The need for a historiographical vanguard: an interview with Ewa Domanska 

Presentation

The work of Ewa Domanska can be described as an excursion through the open fissures in the humanities after the establishment of critical movements that made certain conceptions, once innovative, lose much of their radicality. To the idea that the past is a construction of the present, if not just an artifice created by historians, the Polish historian opposes the affirmation of the ontological status of the past,  valid through its various material and/or spiritual manifestations; to the claim that the main vehicle for understanding history is the text she opposes the multiplicity of ways in which the past can be approached beyond the conventions historiography has established for itself or which the intellectual tradition of the West has made hegemonic. “Postmodernist currents,” she wrote in 2011, “are exhausted and no longer belong to the present day but to the history of the humanities” (DOMANSKA, 2011, pp. 131-132). And since it is possible to surpass postmodernism, what space is open to the practice of the humanities? What are the ways to move from criticism as a key concept of the human sciences towards forms of knowledge that can be performative or propositional? What is the need for an intellectual vanguard to reestablish the political and epistemological radicalism of the humanities?

These and other issues are addressed in the interview, held on August 24, 2016, during the second conference of the International Network for Theory of History in Ouro Preto.  Our aim, for the moment, is to present a little more of these questions and how they relate to the thought of Ewa Domanska, seeking to familiarize the Brazilian public with the work of this original thinker and, rehabilitating a term that appears in the interview, the vanguard of contemporary historical reflection.

Ewa Domanska is a professor of History at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland and a regular visiting professor at Stanford in Anthropology and the Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies. Holds a PhD from Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznán, Poland, where she was supervised by the Polish historian Jerzy Topolski. There, Ewa Domanska developed studies dedicated to think about the then recent breakthrough movements with the modern discourse in the humanities, and thus was inserted in the development of the postmodern historiographic critique of the 1990s, animated mainly by the works of Hayden White , Hans Kellner and Frank Ankersmith (the latter having also been his adviser during his doctorate), among others. The interest was in understand the strength of narrativist criticism through open possibilities for the reinterpretation of historiography as a politically active and creative métier. From this emerged a constant preoccupation with the performative possibility of historiography. That is, that rather than just describing a state of affairs, the work of historians could also function as a creative tool for establishing other realities. In an article in 2000, Domanska described his feeling about postmodernism: I am grateful to Postmodernism for many things, especially for giving me an alternative apprehension of the world in terms of difference and continuity rather than binary oppositions, but I am tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos” (DOMANSKA, 2000, p. 173).

One way of approaching this problem would be to rethink the categories of representation as a hegemonic approach in historical studies. In his 2006 text “The Material Presence of the Past,” Domanska articulated strategies to bridge the heavy burden of representation in historiography, attempting to revitalize an approach not focused solely on semiotic or discursive methods, but capable of providing a pathway to the “materiality from the past”. A “return to things” (title of another text of the same year) would make it possible to deal with this problem from the consideration of “nonhumans” (objects, animals, plants) as historical agents. If the binary opposition between organic and inorganic was thus dissolved, and biological theories had to create new ways to describe its object, historiography should be prepared to face the crisis of anthropocentrism as a problem to be overcome by adjustments and transformations in the own epistemology of historical knowledge. (DOMANSKA, 2006, p.184). This kind of post-humanist shift is reiterated in a 2010 article, “Beyond Anthropocentrism in Historical Studies,” in which Domanska seeks to assess the limits of a historical discourse centered on (and limited by) the human species. A non-anthropocentric approach would be justified both by the need to face problems of the planetary conjuncture that are no longer reduced to the mere status of “humanity”, but also by the demand for an ethical orientation to historiography that, after being fragmented by the development of postmodernity , it is again confronted with global problems: “Observing the results of ecological crisis and rapid technological progress and especially recent achievements in genetic engineering, biotechnology, neuropharmacology and nanotechnology, I am convinced that as historians and intellectuals we should again think about “big picture questions”, about global questions” (DOMANSKA, 2010, p. 120).

In 2014, this same insight perception into the place of historical knowledge in a world of biotechnological innovations and growing ecological and political threats drove Domanska to reassess how the idea of ​​”nonhuman ancestry” could offer other future scenarios. An attitude like this has necessitated the destabilization of some central foundations for the constitution of Western thought, in a way in what the account of indigenous epistemologies appears as a real possibility in the reorientation of historical thought. For example, an approach to contemporary anthropological theory could enable historians to recognize the epistemological and ontological value of the animist perspectives. Through the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the recognition of Amerindian cosmologies appear in some insights from Domanska as a form of knowledge capable of reorienting modern historical thinking to an “eco-utopian” future (DOMANSKA, 2014).

The continuing perception of the need for historiography and the humanities in general to be able to convey criticisms capable of offering a more general reflection on the future of society (and not only about its past or its present) goes through Domanska’s work. Such questions require the author to rethink categories that have long remained untouched by traditional historiographical criticism. Such questions require to rethink categories that have long remained untouched by traditional criticism. Thus, the humanity status as an “historical subject”, the materiality of the past (beyond representation), body as manifestation of presence, animism as a legitimate perspective of temporal interaction in the context of anthropocene, “animal history” and many other topics, appear as central concerns to Domanska, in the sense of vitalizing the affirmative reach of historiography within what Isabelle Stengers called the “time of catastrophes”.

All of these issues are revisited throughout the interview. We began the conversation by asking about her formation in Poland and the current situation of the humanities in the country. From the start there is a recurrent concern about a rupture in the critical tradition of the humanities, especially that established after 1968 and represented by the names cited in the interview: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze , Jean Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and others. The recognition of the exhaustion of the questions posed by these authors does not diminish their importance in the history of the humanities, but it makes possible to recognize other epistemic arrangements from which multiple concerns gain relevance. One of them, exemplified by Domanska in the interview, is the appeal of thinkers like Giorgio Agamben, who start from the religious vocabulary to understand contemporary society in an intellectual movement called post-secular. Taking elements of religion as the basis of intellectual reflection implies a direct criticism of human sciences foundation in the midst of modernity, precisely through the refusal of any transcendence and the detachment of science and religion Taking elements of religion as the basis of intellectual reflection implies a direct criticism of the foundation of the human sciences in the midst of modernity, precisely through the refusal of any transcendence and the separation of science and religion between the poles of objective truth and subjective inner consciousness.

Since criticism is no longer possible, either because it has lost its effectiveness or because it has become banal, what can be done? For Domansak, it is time to think about a form of humanitie that are no longer defined by criticism, that is, by the unveiling of a hidden truth, derived from a specialized knowledge, but about humanities that interact with the worl or intervene in it, in an equal footing with other forms of political or epistemological intervention.

