by Jacob Saliba and Zac Endter
In Part I of this interview, we explored the overarching design of Elías Palti’s argument as well as unpacked what and whom he saw as the early stages and pioneering thinkers of the field of intellectual history. In Part II, we further discuss with Palti the fundamental transition that his book identifies in twentieth-century thought, which produced the kinds of questions, theoretical models, and political languages available and salient to contemporary intellectual history. We conclude by reflecting on the institutional arrangements of intellectual history within today’s humanities departments, more practically, and what that says about the field’s latest challenges and opportunities.
Part II
JS/ZE: Chapters six and seven on Hans Blumenberg and Pierre Rosanvallon, respectively, seem to be setting the stage for a turning point in the book toward Foucault. In particular, you seem to treat Blumenberg as a unique forerunner to Foucault’s archeology of knowledge and the collapse of the founding subject. As you write, Blumenberg was successfully able to “transcend conceptual history and address that paradox that the theories we have seen so far solve too easily—without really solving” it. And, yet, Blumenberg’s theory must travel to France before Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge could take “the fundamental step… to break the frameworks of the ‘philosophies of consciousness,’ and thereby… effectively overcome the set of antinomies that are proper to it” (143). What relationship do you see between Blumenberg’s understanding of “absolute metaphor” (130)—founding axioms of a system of thought that escape definition and thereby inscribe contingency—and Foucault’s description of a subject existing only on a discourse’s surface rather than its foundations? In what ways does Blumenberg anticipate, for you, Foucault’s theoretical intervention and, in what ways do Blumenberg’s “fundamental tools” remain insufficient (143)?
Palti: In effect, we can find a common premise behind Blumenberg’s metaphorology and Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. Both start from the premise that all conceptual systems have an axiomatic nature, which leads them to produce a kind of strategic move and to place reflection on a preconceptual level.
As Kurt Gödel showed, the foundational axioms of systems are not derived from the same systems but are given to them; as a consequence, these axioms are neither demonstrable nor refutable within their corresponding systems. The example I provide in my book to illustrate this idea is Gestalt theory. In the Gestaltic tests, we do not first see the eye, the ear, and the mouth and then say “It’s a duck!”, but the other way around: we must first observe that it is a duck so that we then can discern what is an ear, an eye, and so on. That is, we must first identify that which we are talking about in order to subsequently elaborate a rational, discursive knowledge of that object.
This is what Husserl called the primitive institutive instance of sense, the initial act of investment of meaning to reality (Urstiftung), which is of a preconceptual nature by definition. It establishes the ground for the deployment of concepts. Both Blumenberg and Foucault intended to capture the means of production of these primitive instances. As Blumenberg wrote, concepts presuppose a horizon of sense within which they can be deployed. This implies that no history of concepts can explain the constitution and eventual transformation of these horizons. To that effect, reflection must move to a more primitive, symbolic realm than the conceptual, which was the aim of Blumenberg’s metaphorology as well as Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. In this sense, they shared the same philosophical background as the authors that the first part of my book discusses but intended to address an element missing in the latter—more precisely, that whose thematization Skinner and Koselleck had forestalled by placing it under the aegis of the “author” or “social history,” respectively: how conceptual formations are formed and transformed over time. Ultimately, Skinner and Koselleck closed their interrogation at the exact point where Blumenberg and Foucault began. How could they produce that shift? Answering this question leads us, in turn, to the point at which Blumenberg and Foucault started departing from phenomenology’s conceptual matrix by questioning the presence of a founding consciousness, i.e. a transcendental subject. Only eliminating that assumption paved the way for the interrogation of the discursive means of generating and transforming the horizons of sense within which concepts would subsequently be deployed. Now, in making this move, Blumenberg and Foucault approached the limit of the “age of forms,” the point where it started dissolving.
