ABSTRACT

‘What is the use of history?’ Marc Bloch (1991 [1954]: 3) asked in the first line of The Historian’s Craft, his famous book left unfinished when he was executed in 1944 by the Nazis. In raising questions around historical facts, evidence and interpretation, Bloch brought forward the notion of the trace, that which has been left over from earlier periods and enables the craft of writing about the past. Readers of the English translation of Bloch’s book will find that his notion of ‘la trace’ has been rendered there as ‘track’, in the sense of a track of footprints. The same term, ‘la trace’, in Derrida’s work has been translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as ‘trace’ because of its similarity with the English word, although as she also notes in her translator’s preface to Derrida’s (1974: xvii) Of Grammatology , ‘the French word carries strong implications of track’. Therefore, following Spivak, we have opted for ‘trace’ in relation to Bloch’s work as this better carries the conceptualisation of la trace as he uses it and also as the term has been deployed in the archival turn subsequently.