For Ewa Domanska, it is a matter of thinking in “propositional humanities”, mobilizing future as its central concern. Alongside the future, utopia becomes a valid word again, not in the sense of imposing a totalizing world view, but of creating small spaces in which the rules of science can be subverted and knowledge can acquire an intervention character, or a communion one. With this, academic work becomes a creative activity and, together with the criticism of the productivist criteria that characterize much of the current scientific production, Domanska reaffirms the need for a slow science that can become a space of self-creation for the subjects who perform it. It is in the sense of creation of small and localized utopias, as a mean to performative self-construction, that humanities realize the movement of return to the political left, now renewed.

For this, it is necessary to transform the working methods of humanities, going beyond disciplinary boundaries but, and this is also important, radically redefining interdisciplinarity. Domanska suggests that nowadays the natural sciences have taken the lead in defining concepts that were eleven exclusive to philosophy. Life, death, and what it means to be human are no longer privileged questions in humanities, but receive different conceptualization, and not only techniques ones, from natural sciences. This means that humanities’ practice can benefit from knowledge and collaboration with these sciences, reformulating much of their questionnaire. In addition to the pretensions to the realization of an epistemic justice by which other ways of being in the world other than the Western world are considered equally valid, Domanska proposes a look at the nonhuman agents who populate the interaction of humans with the world. Spirits and animals, but also fungi, are part of this new landscape, populated by agents.

The breadth of those issues demonstrates the scope of Ewa Domanska’s reflection. They appear as a preoccupation of an author interested not only in understanding the limits of history as a dominant approach in the representation of the past but also engaged in establishing a historical thinking that is future oriented. And that confronts the universe of political, ethical and environmental issues that affect our societies in a responsible way.

***

Pedro Silveira: We are here with Ewa Domanska, Polish historian and humanist – or post-humanist, as we’ll discuss later. We have some questions brought by your work and, of course, we are very glad to for being able to do this interview.

Guilherme Bianchi: Thank you very much for being so generous about this interview. We know you are very busy in these conference days, so it is really an honor to us.

Ewa Domanska: The idea of being always busy I associate with American academic life and the American style of life in general (as I see it). You are supposed to be busy. Even if you are not busy, you say to the others that you are in order to make yourself more valuable. So this is a strategy of being with others [laughs]. But I am not American and I do not think in this way.

PS: In your presentation in the second INTH Conference here in Ouro Preto, you speak about the need for a double decolonization: internal and external. Brazil was one of the main sites of development of the dependence theory, which included an intellectual history branch, represented by Roberto Schwarz’s idea of “ideas out of place”. Marxist dependence theory has been one of the main targets of post-colonial thought. But it remains a cornerstone in developing concepts and theories from the periphery of the capitalist system and one can say it is a contribution from Latin American periphery towards the international intellectual system. Could you tell us what is the relevance of being from the periphery, from the margins, and we mean, as you say and write in some of your papers, from Poland and Eastern Europe, regarding the work of theoretical thought? What was the role, in the lack of a better term, of Polish intellectual tradition and what’s the intellectual and political climate in Poland. How are you inserted in this context?

ED: Well, this is a complex question. First of all, East and Central Europe, Poland included, is in a particular situation, because Poland and this region of the world might be considered as post-colonialonly in a some specific way. In Poland we prefer to use the term “post-dependency”. This term was introduced to the Polish postcolonial discourse by literary scholars – Hanna Gosk and Dorota Kolodziejczyk, and I am not sure if they are aware of criticism of dependency theory.[1] Anyway, Poland was not a colony of the Soviet Union, but – as it is called – a satellite country. That’s why we are more comfortable with the term “post-dependency”. We were dependent economically, politically, and also intellectually. Of course, this situation affected our thinking and after 1945 we experienced a very strong influence of Marxist theory on historical writing; especially in the 50s.

It had bad as well as good sides. For example, a strong methodology of history based on historical materialism developed in Poland, which is not the case of the US and Western Europe where methodology of history is not practiced and taught as a separate discipline. This is because Marxism was used as a source of methods. On the base of historical materialism historians and methodologists of history such as Witold Kula and Jerzy Topolski, developed certain directives of what and how to study history.[2] The focus was of course on peasantry and workers, on economic and material history, and building history from the bottom up. Historians were also interested in class struggle. The idea of what I would call “Marxist anthropocentrism” was very important. As you know, Marx was very much interested in human agency and he really empowered the subject. The so-called activist theory of history advocates a human subject (an individual and a collective) that is an agent; a strong subject.[3] So, Marxism had a good influence since it stimulated various fights for justice and independence. Decolonial and emancipatory movements rely on Marxism, no?

Thus, as I have said, a development of strong methodology and theory of history which is an outcome of Marxism influencing Polish historical thought, I consider as positive. The problem was that this theory and methodology was a part of an oppressive ideology. There were certainly different versions of Marxism practiced in Poland: from a “vulgar” one (instrumental use of citations from Lenin and Stalin) to the Western style (Althusser, Gramsci) and Annales school. The impact of so called “vulgar Marxism” was mostly limited to the 50s. Jerzy Topolski, with whom I did my PhD, was never a vulgar Marxist.[4] He encouraged students to read Max Weber, [Antonio] Gramsci, [Georg] Lukács, and [Louis] Althusser. I have never regretted this lesson, because later on I could easily follow critical and French theory, the discourse of post-colonial scholarship (which does not exist without Gramsci), as well as gender theory. I have read all these thinkers that became the base for postmodernist thought (and so-called French Theory). So, this was positive for my intellectual development.

On the other hand, we were detached from non-Marxist Western scholarship. We had influences from the Annales schools, which was para-Marxist, soft Marxism, French leftist thought, and English social history, like E. P. Thompson, history from below, and so on. But the rest was a kind of tabula rasa. I think that from this point of view we had a lot in common with Latin America, and especially with Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, where Marxist thought was also very influential, but in different ways. (By the way, do you know that Poland is sometimes called the Brazil of Europe and Poles – the Latinos of the East?) Of course, you didn’t have [in Latin America] Marxism as a kind of oppressive ideology that legitimized a political system controlled by the Soviet Union.

What is going on right now, since you asked about the contemporary situation, is that the younger generation in Poland, the majority of students, hate Marxism because they associate Marxism with communism and with the time of oppression. And you can’t blame them. So now we have strong reaction – strong conservative (and even rightist) movement to the extent that some students refuse to read [Frantz] Fanon and [Edward] Said. They refuse to read anything that smells of Marxism.

GB: Because of the political experience?

ED: Absolutely. Because of the previous political system that they did not experience themselves, in fact. It’s hard to convince them. They seem not to understand that Marxism was and still is a valuable theory to understand the rise and development of capitalism. If you want to understand this kind of global and rather aggressive capitalism, you have to know Marx’s theory which is still an important tool to analyze it.

PS: There seems to be a tendency, a political tendency, from part of the younger generation to go right, a little bit. In Brazil, we already had some issues regarding this. Some students don’t want to read Marx, and we even had the case of a student who pressed charges because his professor wanted to do a work on Marx. The class was supposed to read Marx and he refused to do it.