JS/ZE: Your book is powerfully self-reflective in that it takes up the problems and strengths of intellectual history as it performs intellectual history. On a deeper level, you assert that the recovery of historical and conceptual meaning by an author is “semantically indeterminate” and must therefore play on “inconsistency” rather than “ideal types” of historical meaning, the absence of which would make accounting for historical change impossible (145–149). Your own intellectual history seems to surmount that obstacle by rendering consistent and coherent the very problematization of indeterminacy and consistency in the field. In this way, it seems that your book reflects the role of the “author” by the Cambridge School, which sees an author as an agent of change or, at least, an agent of change in the unfolding of our epistemic ground—rendering “thinkable” what was previously “unthinkable” (26–27). By inaugurating a novel way of envisioning and performing intellectual history, this book appears to render intellectual history “thinkable” as a theory and a practice, placing conceptual change within our temporal horizons. Put simply, what school of thought accurately represents your own authorial mode within the book and its relationship to conceptual change?
Palti: Thank you for this question, because it gives me the opportunity to try to clarify one key aspect. Although it may seem otherwise, my book does not seek to elaborate a new theory or propose a new methodology for the study of intellectual history. While it is full of remarks indicating the contradictions and inconsistencies that I observe in the field’s available theories, it has no normative pretensions. More concretely stated, my book does not seek to solve the problem of how to explain conceptual change but, more modestly, to analyze the different views on the topic, how the ways of approaching the issue were modified, and ultimately why it still remains challenging. It should thus be read as a “meta-historical work,” a history of the history of intellectual history. More precisely, my methodology (I certainly have one) is not aimed at explaining conceptual change—that is, at solving the issue—but rather at better understanding how different authors and currents addressed it, observing their approaches against the backdrop of the system of knowledge on which they were founded. Finally, the book aims to offer an up-to-date “state of the art” that is neither merely descriptive nor truly normative, but rather problematizing.
My book does not seek to solve the problem of how to explain conceptual change but, more modestly, to analyze the different views on the topic, how the ways of approaching the issue were modified, and ultimately why it still remains challenging. It should thus be read as a “meta-historical work,” a history of the history of intellectual history.
I focus on conceptual change because I consider it to be the problematic core behind all of the recent developments in the field. The analysis of different ways of approaching conceptual change allows us to illuminate the broader conceptual displacements that occurred in our subdiscipline—more precisely, the reconfiguration that the field of intellectual history has undergone in the sequence leading from the neo-Kantian, phenomenological matrix that imbued the initial elaborations of the NIH to the post-phenomenological, post-structuralist perspectives that subsequently emerged.
As I indicate, the latter entailed redefining not only the ways of apprehending conceptual change, its source and its dynamics, but also, and more fundamentally, the very objects of study (the views on the nature of discursive formations) and, as a consequence, the ways of approaching them. Now, I am far from affirming that we arrived at a finally revealed truth, or even that these new perspectives are more consistent than the preceding ones, i.e. that they are free of fundamental objections. More simply, I identify the point at which we now stand. Whether or not we accept these new theories, they established a new terrain for the studies in the field, configuring the coordinates according to which we can currently formulate questions and articulate their answers. The point is that, even though these theories have been unevenly assimilated in our discipline, and their fundamental tenets can and must be rendered problematic, this history—like any other—admits of no way back. We cannot simply return to the kind of certainties and assumptions that initially paved the way for the emergence of the NIH from the momentthat the conceptual ground from which it had emerged became undermined, and, therefore, its premises became untenable.
Going back to your question, my re-creation of this history begins from some premises of its own. As you certainly noticed, and I already indicated, my historical approach seeks to connect the conceptual transformations that transpired in the field of intellectual history with broader changes in Western thinking at large at the level of the underlying regimes of knowledge. These regimes traverse different disciplines and areas of knowledge, allowing us to meaningfully connect them and observe their interactions at a given moment. Ultimately, the (meta-)historical-intellectual re-creation I provide takes up Foucault’s project of an “archaeology of knowledge,” even though mine departs from his at some critical junctures. In fact, I indicate some inconsistencies in Foucault’s own formulation of this project, which are particularly relevant in our particular case since they refer mainly to the nature of the epistemic ground on which the theories under consideration were founded, which I term “the age of forms.” The study of the series of changes that took place in the discipline of intellectual history thus illuminate how that regime of knowledge emerged and how it eventually started dissolving. Conversely, the comprehension of these changes at the level of underlying regimes of knowledge clarifies the nature and structure of the theories under consideration, as well as the kinds of problems that their authors faced while elaborating them.
