Bibliography

[the_lady_lily]

Writing History: Essay on Epistemology - Paul Veyne, translated by Mina Moore-Rinvolucri

I decided I wanted to read this after working through History, Theory, Text, where Veyne's work was cited as being a useful articulation of some of the key ideas that came up in the debate about the nature of history. Veyne is a classicist who actually wrote on Seneca (in general), so I fancied following him down this particular by-path; apparently he was very close to Foucault, and his writing does follow some of the Foucaultian paths you might expect.

I found two things striking about this book. First, I would never have understood as much of it as I did without having done the amount of background reading that, over the years, I have. Second, very little of it actually sank in. I found this with Veyne's work on Seneca as well; his style is rather flowing and elegant, and breaks over the reader in gentle, constant waves without really making terribly clear overall points. So I think that is a feature of Veyne's writing rather than his thinking; I certainly found his writing on Seneca much clearer the second time around, although I'm afraid that as it took me two weeks to get through Writing History I shan't be extending it the same courtesy.

The general points made here as what you would expect of someone who was a follower of Foucault. History is about tracing practices; history is shaped by its conventions, of which we are unaware; there is no such thing as history, discuss; we cannot escape our contemporary context in writing history; and so forth. The two final chapters discuss the interleaving of history with science and sociology, arguing that history is better than both (well, he would); earlier sections dissect the aim of history and ways of understanding what happened in history. The ideas are now, to me, very familiar, but I can imagine how they were rather shocking in their time; this was first published (in French, obviously) in 1970.

I was hoping, to be honest, to see Veyne be a bit more specific about how Foucault's view of history might be relevant to classicists specifically, but he takes a more general, sweeping approach to the question. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was a bit of a disappointment to see that apart from deploying Thucydides' ktema as a symbolic marker for what history is, and the odd reference to an ancient rather than modern historical example, there wasn't much hands-on engagement with the ancient world. So there we go - it's not a bad read, but I have to say that I got more out of the overview texts which describe this way of thinking than out of this particular primary text.

Comments

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Oh hey, Paul Veyne! Now there's someone I haven't read since 1998! Obv, I read him for Teh Ghay when I was writing about gender difference, transience and liminality. All pretty old hat now, as you observe, but we thought we were just soooooooo clever back then...

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

He's not bad on Seneca, which was written (I think) in 2003 and thus is a bit more caught up - he's more into identifications of self and how the person is the microcosm of the world and the interrelationship of politics and philosophy than sex, but he's also more... grounded than he is when he's doing this kind of theoretical kit. I've never read any of his work on homosexuality, which now I come to think of it is actually A Bit Odd.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I'll have to keep him in mind, I think.