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Mysticism and Epistemology: The Historical and Cultural Theory of Michel de CerteauMichel de Certeau: Les chemins d'histoire by Christian Delacroix; François Dosse; PatrickGarcia; Michel TrebitschReview by: Jerrold SeigelHistory and Theory, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Oct., 2004), pp. 400-409Published by: Wiley-Blackwell for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3590652 .Accessed: 02/10/2012 13:17

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History and Theory 43 (October 2004), 400-409 ? Wesleyan University 2004 ISSN: 0018-2656

MYSTICISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY: THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY OF MICHEL DE CERTEAU

MICHEL DE CERTEAU: LES CHEMINS D'HISTOIRE. Edited by Christian Delacroix, Franqois Dosse, Patrick Garcia, and Michel Trebitsch. Brussels: Editions

Complexe, 2002. Pp. 239.

One of the more intriguing and mysterious figures on the French intellectual scene from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s was a Jesuit on leave from his order, Michel de Certeau. Turning to history after an early interest in theology, he first became known as an editor and interpreter of early modern mystical writers. After the events of 1968 (which he welcomed and wrote about) Certeau broadened his interests toward questions of more secular and contemporary import. He collab- orated with Jacques Revel and Dominique Julia in a notable study of linguistic politics during the French Revolution, involved himself in Lacanian psycho- analysis, and wrote a remarkable book-length essay on everyday life.1 Like some of his better-known contemporaries, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, he

sought to raise fundamental epistemological questions, sowing doubt about the

positivistic attitudes displayed by certain historical schools and currents in his

country and ours, and challenging historians to recognize the limits imposed on their work by the conditions within which it is produced. He was known as a bril- liant conversationalist and interlocutor, although some people found his thinking and writing idiosyncratic and obscure, as some still do today. Kept at the margins of French intellectual life in the early part of his career (a circumstance that con- tributed to his spending a number of years teaching in California), he eventually became a celebrated and for many a cherished presence on the Left Bank.

Since his death in 1985 a number of essay collections have sought to preserve Certeau's memory, clarify his position, and assess his continuing relevance in the various fields he cultivated.2 Gradually the connecting links between his seem-

ingly disparate interests and involvements have emerged, and some of the pieces in the book under review (the product of a seminar organized by its editors between 1998 and 2000) help to make those ties still clearer. Taking off from

1. Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue: la Rdvolutionfrangaise et les patois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quoti- dien, I: Arts defaire (Paris: Union gdnrrale d'hditions, 1980), transl. Stephen Rendall as The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Certeau also inspired a companion volume by Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, L'Invention du quotidien, II: Habiter cuisiner (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

2. See, in addition to the volume under review, Michel de Certeau, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987), and Histoire, mystique etpolitique: Michel de Certeau, ed. Luce Giard, Herv6 Martin, Jacques Revel, and Pierre-Jean Labarribre (Grenoble: Editions Jdr6me Millon, 1991).

MYSTICISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY 401

them, one can see that mystical religion always provided Certeau with a ground and (in ways I will try to specify below) a kind of pattern through which to see the world and operate in it. His development of a secularized mystical perspec- tive on a wide variety of topics and interests likely had something to do with both the marginal position he occupied in France during the early part of his career, and with his eventual acceptance there. In the end Certeau's mystical roots did not separate him from more immediately influential figures as much as we might suppose. The fascination that thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida felt for Antoine Artaud, for Georges Bataille and other dissident surrealists, brought mystical elements into their formation too. That Jacques Lacan also drew from the mystical well is a point Certeau himself recognized and elaborated.

