By ALINE MAGALHÃES PINTO*

Preface to the book by Dominick LaCapra

Understanding, justice and generosity: for an ethos beyond the human

“Starting, starting over (let’s start over) — it’s risky, sometimes impossible, we know — as we say, as fairly, as least unfairly as possible.” (Jacques Derrida, About).

"Tout autre est tout autre”, says Jacques Derrida, in Donner la mort.^[I]The philosopher — with whom Dominick LaCapra, throughout his work, dialogues intensely — states that the strangeness caused by this formula, at once extremely economical and deeply elliptical, comes from the fact that the play of his words, far from being constituted as a tautology, it holds in its encrypted language something that we should consider as if it were the secret of all secrets.

For, continues Jacques Derrida, in this short and powerful formulation, the encounter of the indefinite adjective pronoun (any) with the adverb of quantity (any) produces the effect of a drastic heterology: not everyone, but only some who are others. Only some, and never all others, are totally, absolutely, radically and infinitely Other. It's because?^[ii] We can say that the movement that Dominick LaCapra pursues in the book we have in hand is condensed in the formulation of heterology pointed out by Jacques Derrida. Through the set of texts gathered here, we engage once again in the shifting terrain of the relationships between identity and otherness.

Understanding others, however, does not constitute an abstract speculative gesture in the name of deciphering or conserving this anthropologically basic enigma. Moving, with dexterity, between practice and theory, Dominick LaCapra's reflection mobilizes, in a very peculiar way, the links between action and subjectivity, consciousness and nature, in order to indicate, on the one hand, the need for a change in the paradigm of regulation of socio-historical processes by which some, and not all, become Others.

On the other hand, Dominick LaCapra points out, through his work, the elements that, in his view, are fundamental for the construction of a theoretical-conceptual framework of references for an intellectual history of others: other peoples, other times and beings other than humans — as the book’s subtitle makes clear. This story, the author warns from the outset, cannot ignore economic, social and ecological issues (p. 37). But that won't be enough. To be able to see and make others seen, we should become capable of recognizing how, even against our deliberate intention, in our research and studies we are open to the possibility of acting as “informants of the powers” ​​we serve.

With some irony, Dominick LaCapra states that, “structurally, anthropologists are what Jean-Paul Sartre called, in a revealing expression, subordinate functionaries of the superstructure” (p. 181). This recognition is the starting point for a self-reflective and self-critical stance regarding the epistemological limitation of the demands for objectivity and neutrality, often associated — in the case of historiography — with archives and documents.

The complex nebula that arises between us, the other that lives in us and those that become others, acts as a lighthouse that guides Dominick LaCapra in the composition of what I previously mentioned as his “peculiar way” of thinking. In that regard, Understanding others is a very interesting book for us to learn what is specific about the author's historiographical production, as it offers a thoughtful synthesis of his theoretical inspirations, his main objects and his way of practicing intellectual history, which, in general, aims to re-elaborate cultural patterns from different temporal, psychic and social perspectives.

Dominick LaCapra, since the 1980s, has shown himself to be a historian who took a stand against the empirical naivety of his peers. His theoretical procedure, by placing Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida in dialogue, challenged the hegemonic stance in the practice of professional historiography at the time, marked by a conception in which the context assumed the value of a privileged ontological nature. Through the exploration of the notions of carnivalization and textuality, LaCapra designed his research as the weaving of an inter-relational network between reader, text and context, highlighting a theoretical issue: the aporia of a historical meaning configured in an unstable way, always mediated, never transparent, never discernible once and for all and which, for this very reason, engenders a historiography that walks between the territory of language in a denotative, conceptual, serious and scientific sense and the domains of metaphor and rhetoric.^[iii]

Although very thought-provoking, Dominick LaCapra's vision did not escape the fierce criticism that fell on those who dared to take, to the historiographical field, theoretical developments extracted from the linguistic turn.

