Boucheron, Patrick. Of What Is History Capable?. Translated by Liz Libbrecht, Collège de France, Open edition books, 2018
https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.5852
Open access
Extracts
We need history because we need rest: a pause to rest our consciousness, so that the possibility of a consciousness may remain – as the seat not only of thought, but of practical reason, affording full latitude for action. Saving the past, saving time from the frenzy of the present: the poets devote themselves to this with exactitude. For this purpose we must work to weaken ourselves, to make ourselves idle, to make inoperative this endangering of temporality that wrecks experience and despises childhood. “Surprise the catastrophe”, said Victor Hugo. Or, as Walter Benjamin put it, throw oneself against the slow oncoming disaster that is more a continuation than a sudden rupture.
[…]
Not taking the floor, but preparing to become the one from whom speech emanates, allowing oneself to be enveloped, traversed, by it, “a slender gap – the point of its possible disappearance”.3 I read and reread these unforgettable pages from L’Ordre du discours (“The Order of Discourse”) by Michel Foucault, understanding that this order is all the more imperious insofar as it does not need to state its commandments. I read and reread them, feverishly, for I find in them an ever fiery warning that enables us to protect ourselves against the violence of the word, not to allow ourselves to be intoxicated by its unjust power. “What, then, is so perilous in the fact that people speak, and that their discourse proliferates to infinity? Where is the danger in that?”4 This is the only valid question today, for it demands an answer that may well surprise us, offend us, and be distasteful to us. For the greatest dangers are both those that announce themselves noisily, and those, less noticeable, that we could hasten in wanting to avoid them.
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