JS/ZE: You make a very insightful claim in your discussion of the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism: “[W]ithout an idea of truth, political debate is impossible; but with an idea of truth, political debate would be idle, meaningless. Politics . . . springs from the simultaneous need and impossibility of defining political concepts. Ultimately, this is what makes a concept a political concept” (152). At stake here is the practice of truth-telling in the absence of normativity. In contrast to Habermas, if systems of truth are ultimately contingent, indeterminable and not universal, on what grounds can a theory of history and claims of truth be mutually taken as valid? On this point, you seem to reflect Foucault’s mature writing on parrhesia, that ancient-inspired practice of speaking openly and honestly without rhetorical manipulation. While you do not explicitly take up Foucault’s late writing in your book, you seem to parallel it in your discussion of the Cambridge School’s focus on paradiastole—an ancient rhetorical mode that puts into play competing interpretations through which actions can be seen as virtue or vice. As you quote Quentin Skinner, “all changes in languages entail, for Skinner, an analogous exercise of transvaluation; they are, in short, paradiastolic movements” (55). How do you see the relationship between paradiastole and parrhesia on the wider question of truth-telling and normative instability?
Palti: I must say that I am not a classicist, so I am not qualified to assess the accuracy of Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek concept of parrhesia. However, it appears too close to Lacan’s concept of Truth, which makes me suspicious; it leads me to wonder whether Foucault was projecting a contemporary concept upon the past. A Truth, for Lacan, is that “which makes a hole in the web of knowledge,” it indicates the irruption of something that escapes from the borders of the given conceptual universe, pointing to a transcendent beyond. It would thus be a local index of a different symbolic dimension placed beyond a given conceptual order, opening up a new horizon for thought. Hence the analogy with Skinner’s idea of paradiastole. We must take into account that we are discussing the pre-structuralist Lacan still heavily imbued with the phenomenological ideas that Merleau-Ponty, in particular, introduced into France. In turn, this Lacanian understanding of Truth expresses itself in Foucault’s historical-intellectual approach via his idea of a discourse’s founders: figures like Copernicus or Freud who radically redefined a given field of knowledge. Yet it was not really compatible with Foucault’s own concept of history, especially his rejection of the idea of “precursors.”
In sum, when seen from a historical-intellectual perspective, Foucault’s reading of the concept of parrhesia raises a number of questions for which I have no answers. Now, my statement that “Politics … springs from the simultaneous need and impossibility of defining political concepts” (152) operates in a very different register. It points to the very nature of the structural field of politics—more precisely, to that aporetic core which renders it inconsistent. In this fashion, it moves the whole issue from the subjective realm to the objective conditions for the emergence of subjective (intentional) action. From this perspective, only the presence of inner fissures within a given system (whether conceptual or juridico-political) makes room for subjective action, and not the other way around. That is, the opening up of a space of undecidability, a fissure in the regular ambit of a given normative system for the demand for a decisional instance, is necessary for a properly subjective (intentional) action that closes that fissure to emerge. A decision taken according to a norm cannot be considered a subjective action because, in that case, it is not I who decides but the norm that does it for me or through me.
The point is that, as you remark, only the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of defining concepts like justice, liberty, or democracy—their radical undecidability, their ultimately aporetic character—turns them into properly political concepts and not merely dictations of reason. More importantly in our particular case, it is this radical undefinability of concepts that renders past debates around them meaningful and permits us to make sense of these disputes. Otherwise, if we were to assume that concepts accept a univocal definition, that there is a “true” definition of concepts like democracy, republic, or liberty, we could only explain past thinkers’ debates about them as expressing merely miscomprehensions of those “true” definitions that we presume to know. The whole of intellectual history would thus become reduced to a string of regrettable misunderstandings, and past developments would appear as just more or less deficient approaches to our own current views, which we would thus posit as the final goal to which all past developments tended to converge or should have. In short, such an assumption would entail relapsing into a teleological perspective, bringing about all of the “mythologies” that Skinner denounced in his seminal theoretical essay, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.”