From the 1990s onwards, themes linking ethics and memory emerged as the center of concern in academic research, at the same time as the impact of post-structuralism and language tour in North American postgraduate circles tended to decrease. As I analyzed in detail on another occasion,^[iv] Intense debates in the North American intellectual world from the late 1980s ended up transforming into the demand for a theoretically sophisticated and ethically attentive historiography, capable of refusing fascist interpretations of the past.

In this context, Dominick LaCapra rethought certain ethical consequences of a linguistically oriented skepticism, shifting his intellectual efforts towards new objects and themes, with emphasis on trauma, and transformed psychoanalysis into a privileged source of theoretical dialogue. The results of this shift in Dominick LaCapra's research work can be seen in the book Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) and in the publications that follow it, History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998) and Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001)

Since then, Dominick LaCapra's intellectual history, moving between different objects, remains a practice of theoretically conducted investigation in a critical, questioning, reflective way, which is located from an enclave between an “unconscious” temporality linked to memory, to myths and rituals and a properly historical and conjectural temporality linked to the specificity and singularity of events.

Em Understanding others, Dominick LaCapra carries out a critical-reflective exercise on the way in which, in his work, the different concepts and notions that underlie his historiographic vision are articulated. Perhaps the most appropriate name for this exercise is “self-reflective vigilance”, an expression coined by the author to designate the attention that must be given to distinctions, concepts and theoretical investments on the part of the historian. Resuming the still necessary problematization regarding the notion of context, LaCapra reaffirms the importance of Jacques Jacques Derrida's contribution to the historiographic field, taking his interpretation around the Algerian philosopher's work outside the field of strict textualism.

As Dominick LaCapra asserts, the conception of text in Jacques Derrida's philosophy is an operator that allows the historian to articulate the synchronic and diachronic elements of the specific and multiple temporalities that traverse experience; that is, it enables historiographical work with texts, languages ​​and significant practices that is less naive and more critical of a denotative-descriptive conception of language. As a generalized structure of traces of mutual and asymmetrical binding, crossed by tensely interrelated forces, the text, or better yet, the “non-existence of something outside the text”,[v] constitutes, for LaCapra, a way to think in contrast or deviation from the binary oppositions that, for the North American author, feed the scapegoat mechanism — a psychic, collective and individual expedient through which the anguish and insecurity inherent to the self are projected outwardly onto vulnerable others who, paradoxically, are feared as a threat.

The figure of the scapegoat and the binary opposition between the self and the other (or between “us” and “them”) take us back to the “secret of all secrets” enunciated by Jacques Derrida and which concerns, finally, the fact that moral and political consciousness remains marked by the notion of sacrifice and, ultimately, through the shadow of violence: we only make some people die or let them die, not all. This illumination is the order of the day, as it is the core of discussions about necropolitics.^[vi]

Contemporary political discussion cannot escape the fact that a good functioning of the economic, political and legal order of hegemonic social forms seems linked to the sacrifice of others in order not to sacrifice oneself. In a profound sense, Dominick LaCapra's reflection leads us to recognize in techno-scientific-industrial ways of life the founding presence of trauma, the sacrificial trait and violence. His reflection also leads us to the question regarding the possibility of a history that works (working through) this presence instead of reiterating it (acting out).

The sacrificial, traumatic and violent trait is certainly an unconscious mark that participates in the economy of relations of otherness and identity, including the otherness that resides within oneself. self, and is linked to experiences of violence, victimization, grief, trauma and oppression. However, and paradoxically, sacrifice is also linked to offering, donation, trust, compassion, responsibility and what becomes sacred for a given community. Dominick LaCapra does not seek to dilute the complexity of these relationships. Nor is he satisfied with a melancholy reaffirmation of his ambiguity.