ED: The same in Poland. Carl Schmitt became popular among students. He had interesting ideas about political theology but he was also “crown jurist of the Third Reich.” What are the younger generations looking for now? Are they yearning for a strong authoritarian power? For a conservative alternative to a previous domination of the Left? It seems that people are disappointed with liberal governments and they are looking for an alternative. Part of the younger generation finds this alternative in a kind of conversion to a chauvinistic, atavistic nationalism. This is not only the case of Poland, it’s also the case of Hungary. After the results of the last election, it seems that also the US is turning further right. So, these tendencies are everywhere. The students also want to read Charles Taylor. They long, they say, for something that is not leftist. For them, all this gender, queer, post-colonial, animal studies, etc. smell of Marxism, leftism, indoctrination and as such is bad and related to the old regime. Indeed, Right is a new Left.

PS: To continue on this topic, I have already noticed that, at the same time, in the US and some US colleges, there is also a revitalization of Marx, where Marx wasn’t or did not had the same impact as it had on Poland, Brazil, or Latin America. So we have all these conflicted tendencies because it seems that academia is going left but people are going right…

ED: I don’t know what you think about this but there is a common understanding in Europe that we have reached the end of the impact of post-1968 French thought in the humanities in general. With the death of [Jacques] Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, [Jean-François] Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, [Pierre] Bourdieu, and all these scholars who were icons of this post-1968 leftist French theory, there is some kind of gap. This gap is fulfilled by people who are following scholars such as Giorgio Agamben or Alan Badiou. They are also entering a very interesting space of post-secular humanities. They are using language of theology to talk about social problems. Agamben wrote books about Pilate and Jesus, another one on Opus Dei. This is like smuggling theological concepts via the backdoor into philosophical and social sciences, including history. History is not so affected yet, but is going to be in the future. There is a growing body of literature about post-secular anthropology, post-secular art, post-secular philosophy, sociology, etc. Agamben, Talal Asad, Badiou, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, [Slavoj] Žižek – all these prominent thinkers are leading this post-secular movement in the humanities pushing it in different directions.

GB: Also in your presentation, you talked about regaining the concept of utopia. Oswald de Andrade, a Brazilian essayist from the early twentieth-century used to say that Brazil was the realization of the utopia from the North, showing that utopia can always be part of now logics of domination. Following Fredric Jameson, you spoke about the need to understand utopia as a new method to create alternative visions of the future. I would like to know if you think that certain concepts of utopia possess this double force, to be both a critique of the present and a new orientation regarding possible futures.

ED: This interest in utopia is related to my deep conviction that historians should be more future-oriented. In the last years we have been so overwhelmed with discussions about memory and trauma and involved in the so-called militant or emancipatory humanities, which was fully presentist and criticized everything around, with the result that we put envisioning the future on the side. Now there is a tendency to reclaim the future and create various scenarios of it.

Of course, utopia is a very powerful concept that also has negative connotations. When I use the term utopia I do not refer to some phantasmatic, “idyllic” non-space. I rather have in mind something that I would call responsible, realistic, micro-utopias; – utopias that are possible to be fulfilled here and now in a concrete space and for a limited time. It’s not a totalitarian utopia. I don’t want to “save the world” but only to improve it on a very small scale. For example, in an academic environment, when dealing with students, I can exercise power not as potestas, which is an oppressive power, but as potentia which is a liberating power. I have some idea of how an intellectual and academic well-being of my students can be achieved, what is good for them. I can actually build these little academic utopias.

But, of course, it needs work from both sides. That’s why in my paper I was talking about critical hope and I mentioned Paulo Freie. We all have to be agents, we have to work hard in order to realize this hope. So, it is also about disciplining yourself; about the formative power of the humanities, it’s about being a serious student and a serious scholar. Following Bruno Latour I would say that the main goal of the humanities (and history) today is to build knowledge that would help us to find out how to live together in conflicts. Thus, “my little utopia” is not about creating peaceful, non-violent and just world but about forming concrete groups of people that work hard on building ways of creative collaboration, co-habitation and con-vivality in the condition of permanent conflicts.

I enjoyed today’s keynote by a French professor – [Christophe] Bouton who reminded us about Hegel’s saying that “what experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history”. My question would be: if we know it already, maybe we can do something about it. How to make history performative? Some thinkers would begin with institutions, I would begin with the subject and with a return to the idea of Bildung. That’s why I like virtue epistemology[5], because it focuses on intellectual virtues that we have to cultivate and practice in order to be good students, good teachers, good citizens, and so on. So, again, it requires work, hard work. This is what my understanding of utopia also assesses: yearning for self-perfection for the sake of others, of course. It also requires a critical approach towards an idea of individualistic, narcisscistic subject regarding being with and for others; being in various relations (with fellow humans as well as non-humans).

PS: Your concept of utopia reminds me of Hakim Bey’s concept of Temporary Autonomous Zone, which is an attempt to refocus political action from a major, global transformation, to temporary, local transformations. Do you think utopia, right now, in the time we’re living, is necessarily located, situated action, or is it possible to bring together different kinds of utopia towards a major transformation? I’m asking this because it seems that dystopia is everywhere. The end of the world will happen everywhere, like [Eduardo] Viveiros de Castro, Bruno Latour, and others say. The answers, however, always try to reinforce the local, not the global…

ED: I agree. That’s why I’m talking about de-colonizing post-colonialism and about double decolonization. In order to make these little, local utopias possible you have to somehow empower the provinces. This is nothing new, of course, but the problem is how actually we can do it. For example, speaking about the academic environment, this conference is something that would empower your university; it would show that you are an important center for people interested in theory of history. I’m sure that the university would profit from this meeting. However, it has to be seriously considered how to use this profit; this “capital” or I would rather say – potentiality that was created here. Not just once the conference is over, people go back to their countries and that’s all. The network has to be sustained and developed. So, I think one of the most important things is to spread the networks in all possible directions. Don’t block it. Our task is to connect people; to build relations. “Connect and create” and not “divide and rule”. There are, for example, very simple things you can do. You have contacts and connections, you have or I pass you information about the conference, fellowship or a new book – don’t keep it. Forward it to other people that might be interested. This is how it works on a basic level. This is how the network might be liberating. We know that to have information also means to have power. So, don’t block the networks. We are all transmitters. “Make kins” as Donna Haraway used to say.

PS: I’ll advance a question we thought about not making but as the conversation went on, it seems the proper occasion to ask it. Networks are a different configuration by decentering margins and not necessarily having a center, so it doesn’t have an authoritative place of power. Thinking about this, could you tell us a little bit more about anarchism in the creation of utopias and in your work? How to think about anarchism in an academic setting?

