Abstract
This paper poses the question of what possible desires expressed in
Metahistory
remain un-gratified for Hayden White. In engaging the relationship between White’s later writings on figural realism, middle-voice writing and the practical past, I claim that these more recent topics are concerned with thinking ways for a community to retrospectively appropriate a past for its own project of self-making. Moreover, they also deal with the unavoidably figura-tive nature of any attempt at historical interpretation as narrativization. In other words, the three topics discuss the poetics of history, the constitution of a link between past, present and future, as a critical shifting between discourse and agency.Within this context, I want to suggest that these later issues are elaborations of something that was already present in
Metahistory
forty years ago
: a desire for a progressive historiog-raphy, a writing of history that ironically accepts both the free
and
conditioned
nature of our cultural discursive means for giving ourselves a past that still romantically seeks to transcend its own irony and to imagine a future to call our own. In pursuing this aim, I will claim that a performative theory of (historical) identity inspired by Judith Butler’s work may well be where White’s desire can best be heard.
Metahistory
remain un-gratified for Hayden White. In engaging the relationship between White’s later writings on figural realism, middle-voice writing and the practical past, I claim that these more recent topics are concerned with thinking ways for a community to retrospectively appropriate a past for its own project of self-making. Moreover, they also deal with the unavoidably figura-tive nature of any attempt at historical interpretation as narrativization. In other words, the three topics discuss the poetics of history, the constitution of a link between past, present and future, as a critical shifting between discourse and agency.Within this context, I want to suggest that these later issues are elaborations of something that was already present in
Metahistory
forty years ago
: a desire for a progressive historiog-raphy, a writing of history that ironically accepts both the free
and
conditioned
nature of our cultural discursive means for giving ourselves a past that still romantically seeks to transcend its own irony and to imagine a future to call our own. In pursuing this aim, I will claim that a performative theory of (historical) identity inspired by Judith Butler’s work may well be where White’s desire can best be heard.