Foreign Rights

More and more, history is being written in the first person. Historians no longer simply reconstruct and interpret the past; they now feel the need to tell their own stories. The number of historians’ autobiographies has increased in the last century, and researchers have adopted a self-reflexive stance to better understand their own intellectual trajectory. A new hybrid genre has taken form, exemplified in particular by the works of authors such as Ivan Jablonka in France or Mark Mazower in the English-speaking world: historians recount their investigations and describe the emotions they stirred up in them, thus joining the novelists who borrow from the methods of historical investigation (Carrère, Cercas, W.G. Sebald, etc.). This surge of the self upsets historiography and raises questions about the world in which we live. The era of the selfie transforms human sciences and the neoliberal way of thinking provokes a subjectification of social relations and of the apprehension of the past. A new regime of « presentist » historicity emerges, characterized by a withdrawal of the historian into the sphere of the intimate, an absence of future and a melancholic gaze turned towards a discontinuous past where the political is secondary. Enzo Traverso questions this subjectivist shift and highlights its creative potential and political ambiguities while identifying its intrinsic limits.

It’s a commonplace to describe the State of Israel as a democratic island in the middle of an ocean of obscurantism, and Hamas as a horde of bloodthirsty beasts. It’s like being back in the 19th century, when the West perpetrated genocide in the name of its civilizing mission. Orientalism isn’t dead; it’s just saturating the atmosphere. Its essential postulates remain the same, fixed in an imaginary ontological dichotomy between civilization and barbarism, progress and backwardness, enlightenment and darkness. Alongside ritual declarations of Israel’s right to defend itself, no one ever mentions the Palestinians’ right to resist a decades-long aggression, because no one recognizes that the Palestinians have a history. The attack of October 7 is an atrocity, but it must be analyzed and not just deplored. If the war in Gaza were to end in a second Nakba, Israel’s legitimacy would be definitively compromised. In that case, neither American weapons, nor the Western media, nor German Staatsraison, nor the memory of the Shoah will be able to redeem it.