History as anguish

Abstract

This article proposes a path of reasoning capable of showing how history can become personal inasmuch as it produces the experience of anguish. To attain this goal, based on two concrete personal experiences during the current political context of Brazil, it will take the following steps: history becomes personal, first as it helps build one’s personality (as asserted in Johann Gustav Droysen’s Historik), by the ability of historical knowledge — produced by research or received by its readers — has to be morphological; in other words, via its ability to find unity in what, at first glance, seems to be dispersed. Secondly, history can become personal as it produces empathy, considered under Dominick LaCapra’s concept of empathic unsettlement. Finally, since LaCapra indicates that Primo Levi’s concept of gray zone contains certain possibilities in terms of empathic unsettlement, the final section of this article carries out an exercise about this notion to show that this type of experiences — limited to two specific cases in this study — invite us to think that history becomes personal in as much as it produces anguish, a notion that permeates The Drowned and the Saved (1986) — book that contains Primo Levi’s classic chapter on the gray zone.

Keywords

• Theory of history
• Morphology
• Testimony