Abstract
Committing the Future to Memory: History, Experience, Trauma examines canonical philosophies of history, memory and identity in the context of contemporary interest in finitude and the temporalities of trauma. Engaging texts spanning multiple genres and several centuries - from John Locke to Maurice Blanchot, from Hegel to Benjamin - Clift combines close readings with conceptual generalization to bring those works together as sites where the pressure to think about the impact of history on individual and collective identities is at its highest. In order to gauge the force of these various relations between history and identity, the readings in Committing the Future concentrate on the experiences of time that exceed the historical narration of experiences said to have occurred in time. Thus, focus is brought to bear on the co-existence of multiple temporalities, and the quintessentially modern notion of historical succession is opened up to other possibilities beyond its status as the sine qua non of historical experience. By virtue of these openings, Clift conjures various alternatives, including the mediations of language and narration, temporal leaps, oscillations and blockages, and the role played by contingency in representation. Clift argues that such alternatives compel us to reassess the ways we understand history and identity in a traumatic, or indeed in a post-traumatic, age. Whereas historical determinacy conceives the present in terms of a complex and even unstable network of causalities, Committing the Future to Memory asks how history can be related to the future and to that end, it examines the issue of how determination works. In asking what it might mean to be historically 'determined,' it also asks about what kind of openings there might be in our encounters with history for interruptions, re-readings and re-writings.