ABSTRACT
In addressing the problems characteristic of modernity, historicism becomes still more flexible. It adapts the hermeneutical tradition to accommodate even more radical disruptions of tradition; the interpretative exchanges between past and present become sharper and more critical at both ends. But what happens after modernity? Classical critiques of modernity, as we might call those of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, claim a wiser understanding of history. They feed severer examinations of historical continuity, inspired by their more radical dialectic between past and present. The question, though, is whether avowedly postmodern critiques of history still historicize history from their own vantage-point, or try to abolish it. As we have just seen, Lacan’s return to Freud, as Samuel Weber emphasizes, shows a connection between postmodernism and a self-critical modernity; a repetition whose uncanniness Freud had already theorized but which Lacan can recast in the terms of a new historicism critical of Freud’s scientific pretensions. But is such productive dialogue between the two eras always possible? Doesn’t postmodernity typically protest a scepticism of any kind of narrative which
might significantly join it to what went before? Don’t we at last encounter thinkers not content to relativize history and science, but eager to discredit anything in relation to which they might be relativized?
