HOW WE LIVE WITH THE PAST NOW

• Published in: History and theory :Studies in the philosophy of history 2015-10, Vol.54 (3), p.419-428
• Main Author: Goldstein, Jan E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: hypnosis; hysteria; memory disorders; narrative; photography; piety toward the past; Postmodernism; psychoanalysis; REVIEW ESSAYS; trauma
• ISSN: 0018-2656; 1468-2303
• DOI: 10.1111/hith.10769

Michael Roth's new collection of essays, written over the last two decades, is held together by its author's pervasive concern with human temporality: our individual and collective passages through time, recorded by the faculty of memory, which pose some of our most intractable problems. The essays treat, and indeed provide a map to, several adjacent areas of inquiry: the history of the psychopathology of memory in the long nineteenth century; the vicissitudes of the trauma-concept from its relatively modest medical origins to its postmodern apotheosis; and photography as a medium and art form embroiled in our relationship with the past. Roth's major interventions are threefold. First, while persuaded of the value of the psychoanalytic version of the trauma-concept, he critiques the so-called traumatophilia of postmodern theorists who, usually with reference to the Holocaust, seek to invest trauma with ethical valences and powers of legitimation or even, as in the case of Agamben, raise it to ontological status. Second, through his fine-grained account of Freud's convergence with and divergence from his French colleagues, especially Charcot and Janet, Roth argues that the stunning breakthrough of psychoanalysis was to take the past seriously, to recognize the inevitable penetration of the past into the present in the human psyche as well our affective investment in and need to narrativize the past. For Roth, Freud's continued relevance today resides in what he has taught us about living with the past. Finally, Roth begins to develop the concept of "piety" as an attitude toward the past that fuels the writing of history. He leaves the concept in rudimentary form, but his evocative remarks suggest the fruitfulness of developing it further.