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Mysticism and Epistemology: The Historical and Cultural Theory of Michel de Certeau Michel de Certeau: Les chemins d'histoire by Christian Delacroix; Franois Dosse; Patrick Garcia; Michel Trebitsch Review by: Jerrold Seigel History and Theory, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Oct., 2004), pp. 400-409 Published by: Wiley-Blackwell for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3590652 . Accessed: 02/10/2012 13:17
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History and Theory43 (October2004), 400-409

? Wesleyan University 2004 ISSN: 0018-2656

MYSTICISMAND EPISTEMOLOGY: THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURALTHEORYOF MICHELDE CERTEAU

DE CERTEAU: MICHEL D'HISTOIRE. Editedby Christian LESCHEMINS Delacroix, Patrick and Michel Trebitsch. Brussels: Editions Garcia, Franqois Dosse, 2002. 239. Complexe, Pp.

One of the more intriguing and mysterious figures on the French intellectual scene from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s was a Jesuit on leave from his order, Michel de Certeau.Turningto history after an early interestin theology, he first of earlymodernmysticalwriters.After became known as an editorandinterpreter the events of 1968 (which he welcomed and wrote about) Certeaubroadenedhis intereststowardquestions of more secular and contemporary import.He collaborated with Jacques Revel and Dominique Julia in a notable study of linguistic politics during the French Revolution, involved himself in Lacanian psychoanalysis, and wrote a remarkable book-lengthessay on everyday life.1 Like some of his better-knowncontemporaries,Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, he sought to raise fundamentalepistemological questions, sowing doubt about the positivistic attitudesdisplayed by certain historical schools and currentsin his countryand ours, and challenging historiansto recognize the limits imposed on theirworkby the conditionswithin which it is produced.He was known as a briland interlocutor, liant conversationalist althoughsome people found his thinking and writingidiosyncraticand obscure,as some still do today.Kept at the margins of Frenchintellectuallife in the early partof his career(a circumstancethatcontributedto his spending a numberof years teachingin California),he eventually became a celebratedand for many a cherishedpresence on the Left Bank. Since his death in 1985 a numberof essay collections have sought to preserve Certeau'smemory,clarify his position, and assess his continuingrelevance in the various fields he cultivated.2Graduallythe connecting links between his seemingly disparateinterestsand involvementshave emerged, and some of the pieces in the book under review (the product of a seminar organized by its editors between 1998 and 2000) help to make those ties still clearer.Taking off from
1. Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue: la Rdvolutionfrangaiseet les patois (Paris:Gallimard,1975). Michel de Certeau,L'Inventiondu quotidien, I: Arts defaire (Paris:Union gdnrraled'hditions, 1980), transl.StephenRendallas The Practice of EverydayLife (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1984). Certeaualso inspireda companion volume by Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, L'Inventiondu quotidien, II: Habiter cuisiner (Paris: Gallimard,1994). 2. See, in additionto the volume underreview, Michel de Certeau,ed. Luce Giard(Paris:Editions du CentreGeorgesPompidou, 1987), andHistoire, mystiqueetpolitique: Michel de Certeau,ed. Luce Giard, Herv6Martin,Jacques Revel, and Pierre-JeanLabarribre (Grenoble:Editions Jdr6meMillon, 1991).

