ABSTRACT KEANE

ð The belief that history is Just history tends to be undermined during crisis periods.

ð Historical materialism and Leo Strauss’s predilection for understanding authors as they understood themselves (the interpreters) are being replaced by an emphasis on understanding past political thoughts as political argument, as the discourse of particular historical actors situated in specific contexts.

ð He calls this as “new history”

ð 3 main fails:

1. Argument – THE INTENTIONALITY CLAIM: Denies the “Death of the Author” principle and points out the hermeneutic principle according to which texts do not speak, only authors do. What means that writers are not prisoners of their discourses neither transcendental egos. On the contrary, they are intentional objects of their creators.

Failure: If we took some theories of the unconscious we see that authors don’t really have a full intentionality over his claims.

The authors will here is not seeing as a result of his individual subjectivist preferences, but, instead, as the presumed fulfillment of the agent constrained by the structure. The agent intentionality is viewed under a structural perspective. That is the SEMANTIC AUTONOMY.

2. Argument: The intentionality of the claim is determined by the context to which it refers and, so, to understand the context is to understand the claim of the author and, for consequence, his work.

Failure: Points to a misuse of hermeneutics (INSIDE CRITIQUE) since its right prescription is to validate the content of works by facing it to the context it belongs, and not simply deducing its meanings from the context.

(OUTSIDE CRITIQUES)The context determination of the claim presumes rationality among the agents of the structure, however, Keane points that rationality is co-determined by the context and the interpreter also.

3. Argument: - HISTORY MUST BE AN UNBIASED EFFORT TO RECONSTRUCT THE PAST, just placing it before the present, without trying to employ the local and defeasible standards of the present to judge the past

Failure: Presuming that currently authors can re-play the speeches of the past is to say that the so stressed influence of the structure struggle in the intentionality of the authors does not exist anymore. It is paradoxically to say that the content of the studied authors is a simple reflex of their structure position but, at the same time, pretend that we can go over this structural binding.

For observing only most visible traditional social forces, the new history fails to account that authors may uncounsciously or half-consciously rationalize their power-hidden forms of life as universal.

Not only those whose utterances are to be interpreted, but interpreters themselves are always situated within a field of historically bound conventions and practices mediated by ordinary language.

According to Keane; “historians understanding of the past political speech-acts is possible only in so far as they assume the role of partner in dialogue with those acts”.

ð For this he states that there is no absolute knowledge of a text.

ð History, as Burckhardt observed, is always the record of what One age finds worthy of note in another.

ð The very intention of looking to the past only with reproductive goals is criticized for its lack of creativity.

o Quotes people who looked to the story in inventive ways to approach most different themes:

§ Carole Peterman - Feminism

§ Hanna Pitkins – Feminism

§ Carlo Ginzburg’s – The cheese and the worms

§ Michel Foucault – Histoire de la folie

ð Critically looking to his own work, Keane admits that his critiques to Skinner are contradictories. However, he claims that his goal is not to set a general theory of history, but just show the plurality of possible methodologies, denying any universalist theory.

ð Democracy among the living requires democracy among the dead.

ð Criticizes Walter Benjamin stressing that voices from the past can’t always be resurrected

ð The new history quest of writing history as reproduction is harmless to democracy because it legitimate official histories which unwittingly defends the spellbinding hold of past ideologies over the present.