ABSTRACT
For Thomas Carlyle, history is a very precarious phenomenon, and the historical text a very precarious document. World history hinges on a series of ‘cardinal’ points. As Deleuze reminds us, in Latin, ‘le gond, Cardo, indique la subordination du temps aux points précisément cardinaux par où passent les mouvements périodiques qu’il mesure’ [the hinge, Cardo, indicates the subordination of time to precise cardinal points, through which the periodical movements it measures pass].2 Common opinion determines these cardinal moments — the opinion of the Philistines that Wilde, no less than Arnold, sought to attack — common doxa. But suppose, Carlyle writes, that the common opinion was wrong, that the cardinal points were not those major events of world history, events such as the storming of the Bastille of 14 July 1789, but rather events that had gone unnoticed, events suppressed or forgotten: the minor events, as Walter Benjamin would say.3 For as Benjamin makes clear, history is a document which is written and which is constantly being rewritten: it is complex palimpsest of intensity, forces, and of writing.
