History, violence, responsibility

Since post-structuralist theory has criticized representational historiogra phy, the ethical and political responsibility of the historian has been scr utinized anew. This essay investigates the responsibility of the profession al historian in particular, with regard to possible responses to what we mi ght come to see as the 'victims' of modern history. Focusing on a Derridian account of the formation of subjectivity in history and its inevitable vio lence. I argue that a deconstructive notion of historical time may help to articulate the historian's political and ethical responsibility in the pres ent and for the future. For it every attempt to represent 'the' past adequa tely is constructed in the present and written from an essentially open fut ure, the historian must take responsibility for the political consequences of her or his work in the present. However, Derrida's notion of responsibil ity, as an always-already openness of the subject to what is other than its elf, fails to distinguish between the 'originary' violence which necessaril y afflicts every relation to history and the victimization in the past, and its more or less violent suppression in the present, which the historian i s asked to expose. Thus, turning to Walter Benjamin's writing on history, I argue that a responsible response to the victims of the past requires, as much as possible, to distinguish between various senses of violence, distin ctions which in turn demand the projection of determinate horizons of polit ical change. A notion of the historian's responsibility would, thus, not be exhausted in the relation to the past, but demand the struggle against dis courses and institutions which occlude the recognition of past victimizatio n in the present and which might contribute to such victimization in the fu ture.