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them, one can see that mystical religion always provided Certeauwith a ground and (in ways I will try to specify below) a kind of patternthroughwhich to see the world and operatein it. His development of a secularizedmystical perspective on a wide varietyof topics and interestslikely had somethingto do with both the marginalposition he occupied in France duringthe early part of his career, and with his eventual acceptance there. In the end Certeau'smystical roots did not separatehim from more immediatelyinfluentialfigures as much as we might suppose. The fascination that thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida felt for Antoine Artaud, for Georges Bataille and other dissident surrealists, brought mystical elements into their formationtoo. That Jacques Lacan also drew from the mystical well is a point Certeauhimself recognized and elaborated. The seminarfrom which Michel de Certeau: les chemins d'histoire emerged was premised on a belief that Certeau'swork and example have grown increasingly relevantin recent years; the essays, by eleven historians,two philosophers, and two literarycritics, testify that others share their view. Some of the papers are substantialand illuminating,notablyAlain Bourreau'sthoughtfulconsideration of Certeau's interest in the historical anthropology of belief, Frank Lestringant'slively meditation on the relations between rival theories of language and Catholic vs. Protestant ideas about what is represented in the Eucharist, and Olivier Mongin's and Guy Petitdemange's complementary approachesto Certeau'soverall project from the side of the mystical impulses that first inspiredit. Most of the otheressays recounta personaldebt to Certeau, or evoke some particular aspect of his work-about 1968, or everydaypractices, or language. In the view of the editors, whatmost makes Certeauimportant today is his proof historical itself, gram historicizing writing analyzingl'ope"ration historiqueas "the combinationof a social place, scientific practices, and a mode of writing" (la combinaison d'un lieu social, de pratiques scientifiques, et d'une &criture [15]).3 This is a promising formula,but also a vague one. Much of its meaning and value dependon how one unpacksits terms, andjust how une &criture should be renderedin anotherlanguageis a puzzling questionin itself. The vagueness is not dispelled when Herv6Martin,laterin the book, describeswhat is gainedfrom that "historicaldiscourse never exists Certeau'sperspectiveas the understanding in a pure state, free of all constraintand devoted to revealing the simple truthof the facts in theirtransparency" (111). Since hardlyanyone these days doubtsthat historical writing is shaped and colored by the situations and commitments of those who engage in it, the task of a historicalepistemology ought to be not simply to remind us about this, but to clarify the natureand extent of such limitations, to examinejust how constrainingthey must be. No one in the book really takes up these questions, but the editors provide a hint of how Certeauresolved them by remindingus that he regardedthe kind of
3. The editors'phrase,I'opdrationhistorique,comes from the title of Certeau'scontribution to the collective volume Faire de l'histoire, ed. JacquesLe Goff and PierreNora (Paris: Gallimard,1974), 3-41. An expandedversion of this text, retitled"L'opdration appearedin Certeau, historiographique," de l'histoire (Paris:Gallimard, 1975). Some contributorsto the volume underreview use L'&criture the first phrase, some the second.

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perspective he wanted to bring to bear on historical writing as close in spirit to the Marxist analysis of individualsas formed by their participationin a particular system of productiverelations.At a roundtablein 1977, he coupled his criticism of French historians for failing to historicize their own practice with an expression of regretabout the very weak role he thoughtMarxismhad played in French historical writing. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Philippe Aries, and Georges Duby all protestedthat, on the contrary,Marxism had been at the heart of their formation, but this response, as the editors of Les chemins d'histoire point out in their introduction(17), mistook Certeau'spoint. He was not calling for a Marxistaccountof the thingshistoriansstudy,but for a recognitionby practitionersof how their work is shapedby its own conditions of production.In his view, his colleagues' insistence on their Marxist pedigree veiled their refusal to subjecttheir own "site"or "place"(more on Certeau'snotion of the lieu below) to an analysis of the limitationsthat social circumstancesand practicesimposed on what they did. Since Les chemins d'histoire contains no sustained analysis of what Certeau meant by all this, we need to turnto some of his writings to clarify his position. A convenient startingpoint is provided by an essay on "History,Science, and Fiction," published in English in 1983, and reproducedin the collection of his articles called Heterologies.4Here Certeaudescribed modem historiographyin terms that linked it to once-dominant religious assumptions and practices. History displayed a "dogmatizingtendency," seeking to turn its products into of a reality in which everyone must believe." It pursuedthese "representations ends throughsomething he dubbed"the institutionof the real," a projectfounded on Westernhistoriography'sstruggleto distinguishitself from fiction through the critical reading of documents and the exposure of traditionalaccounts as mythical and erroneous. Certeau likened such practices to the gesture through which attackersof "false gods" representedthemselves as prophetsof a trueone: the presence of errors,discourse must pass off as 'real' what"by demonstrating ever is placed in opposition to the errors.Even thoughthis is logically questionable, it works, and it fools people" (201). Proposing such a parallel between religious and secular knowledge claims is not objectionablein itself, but Certeau'sway of doing it often makes the analogy substitutefor any close attentionto what takes place when historianscriticize their sources or each other. Even if many historians, whether in the 1980s or today, want nothing more than to have their own views accepted as truth,two centuriesof ideological debate, the powerful strainof skepticalrelativismit has left behind, and the existence of mechanismsfor subjectingevery new argument to criticism and debate as soon as it appears,all cast strong doubt on the claim thatevery exposure of past fictions or errorsfools people into taking itself as the revelationof a new truth.Just how far are we to thinkthat such intendedor unintended strategies work, and on whom? Certeau's unqualified assertion here is typical of his rhetoric.His essay contains some pointed and useful criticisms of
4. Michel de Certeau,Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, transl.Brian Massumi, forewordby Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 199-221. Many of the ideas expressed in Heterologies were alreadypresentin the earlierpiece referredto just above, in note 3.