ED: [Laughs] You know that I’m a student of Hayden White and he likes to provoke the audience by saying things like “I am the last Marxist” or “I’m an anarchist”, and this is funny. It is funny to hear something like that from somebody who is a true emanation of a patriarchal figure; from somebody in Hayden’s age. You know, an anarchist is usually a young person. Old people usually do not rebel. Rebel is a somebody who has dreams and hopes… But seriously speaking, I would associate myself with a kind of intellectual anarchism, by which I mean to have enough intellectual courage to be epistemically disobedient (to use Walter Mignolo’s term).  Of course, you need a proper environment, a space of potentiality to exercise your own ideas. And again – it requires a lot of work on both sides (from professor as well as from student), to create such space but you suppose to exercise your epistemic disobedience because you have different views and ideas. This is what I would like to associate right now, in this limited context of an “academic utopia”, with anarchism. I’m not talking about anarchism as a kind of radical movement that would use violence against the system. As we know, violence multiplies violence. Of course when you live and work under an oppressive regime, that’s a different matter but in a democratic environment I would push students to be disobedient, to develop and practice intellectual courage, to be independent in their thoughts, because they are the future, I already belong to the past.

There is a paradigmatic gap and shift in the humanities and social sciences going on and this creates a great chance for graduate students. When I did my PhD I already had a theoretical “box of tools” ready. You have a chosen empirical material (let’s say works of a particular historian or a theoretical problem such as a problem of historical narrative, truth, etc.), you picked up White, Frank Ankersmit, Fredric Jameson, Lyotard, Joan Scott or Judith Butler, use their approaches and theories to analyze and interpret this material and then it was done. There is nothing like that now. If you really want to do something interesting and fresh, you might use Hayden White’s theory as a point of departure but you ask research questions which interest your generation and they are different, of course. For example, one of my graduate students – Tomasz Wisniewski, is interested in Hayden White as a post-secular thinker. He tries to find out how White’s idea of figura and figure fulfillment model that has theological connotations might help to build a postsecular theory of history. This is the sort of questions which are bringing different light on White’s ideas. Thus, the question is if you have enough imagination and intellectual courage, and also knowledge, to ask fresh research questions? In fact, the most difficult thing in your thesis is to ask innovative research questions. This is also why you need not only knowledge but also imagination and scholarly intuition, and you also need to put a bit of yourself in your research, because you are interested in different issues than I am as being from a different generation.

GB: In more theoretical ways, last year David Graeber published in an academic journal an answer to Viveiros de Castro and many other authors affiliated with the so-called “ontological turn” in the humanities. Besides the main philosophical argument – that Castro and other thinkers misunderstand the meaning of the word “ontology”, Graeber also advances a political consideration by thinking that, by taking their interlocutors seriously, anthropologists of the ontological turn inadvertently take what is said about a culture as a description of reality itself, thereby nullifying a critical perspective. In relation to the function of criticism, how do you believe that future-oriented historiography can work in a context of demands for epistemic justice?

PS: Do you think critique is possible now?

ED: Some scholars are talking about the post-critical condition and I would recommend an article by Hal Foster who deals with this subject.[6] Of course, there was Adorno and the Frankfurt school, a generation of 68, – the French theorists – they were and still are crucial for humanists who are practicing this critical approach. But are they enough today? I think the ontological turn is a symptom of an exhaustion of a certain critical theory. This doesn’t mean that it’s not important or valid, but avant-garde humanists (and also historians) are interested in different things than three decades ago. They like to talk about the past not in terms of representations but in terms of presence. In 2006 History & Theory published a special issue on presence. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and [Eelco] Runia published important articles there. I also like to talk about the past as something that is still available to us in terms of concrete, material traces that we can actually touch, instead of talking about representations which are very tricky in terms of politics but also in terms of aestheticizing human suffering and violence.

On the one hand, as Hal Foster says, this is the worst time to become post-critical while the world faces problems with terrorism, migrations, poverty, ecological disasters and climate change. All these phenomena require critical approaches and (new) critical theories. On the other hand, there is also this kind of tiredness with militant, engaged humanities. During last decades the humanities was fighting for justice, empowering the oppressed, giving voice to the subaltern others, and this is certainly not a bad thing. However perhaps we (also the younger generation) need a little bit of calmness. We are not all fighters. Not all students, not all scholars feel they want to (and have to) fight for justice. Even if they are good citizens and critical thinkers. Now the problem is “can we really practice something that might be called slow science or calm humanities?” Maybe you study something because you just like the problem, not because your research and writing might change consciousness, which was the Marxist idea. Perhaps you just like history for its own sake … Perhaps you enjoy contemplating the past and experiencing archive and historical sources.

This is an individual choice. I understand that, because we are living in a permanent time of conflict, in zones of conflict and we need to be critical. Thus, I am also aware that criticism is necessary but I’m also convinced that it is not enough to criticize the present. As I said before, we also need some vision or scenarios of the future. Post-modernism was really dominated by critical theory and it was skeptical about utopia; it criticized utopia as a kind of totalitarian vision which led to violence rather than liberations – which was, of course, right in terms of Nazism and communism as kind of totalitarian regimes. Scholars even hesitated to use the term utopia, which was almost like a forbidden concept. Now it’s coming back, but it is understood in different ways.

GB: There is a recent recovery of Ernst Bloch’s work The Principle of Hope.[7]

ED: This is a very important and a classic book. There are also new ideas of hope that are coming from people like Jonathan Lear and from feminist philosophers who are interested in radical and critical hope. Within emerging methods in the humanities and social sciences I observe an interesting idea of turning certain concepts (and values?) into methods of research. So for example scholars are writing about hope as method, friendship as method and utopia as method of research.[8] This is a very interesting, let’s say, movement. Yasemin Ipek Can – a doctoral student from Stanford is working on political issues in Syria and is using hope as a method and analytical category and asks questions how we can actually create hope which is performative and it’s really pushing people to act.

Perhaps I can introduce some ideas of post-humanism here. An important aspect of the ontological turn is its contribution to the discussion about “big picture questions” such as what it means to be human, what we mean by life which are asked in a new context. Deep changes of our thinking about these issues are stimulated by the progress in technology, neurosciences and the biological sciences, especially molecular biology. Biologists are bombarding us with ideas of microbial identity and statements that we are in fact symbiotic holobionts, that “we have never been individuals” or even that “we have never been human.”[9] Indeed, from their point of view, if you have two kilograms of non-human speciesin our gouts, so how can you claim that you are purely human? What does it means to be human? Or, what does it means to be alive or to be dead? The idea of what is dead and what is alive is very ambiguous. Your body might be still somehow alive (thanks to life support systems) but you brain is dead. What does it mean for you? You are ready to be a reservoir for organ transplants. On the other hand there is nothing more alive than a decaying corpse that becomes a habitat for various species.

