Historiography of Sense

“Bodies and states are only of the present. For the present living instant is a temporal expanse that accompanies the act, that expresses and measures the action of the agent, the passion of the patient. But, at the limits of the unity of bodies and the space between them, at the limits of the unity of active principles and passive principles, one cosmic present encompasses the whole universe: only bodies exist in space, and only the present in time.” Deleuze, Logique du Sens, p 13.

I won’t pretend to have insight into this complicated quote, which I may or may not have translated accurately. I’ve translated this myself, and I’m an adequate reader of French but by no means do I have the nativity to be running around translating it, particularly when it’s as complicated and tricky as Deleuze’s work. On the one hand I bring it here partly just for the astonishing pomposity of the gesture, which this space seems to encourage almost—would I have the guts to stand up in front of a room of scholars or an empty room that could have potentially had scholars in it and explicate a Deleuze quote I just translated myself? I’m not sure, I doubt myself. But there also seems something appropriate to offering up a translation here in this space, where I’m comfortable enough not even to be concerned with the translation’s accuracy—if an accurate translation is even possible in this case.


The possibility of an accurate translation, of course, depends on a particular concept of meaning, a meaning that exists in a very curious relationship to the facts of the words on the page itself. So I think the problem of translation is a workable metaphor for a problem of history, because just as the translation stands in a curious relationship to words and meaning, history stands in a curious relationship to the past and meaning. Deleuze’s text is about taking the measure of a transcendental space that is what we call “sense” (and in relation to this his quote above is also an allusion to Kant’s example of the analytic that bodies are extended in space—right? but “only bodies are extended in space” is a different kettle of fish (in space)). Both translation and history depend for their validity on some meaning that exists outside the realm of the sensible, but that meaning is, depending on the moment and the reader, up for grabs.

The discipline of History proper has a kind of lengthy discussion, historically speaking, about the methods it will use to establish that something happened or the ways that something can be talked about in terms of having happened. But do we need to be bound by those same methods? We are not the discipline of history, and while it may be true that we need to be careful when we borrow the methods of another discipline (as Susan Jarratt has suggested), perhaps we need to be careful not because otherwise we will abuse or pervert those methods, but because we won’t. An accurate history is as ephemeral as an accurate translation. This is not a call for some Vitanza-like (parenthetically charged) destruction of history, but it’s not not a call for that either. But it is a declaration that we are very much engaged, as young historians of rhetoric, in the process of determining the nature of fact-ness and of meaning, and that that is a very serious, inescapably political activity, and in that light, what it most certainly is a call for is for us to use this space to reflect on and reimagine what the limits and ethics of that activity ought to be.

The way I am suggesting that we do this would be to offer a quote that speaks directly to the philosophy that guides your historical work, or that illustrates the problems you face as an historian of rhetoric; perhaps it’s Nan Johnson, or perhaps it’s Nietzsche, or perhaps it’s Mitch Albom. Explain why that quote is meaningful to your work, by talking about your work specifically, and/or by talking about the scholars and conversations your work engages, some of whom you obviously share historiographic methodologies and philosophies with, but others of whom, presumably, you do not—how does your work fit into a vision of history? And how does that make you feel? How does your history intervene in the world, and what do you value about that process? Does the value of your translation of the past lie in its accuracy, or somewhere else? As a starting point, or a second starting point, or as an example, or as another example, I offer the next post.