In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BEING-IN-THE-WORLDS OF 1926 475
that texts as different in their complexity, status, and origin as Sein und
Zeit, Kampf der Gestirne, and Nigger Heaven share certain key motifs
and perspectives, I ultimately dealt not only with totality as a phenomenon
intrinsic to my historical field of reference, but found myself confronted-on
a practical (or rhetorical) rather than on a philosophical
level-with the temptation to attempt a historiographic totalization. I
was indeed trying to invent aspects and forms of representation that
would provide a view of the different worlds of 1926 as a unity.
Yet it is true that totality and totalization became issues only because
I exposed my project (of making present a year of the past) to the
question of whether it was capable of yielding some results that would
be regarded as useful-even from a less eccentric viewpoint. I wish to
emphasize, therefore, that the possibility (or impossibility) of a historical
totality and the problems of historiographic totalization have nothing to
do with the primary, and perhaps crude, desire behind this book-the
desire, that is, of coming as close as possible to making present a moment
of the past, and of making it "present" in the fullest possible sense of the
word. Such effects of presence, I assume, are more likely to come through
reference to concrete historical detail than through abstract, "totalizing"
overviews. At any rate, it is enough to say that effects of presence do not
systematically depend on totality or totalization. For myself, the experiment
detailed in this book came to a successful and early fulfillment
during the few-but real-moments in the composition process when I
managed (or rather happened) to forget that I was not living in 1926.
And I suppose that, on the reader's side, there will be no other way of
assessing the failure or success of what, in the introduction to this book,
I offered as my intellectual wager.
Regarding the relationship between (the classic value of) historical
totality and the (more recent?) desire for a past made present, one can
perhaps go even a step further. Not only are effects of presence independent
of totality and totalization, but one can indeed claim (as I have
already done, though from a different angle, in the preceding chapter)
that the vanishing of our belief in historical totality and a waning interest
in historiographic totalization are important-if not necessary-preconditions
for the latest changes in our fascination with the past. At this
point, we could again take up the question of why these ideals have
become so attenuated in recent years. The answer would lead us to the
(in)famous crisis of subjecthood and agency, and to the way in which