I cannot resist mentioning an ambiguous difference between human and non-human animals. Can we imagine knowledge of the past (which I would not limit to history) that would be based on multispecies co-authorship? Primatologists developed a version of sign language and they can communicate with primates.[10] Thus, how about discussing first person non-human testimony as a historical source. An art historian – Concepción Cortés Zulueta analyses an online video entitled “Michael’s Story, Where He Signs about His Family”. In this video a male gorilla uses a modified version of American Sign Language (ASL) to answer the question “what can you tell me about your mother?” Zulueta claims that the video might be understood as a “first person account” (she also calls it “testimony”). Thus, some animals might communicate their own stories.Such kind of accounts challenge us to think about what constitutes historical evidence and personal testimony. More importantly, they force us to think about the very concept of animals, the belief that only human beings can narrate.[11] This is really a challenge that is coming from animal history and such considerations might announce a major change in the ways we think about obtaining knowledge of the past.

We were still debating postmodernism that questioned the fundaments of historical knowledge (relations between history and literature, fact and fiction, an idea of objectivism and truth), but I think that this was just a preliminary step to what is now emerging. If we observe discussions on biological understanding of life, the Anthropocene and climate change that push us into a deep and geological time, the impact of neurosciences, then this might really change the idea of what historical knowledge is (or should be), how to build it, what is its purpose, what is testimony, what is historical source and all this stuff.

PS: I just remembered Franz Kafka’s story “A Report at the Academy”, in which the ape, a caged ape, learned to speak as a human but he couldn’t tell how it was in the jungle because back then he didn’t had the language to understand what he was living.

ED: The New York Times Magazine published an interesting article about the court case in which the ape had an advocate who was speaking for him.[12] Anyway, there all these challenging issues that historians usually neglecting and I think this is not the best approach because these issues are really challenging the classic ideas of knowledge building and sources of knowledge.

GB: In recent works, you have retaken Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic justice as an ethical conduct in search to, and here I quote you, “neutralize the privileged position of Western knowledge in relation to other forms of knowledge”. This leads us to think, first, of possible discursive tools capable of subverting this hierarchization of knowledge. An example I’ve been using in my own work is Werner Herzog’s movie “Where The Green Ants Dream”, about the juridical struggle between aboriginal people and a mining company in Australia. In short, you have an aboriginal demand for land in cosmological basis and a juridical system which does not recognize this claim as anything but “myth” or “irrationalism”. More than a narrative struggle, what we have in this case is a political struggle based on the need to take seriously other forms of knowledge. Could you talk briefly about how the production of epistemic justice casts the need for a bridge between the textual, the narrative, and politics itself?

ED: I hope it will bridge it somehow. I hope it might, right? Insofar I still believe that knowledge can be performative and change the way we think. I’m absolutely with you on that. For instance, the claim for land by aboriginal people or Native Americans is dismissed because the claim is based on something that Western knowledge calls “myth”, “dreaming”, and is not rational (according to Western standards). But, of course, this is the ideology of Western knowledge and “the myth of science” as the dominant, preferable and the only serious way of knowledge building. I wouldn’t say about indigenous knowledges that they are not rational, because there are different rationalities, as Paul Feyerabend would say. Magic is perfectly rational in its context. And it works. The problem is how we might actually include various non-Western ways of knowing and indigenous knowledges into a body of global knowledge. That’s the problem … but do we really want to include these knowledges?

I have to tell you an anecdote. For the 21st International Congress of Historical Sciences in Amsterdam (2010), I organized a session on “The rights of the dead.” My colleague from the Netherlands said that we are not going to discuss the ghosts of the ancestors. But a participant from Lagos in Nigeria became furious, rightly so, I think. She said that for her culture the ghosts of ancestors are part of everyday life. And this is not about some irrational, primitive beliefs but about their lives and the way they co-habit with ancestors. There were other historians from various African countries sitting in the room who stood up and started to clap. This was really an event. It was like a demand that even if you personally do not share this system of believes, you shouldn’t readily dismiss it as if it is some kind of silly folk conviction, because for many cultures such believes have important status not only as para-religions but also as ways of knowing and being. I do respect it and personally learned a lot from my colleagues who are natives.

So, I’m very much into a process of building a holistic, integral and inclusive ways of knowing the past that would include Western type of knowledge as well as different indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing. The problem of course is institutional. But, in the spirit of post-secularism, when the academia is “decompressing” and become more sensitive and open toward issues related to religions and spirituality, there might be ways of embracing non-Western knowledges in the future. I don’t think we might do it within the framework of history (as a discipline) because it is too limited. That’s why I avoid using the term “history”. I prefer “knowledges of the past”. I’m thinking how we can actually build not alternative histories, but alternatives to history. This is an idea posited by [Arjun] Appadurai in his important article “History’s Forgotten Doubles” published in History & Theory (1995). This is possible, I think, but we need to become more open to non-European, non-Western ways of knowing, and the best way to be open is to get in touch with people who are thinking in different ways. For example, if you have friends who are natives, they might teach you about their ways of knowing and being. What was important for me in this respect, is that you cannot learn such knowledge from books in an abstract way. You learn it by practicing and by imitation, thus of course you have to have a teacher/master. After a while it becomes part of your general knowledge and as normal as everything else. It also provides a certain practical wisdom that scientific knowledge is lacking.

I think that the idea of friendship as method might be at stake here. I have a friend who really taught me a lot. He is an American Indian, and the first question he asked me when I have met him for the first time was: “What’s your totemic animal?” I’m from Poland – a Catholic country and I thought that totemism and an idea of totemic animals was something that belonged and to anthropology and “exotic” beliefs [laughs]. We indeed “forgot” about our common “pagan” pasts. I have never thought about it as a serious existential question. He continues joking with me and said: “How can you not know what’s your totemic animal? So, who is guiding you? How do you know, how to orient your behavior; your life?” I had to pass these questions to you for consideration because it was transformative to me. Of course it has nothing to do with an idea of “going native”, or with an image of a “noble savage”. At least in my case, it is about “will to knowledge”, about curiosity, a constant learning and extending of knowledges about various way of living and being which has practical dimension. I said to my friend that we have a proverb in Poland which says that if you have to fall, it is better if you fall off from the high horse. And he said “No, it is better to become the horse yourself”. This is an example of a practical wisdom that can’t be learned from (scientific) books (not even from literature or poetry) because it requires a particular context not associated with academic buildings. You have to cooperate or do things and be with someone who is introducing you to this kind of knowledge. But, of course, one might say that this is what we mean by a proper teacher-student relationship. It’s profitable to learn from the real person than only from reading books. And here we are back to the idea of presence – presence of a teacher and a teacher as presence.

GB: The regular answer of traditional history would be: “I’m working with dead people, I can’t get in touch with them”, in terms of materiality.