Throughout the book, in a courageous clash with the political moment in which Donald Trump's government in the United States meant the manifestation of issues such as prejudice, racism, misogyny, ultranationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment, bathed in a broth of authoritarianism and political personalism, Dominick LaCapra seems to want to tell himself and all of us that we need to put an end to the constant reiteration of sacrificial violence in order to launch ourselves towards a future project, a new future, a more desirable future or, at least , “a more bearable future” (p. 268). His work, therefore, deliberately encourages the revision of the thresholds through which some become others, separating other peoples, other times and other animals.

Certainly, the elaboration of this perspective comes from the baggage accumulated by the research that resulted in History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence, in which Dominick LaCapra identified the configuration of a transhistorical or structural trauma that is plastically enacted in different ways: as original sin, as a passage from nature to culture, as separation/loss of the mother, as the “entry” into language or conceived as the Lacanian real. From there, he tried to elucidate how and to what extent the elements of this traumatic trans-historical plan are inserted in traumatic historical experiences, such as the atrocities of war and genocide. The theoretical articulation between trans-historical and historical planes opens space for an anthropological discussion about trauma from which emerge the limits not only of history, but also of the relationship between the human and the animal itself and, consequently, the limits between reason and violence.^[vii]

Em Understanding others, we see the resumption of the discussion with an anthropological and historical background, now accompanied by an immersive work of clarification regarding the notion of transfer, whose centrality was already identified in previous books. This elucidation is decisive for us to understand how the notion of transference occurs from the strictly psychoanalytic field to the historiographical one and what its role is in formulating a critique of the cuts that produce otherness that generate identities thirsty for self-affirmation all the time.

Dominick LaCapra considers psychoanalysis as a social science with which historiography cannot fail to interact. In previous works, the dialogue with Lacan was more common. In the texts that make up Understanding others, dialogue with the psychoanalytic field takes place primarily with Freudian thought. As LaCapra states, for Freud, otherness is associated with the role of transference and it concerns, above all, the father-son relationship, which signals an inherent, but differential, mutual implication of the self in others.

Initially, Dominick LaCapra requested the concept of transference to question the ways in which the historian is implicated in relation to his object of study. Understanding others presents an expansion of this conceptual angle of action. By treating transference as a relational concept not restricted to individual psychology, this mutual implication of self which involves a tendency to repetition and an affective investment, for Dominick LaCapra, is not restricted to people.

It also occurs in relationships between different human communities, between texts and between animals. If Freud believed that transference affected all human relationships, Dominick LaCapra goes further and thinks that transference, that is, the mutual implication of self, it also happens in relationships with “beings other than humans” (p. 188).

The transference implication, as understood by Dominick LaCapra, supposes the recovery of the meanings of empathy and compassion in opposition to the meaning of identification. As the historian argues, while identification threatens otherness with collapse and subjection, empathy requires putting oneself in the other's position, without taking their place or taking the other's place. loci enunciation of the speech by him. That is, insists Dominick LaCapra, empathy is not a synonym for identification, since it is based on the recognition, under certain conditions, of the possibility of performing certain actions or certain experiences — which engenders an “expanded consciousness”, capable of remain ethically vigilant in the face of this possibility.

Faced with the perpetration of an atrocious act, the vigilant conscience understands that it could also act like this and, therefore, becomes capable of intervening in itself, preventively, in order to prevent this possibility from happening. Empathy or compassion cannot, from Dominick LaCapra's perspective, be confused with supporting, accepting or forgiving the perpetration of violence and traumatic experiences. It would almost be the opposite. They are fundamental components and, however, not sufficient for a grounded historical understanding and for viable social and political action (p. 88).

Dominick LaCapra's conceptual framework links this specific understanding of empathy to the inescapability of the transferential tendency. Individually or collectively, we have the propensity to incorporate traits of the other in ourselves or to project onto them certain traits that belong to us, even if the “other” is an object of research. These “traits” are marks that concern our own convictions, world views and desires. Understood in this way, empathy is an important device so that the transference implication, whether involved or not in a traumatic experience, can trigger a process of elaboration.