The seminar from which Michel de Certeau: les chemins d'histoire emerged was premised on a belief that Certeau's work and example have grown increas-

ingly relevant in recent years; the essays, by eleven historians, two philosophers, and two literary critics, testify that others share their view. Some of the papers are substantial and illuminating, notably Alain Bourreau's thoughtful considera- tion of Certeau's interest in the historical anthropology of belief, Frank

Lestringant's lively meditation on the relations between rival theories of lan-

guage and Catholic vs. Protestant ideas about what is represented in the Eucharist, and Olivier Mongin's and Guy Petitdemange's complementary approaches to Certeau's overall project from the side of the mystical impulses that first inspired it. Most of the other essays recount a personal debt to Certeau, or evoke some particular aspect of his work-about 1968, or everyday practices, or language.

In the view of the editors, what most makes Certeau important today is his pro- gram of historicizing historical writing itself, analyzing l'ope"ration historique as "the combination of a social place, scientific practices, and a mode of writing" (la combinaison d'un lieu social, de pratiques scientifiques, et d'une &criture [15]).3 This is a promising formula, but also a vague one. Much of its meaning and value depend on how one unpacks its terms, and just how une &criture should be rendered in another language is a puzzling question in itself. The vagueness is not dispelled when Herv6 Martin, later in the book, describes what is gained from Certeau's perspective as the understanding that "historical discourse never exists in a pure state, free of all constraint and devoted to revealing the simple truth of the facts in their transparency" (111). Since hardly anyone these days doubts that historical writing is shaped and colored by the situations and commitments of those who engage in it, the task of a historical epistemology ought to be not sim-

ply to remind us about this, but to clarify the nature and extent of such limita- tions, to examine just how constraining they must be.

No one in the book really takes up these questions, but the editors provide a hint of how Certeau resolved them by reminding us that he regarded the kind of

3. The editors' phrase, I'opdration historique, comes from the title of Certeau's contribution to the collective volume Faire de l'histoire, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 3-41. An expanded version of this text, retitled "L'opdration historiographique," appeared in Certeau, L'&criture de l'histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Some contributors to the volume under review use the first phrase, some the second.

402 JERROLD SEIGEL

perspective he wanted to bring to bear on historical writing as close in spirit to the Marxist analysis of individuals as formed by their participation in a particu- lar system of productive relations. At a roundtable in 1977, he coupled his criti- cism of French historians for failing to historicize their own practice with an

expression of regret about the very weak role he thought Marxism had played in French historical writing. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Philippe Aries, and

Georges Duby all protested that, on the contrary, Marxism had been at the heart of their formation, but this response, as the editors of Les chemins d'histoire

point out in their introduction (17), mistook Certeau's point. He was not calling for a Marxist account of the things historians study, but for a recognition by prac- titioners of how their work is shaped by its own conditions of production. In his view, his colleagues' insistence on their Marxist pedigree veiled their refusal to

subject their own "site" or "place" (more on Certeau's notion of the lieu below) to an analysis of the limitations that social circumstances and practices imposed on what they did.

Since Les chemins d'histoire contains no sustained analysis of what Certeau meant by all this, we need to turn to some of his writings to clarify his position. A convenient starting point is provided by an essay on "History, Science, and Fiction," published in English in 1983, and reproduced in the collection of his articles called Heterologies.4 Here Certeau described modem historiography in terms that linked it to once-dominant religious assumptions and practices. History displayed a "dogmatizing tendency," seeking to turn its products into

"representations of a reality in which everyone must believe." It pursued these ends through something he dubbed "the institution of the real," a project found- ed on Western historiography's struggle to distinguish itself from fiction through the critical reading of documents and the exposure of traditional accounts as

mythical and erroneous. Certeau likened such practices to the gesture through which attackers of "false gods" represented themselves as prophets of a true one:

"by demonstrating the presence of errors, discourse must pass off as 'real' what- ever is placed in opposition to the errors. Even though this is logically question- able, it works, and it fools people" (201).

