I was reading something related to our nice conversations of today and I thought to share a passage about history by Tomoko Masuzawa that I find very nice:
What if "being historical" is not a matter of recovering and reconstructing a richly nuanced narrative truth, full of "thick descriptions", of a certain wholeness of a past, but instead is a matter of more or less outwitting such a compelling narrative truth and letting some forgotten moments and contours of the past "flare up", as Walter Benjamin would say, in order to illumine and decompose the compulsive narrativity of history that dictates the ideology of the present?
You find it in the chapter called 'Culture' in M.C.Taylor's Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: Chigago University Press, p.91). It's in the library (many copies) for the most willing of you (A210.14 /826952).
By the way, coming back to my 'hypertext' historical theory (that the most lucky of you enjoyed today) think for a second about what I've just done: I copied a passage from a book (a passage chosen by me and eradicated from the context), posted it onto a blog, and i've hyperlinked it to other texts. For all practical purposes I've 'exploded' it to both a wider range of users and to a wider network of informations/meanings.
How postmodern of me.
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