The Arcades Project - Operi

The archaic form of primal history, which has been summoned up in every
epoch and now once more by Jung, is that form which makes semblance in
history still more delusive by mandating nature as its homeland. [N1 1, 1]
To write history means giving dates their physiognomy. [Nl l,2]
The events surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes part, will
underlie his presentation in the form of a text wltten in invisible ink. The history
which he lays before the reader comprises, as it were, the citations occurring in
this text, and it is only these citations that occur in a manner legible to all. To
write history thus means to cite history. It belongs to the concept of citation,
howevel; that the historical object in each case is tom from its context. [NII,3J
On the elementary doctlne of historical materialism. (1) An object of history is
that through which knowledge is constituted as the object's rescue. (2) History
decays into images, not into stories. (3) Wherever a dialectical process is realized,
we are dealing with a monad. (4) The materialist presentation of history carries
along with it an immanent critique of the concept of progress. (5) Historical
materialism bases its procedures on long experience, common sense, presence of
mind, and dialectics. (On the monad: NI0a,3.) [N11,4]
Tbe present determines where, in the object from the past, that object's forehistory
and after-history diverge so as to circumscribe its nucleus. [Nll,5]
To prove by example that only Marxism can practice great philology, where the
literature of the previous century is concerned. [N 11,6]
"The regions which were the first to become enlightened are not those where the
sciences have made the greatest progress:' Turgot, Oeuvres, vol. 2 (Paris, 1844),
pp. 601-602 ("Second discours sur les progres successifs de l'esprit humain").""
The thought is taken up in the later literature, and also in Marx. [Nll, 7J
In the course of the nineteenth century, as the bourgeoisie consolidated its positions
of power, el,e concept of progress would increasingly have forfeited the
critical functions it originally possessed. (In this process, the doctrine of natural
selection had a decisive role to play: it popularized the notion that progress was
automatic. The extension of the concept of progress to the whole of human
activity was furthered as a result.) With Ttlrgot, the concept of progr·ess still had
its critical functions. In particular, the concept made it possible to direct people's
attention to retrograde tendencies in history. 1urgot saw progress, characteristically,
as guaranteed above all in the realm of mathematical research.
[Nlla,IJ
""But what a spectacle the succession of men's opinions presents! There I seek the
progress of the human mind, and I find virtually nothing hut t.he history of its
errors. Why is its course-which is so sure, from the very first steps, in the field of