I'm an avid book reader and reviewer located in San Antonio, Texas. These videos are meant to help potential readers of these books to decide whether they might find them interesting or worth their time. I welcome all questions, comments and concerns regarding the content herein.
I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.
Books discussed include:
Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
Auto-da-fe, Elias Canetti
Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh
Bertram Cope's Year, Henry Flake Fuller
A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, Julian Barnes
The Worldly Philosophers, Robert Heilbroner
Machiavelli in Hell, Sebastian de Grazia
The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan
Present at the Creation, Dean Acheson
[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an
occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about
the material contained in this video.]
Dominick LaCapra is a Cornell historian concerned with history and historiography, especially how traumatic experiences (which he also refers to as “limit experiences”) relate to historical writing. He might be called one of the first writers to ask serious questions about what has lately come to be known as “trauma studies,” in which he integrates concepts from psychoanalysis, critical and literary theory, and philosophy all for the purpose of better understanding, talking about, and writing about historical traumatic experiences. Because of the way this short book is constructed - it’s a series of five essays in addition to one long interview - there is no unifying thesis but instead a number of ideas that popped into the foreground and, at least in my opinion, were of both real theoretical and practical importance in the writing of history.
The first essay mostly carves out two kinds of historical writing, which LaCapra calls the “documentary or self-sufficient research model” and “radical constructivism.” In the former, “priority is often given to research based on primary (preferably archival) documents that enable one to derive authenticated facts about the past which may be recounted in a narrative (the more ‘artistic’ approach) or employed in a mode of analysis which puts forth testable hypotheses (the more ‘social-scientific’ approach).” The purpose of this method is to tell what happened, how it happened, oftentimes with an emphasis on facts, figures, dates, places, and names. Its extreme form is positivism, which was popular in nineteenth-century historical writing. Radical constructivism, less widely known outside of the academy, suggests that history is merely one mode of writing, and really has no pride of place over any other form of writing, whether it’s philosophical or literary, and that we are mistaken in believing that the writing of history is in any way more objectivist or “real” than a novel. Two proponents of radical constructivism working today are the theorists Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White. LaCapra eschews both of these and advocates for what he calls a “middle voice” – a term he takes from linguistics – which carves out a middle road between these two methodologies which can leave room for both objective facts, but also account for the performative, figurative, aesthetic, rhetorical, political, and ideological factors that “construct” structure and narrative. As LaCapra asks in another essay, “Rather, the problem [of resolving these two approaches] is how an attentiveness to certain issues may lead to better self-understanding and to a sensitivity or openness to responses that generate necessary tensions in one’s account. This attentiveness creates, in Nietzsche’s term, a Schwergewicht, or stressful weight in inquiry, and it indicates how history in its own way poses problems of writing or signification which cannot be reduced to writing up the results of research” (p. 105).
In the second essay, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” he argues for a more clear distinction between loss and absence in historical writing – a difference which he says is often made ambiguous. Absence is transhistorical and signifies an existential lack whereas loss is always historical specific and tangible: something is taken away or let go. Therefore, loss always entails absence, but not always vice versa. “My contention is that the difference (or nonidentity) between absence and loss is often elided, and the two are conflated with confusing and dubious results. This conflation tends to take place so rapidly that it escapes notice and seems natural or necessary. Yet among other questionable consequences, it threatens to convert subsequent accounts into displacements of the story of original sin wherein a prelapsarian state of unity or identity, whether real or fictive, is understood as giving way through a fall to difference and conflict” (p. 47-48). In other words, ignoring or not recognizing this difference can exacerbate historical traumas needlessly by creating unnecessary tension.
Another essay, “Perpetrators and Victims,” is in many senses an extended criticism of Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” LaCapra raises questions as to what the real task of the historian is and what it’s not. Is the job of the historian to attempt to completely identify with the victim of traumatic limit events, or to stay completely, coolly objective? This is different, but slightly related to, the distinction between the two kinds of historical methodology outlined above. It will come as no surprise that LaCapra supports a mediating path that attempts both empathy and concern for the victim, but also a willingness to see how their accounts accord with and sing in tandem with others.