ED: Yes, that’s why we need a more anthropological approach, do field studies and become more involved in the subject of research. The traditional history would require that you distance yourself so you might be more objective, but you can’t be objective and inhabit “God’s point of view” because of your “situatedness”. This is what a theory of situated knowledges is about (I refer here to Donna Haraway’s important essay).[13] The way you have created knowledge depends on who you are and where you are situated (a historian is always a part of his/her own history). Because you’re from Brazil (Latin America), because you’re a men, because you’re young, because you’re white, heterosexual, Christian, etc. – this is really important for your way of thinking. So you can’t obtain a kind of objectivity understood as looking at things from a neutral point of view, or God’s point of view. It does not mean however, that we should not have an idea of objectivity that is reachable. You might (or might not) have intentions to be objective. I think that personal involvement is important. However in my writing I like to discipline myself, try to keep a distance to my subject of research and present various points of view on it.

PS: In Brazil we have the same set of questions regarding the recent massive entrance of Black people in the university. It’s been six or five years since the affirmative actions have been instated in Brazil and all this set of questions regarding how to validate Black traditions, especially religious traditions, and all its entanglements between subject and object of research. It’s a very hot topic in Brazilian academy nowadays and in history there is this tension because scholarly legitimacy still comes from traditional, objectivist history, although there is a number of problems brought by these traditions inside the academy which clash with it.

ED: But it will change the academy. These colleagues are often thinking in different ways about the past and the ways of approaching it and they have epistemic rights to do so. I mean, they have rights to reclaim this knowledge. It is equally important for their identity as Western knowledge is for ours. And this process of “indigenizing the Academy”[14] is (slowly) changing academia in regions like Australia (but also in Canada, and in some states in the US). It happens also because ecological humanities is so popular and important right now. Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing are important for building “sustainable epistemology”.

PS: In one of your articles, you refer to Hayden White’s idea of “retroactive ancestral constitution” and his distinction between historical and biological pasts. You asked a question what would happen if a certain group would choose non-human as its ancestor. Both Hayden White’s and your reflection reveal – I take the risks here because I wrote this – a voluntarist trait in the sense that humans choose their ancestors rather than those being imposed upon them. What we would like to know, then, is what is the role of human agency in the selection of these ancestors and what would be the role of human agency in history itself if we are confronted with the return of transcendence, as Isabelle Stengers says or if we need to confront the consequences of a geophysical karma, as Bruno Latour says.

ED: For somebody who is from a Catholic country like Poland, to speak about animal ancestors sound like a heresy, right? But, I like to practice a kind of “epistemic disobedience” (to use Walter Mignolo’s term). I treat this interest in new animism and totemism (that I relate to the possibility of building alter-native modernities), as liberating.[15] The human subject was under criticism for a long time. We see it in the anti-humanist approaches of [Michel] Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who were writing about the end of man. Certainly they mean that a certain understanding of man associated with white male, bourgeois, middle class subject is, is coming to an end. These ideas were pushed much farther by posthumanism and its criticism of anthropocentrism and species chauvinism. So, in this context, let’s speculate about choosing non-human ancestors. It would be a kind of rebellious act in the frame of European world-view.

Of course, for cultures who practice animism and totemism and for scholars working on new animism (such as Graham Harvey) this is nothing unusual. New animism is a kind of relational epistemology and ontology of relations. You are an animist if you’re able to enter and sustain relations with humans and non-humans. This is not so radical as it seems to be since we are all animists. We have a kind of animistic relationship with iPods, laptops, cars, etc. I think it was Achille Mbembe who said that “capitalism has become a form of animism”.

GB: The need for interdisciplinary approaches is a relatively old topic in historiography. Your work has been building bridges between history, art history, anthropology, archaeology, literary studies, philosophy, etc. The link between different forms of disciplinary expression it is, in my opinion, the result of the imperative need to a further engagement between scholars and public sphere matters in the context of our catastrophic times, as said by Isabelle Stengers. We would like to know if you think that your claim to a future-oriented or pre-figurative humanities requires some new academic behaviors that could build a common language between disciplines.

ED: Definitively, and I’m thinking here about so-called “radical interdisciplinarity.” In fact, in my own research, I practice – what I call – complementary approach that is going beyond interdisciplinary approaches and I advocate a merging of disciplines. Thus, it is not only about a kind of interdisciplinarity between humanities and social sciences because this is already going on for many years. Now, we have more and more research problems that require radical interdisciplinarity or complementary approach, which is the cooperation between the humanities, social sciences and life sciences, natural sciences, cognitive sciences, neurosciences. I even would say, and it is probably too heretical for some historians, that in certain research areas, the humanities might not only reduce but even block our understanding of certain phenomena. For example, how can we understand what is life without biology at present? A British sociologist and social theorist – Nikolas Rose, who is working on a relationship between social and biological sciences, says that „it is not philosophy but the life sciences that is leading an epistemic change in our relationship to the human.”[16] He’s right. There are certain topics – but of course not all topics are like that – that really require this kind of cooperation.

For example, there is a developing subdiscipline called as an “environmental history of the Holocaust.” Agnieszka Kłos, Jacek Małczynski and Mikolaj Smykowski – my PhD students are working on this topic. They are interested – among other things – in examining eco-witnesses and eco-evidences. What does it mean to talk about a tree as an eco-witness understood in non-metaphorical, poetic terms? Of course, you can do that with a use of forensic sciences such as forensic botany. For example, plants might indicate where the mass grave is and trees that grow there contain specific chemical elements. Thus, we are entering here very empirical and scientific research. So, students begin with history or cultural anthropology but soon they realize the limitations of these disciplines and they read forensics, physical anthropology, life sciences, geography, geology, etc. I recommend an important book by a young scholar – Caroline Sturdy Colls Holocaust Archaeologies (2015). She is a forensic archaeologist who is also using oral testimonies and documents. I like when she says that forensic archaeology and history should “complement and supplement” each other. I think that this complementary, rather than interdisciplinary approach, announces a new future. Colls represents a new generation of scholars that promote a biohumanistic approach. But a similar situation is with animal history: it would not do well without ethology and studies of animal cognition. If you study historical sources and you bump into a description of animal behavior – for example, a tiger who attacks a human. Historians might interpret it in a different way in comparison to an ethologist who might recognize a certain pattern of animal behavior and explain it in a different way (I recommend you a book The Historical Animal edited by Susan Nance). Thus, those students who like to research such challenging subjects as animals, plants and environment, etc. should think about entering a space of biohumanities.

But I also respect positivistic history by which I mean “philological workshop” and knowledge of auxiliary sciences. It would be probably impossible to follow assumptions of old, philological study of history: to know all sources related to your topic of research, to be able to read Greek and Latin texts. In Poland, for example, students of history do not learn Latin and Greek any more. They usually choose contemporary history because it doesn’t require knowledge of these languages. A few “desperados” would study ancient or medieval history but this is a very demanding field. I’m interested in different things but I learn from my colleagues, traditional historians who would study every footnote, check my quotations and say “You miss a word here” “you miss a bracket there”. I admire them since they taught me accuracy and paying attention to details. I respect it and try to teach my students the same.