JS/ZE: The book traces a general shift from the category of transcendence to contingency in intellectual history. Throughout, you identify and classify transcendence as it appears for different movements and thinkers: from the “author” in the Cambridge School and “social history” in Koselleck to the “facticity of the factum” in Gadamer and “absolute metaphor” in Blumenberg. By the time that we reach Foucault and Derrida, transcendence is no longer a viable category insofar as other thinkers failed to see that contingencies, paradoxes, and instabilities always already penetrate systems of knowledge and meaning. And, yet in your discussion on Foucault, for example, you seem to favor Foucault’s understanding of “objective transcendentals” which represents “a more radical turn . . . to a new realm, a non-existent one until then” (184). Given your contention with transcendence in your other interpretations as well as the temporal overlap between Foucault and other thinkers, why and how does Foucault’s category suffice and become a recoverable concept for you?
Palti: It could be said that every system of knowledge is defined by the way in which it conceives the connection between immanence and transcendence. Yet here we must avoid confusing the transcendental and the transcendent. As understood by Kant, the transcendental represents the conditions of phenomena’s possibility and can be placed on either an immanent or a transcendent plane. The concept of the “objective transcendentals” that Foucault speaks about indicates a particular form of conceiving that relation. As Deleuze remarked in his course on Foucault, for the “classical period” or the “age of representation” (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), only the infinite could be the foundations of the finite. The transcendental (the conditions of phenomena’s possibility) was thus projected upon a transcendent realm, inaccessible to reason (the noumenal). In the nineteenth century—the “modern period” or the “age of history”—we observe the paradox that the conditions of the finite’s possibility are now placed on the realm of the finite itself. The transcendental is thus transferred to the immanent ambit, thus giving rise to those paradoxical objects, the “objective transcendentals,” at once empirical and transcendental.
I also observe how, at the end of the nineteenth century, this “modern episteme” started dissolving. The evolutionary-teleological views of history became increasingly problematic until they finally had to be abandoned, and, along with them, the idea of the “objective transcendentals,” which then became unavailable and beyond recovery, since the conceptual ground which made it thinkable had definitively collapsed. This paved the way, in turn, for the emergence of the “new historicism,” the neo-Kantian philosophies of history, whose main representative was Wilhelm Dilthey (who targeted his criticism mainly at Hegel’s philosophy of history). In the new regime of knowledge that then emerged (which I call “the age of form,” to distinguish it from the preceding “age of history” described by Foucault) the transcendental ambit, the conditions of phenomena’s possibility, is sent back to the subjective, transcendent realm, which, as such, escapes again from the reach of reason, from the ambit of the established signifying structures. However, it no longer refers to a supernatural agent, as for the Enlightenment (for which the foundation of the empirical, the ultimate condition of phenomena’s possibility, was god) but rather to a profane one, the “subject,” which then gathers all the attributes previously conferred to god. Skinner’s idea of the “author” and, ultimately, the theories under study must be placed in this framework to render them meaningful in historical-intellectual terms.
JS/ZE: In your concluding reflections, you argue for a “second disenchantment” of the world in which we now suffer not only from the loss of God but from his “secular surrogates,” too (254). Do you mean a “return to religion” or an even greater departure from religion?
Palti: What I mean by a “second disenchantment of the world” is that not only god but also all of his secular surrogates (History, Reason, Nation) have lost their previous symbolic efficacy as providers of a sense to our worldly existence. Rather than a “return of religion,” it indicates a more radical departure from religion and indeed all expectations of transcendence. And it is an objective condition, the defining feature of our time, which is closely associated, in turn, with what François Hartog describes as a “presentist” regime of historicity. This refers not to the changes observable at the level of subjects’ “ideas,” but rather to the structure of the field that determines the condition of possibility for their public articulation. Now, what kind of political thinking and practice, what idea of history, can emerge in this context is something that we cannot yet know, but we can at least try to clarify which questions are currently at stake. In this regard, this book is connected with my previous one, An Archaeology of the Political.
JS/ZE: In this case, is your book’s discussion of “presentism” in conversation with Hartog’s work? For example, in your book, you express hesitation at the idea of intellectual historians, or historians in general, participating in “the problem of presentism” by projecting onto the past their own reflections from the present (147).
