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ABSTRACTThis article discusses the necessity of reintegrating political history into Quebec historiography. With no pretense of being exhaustive, it outlines the conditions of and certain steps necessary for such a reintegration, and attempts to present its limitations and its possibilities. Focussing on a better comprenhension of the nature of the political and on an analysis of the internal tensions of the discipline in Quebec since the end of the 1960s, it proposes that this reintegration will be possible only through a renewal of traditional political history, directed towards new objects of study and new approaches, and through a revalorisation of the political itself. To demonstrate this contention, the article analyses a number of aspects of the work of political and other historians. It then examines, deplores and explains the past and present isolation of political history. Finally, it invites, in a spirit of mutual respect, a dialogue between historians of all fields in order to promote the reintegration of political history into historical explanation. From this will emerge the renewed position that political history might occupy in the practice of history today.
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Instead of circumventing the ban that weighs down on literary representations of the Shoah, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones charges headfirst into controversy by way of transgression. Yet Littell's transgressive aims are not to be mistaken for “pornography of horror,” as they also seek to explore the very limits of a concept that is of utmost importance to the author and his novel: literature. Indeed, in The Kindly Ones, the “space of literature” becomes the locus of a fierce debate between aesthetics and historiography. For example, the novel expressly ‘musicalizes' Nazism's bureaucratic structures, turning them into formalist narrative devices that operate an aesthetic contamination of reality. A quest for truth nevertheless arises in the process, yet one that is paradoxically grounded in unlikelihood so as to better delineate the borders of knowledge-based fields such as historiography. Indeed, the novel suggests that the Shoah, which embodies a point of rupture in History, calls for a kind of writing whose quest for truth requires a break with historiography. This “dis-course,” palpable all throughout the novel, is indebted to writers such as Georges Bataille and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, but it is Maurice Blanchot who seems casts the longest shadow over The Kindly Ones. Beyond the fact that his name is repeatedly quoted in the novel, Littell's writing also bears the mark of Blanchot's notion of “mourir” (dying), especially as formulated in The Step Not Beyond. The deliberately transgressive and Sadian gestures that define The Kindly Ones turn out to be inseparable from a conception of whom Blanchot is the literary godfather: writing as nearness to, even experience of, the death of the other, as well as death as Otherness. Thus, if The Kindy Ones seeks to transgress, this quest reveals itself to lie at the very heart of the novel's ethical impact.
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This article aims to shed light on the contribution of reflections concerning the notion of “present time” in contemporary French historiography, reflections that are mainly, though not limited to, those drawn from the researches of the Institut d'histoire du temps présent founded by François Bédarida in 1978. After providing a brief overall picture of the epistemological context of the second post-war period, I propose to include three stages of legitimization of this controversial historian's practice (manifestation, assessment and simplification), stages that correspond to the various successive states of arguments in favour of studying the contemporary. The issue, then, is to demonstrate how those who defend the history of the present time have thought about history while taking a position vis-à-vis general historiography.
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There exists an epistemological tension, seen as a dilemma, in current philosophy of history. History as a human science aims to explain past events, but as a narrative discourse, it seems ill fitted for any kind of formal epistemological justification. This dilemma seems artificial in a way inasmuch as we give meaning to the events of our lives by inserting them in narratives. We spontaneously use narrative to explain what has happened. We consider narrativity here as a range of “language-games” bound to a variety of forms of life, and on which we rely to understand actions and events. If we are worried about the contamination of the logos by the mythos, we revisit the Aristotelian distinction between poetic and historical narratives to support the idea that history can remain in narrative discourse and that narrativity participates in explanation and understanding.