PS: Could this attention to detail be a feature of slow science? Is it slow science?

ED: In a way it might be a part of slow science, indeed. You should have more time to think, to digest your research, to rewrite and correct your texts. I do not like an expression: “knowledge production”. I’d rather think that I create or build knowledge. University as a capitalistic factory that produces people with certificates – this is not the way I think about academia. Thus, I like an idea of slow science. However, I’ve read an interesting article by a Brazilian scholar who claims that that in the case of “epistemic peripheries,” like Latin America, producing “fast science” was fruitful and transformative for academics because Latin American scholars have become more visible in the mainstream scholarship and publications. That’s true. You began to publish more in English and attend more international conferences. I think Latin American scholarship is becoming more and more interesting and important for the mainstream scholarship. To me right now it is much more interesting than French. (By the way, recently I heard Francois Hartog saying that “the future of history in not in France”.) I don’t find current French thought as interesting as French Theory was in 70s, 80s and 90s. Who is there? Bruno Latour of course, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou … But a Latin American way of theorizing and philosophizing is different and brings certain freshness to thought that was occupied by French, German and English philosophy for ages. So, good luck.

GB: Talking about the relation between scholars and contemporary global problems: I told you about the recent dam collapse in Mariana and how this affects the poorest part of the local population as well as indigenous people and all those that’s depends on the river for everyday life. You told me about a strong correlation between ecocides and genocides. If we follow [Dipesh] Chakrabarty’s diagnosis about the end of the humanistic distinction between natural and human history, what effect this condition might have on the field of history?

ED: This question should be addressed to your generation since you better understand the connections between ecocides and genocides than mine. When I proposed to teach a course on ecocides and genocides some colleagues were quite upset. They thought that I equalize these two phenomena. When we study ecocide and genocide in a comparative perspective, we see similarities of processes that make such disasters possible such as: an instrumental approach to fellow-humans and nature, institutionalized cruelty, dehumanization and depersonalization, profanation of life and body, similar machinery of mass destruction and methods of mass killing but also lack of respect and greed.

Speaking about radical comparativity – one of the most interesting texts that I have read recently, was about comparative thanatology and pan-thanatology. You probably wouldn’t guess what this is about. It’s not about cross-cultural comparison of burial customs. It’s about comparing reactions towards death between humans and non-human animals.[17] This is new to me. I’ve read it a few days ago and I was astonished by these kind of studies done by ethologists. So, this idea of comparativity is not limited to cross-cultural perspective but becomes cross-species. This is really challenging for historical reflection.

Sorry, I diverted from your question, but I would say that in the case of ecocide and genocide, this is a good topic to show how natural history is overlapping with human history. Studying this problem shows that this distinction between human and non-human (natural) history becomes non-operational. Some time ago already Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway proposed to go beyond a nature/culture opposition and used the term „nature-culture” or “natureculture.” A distinction between an idea of natural history versus human history should be transcended (and already is, at least in a field like environmental history). But we need more ideas that emerge from analysis of research material. Your subject of interest – the Mariana tragedy, could be a proper case to study relations between human and natural disasters in a comparative perspective. Perhaps it enables to write a “naturocultural history” of this event.

PS: You have probably read Eduardo Viveiros de Castros’ Cannibal Metaphysics, in which he uses a fictional device to frame the book. We were thinking about the book you’re writing on Affirmative humanities and non-anthropocentric knowledge of the past. Could you tell us a little bit more about the book? How is the work going on? And, if you were not able to write it, will you use some fictional device as Viveiros de Castro?

ED: I have become impatient with humanistic, “powdery” discourse. After poststructuralism, deconstruction and narrativism, I feel that I learn less and less from the humanities. That is why several years ago I started to read periodicals such as Nature, Science, Current Biology on a weekly basis, but also articles and books published in such fields as forensic sciences, geography and geology. I find them fresh and innovative for my thinking. Of course, I still read and learn from philosophers, like Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, Latour, etc. They are absolutely crucial. I am also a fan of Walter Mignolo (I love his The Dark Side of Modernity), Boaventura de Sousa Santos, as well as RosiBraidotti, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. As far as Viveiros de Castro is concerned, I do like his idea of multinaturalism and the way that he develops the idea of Amerindian perspectivism.

In my book, I would rather use a term “prefigurative humanities, because many scholars might associate “affirmative humanities” with affirmative actions and this is not what I mean. I understand “affirmative” as going beyond a politics of fear, victimhood, catastrophes, and species extinction. I want to discuss the possibility of building non-apocalyptic scenarios of the future, even if this is against our times, “in spite of the time” – as [Rosi] Braidotti would say. I was inspired by Braidotti’s idea of affirmative politics, affirmative ethics and affirmative subjectivities.[18]

In the title I would probably also use the term “non- or post-anthropocentric.” Of course, I don’t want to dismiss human history, but I also see its limitations. I’m interested in how humans and non-humans (nature, animals, plants, things), might be considered historical agents. In one of the chapters I describe how animal history is changing the historical profession. Another one is dealing with a problem of an archive as a multispecies collective. Fungi are quite powerful agents. For example you can’t read certain sources because they are destroyed by fungae or the paper is eaten by insects. The book is also about various emerging subfields of history such as stimulated by posthumanism environmental history, biohistory, neurohistory or zoohistory. Of course, these avant-garde tendencies will not dominate historical reflection, but they are challenging to our profession. They push us to reevaluate traditional definitions of history, the idea of chronological time, understanding of historical sources and evidences, and perhaps might even push the historical profession beyond history.

PS: Do we need an academic avant-garde then, as you use this term?

ED: Definitely, yes. These currents set borderlines of the discipline. As I said, I learn from my colleagues who are traditional historians doing political history and I really respect them. I learn from their accurateness and attentiveness to detail. This is one thing that I would like to say in conclusion: some progressive historians would complain and would say “oh, you know, traditional historians are so resistant” to current currents, but there is a way of peaceful coexistence between avant-garde and traditional historians. Just show them that you are a good historian, which means that you base your study on historical sources (they might be very different like visual or material, oral testimonies, literature, etc.) and show that you know how to use them and do proper historical research. In the case of the MA thesis I encourage students to work on historical sources and ask a colleague, who considers himself/herself to be a traditional historian, to review their work. This is how we might neutralize conflicts between historians who practice “real” history and those who “speculate” about the past. Students are choosing research topics themselves, and they might work on whatever they want, but their work must be based on sources. So, theoretical speculation is welcome if it is grounded in analysis of historical evidences. There is a way of pacifying potential conflicts that sometimes exist between so-called traditional historians and theorists of history. But you must be willing to do that. Both sides should be willing to cooperate.

PS: And just for curiosity, did you find out what’s your totemic animal?

