Abstract

The relationship between literary and historical thought is structured by a shared epistemological problem: the question of the subject. The very possibility of historical consciousness and symbolic production is based on the openness of that question and yet this openness is spoken of as a "crisis." I argue, therefore, that to question the crisis of historical consciousness--more specifically, the crisis of "historical optimism"--the rhetoric of crisis itself should be understood historically as a symptom of the effort to identify the category of the subject with specific representations of self, agency and discourse. Georg Lukacs's concept of double irony in his Theory of the Novel recognizes the novel as an active force in the construction and critique of these representations. ;The first essay compares the attempts of Jurgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu to reconstruct a homologous representation of the historical subject; yet the presence of incommensurability persists, initiating a crisis of historical optimism. The novel, however, represents the subject hermeneutically, with incommensurability as a given point of departure. ;The second essay explores this incommensurability as the presence of the "uncanny" in history through a reading of duel-narratives by Turgenev, Flaubert and Freud. The excess of signification in the struggle of life and death becomes a primal scene of historical consciousness in the Lacanian sense of a fiction of reconstruction, an a posteriori a priori. ;The third essay treats the critical realist novel of the 1930s as a "project of narrative repetition" which questioned the ideological need for historical optimism while engaging in the anti-fascist struggle. ;In conclusion, I propose a hermeneutical reformulation of the possibility of historical optimism as a question of historical desire. Both the ideological construction of the subject and the nostalgia and melancholy of its incommensurability are symptoms of the need for meaning, and, therefore, of the need for history. The theory of the categorical subject is offered as a means of comprehending the "economy of the vacant place" as an inevitable paradox of thought which allows us to think symbolic and socio-historical processes as open, as places of desire