Palti: We must introduce a distinction here. In these two cases, the term “presentism” designates two very different things. The “presentist” regime of historicity that Hartog describes refers to the lack of expectation regarding the future. By contrast, the “presentist” approach in intellectual history refers to the trend of projecting our current ideas onto the past. The former use operates on an ontological level, describing our present condition. The latter use operates on an epistemological level, describing our ways of approaching the past.
I agree with both. Like Hartog, I believe that the future is no longer the horizon around which we orient our collective action. We no longer expect that some moment in the future will retrospectively give sense to our whole historical march towards that point in time. Today, we do not articulate our actions with the aim of reaching that final, expected goal. With those who reject the “presentist” approaches in intellectual history, I agree that we cannot reduce past beliefs to merely incomplete realizations en route to our current ideas, posited as finally revealed truths. Such a “presentist” view falls victim to a methodological fallacy. This teleological perspective is ultimately unable to regard our present ideas and systems of thought from a critical distance, thereby naturalizing them and obscuring their foundations’ contingent nature.
JS/ZE: Your book ends with a call for the rejection of self-satisfied retreats to methodological pluralism and a return to the explicit theorization of intellectual-historical methodologies. In making this argument, you cite the wider problem of the collapse “of theoretical debate” (229). And, yet, beyond the debate over theoretical dilemmas, intellectual history—on an institutional level—remains a relatively marginal subfield in most history departments. Part of this may be due to the predominance of various forms of social or economic history, some of which have joined forces since the 2008 financial crisis under the popular banner of the “history of capitalism.” Is the retreat from theory and intellectual history, as you see it, also in part due to a defensive posture reflecting institutional arrangements in the field of history?
Palti: Yes, I think that institutional arrangements play their part in it, although, as you remark, behind them we can also observe the pressure of broader problems that transcend them. We cannot avoid considering that we are living at particularly critical moment. Actually, a prominent member of the so-called neo-reactionary movement (NRx) that has just taken power in the US, Nick Land (whose ideas have been very influential in the views of the new vice-president, J. D. Vance), calls for a “civilizational existential cataclysm” leading beyond the democratic political form and the capitalist system of production (and towards the instauration of one definitively much more brutal than any other hitherto known). These neo-reactionaries refer to it as a “singularity,” a radical break in human history similar to that which occurred three centuries ago with the Enlightenment, and which will entail its full reversal. In this deeply disturbing context, probably not only the study of intellectual history, but history at large may seem irrelevant for a large part of society (and for some within the Academy, too). In sum, I wonder now if what I have stated in my book about the receding of theoretical reflection in recent times in the field is not actually just a symptomatic expression of a cultural context that has turned increasingly hostile to intellectual production in general. What kind of new theories in the field of intellectual history can emerge in such a context? As Skinner (120) would say, I leave it to you to ruminate.
Elías José Palti is a Consulting Professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He obtained his doctoral degree from the University of California at Berkeley and pursued postdoctoral studies at El Colegio de México and Harvard University. He previously served as Full Professor at both the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of Quilmes and as Principal Researcher at the CONICET, Argentina. He is the author of more than two hundred works, which have appeared across twenty-two countries and six different languages. His more recent books are: An Archaeology of the Political. Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (2017), Misplaced Ideas? Political-Intellectual History in Latin America (2024) and Political-Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change (2024). He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Ideas and Prismas: Revista de historia intelectual. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship (2009) and the Pensamiento de América “Leopoldo Zea” prize (2021) conferred by the Pan American Institute of Geography and History at the Organization of American States (OAS), among other distinctions and prizes. At the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, he served as the director of the Center for Intellectual History from 2016 to 2022 and as director of the Master’s Program in Intellectual History.
Jacob Saliba is a PhD candidate (ABD) at Boston College, where he studies modern European intellectual history with a focus on twentieth-century France.
Zac Endter is a PhD student at New York University researching the history of technology and concepts in the twentieth-century United States and Germany.
Featured image: Diego Rivera, The Alarm Clock, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