In a couple of the essays, LaCapra discusses another important distinction – between what he calls “acting out” and “working through.” In acting out, a person or society revisits the site (which is not always a physical place) or trauma over and over again, unable to come to terms with it. This is a compulsive behavior which blocks recovery, even if that recovery would never be complete or totally harmonizing. Though he doesn’t explicitly say this in the book, I would imagine two examples would be Nazi sympathizers in modern-day Germany who are still upset, seventy years on, about Allied victory in WWII. Another similar example would be modern-day Americans who historically fetishize the South and their affiliation with it, proudly flying their Confederate flags, denying that they ever lost the Civil War. The other kind of relationship to history – since “acting out” isn’t really a form of resolution at all, but rather a compulsive behavior – is “working through,” which involves a certain distance from historical trauma which will eventually allow for the possibility of healing, acceptance, and political progress. While these two are not mirror images of one another, I found them really useful in thinking about trauma studies as a field and the problems of history writing.
One of the looming themes running through the essays is that historians need to realize and reckon with what LaCapra refers to as, explicitly borrowing language from Freud, as our “transferential implication” in history. History isn’t something that we can separate ourselves from; when writing it, it is necessarily something we implicative ourselves in. While objective facts exist, the objectivism of positivism and the self-sufficient research model have wholly failed to realize this. This, along with their lack of affect toward victims and sensitivity toward kinds of narrativity, largely account for their failures as methodologies.
This is a superb book whose only weaknesses are due to its lack of cohesion as a unifying narrative. Then again, given what LaCapra’s trying to talk about here, this may have been an intended effect, not a mistake. If we’re lucky, we’re always working through history; we’re certainly always implicated in its processes however much we would like to see ourselves as separate from them. There are some wonderful ideas here that any intelligent students of history, in the academy or otherwise, should be exposed to.
[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an
occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about
the material contained in this video.]
For several years, I’ve had Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Moral Man and Immoral Society” and “The Nature and Destiny of Man,” by far his two most well-known books, resting on my bookshelf, but never felt it urgent enough to read them any time soon. In some ways, Charles Lemert’s book about the elder Niebuhr brother changed this. This book’s main strength is Lemert’s hagiographic voice, one that is almost always prepared to mount a passionate and reasoned defense of Niebuhr’s views; its main weaknesses are frequent and somewhat lengthy jeremiads into political and social issues Niebuhr was never able to address himself, because they took place after Niebuhr’s death, and which often come across as sanctimonious grandstanding on the part of Lemert.
Niebuhr was born in Missouri, the son of German immigrants. His father was a German Evangelical pastor (which was absorbed into the United Church of Christ in the 1950s). His origins were austere, but there must have been something truly special going on in the Niebuhr household: not only did Reinhold become a leading theologian and ethicist, his brother Richard taught the history of religion at Yale, and his sister Hulda was a vocal proponent of Christian education and professor of divinity in Chicago at a time when women were still rarely afforded the opportunity to attend university, let alone be awarded teaching positions.
After attending Yale Divinity School and taking his M.A. (but never the terminal Ph.D.), Niebuhr took became a pastor at a small church in Detroit where he quickly became enamored with the culturally and economically liberal message of the Social Gospel, and spoke out against what he thought were the abuses and greed of Henry Ford. Lemert discusses Niebuhr’s roots in concepts of social justice, his activism, his ever-patient pastoral care while in Detroit, and his eventual move to Union Theological Seminary in New York. While, as we’ll see in a moment, Niebuhr soon abandoned his political liberalism (understood in the contemporary sense of socially and economically progressive), his early experiences undoubtedly shaped one of the questions that would continue to shape his life’s work: How can one balance individual liberties and issues of social justice?
Niebuhr went to Union Theological Seminary to teach in 1930 where he would remain for a generation. Soon after arriving, his avowed Marxism slowly started to change into what we would recognize today as Christian Realism. His earlier liberalism (here understood in the broader sense of the word) affirmed humanity’s ability to better itself through the application of reason, technology, science, and legislation, whereas Christian Realism posits that societies are corrupt and – and here is perhaps the most damning part – that people are unwilling to admit these deficiencies to themselves because of sin. Niebuhr thinks of sin not so much as a theologically or ontologically unchanging category. Rather, he saw it as the inability of people to recognize their own limitations - probably something an atheist could get behind, even if they are wary of the word “sin.”
