Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language

by Dominick LaCapra

Discusses the problems of text and context in studying the philosophical writings of Wittgenstein, Ricoeur, Sartre, Jameson, Marx, and Bakhtin

Genres: History, Philosophy, Theory

350 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Dominick LaCapra received his B.A. from Cornell and his Ph. D. from Harvard. He began teaching in Cornell’s History Department in 1969 and is currently Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies. He has a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and is member of the field of Romance Studies and the Program in Jewish Studies. At Cornell he received the Clark Award for distinguished teaching. He also served for two years as Acting Director and for ten as Director of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. In addition to being a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory (SCT), LaCapra was SCT’s Associate Director from 1996 to 2000, and its Director from 2000 to 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

LaCapra has edited The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (1991) and with Steven L. Kaplan co-edited Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives. He has written thirteen books. With Cornell University Press, he has published: Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (1972), A Preface to Sartre (1978), “Madame Bovary” on Trial (1982), Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (1983), History and Criticism (1985), History, Politics, and the Novel (1987), Soundings in Critical Theory (1989), Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994), History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998), History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory and History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (2009). He has also published History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2000 and Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

The significance of LaCapra’s work has been discussed in many reviews, essays, and books, including Robert Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Harvard University Press, 1995), Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989), and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity” Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Elizabeth A. Clark’s History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Harvard University Press, 2004) provides a critical survey of recent developments in intellectual and cultural history and places LaCapra’s work in this context. Rethinking History 8 (2004) contains an essay LaCapra was invited by the editors to write (“Tropisms of Intellectual History”) that retrospectively reflects on his work. The issue also includes four essays that respond to LaCapra’s contribution and provide appraisals of his role in the historical profession (by Ernst van Alphen, Carolyn Dean, Allan Megill, and Michael Roth).

Reviews

[Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an ambitious book in which LaCapra seeks to upend, reform, and clarify the theories and methods of intellectual history. It's a book about the production of ideas, and it's also a mirror book in being self-consciously an example of the production of ideas.

LaCapra's ideas are many, varied, and multi-sourced, but he posits them into a unifying vision around balancing the relationship of historians to both texts and contexts. He explores the use of language in achieving this balancing act, and he borrows heavily from the theoretical work of philosophy and literary criticism in supplying his arguments, for he sees them as more advanced in the work of self-reflexive and self-critical theory. Self is important here, because LaCapra also emphasizes the ultimate indistinguishability of the historian and the texts she studies. The writers of history is confederate with history, their writings our looking glass through which we see the past darkly.

One of my favorite elements of this work--which took me a very long time to read--is LaCapra's reference to other writers' works as illustrations of his premises and points. These include many well worth knowing: White, Wittgenstein, Ricoeur, Habermas, Sartre, Jameson, Marx, Bakhtin, Derrida, and Heidegger.

LaCapra taught me a large number of new words, 79 to be exact!. No doubt many graduate students in the humanities will be familiar with this list, but they were nearly all new or clarifying for me. Here they are:

-Dialogic: Discussing a problem AND what others have said about it
-Univocity: Having only 1 possible meaning
-Praxis: Practice, as distinguished from theory
-Putative: Generally considered or reputed to be (ostensibly)
-Anomic: A state of breakdown or absence of social norms
-Antinomian: Denies moral law (or works) in favor of faith alone
-Exiguous: Scanty or meager
-Perforce: Expresses necessity or inevitability
-Pastiche: Imitation of other art
-Plenum: Assembly of all members of a group
-Aporia: Irresolvable internal logical disjunction
-Haptic: Relating to touch, esp. manipulation of objects
-Asperity: Harshness of tone or manner
-Aphorism: A concise statement of principle
-Diachronic: Concerned with change (esp. of language) over time
-Feuilleton: Part of a European paper designed to lightly entertain the reader
-Aperçus: A hasty glance or glimpse
-Gnomic: Like or containing gnomes or aphorisms
-Lapidary: Suitable for engraving; elegant & concise (of language)
-Eidos: Mental images of great detail
-Copula: A connecting word, esp. form of 'be' between the subject and predicate
-Simile: Compares one thing w/ another to make vivid points, e.g. 'brave as a lion'
-Semiotic: Analysis at the level of a word
-Semantic: Analysis at the level of a sentence
-Hermeneutic: Analysis at the level of a text
-Conative: The part of the mind dealing with desire, volition, and striving
-Apposite: Form of 'apt,' e.g. an apposite answer is a good one
-Codpiece: A pouch on one's britches to cover the crotch worn in 14th and 15th centuries
-A fortiori: From a stronger place (of reason)
-Polysemy: The coexistence of many possible meanings, esp. words & phrases
-Synechdoche: When a part represents the whole in signifying speech, e.g. 'Germany defeated Brazil' of soccer
-Liminal: Initial or transitional stage of a process
-Sublate: Assimilate a smaller entity into a larger one
-Involuted: Complicated or abstruse
-Procrustean: Enforcing uniformity w/out regard to natural variation
-Lodestar: Star guiding a ship
-Remissive / Irremissive: Obsolete / Not obsolete
-Schizoid: An aloof, solitary personality type
-Translucid: To shine through
-Alterity: Otherness
-Metanomy: Substitutive name of an attribute for a signified whole, e.g. 'suit' for 'executive'
-Ab ovo: 'From the egg,' beginning at earliest point
-Eschatology: Part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and salvation
-Ersatz: Not real or genuine
-Aleatory: Random
-Apostrophic: (of speech) Directed at an inanimate or absent character
-Métier: Profession or occupation
-Plenitude: Abundance
-Filigree: Decoration consisting of delicate & complicated designs made of fine gold or silver wire
-Otiose: Serving no practical purpose
-Labile: Liable to change; easily altered
-Ternary: Composed of three parts
-Specular: Having properties of a mirror
-Inter alia: Among other things
-Plangent: Having a loud, reverberating sound
-Anagogical: Mystical exegesis, esp. relates to allusions of the afterlife
-Nostrum: Medicine prepared by a quack, esp. ineffective medicines
-Libidinal: Relating to instinctual psychic energy
-Monad: 'Unit' in philosophy signifying a variety of entities, e.g 'Util' in Economics
-Semanteme: Minimal distinctive unit of meaning, similar to concept of 'roots' in linguistics
-Acrostic: A poem or other composition in which certain letters in each line form new perpendicular words
-Insouciance: Casual lack of concern; indifference
-Prolepsis: Anticipation of possible objections in order to answer in advance; OR use or description of something in an anachronistic way, e.g. 'prophetic perfect' tense
-Occlude: Stop, close up, or obstruct
-Inimical: Tending or obstruct or harm
-Bathetic: Producing an unintentional effect of anticlimax
-Encomium: A text praising something highly
-Charivari: A cacophonous mock serenade
-To travesty: To create pastiche in an incongruous, failed way
-Heteroglossia: Presence of 2 or more expressed viewpoints within a text
-Mimetic: Imitative
-Quiddity: Inherent nature or essence of someone or something
-Peroration: Concluding part of an oration, typically meant to inspire enthusiasm
-Apotropaic: Supposedly having power to avert evil influences or bad luck
-Autotelic: Having an end or purpose in itself
-Polytropic: Versatile; affecting many kinds or types
-Shibboleth: Peculiarity of something that distinguishes a set of people; a catchword; a common saying w/ little current meaning or truth
-Passe-partout: A master key
-Leitmotif: A motif or theme associated throughout a work with a particular thing