The Future of Philosophy of History from its Narrativist Past: Figuration, Middle Voice Writing and Performativity

Abstract

Hayden White inaugurated narrativism in philosophy of history when he effected a productive displacement of earlier epistemological discussions around the relationship between narration and historical knowledge: White identified the problem of narrative in history with the problem of the use of figurative language in the representation of the past. Thus, he enabled a new way of thinking philosophy of history’s object of study by paying attention to an aspect of historical practice he considered wrongly overlooked: the writing of history. His formal theory of the historical work needs no introduction. Instead, this paper aims at reclaiming the fundamental philosophical legacy White has left us in his latest work on middle voice writing. First, I will frame White’s thought as a response to what I call the paradoxical nature of historical narrative, as Louis Mink and Roland Barthes understand it. By presenting our narrativist past as White’s ironical and liberating stance on historical narrative, I will show how he identified figuration as the paradoxical resource and constrain of historical writing. Secondly, I will elaborate on his latest inquiries into middle voice writing as pointing the way into the future of philosophy of history. Thus, I will claim that the notion of middle voice writing that White adopted from Roland Barthes should be read from the point of view of performativity theory in order to reassess the philosophical nature of historical writing now considered as the performative self-constitution of the historical subject.