ED: Yes, I think – it is something like a lizard or a salamander. Last year I was giving a talk about new animism and affirmative humanities at the University in Vitória. And someone from the audience asked me what is my totemic animal and at the same time the audience noticed a little lizard walking on the wall and I said: “see, my ancestor is here”. There was a student who was a Native and he was happy with this little intervention because – as he said – it legitimized the presence of indigenous beliefs. So, it might be told as a joke, but perhaps we should be more serious about that. I mean, I try to learn something new and other in comparison to my Western type of culture. Perhaps animism is just such a proper approach to the world and has “survival value”. Besides, I like the idea of multispecies history and knowledge of the past built by multispecies collectives and I find it interesting and challenging. I think that poets and writers (likeCarlos Drummond de Andrade and Clarice Lispector), as well as our colleagues who are native scholars or scholars who works on indigenous knowledges and scientists researching plants’ neurology and animal behavior, might help us to think in this direction.

Ouro Preto, August 24, 2016

NOTAS

[1]                     Cf.: Postcolonial or Postdependence Studies? special issue of Teksty Drugie/Second Texts, no. 1. 2014.

[2] Jerzy Topolski, Methodological Problem of Application of the Marxist Theory to Historical Research. Social Research, vol. 47, no. 3, 1980 [458-478] and his, Polish Historians and Marxism after World War II, in: Studies in Soviet Thought, no. 43, 1992. Kluwer Academic Publishers [169-183]; Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, The Rise and Decline of Official Marxist Historiography in Poland, 1945-1983. Slavic Review, vol. 44, no. 4, Winter, 1985 [663-680]; Zenonas Norkus, Modeling in Historical Research Practice and Methodology: Contributions from Poland. History and Theory, vol. 51, no, 2, May 2012 [292-304]; Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Between Positivism, Narrativism and Idealisation in Polish Methodology of History. Historein, vol. 14, no. 1, 2014 [75-87].

[3] Jerzy Topolski, The ActivisticCornception of Historical Process, Dialectics and Humanism, no. 1, 1975 [17-30].

[4] Jerzy Topolski, Methodology of History, trans. by OlgierdWojtasiewicz. Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1977 and his, Narrare la storia. Nuoviprincipi di metodologiastorica. Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 1997. See also: RaffaelloRighini, Jerzy Topolski. In Memoria. Nuova RivistaStorica (Italy), vol. 84, no, 1, 2000; PatriziaFazzi, Narrare la storia: la lezione di Jerzy Topolski. Diacronie. Studi di StoriaContemporanea, vol. 2, no. 2, 2015: Costruire. Rappresentazioni, relazioni, comunità (http://www.studistorici.com/2015/06/29/fazzi_numero_22/ – accessed: 16.12.2016).

[5] John Greco, „Virtue Epistemology”, in: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2004 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2004/entries/epistemology-virtue/ – accessed: 16.12.2016); Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, ed. Abrol Fairweather and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, ed. by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003.

[6] Hal Foster, “Post-Critical.” October, vol. 139, Winter 2012; Jeff Pruchnic, „Post-critical Theory. Demanding the Possible”. Criticism, vol. 54, no. 4, Fall 2012.

[7] Ivan Boldyrev, Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism. London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney, Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., 2014; Thompson, Peter. and Žižek, Slavoj. (eds) The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, SIC 8. Duke University Press 2013 ;Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. Verso, London, 1997.

[8] Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Harvard University Press, 2008; Hirokazu Miyazaki, The Method of Hope. Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004; Hope and Feminist Theory, ed. by Rebecca Coleman and Debra Ferreday. Routledge 2011; Lisa M. Tillmann-Healy, “Friendship as Method.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 9, no. 5, 2003: 729-749; Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Fredric Jameson, Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future, in: Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, ed. by Gordin, Michael D., Tilley Helen, and Prakash Gyan. Princeton University Press, 2010: 21-44.

[9] Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Alfred I. Tauber, „A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” The Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 87, no. 4, December 2012; N. Gane, When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?: Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (7-8), 2006. “We Have Never Been Human” is also the title of the first part of Haraway’s book When Species Meet. Minneapolis 2008.

[10] A known primatologist – Sue Savage-Rumbaugh published an article as co-author along with three chimpanzees. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi Wamba, Panbanisha Wamba, and Nyota Wamba, ‘Welfare of Apes in Captive Environments: Comments On, and By, a Specific Group of Apes’, Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 10 (1), 2007. Of course, the chimpanzees (Kanzi Wamba, Panbanisha Wamba, and Nyota Wamba) did not physically write this article but they did communicate with the researcher (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh) and responded to questions concerning their own needs. The article has aroused great interest because it undermines the human monopoly over epistemic authority and thus shows the potential for multispecies authorship and the construction of transspecies knowledge. See also on this subject: G.A. Bradshaw, An Ape Among Many: Co-Authorship and Trans-Species Epistemic Authority, Configurations 18, 2011.

[11] Concepción Cortés Zulueta, “Nonhuman Animal Testimonies: A Natural History in the First Person?”, in: The Historical Animal, ed. by Susan Nance. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015.

[12] Charles Siebert, “The Rights of Man … and a Beast.” The New York Times Magazine, April 27, 2014.

[13] Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of

Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn, 1988: 575-599.

[14] Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, ed. by Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

[15] Ewa Domanska, Retroactive Ancestral Constitution and Alter-Native Modernities. Storia della Storiografia”, vol. 65, no. 1, 2014: 61-75.

[16] Nikolas Rose, “The Human Sciences in a Biological Age.” Theory, Culture, Society, vol. 30, no. 1, January 2013, p. 25.

[17] James R. Anderson, Alasdair Gillies, Louise C. Lock, Pan thanatology. Current Biology, vol. 20, no. 8, 2010, s. 349 [349–351]; James R. Anderson, Comparative Thanatology. Current Biology, vol. 26, no. 13 July 11, 2016 [543–576].

[18] Rosi Braidotti, “In Spite of the Times. The Postsecular Turn in Feminism.” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 25, no. 6, 2008 [1-24] and her, “Conclusion: The Residual Spirituality in Critical Theory: A Case for Affirmative Postsecular Politics,” in: Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere, ed. by Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw, Eva Midden. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 [249-272].

REFERÊNCIAS

DOMANSKA, Ewa. Retroactive Ancestral Constitution and Alter-Native Modernities. Storia della Storiografia, v. 65, n. 1, 2014, p. 61-75.

________. Beyond Anthropocentrism in Historical Studies. Historein. A Review of the Past and Other Stories [Greece], v. 10, 2010, p. 118-130.

________. The Material Presence of the Past. History and Theory, v. 45, n. 3, 2006, 337-348.

________. El “viraje performativo” en la humanística actual. Criterios. Revista Internacional de Teoría de la literatura, las Artes y la Cultura (Cuba), v. 37, 2011, p. 125-142.

________. Hayden White: Beyond Irony. History and Theory, v. 37, n. 2, 1998, p. 173-181.

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