Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical TheoryHistory in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory by Dominick  LaCapraReview by: John E. ToewsThe Journal of Modern History, Vol. 78, No. 3 (September 2006), pp. 684-686Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/509151 .

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Book Reviews

History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. By Dominick LaCapra.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Pp. xi�274. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

History in Transit is the tenth volume of critical essays by Dominick LaCapra since Re-thinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY, 1983), his first dem-onstration of this genre as his preferred form of intellectual communication. There is aremarkable thematic consistency and argumentative persistence in this body of work. Thedesire to sustain a dialogic tension between archivalists and textualists within the disciplineof history so prominent in his critical interventions of the early and mid-1980s surfaceswith equal concern and vehemence in the lengthy introduction to this volume. The focuson historicizing the Holocaust, and traumatic experience more generally, as the exemplaryproblem of representing past experience in contemporary historiography, which emergedin his work in Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY, 1994)and remained central to his essay collections published in 1998 and 2001, also informsthe central essays of his new book—extended review essays on Giorgio Agamben andrecent trauma studies (chaps. 3 and 4). The essay “History, Psychoanalysis, Critical The-ory” (chap. 2) expands and clarifies certain points in his use of the psychoanalytic conceptsof transference, acting out, and working through but remains true to its “original”—theessay “History and Psychoanalysis,” first published in 1985, republished in revised formin Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY, 1989), and evident in some form in each ofhis essay collections since. LaCapra’s intellectual and critical conversations, as his foot-notes now also suggest, are increasingly conversations with himself as well as with hiscritics or exemplary “others.” Not that he has changed or rejected positions taken earlier—rather, they have become more nuanced, complex, and peppered with qualifying adjectivesand parenthetical phrases in the constant struggle to make himself clear(er), to defendhimself against misreadings, and to keep everyone talking as lucidly as possible. Historyin Transit thus can serve as an adequate introduction to the full range of LaCapra’s con-cerns and critical practices. The reader coming to LaCapra for the first time need go nofurther.The title of the book names the two primary organizational foci of LaCapra’s essays.

The phrase “history in transit” is obviously meant to contrast with statements about the“end of history” that ground the postapocalyptic forms of historicization LaCapra attemptsto engage in critical dialogue. Both as a body of disciplinary knowledge and as a processof experiencing self and other through time, history is in a constant state of transition andtransformation. But if historical identities are always unstable, never fixed in place, theyare not necessarily completely indeterminable or meaningless. LaCapra would like to de-fend meaningful identity, and the normative bonds and institutions it makes possible,against the nihilists and utopians who see the traumatic destruction of inherited values—the historical “deaths” of God and man—as the existential ground for a leap into tran-scendence. From the perspective of LaCapra’s “dialogue partners,” the radical negation ofthe present represented by the death-in-life of the Nazi extermination camps (Agamben)or the total commodification of life under global capitalism (Bill Readings) becomes thestarting point for an ecstatic experience of return to ground zero, the unrepresentableexistential site from which all contingent historical forms arise and from which a kind ofNietzschean transvaluation of values can be projected. LaCapra tries hard to practice em-pathetic reading and compassionate understanding of the positions of his nihilistic andprophetic dialogue partners. Careful and self-critical examinations of these surveys of the

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Book Reviews 685

sites of destruction is required before it can be pointed out that beneath the all-or-nothinghyperbole of the destruction/transcendence discourse there remain elements of continuityand potential progressive change from which normative boundaries and institutional frame-works for social interaction can be salvaged, reformed, or built anew. Even in the wakeof traumatizing experiences that seem to leave inherited meaning in ruins, immanent his-torical criticism that builds on the past and present to refashion identities and norms (andnot just proclaim their death), LaCapra insists, is still possible. To declare an end to theinterminable process of making and remaking identities that defines historical existence isan evasion—understandable perhaps under certain extreme conditions but nonetheless anevasion—of responsible maturity.At the center of LaCapra’s defense of “history in transit” against the “end of history,”

of interminable, self-critical historicization against the postapocalyptic combination ofnihilism and transcendence, lies his second organizing focus (designated in both the sub-title of the book and the title of its first chapter)—a critical, theoretical reconsideration ofthe relationship between experience and identity. The discussion of identity and experienceis the most interesting part of this book; it shows LaCapra himself in process, not quiteclear about his position, not confident enough to get schematic in his distinctions. Thechapter seems unfinished and relatively unpolished, almost like a series of notes that takethe author in different directions. The overall tendency of LaCapra’s analysis, however, isclear: he would like to defend identity and experience as concepts referring to somethingbeyond the discourses of the symbolic world of culture and simultaneously to insist thatthey are also formed and shaped within those discourses. “Identity” seems easier for himto handle. LaCapra wants to define its referent not as an essence but as a process, an active(and endless) process of choice, selection, and integration among the “subject positions”that are given as discursive possibilities within the various networks of cultural meaning.There is clearly a passive side to identity—subject positions are historically given—butthe process of making an identity out of them is an experimental and ultimately ethicalactivity. Group identities also involve complex issues of subjective identification and ne-gotiation. What is important for LaCapra is that identity can be saved as a referentialconcept even if the notion of essential identities is dismissed.A similar pattern of argument is pursued in relation to “experience.” LaCapra rejects