Proposing such a parallel between religious and secular knowledge claims is not objectionable in itself, but Certeau's way of doing it often makes the analo-

gy substitute for any close attention to what takes place when historians criticize their sources or each other. Even if many historians, whether in the 1980s or

today, want nothing more than to have their own views accepted as truth, two centuries of ideological debate, the powerful strain of skeptical relativism it has left behind, and the existence of mechanisms for subjecting every new argument to criticism and debate as soon as it appears, all cast strong doubt on the claim that every exposure of past fictions or errors fools people into taking itself as the revelation of a new truth. Just how far are we to think that such intended or unin- tended strategies work, and on whom? Certeau's unqualified assertion here is typical of his rhetoric. His essay contains some pointed and useful criticisms of

4. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, transl. Brian Massumi, foreword by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 199-221. Many of the ideas expressed in Heterologies were already present in the earlier piece referred to just above, in note 3.

MYSTICISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY 403

the confidence some historians in the 1970s and 1980s invested in quantification and in computer technology, and more generally of the positivistic strain that per- sisted especially in French historical writing (namely the project of histoire totale) in those years. But what mattered to him was less the details of this cri-

tique than the opportunity it offered to cast historians as successors to priests who claimed authority by virtue of their ability to represent higher powers ("the real"). At the risk of sounding harsh, it seems to me there is something both vul-

gar and silly in such assertions as that "the tribute that contemporary erudition

pays to the computer will be the equivalent of the 'Dedication to the Prince' in books of the seventeenth century," and that the historian "is in attendance on the

computer just as in the past he was in attendance on the king" (213). Certeau's admirers, by their willingness to gloss over such pronouncements, and to describe his analysis of l'op"ration historique in vague and general terms, cloud his thinking, glossing over the essential helplessness he attributed to historical discourse in limiting the power of social prejudices or power relations to put their

stamp on it. In Certeau's view, practicing historians appear to be devoid of any ability to subject their own work to critical scrutiny from within their own insti- tutions or practices.

Responding to the Popperian notion that scientific communities advance

knowledge by subjecting their members' biases or prejudices to criticism, Certeau retorts:

But this community is also a factory, its members distributed along assembly lines, sub- ject to budgetary pressures, hence dependent on political decisions and bound by the growing constraints of a sophisticated machinery (archival infrastructures, computers, publishers' demands, etc.), . . . governed by socicultural assumptions and postulates ... stemming from the personal interests of a boss, through the modes and fashions of the moment, etc. (204)

Can the person who writes such a sentence really claim to operate outside the "institution of the real"? Not only does Certeau rely on the very claims to objec- tive knowledge he attributes to others, his perspective seems to forget that Weber ever wrote about the value-laden nature of analytical concepts, or that such an

understanding was already widely diffused among historians in the 1970s and 1980s.

According to Certeau, the very act of writing about some particular subject in the past serves to hide the writer's dependence on the conditions within which discourse is produced: "the text substitutes a representation of a past for elucida- tion of the present institutional operation that manufactures the historians's text. ... The representation of historical realities is itself the means by which the real conditions of its own production are camouflaged" (206, 207). Such assertions imply not only that historical discourse can only legitimate itself by speaking of its own limitations in the very act of representing the past, but more that it is not possible to act on an awareness of those limitations except by confessing them in exactly the terms Certeau conceives them. Otherwise, why should any historian's elucidation of his or her relationship to some set of institutional pressures or con- straints be expected to be freer of their influence than his or her account of past

404 JERROLD SEIGEL

events? On Certeau's premises, only someone who shares his view that every claim to stable historical knowledge is a deluded one, resting on the false foun- dation of "the institution of the real," and who accepts his images of factories, assembly lines, bosses and the rest, can recognize how far the dependency of his- torical discourse on the conditions of its production extends. Merely to do what in fact many historians do (and which many did, explicitly or implicitly, in the

years when he was writing), avow their political or ideological positions, be as honest as human beings can be about their biases and prejudices, recognize the limits of their knowledge, would not be sufficient.