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the confidence some historiansin the 1970s and 1980s invested in quantification and in computertechnology,and more generallyof the positivistic strainthatpersisted especially in French historical writing (namely the project of histoire totale) in those years. But what matteredto him was less the details of this criit offered to cast historiansas successorsto priestswho tique thanthe opportunity claimed authority by virtue of their ability to represent higher powers ("the real").At the risk of soundingharsh,it seems to me thereis something both vulgar and silly in such assertions as that "the tribute that contemporaryerudition pays to the computerwill be the equivalent of the 'Dedication to the Prince' in books of the seventeenthcentury,"and thatthe historian"is in attendanceon the computerjust as in the past he was in attendanceon the king" (213). Certeau's admirers, by their willingness to gloss over such pronouncements, and to describehis analysis of l'op"rationhistoriquein vague and general terms, cloud his thinking, glossing over the essential helplessness he attributedto historical discoursein limiting the power of social prejudicesor power relationsto put their stamp on it. In Certeau'sview, practicinghistorians appearto be devoid of any ability to subjecttheir own work to critical scrutinyfrom within their own institutions or practices. Responding to the Popperian notion that scientific communities advance knowledge by subjecting their members' biases or prejudices to criticism, Certeauretorts: Butthiscommunity is also a factory, its members distributed lines,subalongassembly hence dependent on politicaldecisionsand boundby the ject to budgetary pressures, of a sophisticated infrastructures, (archival growingconstraints machinery computers, andpostulates demands, etc.), . . . governed publishers' by socicultural assumptions ... fromthe personal interests of a boss, through the modesandfashionsof the stemming etc. (204) moment, Can the person who writes such a sentence really claim to operate outside the "institution of the real"?Not only does Certeaurely on the very claims to objective knowledge he attributes to others, his perspectiveseems to forget thatWeber ever wrote about the value-laden natureof analytical concepts, or that such an understandingwas already widely diffused among historians in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Certeau,the very act of writing about some particularsubjectin the past serves to hide the writer's dependence on the conditions within which discourseis produced:"thetext substitutesa representation of a past for elucidation of the presentinstitutionaloperationthat manufactures the historians'stext. ... The representation of historicalrealities is itself the means by which the real conditions of its own productionare camouflaged"(206, 207). Such assertions imply not only that historicaldiscourse can only legitimate itself by speakingof its own limitationsin the very act of representingthe past, but more that it is not possible to act on an awarenessof those limitationsexcept by confessing them in exactly the termsCerteauconceives them. Otherwise,why should any historian's elucidationof his or her relationshipto some set of institutionalpressuresor constraintsbe expected to be freer of their influence than his or her account of past

