The Writing of History [Paperback]

Michel de de Certeau (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1992 | ISBN-10: 0231055757 | ISBN-13: 978-0231055758 0

A leading intellectual member of France's Freudian school, Michel de Certeau combined principles from the disciplines of religion, history, and psychoanalysis in order to redefine historiography and rethink the categories of history. In The Writing of History, de Certeau examines the West's changing conceptions of the very role and nature of history itself, from the seventeenth-century attempts to formulate a "history of man" to Freud's Moses and Monotheism with which de Certeau interprets historical practice as a function of mankind's feelings of loss, mourning, and absence. Exhaustively researched and stunningly innovative, The Writing of History is a crucial introduction to de Certeau's work and is destined to become a classic of modern thought.

(Voice Literary Supplement )

Editorial Reviews

Review

Erudite in the extreme... Brilliant and rewarding.

(Voice Literary Supplement )

The crowing work of the late Michel de Certeau is this volume of essays on historiography... Tom Conley has now translated the text into English, with lovely fidelity to de Certeau's mellifluous Gallic idiom. The book is a brilliant, disjoined, baffling work, brimming with complex metaphors, Franco-German metaphysics and a post-modern sensibility.

(American Historical Review )

Although he has not yet gained the international reputation of a Foucault, a Bourdieu or a Derrida, the late Michel de Certeau was in their class as a thinker and and his spectrum of interests was even wider than theirs, ranging frm theology, sociology, and anthropology.

(French History )

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (April 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231055757
• ISBN-13: 978-0231055758
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #276,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for those interested in historiography and theory, April 11, 2002

By 

Nessander - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Writing of History (Paperback)

Along with French intellectual giants such as Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Levinas, stands Michel de Certeau. Despite being far less kown than these other figures of post-structuralist thought, it has been said that his thought and range of interests exceeded all of them (He studied and taught history, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, theology, literature and French). He deserves to be better well-known in the English speaking world, and will undoubtedly become so, now that his major works have been translated and are available.

This book, The Writing of History, is where de Certeau deals most comprehensively with post-structuralist theory and history, or, more specifically, historiography. Although American academia is still very hesitant about anything smacking of "postmodernism", it is inevitable that they too will have to acknowledge the sea change taking place, and find a place or at least a thought-out response to, theory. Despite definitely locating itself within the post-structuralist camp, de Certeau's work offers a way forward that is neither repulsive nor irrational, but can in fact be seen as liberating and promising. He argues that historians have worked on a principle of exclusion, whereby they draw an artificial line between the past and present, and separate what is "dead" from what is not. Through this navigation, they neglect the fact that they themselves are historical beings - they fail to historicize themselves and to recognize fully the ways in which historical processes shape their own actions, their own writing. They also believe - wrongly - that they are somehow above "politics", and that they may be able to describe politics without being themselves implicated in political processes. Even Foucault, de Certeau argues, fell victim to this trap (see Birth of the Clinic) since he attempts to point out the fundamental basis for knowledge systems without addressing his own basis.

De Certeau's thought cannot be summarized here. I would encourage this book to all historians who are not theory-phobic, especially those who are interested in the possibilities of thinking about ethics and history together (de Certeau is influenced by Levinas, here). Not many are doing this today, and it is a topic worth exploring more fully, especially as we wrestle with problems in the historiography of the holocaust, genocide, oppression, and other important issues.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Influential Postmodern, Christian Historiography, May 30, 2003

By 

Tron Honto - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Writing of History (Paperback)

This work is one from which a great many specialists from different fields will draw much insight from. Though ostensibly a work on historiography, this meta-topic is explore through the various alleyways of other disciplines such as politics, theology, history of religions, ethnology and psychoanalysis.

Its diverse topics reflect the diverse interests of its author. Undoubtedly, the fascination with ethnology is a reflection of de Certeau's earlier aspirations to be a Jesuit missionary to China. Part of this work bears the mark his interests while pursuing his doctoral degree at the Sorbonne where he studied the origins of the Jesuit order in the 17th century.

This is a disparate book, made of disjointed sections, which only interact with each other loosely under the umbrella of `historiography'. The first part of the book is more focused on historiography proper-the nature of making history and the making of history that necessarily occurs from the `place' of the historian and is shaped by his `archive'. In the following section, details of 17th century European religion serve as the locus of a larger discussion on what it means to write a religious history and a history of religion-elucidating the relation between ideology and religious belief. Then the transition is made to concerns of ethnology, alterity and semiotics in the economy representation and its narrative. The book concludes with a discussion of Freud and religion, taking on the two subjects of his approach to possession and his work Moses and Monotheism.

The general conclusion of the work is that a self-/place-conscious history is best (one that is not blatantly ideological and one that is not naïvely positivistic either) through throughout the course of the book many other theme, sub-themes, etc. are unpacked. Though average length, it's a dense work bound to effect how anyone who reads it writes, approaches, and understands narratives of the real.