Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
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Riccardo Baldissone
Riccardo Baldissone is currently Honorary Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, and adjunct researcher at the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. His last major completed project was an attempt to rethink both human rights and modern theoretical discourses, which he construed as a family of related fundamentalisms. Among his most recent publications, “Beyond the Modern Synecdoche: Towards a Non Fundamentalist Framework for Human Rights Discourse” inActivating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices and Contexts , eds. Rob Garbutt, Bee Chen Goh and Baden Offord (London: Ashgate Press, 2012); “The Multiplicity of Nothingness: A Contribution to a Non-Reductionist Reading of Stirner” in Max Stirner, ed. Saul Newman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).Marc de Wilde is Professor of Legal Theory with a focus on the History of Legal Thought at the University of Amsterdam. He wrote a dissertation on political theology in the work of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. His current work focuses on the theory and history of the state of exception and emergency powers. Recent publications include: “The Dictator's Trust: Regulating and Constraining Emergency Powers in the Roman Republic,”History of Political Thought 33.4 (2012): 555–577, and “Fides Publica of Roman Law and its Reception by Grotius and Locke,”Legal History Review 79.3–4 (2011): 455–487.
Abstract
In the course of the nineteenth century, the new scientific approach to history turned the past into a passive object of knowledge. This approach betrayed a strategy of domination, as it endowed certain interpretations of history with an aura of objectivity, while delegitimizing others as myth. On the contrary, Nietzsche asserted the formative powers of the present, and he argued that the historian had to actively re-create the past and turn it into a meaningful historical narrative. In his view, the meaning of the past depended on the will to transform the present itself. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, other theorists and writers, such as Croce, Péguy, and later Borges, attempted to reconceptualise the relation between the past and the present. Similarly to Nietzsche, they claimed that historians actively re-create and modify the past. This claim was also shared by Benjamin and Foucault, who emphasized the historians' duty to modify the past by seeking to revive subjugated historical knowledges. The aim of this article is to connect the writings of all these authors in a constellation that points to a shared conviction: that history is not objectively given, but constantly re-created and modified in the present.
About the authors
Riccardo Baldissone is currently Honorary Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, and adjunct researcher at the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. His last major completed project was an attempt to rethink both human rights and modern theoretical discourses, which he construed as a family of related fundamentalisms. Among his most recent publications, “Beyond the Modern Synecdoche: Towards a Non Fundamentalist Framework for Human Rights Discourse” in Activating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices and Contexts, eds. Rob Garbutt, Bee Chen Goh and Baden Offord (London: Ashgate Press, 2012); “The Multiplicity of Nothingness: A Contribution to a Non-Reductionist Reading of Stirner” in Max Stirner, ed. Saul Newman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Marc de Wilde is Professor of Legal Theory with a focus on the History of Legal Thought at the University of Amsterdam. He wrote a dissertation on political theology in the work of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. His current work focuses on the theory and history of the state of exception and emergency powers. Recent publications include: “The Dictator's Trust: Regulating and Constraining Emergency Powers in the Roman Republic,” History of Political Thought 33.4 (2012): 555–577, and “Fides Publica of Roman Law and its Reception by Grotius and Locke,” Legal History Review 79.3–4 (2011): 455–487.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
- Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
- Finding The Guilty One: Media Sensationalism, Defendant's Performance, and Jury Equity
- Book Review
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
- Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
- Finding The Guilty One: Media Sensationalism, Defendant's Performance, and Jury Equity
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Book Review