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events? On Certeau'spremises, only someone who shares his view that every claim to stable historicalknowledge is a deluded one, resting on the false foundation of "the institutionof the real," and who accepts his images of factories, assembly lines, bosses and the rest, can recognize how far the dependencyof historical discourse on the conditions of its productionextends. Merely to do what in fact many historiansdo (and which many did, explicitly or implicitly, in the years when he was writing), avow their political or ideological positions, be as honest as humanbeings can be about their biases and prejudices,recognize the limits of their knowledge, would not be sufficient. In Certeau'sworld, the only way for historicalwriting to escape from its positivistic cage would be for it to make itself "other" to itself. The particularotherness into which he wished to see it merged was the fiction from which historical writing since Thucydides has attemptedto distinguish itself. Fiction acknowledges the equivocal natureof human claims to know the world by not ascribing reality to its contents. It "delineatesitself in a language from which it continuously draws effects of meaning that cannot be circumscribed or checked." Whereas historical discourse seeks to establish itself at a definite "place,"instituted by a certain set of social relations and practices, and within which it endeavors to acquire some degree of stable existence, "fiction has no proper place of its own. It is 'metaphoric';it moves exclusively in the domain of the other"(202).5 Certeau'slanguage calls to mind the years in which his essay was written, when the notion that all historical narrativeswere in essence fictional was often encountered,alongside the broaderpropositionthat in a world where all is discoursetherecan be no such thing as truth.In promotingsuch ideas, however, Certeau'sessay relied over and over again on outrighttruthclaims, most notably those about the conditions of productionthat lie behind historical writing (whose metaphoricalnaturedid not seem to trouble him). The defining and in my view cripplingparadoxof Certeau'sworkis thathe representshis own criticism as capable of reflecting on historical practice and achieving an effective understandingof it because he operates from a point that lies outside it, while denying the same capacity for reflective self-scrutinyto those who operatefrom Certeau'scritique,despite the historicalclaims on within history as practitioners. which it is based, is supposed to transcendthe limits of historical practice;the rest of us remain confined inside them. Put in general terms, this means that human beings are capable of insight about their own doings, and of liberation from the restrictionstheirinstitutionsimpose, but only on the conditionthatthey occupy a location-or non-location--outside those institutions,or at least at their margins. In other domains too, Certeau's work often calls up the human capacity to achieve forms of insight or creative agency that transcendor escape from estab5. Certeau'sconcern here lies close to Foucault's in "Whatis an Author?"where we read that attributingworks and ideas to named individuals serves an ideological function, namely to impede "the free manipulation,the free composition, decomposition,and recompositionof fiction," and thus to "reducethe great danger,the great peril" that fiction in a pure state representsfor a world organized aroundthe acceptanceof limits. "Whatis an Author?"in TheFoucault Reader,ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:Pantheon, 1984), 118-119.

