With The unconscious or forgetting history, Hervé Mazurel attempted a master book, and he succeeded in his bet: showing the difficult paths of the encounter between history and the human sciences, at the heart of which resides psychoanalysis, the unconscious and the revised Oedipus complex or not by anthropologists.
Hervé Mazurel, The unconscious or forgetting history. Depths, metamorphoses and revolutions of emotional life. La Découverte, coll. “Writings of history”, 590 p., 25 €
Historians, who know how much every notion is historicity and the trace of an infinitely plastic moment, need these notions and their criticism if they want to listen to what is excess, extraordinary, violence and singularity without shore. Hervé Mazurel’s book therefore examines how the analyzes of the proponents of conceptual approaches were particularly reductive and almost always those of a structuralism all the more rigid as we have forgotten their resonances, the openings they simultaneously gave. to the various fields they reopened.
This wandering walk brings to mind all the historians who have embarked on the path of the dialogue of new objects of the 1970s. The constant is to emphasize that no one has ever sufficiently felt the weight of the hazard, of the fleeting recomposition, of dynamic evolution, which mark, in each case, alliances of the singular, the individual and the collective, the society that he carries within him, the one that shapes him as much as it is developer.
Placing himself in the great tradition of historiographers, but strong in his own quests around sensitivities (the name of the review which he also co-directs), Hervé Mazurel, part of the “Greek mirage” of Philhellene soldiers in the time of Romanticism, then devoting himself for a moment to the violence of war and more recently to the Kaspar Hauser case, first of all avoids the pitfall of outrageous pedantry, which is a feat. It recapitulates with ease, in almost 600 pages, the theories of Freud and Lacan, it evokes the College of Philosophy and walks us among the authors and the books which marked their time. He pursues the aporias of psychoanalysis in its various schools through the gaze that anthropologists have on the treatment of the singular and the collective, from Géza Róheim to Lévi-Strauss, then Clifford Geertz. Part of it then comes back to the sociology ofattitude, taking up Bourdieu and many others. Its contribution is also to suggest the weight of the image, where the text cannot evoke it without questioning it, whether they are dreams, gestures, interactions or evocations.
With this crossing of the thought of the XXe century, the author is never boring, and this is his tour de force, as much because his pen remains attractive and because he undoubtedly knows what a rhapsody is, thanks to what was at the heart from his practice as a rock musician to his group, Valparaiso: places where we apply ourselves to bringing out the sense of chaos, the form of hazard, very parallel to what is involved in the profession historian who is only know-how, execution, what the good masters repeated, at the risk of the obvious polysemy of the formula.
Born from the questioning of cultural history for its margins, a nameless story that Alain Corbin eagerly called for thirty years ago already, placed under the injunction to recapitulate each approach in its stop on the insufficient historicization of recounted facts and actions, The unconscious or forgetting history offers its reader the best names and great case studies: Certeau, Le Roy Ladurie, Delumeau and Carlo Ginzburg. However, the desire to demonstrate the insufficiency of the positions which animated the disciplinary scene does not engage him in some settling of scores with the past, because it is as a cheerful storyteller that Mazurel poses the epistemological profusion that decides objects and their questioning.
Radical criticism is a good academic war, and seeing only the flaw of a device allows to carry out an enterprise in the continuity of the critical will of the collection in which it is part, that of Christian Delacroix, Patrick Garcia and especially François Dosse, whom he can occasionally quote, while broadening the scope of what made them famous. Hervé Mazurel’s strength lies in generally having recourse to the works themselves, as befits anyone who teaches university licenses and masters in this context. At present, he continues his quest through his encounters with the works of Bernard Lahire, and more occasionally of Georges Didi-Huberman.
“Study for Oedipus, La Tragédienne”, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (circa 1895)
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More generally, this manifesto against any “conceptual wall” gives air to each possible field of study as much as it takes up the joys of the reader of those who have been widely marked out. His agility to surf, and even to navigate within them, gives strength to this work – which lacks only an index of the names cited and some editorial details, except to refer to “what everyone knows”. Along the way, we find ourselves returning to our own historicity: how much, ourselves, undeniably and without barguign, we never cease to note the shifts which take place in us, beyond any peremptory narrative. One can nevertheless think that a number of authors entrusted to the “white text” the best of the historicization of their theoretical audacity and that the informed reader subsequently made his honey. And it was “always” so, because the classical age already practiced critical thinking to read the suspense of the text, then possibly encrypted or simply cautious.
Hervé Mazurel’s book therefore becomes the manual for those who want to enter the realm of history as it is understood at present in its victory against Marxism, the reduction of the political to what is only a subjectivable component and which no longer focuses on examining the condition of subjects of individuals linked to their fragmented and constantly evolving constructions. These fortuitous identities nonetheless remain the incorporated echo of a world inherited always already there and surrounding, which is, we always come back to this, via Castoriadis and Bourdieu, in a way the heroes maintained in this adventure of the self. . The increased historicizations that are possible / desirable / proven put it at the heart of all the objects to be reinvented, explored, adjusted.
Because, without wanting to be reductive in the face of such work, the hunt for any theory also stems from a historical moment, ours, less keen on Patrick Boucheron’s “meantime” than on those “at the same time” which punctuate the language. A moment which also testifies to the obsession to track down the slightest “explanation”, would it be hidden in the co-occurrences and the concomitances, which would reveal some conspiracy of thought. Perhaps then language remains at the heart of the game, and it is linguistics, less in demand here, which would hold the devil’s part in all analysis. Literature would also be the other asymptote – which many historians now frequent – of this brilliant parade.
An undeniable success, therefore, that this book which cannot be summed up, but, if Hervé Mazurel marks his generation, it is also by constituting himself as the object of his quests, which, obviously, we share unequally but always quite strongly, from distrust to phobias, from biases in accumulation of experiences.
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