the present which explodes the continuum of history.

(Benjamin 1982: 227)