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lished limits or institutionalized restrictions.But even as he depicts this ability in terms that might apply to any humanbeing anywhere,he simultaneouslyidentifies it with groupshe sees as marginalizedor practiceshe identifies with "otherness." A major example is his examination of inventiveness in everyday life. du quotidienis an optimistic affirmation Read in a certainway, L'Invention of the to use the materials and human conditions of the societies beings possess power and cultures into which they are born in novel and innovative ways, finding unpredictableroutes (both literal and metaphorical)throughtheir cities, turning commodified goods to new purposes, responding to visual materials (even TV advertisements)or written texts in ways that inject consumers' own meanings into them. Such a list of inventive practices implies that they are distributed throughout society, occurring in many contexts and at all social levels. But Certeauall the same seeks to attributethem to "the weak" or the marginal.The social practices of dominant groups are "strategies,"those of dominated ones "tactics."A strategyis a calculus of force-relationships whichbecomes of will andpower possiblewhena subject a city,a scientific an enterprise, canbe isolated froman "envi(a proprietor, institution) A strategy assumesa placethatcan be circumscribed ronment." as proper[propre] and relations withan exterior thusserveas thebasisfor generating distinct fromit (competior "objects" of research). . . . [A tactic,however "clienteles," tors,adversaries, "targets," whichcannot counton a "proper" orinstitutional) nor localization, is] a calculus (a spatial the other as a thuson a borderline visible The of a tactic distinguishing totality. place A tacticinsinuates itself intothe other's withbelongsto the other. place,fragmentarily, . . . Theweakmustcontinually out takingit overin its entirety. turnto theirown ends forcesaliento them,. . . [a tasktheyachieve]in the propitious moments whentheyare ableto combine elements.6 heterogeneous On this account only the tactics of the weak are genuinely inventive, since the strategies of the strong operate merely to reproduce existing relationships in alteredforms or configurations; by contrastthe tactics of the weak turnthe materials of everyday life in unanticipateddirections.Among Certeau'sexamples of such tactical operationsare the appropriation of Catholic religious materialsby colonized Brazilianpeasants who employed them to inspire resistancestrategies or utopianvisions, and the Frenchworking-classtraditionof the perruque (literon ally, "wig"),the term applied to a productthat a workermade surreptitiously the job, using an employer's materialsor tools, and on the employer's time, but sold as his own to enhance his income. This distinctionbetween strategyand tactics often grows fuzzy, as for instance when Certeaudescribes a housewife shoppingin a supermarket as operatingtacbased on when she decisions mobile data" makes and tically "heterogeneous (what she has at home, who she has to feed [xix]), or when he characterizescontemporarymarginalityas "no longer limited to minority groups," but "rather massive and pervasive,"even "becominguniversal"(xvii). But in his eyes these ambiguities are resolved in ways that preserve the weak/strong dichotomy, because he regardsall consumersas potentiallydominatedby the system of pro6. The Practice of EverydayLife, xix; some of this is repeatedon 36-37. (The title given to the English translationfails to preservethe referenceto inventiveness createdby the Frenchone.)

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duction and advertisingthat seeks to form their tastes and decisions, so thateven a housewife with middle-class resources needs to employ weapons of the weak when she shops. Certeau envisions his own intellectual practice in these same terms, characterizinghis relationshipto established forms of knowledge and research as "workingwith its machines and making use of its scraps"so as to "divertthe time owed to the institution"and "subvertthe law that, in the scientific factory,puts work at the service of the machine"and destroys creativity.His goal is "to make a kind of perruqueof writing itself' (27-28). Like his historical epistemology, therefore,Certeau'svision of inventiveness in everydaylife identifies abilities that in principleany individual might employ (especially since practicallyall people find themselves in a subordinate position at one moment of their lives or another),while seeking all the same to assign such powers to those who have no "proper" place inside the world of established institutionsand relationships.Such thinking is both puzzling and questionable. Are young computerprogrammers with degrees who find new ways to combine codes, and thus challenge dominant forms of software, examples of strategic practice or tactical?Is the work of computerhackerswho send viruses over the internetmore creative than that of engineers who work for Microsoft? Is a scientist whose work earns a Nobel Prize for work done in a big commercialor university laboratoryless creative than a tinkererin a garage? Is a mayor of Paris who divertsfunds from city revenuesto his family by hiringhis relativesin positions with no responsibilities acting less "creatively"than a worker who produces his perruques with company materials on company time? Certeau's intense identification with outsiders and marginal people seems to flow from deep moral and social commitments,but it leads him onto swampy ground. It thus becomes particularlyrevealing to recognize how deeply all these attitudes are rooted in the readings of mystical texts and practices that were Certeau's first historical work. The essays of Guy Petitdemange and Olivier Mongin in Les cheminsd'histoire help to make these connections clear. Quoting from two seventeenth-century mystical writers whose works and letters Certeau and Pierre Favre edited, Jean-JosephSurin,Petitdemangecites texts thatresound in many of Certeau'sdealings with othersubjects.In a well-known letterof 1630, Surin describedthe deep impact made on him by a boy he met on a journey, a rough, illiterate nineteen-year-old"who had never been taught by anyone but God." He had the heart of a solitary stranger,"incapableof accommodatingor shaping himself to the customs of this world which we consider as an exile." Certeauprovided a gallery of such figures in his book La Fable mystique,tracing out a portraitof "theother"not as demandingfrom us generous or charitable feelings, but speakingin a savage language that works to wear away and dispossess us of "everyset identity,for ourselves or for others."To Certeauwhat mystical practicetaughtwas a perpetualseeking for somethingbeyond the here and now, a persistingdissatisfactionwith any object or relationshipthat might tie us to things as they presently exist, a way of being in the world that makes difference, foreignness, radical otherness the ground of all our relations and experiences. "Thatperson is a mystic," Certeauwrote, "who cannot cease to move on [qui ne peut s'arrdter de marcher],and who, in the certitude of what he lacks,