Soon after he arrived at Union, Niebuhr published “Moral Man and Immoral Society” (1932), a trenchant critique of American liberalism (again, the broad sense). He says that while individuals are often capable of moral behavior, nation-states and societies rarely are because their actions are so tied up with various interests which complicate to the point of impossibility ethical action. Niebuhr courageously takes their ideas to their natural conclusion: National values – sometimes, though not always expressed by those chest-thumping “patriots” – must be corrupt. This is a daring suggestion, and one that Niebuhr would maintain throughout his life which spanned much of the Cold War, a time when such chest-thumping was popular. What is the solution? Increased devotion or time in church? Not really. His critique of the Church was just as harsh. In “Moral Man and Immoral Society,” Niebuhr says of the religion and the Church that they “encourage love and benevolence … by absolutizing the moral principle of life until it achieves the purity of absolute disinterestedness and by imparting transcendent worth to the life of others” (p. 61). In other words, they have a bad habit of making otherworldly (or “transcendentalizing”) very worldly concerns, allowing us to focus on them less and less. Niebuhr’s later book, originally a set of Gifford Lectures published in 1943 as “The Nature and Destiny of Man,” is a truly sobering account of human beings and their place in the world which touches on some of the same issues and more fully develops them.
It may be clear why skeptics or even atheists can see something to agree with in the corpus of Niebuhr’s thought. There used to be, and it still might be around, a group that identified themselves as Atheists For Niebuhr. Morton White, the American philosopher and historian of ideas, wrote this about them: “Those who applaud his politics are too liable to turn to his theory of human nature and praise it as the philosophical instrument of Niebuhr’s political agreement with themselves. But very few of those whom I have called “atheists for Niebuhr” follow this inverted logic to its conclusion: they don’t move from praise of Niebuhr’s theory of human nature to praise of its theological ground. We may admire them for drawing the line somewhere, but certainly not for their consistency.”
In a time when the United States is probably the most religious of first-world countries, it’s more than curious why a figure like Niebuhr would be marginalized as much as he is. It may be because most American Protestant evangelicals are politically conservative, whereas Niebuhr, even the later Niebuhr, was progressive regarding secular issues. Or maybe, especially after 9/11, our naïve ideas about national innocence and purity are too unquestioned to spark a sincere appreciation for and conversation with a thinker who derided cheap patriotism and national exceptionalism. But if the United States ever develops something resembling a left-wing cultural evangelicalism, its founders could do worse than to look to Reinhold Niebuhr – a thinker whose willingness to criticize both his own intellectual roots and those of his country was never weakened by a felt need for conformity or popularization.
Lemert’s personal polemics and grudges sometimes come through in the book, but those faults are his own. His exposition of Niebuhr, however, made me curious to pick up Niebuhr’s original work and finally – finally – read him for myself.
[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an
occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about
the material contained in this video.]
Living in a time of Dolly the sheep and bioluminescent rabbits, it’s easy to lose sight of the ever-blurrier distinction between nature and “art” (understood in the sense of anything “artificial”). Most of us are familiar with an example that Newman himself mentions – that of Hawthorne’s story “The Birth-Mark,” which tells the story of a man who tries to eliminate a small mark on his otherwise remarkably beautiful wife’s face. The moral is so universal as to be predictable: his effort to perfect the already perfect is to have hubris that cannot go unpunished, it is to fail to accept in a Niebuhrian sense our own limitedness and the sin of human nature. But one of the goals of Newman’s book is to show that this conversation is much older than the nineteenth century. It goes back at least to the myth of Icarus and Arachne.
I’ve had a longstanding interest in the history of science, but this was admittedly a bit of a blind purchase from the University of Chicago Press. The subtitle, “Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature,” hinted at perhaps a bit of room for the reader of general interest, but I had no such luck. The topic is fascinating in itself, and I walked away from the book feeling that I’d learned a lot about the history of the art-nature debate in its various instantiations throughout history.
The preface offers a nice, general introduction to the history of alchemy. (It should be noted that Newman’s use of the word “alchemy” is extremely general. Scientists locked away in a laboratory trying to transmute lead or aluminum into gold should be banished from your mind. Instead, think about any kind of transformation produced by a human being, including the visual arts and, in much more recent history, the production of human life through means other than coitus, i.e., in vitro fertilization or other methods.) In fact, Newman’s thesis is that “alchemy provided a uniquely powerful focus for discussing the boundary between art and nature” and that this whole discussion “can only be understood if the reader is willing to engage with the presuppositions of premodern philosophers, theologians, alchemists, and artists about the structure and nature of the world around them” (p. 8).
He’s not kidding, either. The heart of this book is a truly exhaustive attempt to chart the history of this idea, many of whose contributors will not be recognizable, even to readers of the history of science. Some of more popular: Ibn Khaldun, Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas play gigantic roles. But most are unfamiliar: Jean de Meun, Petrus Bonus, Thomas Erastus, Bernard Palissy, and Zosimos of Panopolis are just a few of the dozens. There are so many of these minor people, whose ideas loom large in the book, that they are often picked up, left behind, only to be picked up in another chapter, leaving the readers to flip back and forth in order to intellectually orient themselves.