Em Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra built an analytical model on responses to historical trauma, in which he opposes the concept of working through (working through) to the concept of acting out (which can be understood through the ideas of reacting or manifesting in the present by reiterating something previously configured or experienced). In this book, LaCapra states that the characteristic reaction of acting out is linked to a compulsion or tendency to repeat, and those who suffer from it feel “trapped” to the traumatic experience, which is relived repeatedly, resulting in painful survival, often permeated by a feeling of constant threat that generates compulsive hypervigilance and a desire for security.

In turn, working through, or working through the traumatic experience, is a much more difficult type of response to trauma, as it does not succumb to the temptation, often justifiable, of bifurcating the world between good and evil, victim and perpetrator. The process of working through does not prescribe easy answers or a linear progression through pain, but instead involves a self-shaping of memory through self-reflection and critical engagement.^[viii]

Em Understanding others, Dominick LaCapra continues his research into trauma and its gray areas (a term borrowed from Primo Levi^[ix]), considerably expanding the horizon of action of the concepts of elaboration (working through) to acting out. No longer restricted to the traumatic experience, the scope concerning both concepts now relates to the expanded conception of transference as self-implication, affective involvement and tendency to repeat, which governs relationships between people, communities, texts, knowledge and animals.

As Dominick LaCapra explains, working through involves work (in the psychoanalytic sense) that operates on the self and social processes, requiring a transferential co-implication that models repetition in order to resist compulsion, deviating from it. That is, working “involves opening the self to consider and respect others, and at least to a limited understanding of others as others, without reducing them to their own projective or incorporative narcissistic identifications” (p. 29). In turn, the acting out characterizes the mode of transference totally submerged in compulsive repetitions that produce reactive and defensive identifications and projections, which, in turn, are not only present as a reaction to a traumatic experience.

By acting out We also understand the projection of anxieties, weaknesses and insecurities deposited in the self, which then reacts against any reinvestment and remodeling that may, in the present, produce openings for the future. This mode of action reinforces prejudices and the election of scapegoats, in a cycle of feedback which serves as an instrument to generate or reinforce insulting oppositions and even gestures of violence.

The reference made by Dominick LaCapra to the behavior of the former president of the United States is particularly opportune to interpret this expanded way of understanding the acting out. LaCapra asserts that Donald Trump “sometimes seems like a paradigmatic case of 'acting out' with little or no attempt to 'work through' difficult problems or dubious propensities” (p. 46). Throughout the book, characteristics are pointed out that help us think about what such a paradigm would be.

The former president, says Dominick LaCapra, lies and compulsively repeats the lie until it begins to operate completely for his own benefit. “In a hypocritical and oppressive way, [Trump] uses ridicule, stinging sarcasm, to intimidate and humiliate others he scapegoats, counting on the naivety or duplicity of his supporters” (p. 243). Or, even, “If he is offended by critics, he retaliates not in the same measure, but with a massive overdose of what he projects or imagines seeing in them. At best, he has a severely malfunctioning 'mechanism' of self-censorship and self-control” (p. 242).

That is, by analyzing Donald Trump's positions, postures and behaviors, which, as Dominick LaCapra shows, are driven by pivot-and-project tactics, we can glimpse what the most radical and extreme form of acting out. For the Brazilian reader, it will be inevitable to identify the morbid similarity between Trump's traits and actions described and analyzed by LaCapra and the indigestible figure of our former president Jair Bolsonaro.

The path opened by Understanding others it is opposite to the “feeling of the world” represented by these figures. The bet coined in the book is based on the hope that the Trump phenomenon, and, by extension, for us, Bolsonarism, has made us more sensitive to the deficiencies and limits of approaches, practices and postures anchored in identities driven by a desire compulsive, resulting from a certain anthropocentric fixation (p. 177). In this sense, the reader will find in the book problematizations about different types of otherness: humans and other animals, Westernized people and other peoples, history and fiction, history and memory, human sciences and exact and technological sciences.