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knows aboutevery place and every objectthatthis is not it, thatone cannotreside here or content oneself with this."7For a Catholicmystic, the objects of this perpetual dissatisfaction had to include the Church itself, and toward it Certeau developed an attitudethat was paradigmaticof his stance toward every human institution.Olivier Mongin, taking up one of Certeau'smost convoluted and difficult texts (a commentaryon Freud's analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber'sparanoia), finds its nub in the idea that the only good institutionsare those that recognize their own rottenness and corruption.People who know that they will never be content with any worldly attachment join such institutionsall the same because they provide the only available protectionfrom the delirium, even the madness,thatcomes from being drivenalways beyond what exists. Such persons will neithertry to restorethe institutionthey join to an originalpuritynor seek to conserve it as it is, but, looking its unavoidablecorruptionin the face, they will use it as a frame for seeking what they know it cannot provide. "Perhapsthe approachto take,"Certeauwrote, "is the one temporarilytracedin times past by St. Teresa and others, who wanted to join a corrupt order,and therefore sought from it neitheridentity nor recognition,but only the alterationof their necessary delirium."8 Mongin properlyrecognizes in this attitudethe model for Certeau'smode of living in urban space (finding unpredictablepaths through it, inspired by the sense of foreignness that animates those to whom it offers no "proper" place), and more generally the modes of practice he calls "tactical"in L'inventiondu quotidien.Mystics, we might say (I do not know whetherCerteauever made this comparisonor not), employ the materialsof orthodoxChristianteaching in ways that recall the subversive diversions effected by Brazilian peasants; mystical practice is a kind of perruque. The same attitudetoward an institutionto which one belongs in a way that seeks "neitheridentity nor recognition"reappearsin Certeau'shistoricalepistemology, which rests on nothing so much as demanding of historiansthat they acknowledge an incurablerottennessat the heart of their profession (in the very projectof distinguishinghistory from fiction), thus establishing with it a relationshipof simultaneousinvolvement and distance like the one St. Teresahad with the ordinarypracticesof the Church. But it is in Certeau'sreadingof Freudand Lacan that his notion of the mystic as always in motion, never accepting this or that as the goal of the human quest, The Lacanian returnto Freud was a finds its most remarkabletransformation. recognitionof the unappeasabilityof desire, in particularthe desire for the truth of one's own selfhood. Neitherin any objectnor in oneself as subjectcould there be a stable point of rest, since the individualis always led beyond them to some Other.Certeaufound many points of referencefor the idea of othernessto which he constantlyreturned,but one of the most resonantwas the essential otherness of the Lacanian self, lodged in the moment of misrecognitionprovided by the
7. Michel de Certeau,La Fable mystique(Paris:Gallimard,1982), 411; cited in Petitdemange,"Le Deuil impossible de la mystique,"in Les cheminsd'histoire, 49. 8. OlivierMongin, "Une figure singulibrede la pensde,"in Les cheminsde l'histoire, 35; Certeau's text, originallypublishedin 1977, appearsas "TheInstitutionof Rot," in Heterologies, 35-46. The reference to St. Teresa (which Mongin does not quite quote) is on 46.

