ABSTRACT
History is one of the obvious targets of various types of radical criticism within the postmodernist movement. Historians are increasingly called to justify their claims within climate of suspicion of a recuperation of history in the service of power interests. Yet, historians hold to the ideals and procedures of scientific investigation, in order to produce knowledge of past events. Postmodernists raise many criticisms concerning traditional or conventional history – which they consider, wrongly, as monolithic block – as being ideological, exclusionist, hegemonic and patriarchal. For postmodernist philosophers, conventional history has quite a secondary role to play in the reflection on the human being. Thus for Foucault, the traditional history of ideas understands discourse as a ‘document’: ‘as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve’.