In each case, these cuts of otherness are treated in a way that is attentive to detail, based on frames of references shaped according to specific questions that open themselves to theoretical inquiry and, certainly, to critical debate. At the same time, Dominick LaCapra's reflection allows the formulation of a fundamental “knot”: how a point of no return, the dissension between past and future, and even the possibility of some future for humans, are perhaps linked to the formation of a ethos that does not attribute any dominance or exceptionality to our species.

But in this case, and this is what can be disturbing, the implications force us to ask: who and in whose name could be fair, generous and understanding?

*Aline Magalhães Pinto is a professor of literature at the Faculty of Arts at UFMG.

Reference

Dominick LaCapra. Understanding others: people, animals, pasts. Translation: Luis Reyes Gil. Translation review: Mariana Silveira. Belo Horizonte, Autêntica, 2023, 286 pages. [https://amzn.to/3yyUMp9]

REFERENCES

JACQUES DERRIDA, Jacques. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilee, 1999.

JACQUES DERRIDA, Jacques. Grammatology. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2004.

LaCAPRA, Dominick. History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.

LaCAPRA, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.

LaCAPRA, Dominick. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

LEVI, Cousin. The Drowned and the Survivors. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2004.

LIMA, Luiz Costa. Jacques Derrida or the Amazon of writing. In: Fiction and the Poem. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012. p. 66-95.

MBEMBE, Achilles. Necropolitical: biopower, sovereignty, state of exception and politics of death. São Paulo: n-1 Editions, 2018.

PINTO, Aline Magalhães. Dominick LaCapra: textuality, empathy, trauma. In: BENTIVOGLIO, Júlio; AVELAR, Alexandre de Sá (org.). The future of history: from crisis to reconstruction of theories and approaches. Victory:

Milfontes, 2019. v. 1, p. 155-178.

Notes

[I] DERRIDA, Jacques. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée, 1999. p. 114.

[ii] DERRIDA. Donner la mort, P. 114.

[iii] See LACAPRA, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.

[iv] PINTO, Aline Magalhães. Dominick LaCapra: textuality, empathy, trauma. In: BENTIVOGLIO, Júlio; AVELAR, Alexandre de Sá (org.). The future of history: from crisis to reconstruction of theories and approaches. Vitória: Milfontes, 2019. v. 1, p. 155-178.

[v] "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” is an expression that has become famous both to identify and to disqualify Derridean deconstruction. As Derrida explains, in Grammatology, and LaCapra reiterates, the perspective of deconstruction assumes that “there is no out of text”, which does not mean that all references are suspended or denied, or that all points of view are legitimized in a kind of “anything goes”. “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” means that every reference point, all realities have the structure of a trace difference, they are textual, and we can only refer to this reality in an interpretative experience that takes place, or only takes on meaning, in a differential movement. See DERRIDA, Jacques. Grammatology. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2004. For a critical perspective, see LIMA, Luiz Costa. Derrida or the Amazon of writing. In: Fiction and the Poem. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012. p. 66-95.

[vi] According to Achille Mbembe, necropolitics is characterized by the confluence of three notions that participate in the practice of sovereignty as a double process of self-institution and self-limitation: biopolitics, the state of exception and the state of siege. The author seeks to demonstrate how power (and not necessarily state power) continually refers to and appeals to the exception, to the emergence of a split (us and others) that configures otherness as an enemy. Power is, at the limit, power over the lives of others, and, to exercise it, it is necessary to operate this movement through which some become others, a difference that, in extreme situations, marks the division between the people who must live and those who must die. See MBEMBE, Achille. Necropolitical: biopower, sovereignty, state of exception and politics of death. São Paulo: n-1 Editions, 2018.

[vii] LaCAPRA, Dominick. History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. p. 1-36.

[viii] LaCAPRA, Dominick. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

[ix] See LEVI, Cousin. The Drowned and the Survivors. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2004.

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