the notion of experience as the essential “other” that defines the limits of the discursiveworld. Experience, like identity, has both a passive and an active dimension. The passiveelement of experience is perhaps most familiar. We use “experience” to refer to eventsand facts that impose themselves on the subject as somehow “objective”—from the mostemotionally trivial things that just happen to us; to the traumatic and ecstatic experiencesof being torn, grabbed, redeemed, or elevated; to “structural” experiences like being turnedinto an instrument or a commodity by the slow and often hidden transformation of globalsystems of exchange or production. For LaCapra’s purposes, however, it is crucial to pointout as well that “experience” refers to an active process in which what is passively ex-perienced is related to desire and will, in which the subject not only registers objects orevents but selects, chooses, and integrates. We experience subject positions passively aspossibilities imposed on us by the various discursive worlds we inhabit—but we activelyconfigure (and reconfigure) those positions in the processes of identity production, and weexperience ourselves as actors in these processes. Desire and agency are “experienced” asmuch as objects and events. “Working through” a passive experience of an object or event,especially a traumatic experience, in order to reconstruct group identity, ethical respon-sibility within normative limits, and rational communication with recognized others whoare also conceived as agents of their own processes of identification, LaCapra implies,refers to a reality not completely encompassed within the exchanges of the discursiveworld. The “real” beyond the symbolic is encountered not only in trauma and ecstasy, insuffering and passion, but also in the everyday acts of historical agency in the world.The essays in this volume remain predominantly focused on the problem that the passive

experience of trauma presents for processes of representation and historicization. However,

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686 Book Reviews

there are hints everywhere that LaCapra’s real project for his next few volumes should bethe issue of agency, of desire and will, especially the disciplined desire and will of theself-conscious, “rational” acting subject that produces its identity through a complex pro-cess of negotiation with the already-produced identities that are available to it. Engagingin critical examination of the issues involved in representing the experience of historicalvictims of traumatic events has provided LaCapra and others with significant insights intoissues of historical representation more generally. But this focus illuminates only one sideof the issue of historicizing identity and experience. Examining the problem of representingthe experience of the perpetrator (in the broadest sense), and of the relationship betweenexperiences of perpetrator and victim, raises questions of agency and responsibility thatare of equal, if not greater, significance for understanding, representing, and constructingour identities as historical beings and as historians.

JOHN E. TOEWSUniversity of Washington

Postmodernism for Historians. By Callum G. Brown.London: Pearson Education, 2005. Pp. vii�200. £14.99.

Many books define themselves as “primers” of structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism, but very few seek to mitigate the incomprehension and even hostility thathave often characterized the relationship between history and postmodernist theory. True,historians have by now absorbed the challenges posed by both the linguistic and thecultural turn in ways that have led both to methodological innovation and to a focus onnew objects of analysis. Yet in spite of a lowering of the polemical tone of earlier debatesabout theory, many historians still regard it with unease and suspicion. Thus a book thatadvertises itself (on its back cover) as a “primer on postmodernism for the History student”can only be welcome. Moreover, Callum G. Brown declares himself an enthusiast ofpostmodernist ideas and seeks to explain not only their central concepts but also theirusefulness for historians.The author organizes the book thematically rather than chronologically. Accordingly,

he does not provide a history of ideas to explain the historical condition we call “post-modernism,” by which he means “the intellectual, social, and moral condition that super-seded modernity at some point in the twentieth century (probably the 1960s) . . . charac-terized by a rejection and subversion of some of the key intellectual, social, and moralprinciples of Enlightenment modernity” (8). Instead, the book focuses on key concepts ofpostmodernism that continue to mystify historians—among them, sign, discourse, post-structuralism, and text. He summarizes each concept, gives brief overviews of key figures(say, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault), offers an analysis of the various ways histo-rians themselves have incorporated some of these ideas, and then provides guides to furtherreading. In the best chapter (“Criticism of Postmodernism in History”), he argues with theworks of the most ardent critics of “postmodernist theory”—Richard Evans’s In Defenseof History (New York, 1997), in particular—seeking to show where they have gone astray.This book, however, might be understood not as a primer of postmodernism for histo-

rians but as the story of how historians use postmodernist ideas, and even that claim isnot fully explicated except by reference to what some historians say they are doing. Forexample, Brown cites works by Judith Walkowitz, by Robert Darnton, and by EdwardMuir as exemplary of fruitful uses of postmodernist concepts—discourse, semiology, andpost-structuralism, respectively—without any sustained analysis of how historical methodabsorbs these resolutely antihistoricist modes of analysis. Thus Brown’s book, for all itspromises, does not offer a sufficiently rigorous analysis of the tensions between historicalmethod and the theoretical underpinnings of various critical discourses aligned with post-modernity (except to note that historians have been traditionally wedded to empiricism,

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