The Names of History

History in our day is still a story, and yet one that we expect to tell the truth-not just the people and the events of the past, but the invisible order and forces behind them. How can the language of history balance these seemingly contrary tasks, the narrative, the scientific, and the political? This is the question Jacques Rancière explores in The Names of History, a meditation on the poetics of historical knowledge.

In the works of writers from Jules Michelet to Fernand Braudel, Rancière traces an ongoing revolution in historical study, a movement that has challenged, in the practice of language, the opposition of science and literature. By way of a commentary on Erich Auerbach, he shows how fictional narrative intertwines with historical narrative to produce a "truth" that retains mythical elements.

The poetics of knowledge Rancière develops here is an attempt to identify the literary procedures by which historical discourse escapes literature and gives itself the status of a science. His book is also a consideration of Braudel, whose work in the Annales school advanced this project. Rancière follows and extends Braudel's discursive production of new agencies of history, which accounts for the material conditions in which history takes place as well as the language in which it is written. Through an examination of Braudel's style, Rancière valorizes the repressed literary side of history-a model of which he finds in the work of Michelet.

In closing, he insists on the interdisciplinary character of historical study, not least in connection with recent developments in philosophy and critical theory.