I’ll spare you the various transmutations and permutations of these complex arguments (they do get very complex), but Newman seems to have two important takeaways. One is that our view of alchemy as synonymous with witchcraft or other black arts is naïve and undeveloped, and that it needs to be expanded to include all of the arts in the sense described above. The second and more important one is that this intellectual conversation has a long, subtle, and storied past in the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences. This should without a doubt be read by someone with a narrow, serious interest in this subspecialty (if this is the case, you’re probably already familiar with Newman’s name, since he’s one of the better-known scholars in the field). The book doesn’t have even a bit of appeal to a slightly more popular audience that it might have had that would have made it much more enjoyable, at least for this non-specialist.
[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an
occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I welcome questions, comments, or concerns
about the material contained in this video.]
In “The Melancholy Art,” Michael Ann Holly charts an entire constellation of concerns in relation to art-historical (and art-historiographical) writing. Her grasp of philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis is every bit as sophisticated as her grasp of art history (her area of formal academic training). It takes a certain kind of pensiveness and humility to criticize your entire field – for that’s partially what this book sets out to do – with Holly’s active, voracious, but always judicious, interdisciplinarity.
First, a note on the book itself. I ordered the hardback edition directly from Princeton. It has an especially beautiful cover with a close-up of Giovanni Bellini’s “Christ Carrying the Cross.” The book is printed on thick, glossy paper with a generous number of black-and-white reproductions, ranging from Freud’s couch in Vienna to a picture of Reimenschneider’s “Altar of the Holy Blood.” Whoever put the book together was smart in seeing how the format and design of the book could wonderfully sing in tandem with its actual content.
The content is just as beautiful. It’s a collection of five highly interrelated essays, all centering around the intimacy, existential quality, and experience of the aesthetic with an emphasis on how these have been treated in art history writing in the past. At its heart, these essays are meant to, as I said above, criticize in several penetrating ways some contemporary assumptions about art history and the writing of it. Holly argues that art history has an unfortunate inclination toward overt positivism that focuses on analytical reconstruction, and often has a wonderful self-confidence that it can completely and totally represent the work in question, its content, context, and significance; these assumptions will be familiar to anyone familiar with nineteenth-century historiography.
Holly suggests our art-historical encounter with objects is just as full of melancholy, loss, displacement, and gaps that can never be fully bridged – and, most importantly, that acknowledging this will make for a truer, more authentic historiography. She quotes Frank Ankersmit’s “Sublime Historical Experience”: “How we feel about the past is no less important than what we know about it – probably even more so” (p. 7). The object relations theory of Melanie Klein is used to smartly situate the experience all art historians find themselves in: analyzing and attempting to reconstruct something ( i.e., Klein’s “object”) that is inevitably lost and unable to be reconstructed.
Above all, I think Holly is concerned with making the writing of art history phenomenologically and existentially rigorous, to reinvigorate it with a kind of élan vital that positivism saps from it, and that only a pensive melancholy can even partially restore. She wants art historians to recognize loss for what it is and for what it means, instead of trying to cheaply paper over it with the meretricious claims of sentimentalism. Above all, art historians must know that their task is an impossible one: that of working toward a goal that can never be fully completed or realize. We will always have something to say about that diptych, or this altarpiece. Meaning abides and never exhausts itself – and this is the source of our melancholy.
Holly quotes one of Whitney Davis’ articles on Winckelmann, a quote more than deserving of full repeat here, for it sums up the entire spirit of Holly’s project: “The history of art is lost, but art history is still with us; and although art history often attempts to bring the object back to life, finally it is our means of laying it to rest, of putting it in its history and taking it out of our own, where we have witnessed its departure. To have the history of art as history - acknowledging the irreparable loss of the objects – we must give up art history as a bringing-to-life, as denial of departure. If it is not to be pathological, art history must take its leave of its objects, for they have already departed anyway” (p. 21).
If I have one small criticism of the book, it is that she does not seem to recognize the expansiveness of its implications. I quoted her quoting Frank Ankersmit above, not an art historian but a historiographer, so she knows that these ideas have already been touched upon. Dominick LaCapra, Hayden White, Cathy Caruth, and other historiographers have written on similar topics. However, while acknowledging her intellectual debts, she makes unique contributions of her own, but never applies them outside of art history, when they are extremely applicable. Without ever becoming insular, she keeps the explicit implications for her work within the realm of art history, and the result is a work of undiminished thoughtfulness, rigor, and melancholy in its own right.