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"mirror stage,"when a person first takes the reflection of her or his own body to the presence of a stable, coherentbeing undiscoverableinside the chaos signify of desire. To free people of this false sense that they are subjectsable to find satisfaction in an object was a chief goal of Lacanian therapy,whose techniques were calculatedto dispossess patients of their confidence in the therapistas the "subject supposed to know" (sujet suppose savoir), and of the mirror-stage residuethatput them in quest of a discoverableand stable core of their own subjectivity. FromLacanwe learn,in Certeau'sformula,that "theother always institutes the subjectby alienatingit." Read throughLacan's lens, Freud'stexts teach this truthbecause they "do not designate a past to be rediscovered.They articulate what, in different scenes in the psychic structure,does not cease being the returnto that Otherwhich constitutesthe subjectas a relationshipto an impossible object."9 of this pattern,in which humansubjects Certeaufound a crucialdemonstration seek satisfaction for their desires in a stable object whose deeper meaning emerges only in revealing that it cannot satisfy them, in the Lacanianequivalent of the Church,the Ecole Freudienne, founded in 1964, and dissolved in 1980. The lesson of its history was thatLacan's "institutional adventure,this trip of his itself this must have terminated desire, by 'failing.': this is not that." The Lacanianinstitutionwas like the Christianone: the truthits founderrevealed to his followers was one he could enact only by removing himself from its presence, so that they would learn always to seek him somewhere else. "If it is true, accordingto Freud, that the traditiondoes not stop cheating on its founder,will Lacan still be heard in those places where one claims possession of his heritage and his name, or will he returnunderother names?"10 Because it is these themes of unappeasibility,absence, the "rottenness"of institutions,the othernessof the subject,the fictionality of truthclaims, that give persisting structureto Certeau'swriting, the most telling essays in Les Chemins d'histoire are those by Olivier Mongin and Guy Petitdemange,both of which highlight the relations between his apparentlysecular interests and his original mystical inspiration.As Mongin points out, Certeau's historical passions were above all arousedby the "rupture" that, from the seventeenthcentury,displaced Christianityfrom its central place in Europeansociety and culture, and by the "debt"he was sure thatmodems all the same owed to theirforsakenheritage."If rupturethere is, there is no less a debt, this is the fundamentalplot that modem history ceaselessly re-teachesus."'1It was just such a compoundof ruptureand debt that lay behind Certeau'scomparisonsof contemporaryhistoriansto court making obeisance to new forms of power, and behind his insishistoriographers, tence that the pretendedbreakbetween history and fiction left a similar indebtedness behind.It was this posture,ratherthanany actual argument,that underlay the radical and arbitraryassertion that only those who have no "proper" place inside an institution-whether it be the historical profession or society as a whole--can achieve reflective distance from its practices. The very attractive9. Certeau,"Lacan:An Ethics of Speech," in Heterologies, 58. 10. Ibid., 64. The link between Lacan and Christianitywas explicit; see 59. 11. Mongin, "Une figure singulihre,"33.

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ness of Certeau'swritings to a number of establishedhistorians, some of them contributorsto Les chemins d'histoire, belies his brief for the epistemological privilege of radicalotherness. For these reasons the editors' claim that Certeau's historical epistemology makes him increasinglyrelevantto those who may read his work today seems to me at best questionable.His writings make a powerful appeal, but it is one that arises from a certain poetic quality (the same feature that often makes them obscure), and from the courageous and imaginative persistence with which he pursued a constant vision across many regions of life and thinking. Certeau's moral seriousness deserves our respect, but his thinking also merits at least as much skepticism as he seeks to direct at actual historicalpractice. JERROLD SEIGEL New YorkUniversity