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Whereas historical determinacy conceives the past as a complex and unstable network of causalities, this book asks how history can be related to a more radical future. To pose that question, it does not reject determinacy outright but rather seeks to explore how it works. In examining what it means to be “determined” by history, it also asks what kind of openings there might be in our encounters with history for interruptions, re-readings, and re-writings.
Engaging texts spanning multiple genres and several centuries—from John Locke to Maurice Blanchot, from Hegel to Benjamin—Clift looks at experiences of time that exceed the historical narration of experiences said to have occurred in time. She focuses on the co-existence of multiple temporalities and opens up the quintessentially modern notion of historical succession to other possibilities. The alternatives she draws out include the mediations of language and narration, temporal leaps, oscillations and blockages, and the role played by contingency in representation. She argues that such alternatives compel us to reassess the ways we understand history and identity in a traumatic, or indeed in a post-traumatic, age.
Through the originality of her questions, her deft combination of close reading and conceptual generalization, the patience and lucidity of her analyses, and the remarkable surefootedness of her argumentation, Sarah Clift has succeeded in reinvigorating the interpretation of important works by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, John Locke, G. W. F. Hegel, and Maurice Blanchot. Her book will be of vital interest to political theorists, philosophers, literary critics, and intellectual historians, and may help to transform the discussion of fundamental issues they confront, most notably the relation between history and memory.---—Thomas Trezise, Princeton University