In Certeau's world, the only way for historical writing to escape from its pos- itivistic cage would be for it to make itself "other" to itself. The particular other- ness into which he wished to see it merged was the fiction from which historical

writing since Thucydides has attempted to distinguish itself. Fiction acknowl-

edges the equivocal nature of human claims to know the world by not ascribing reality to its contents. It "delineates itself in a language from which it continu-

ously draws effects of meaning that cannot be circumscribed or checked." Whereas historical discourse seeks to establish itself at a definite "place," insti- tuted by a certain set of social relations and practices, and within which it endeavors to acquire some degree of stable existence, "fiction has no proper place of its own. It is 'metaphoric'; it moves exclusively in the domain of the other" (202).5 Certeau's language calls to mind the years in which his essay was written, when the notion that all historical narratives were in essence fictional was often encountered, alongside the broader proposition that in a world where all is discourse there can be no such thing as truth. In promoting such ideas, how- ever, Certeau's essay relied over and over again on outright truth claims, most

notably those about the conditions of production that lie behind historical writ-

ing (whose metaphorical nature did not seem to trouble him). The defining and in my view crippling paradox of Certeau's work is that he represents his own crit- icism as capable of reflecting on historical practice and achieving an effective

understanding of it because he operates from a point that lies outside it, while

denying the same capacity for reflective self-scrutiny to those who operate from within history as practitioners. Certeau's critique, despite the historical claims on which it is based, is supposed to transcend the limits of historical practice; the rest of us remain confined inside them. Put in general terms, this means that human beings are capable of insight about their own doings, and of liberation from the restrictions their institutions impose, but only on the condition that they occupy a location-or non-location--outside those institutions, or at least at their

margins. In other domains too, Certeau's work often calls up the human capacity to

achieve forms of insight or creative agency that transcend or escape from estab-

5. Certeau's concern here lies close to Foucault's in "What is an Author?" where we read that

attributing works and ideas to named individuals serves an ideological function, namely to impede "the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction," and thus to "reduce the great danger, the great peril" that fiction in a pure state represents for a world organ- ized around the acceptance of limits. "What is an Author?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 118-119.

MYSTICISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY 405

lished limits or institutionalized restrictions. But even as he depicts this ability in terms that might apply to any human being anywhere, he simultaneously identi- fies it with groups he sees as marginalized or practices he identifies with "other- ness." A major example is his examination of inventiveness in everyday life. Read in a certain way, L'Invention du quotidien is an optimistic affirmation of the

power human beings possess to use the materials and conditions of the societies and cultures into which they are born in novel and innovative ways, finding unpredictable routes (both literal and metaphorical) through their cities, turning commodified goods to new purposes, responding to visual materials (even TV

advertisements) or written texts in ways that inject consumers' own meanings into them. Such a list of inventive practices implies that they are distributed

throughout society, occurring in many contexts and at all social levels. But Certeau all the same seeks to attribute them to "the weak" or the marginal. The social practices of dominant groups are "strategies," those of dominated ones "tactics." A strategy is a

calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an "envi- ronment." A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper [propre] and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competi- tors, adversaries, "clienteles," "targets," or "objects" of research). . . . [A tactic, however is] a calculus which cannot count on a "proper" (a spatial or institutional) localization, nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, with- out taking it over in its entirety. . . . The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them, . . . [a task they achieve] in the propitious moments when they are able to combine heterogeneous elements.6

On this account only the tactics of the weak are genuinely inventive, since the

strategies of the strong operate merely to reproduce existing relationships in altered forms or configurations; by contrast the tactics of the weak turn the mate- rials of everyday life in unanticipated directions. Among Certeau's examples of such tactical operations are the appropriation of Catholic religious materials by colonized Brazilian peasants who employed them to inspire resistance strategies or utopian visions, and the French working-class tradition of the perruque (liter- ally, "wig"), the term applied to a product that a worker made surreptitiously on the job, using an employer's materials or tools, and on the employer's time, but sold as his own to enhance his income.

This distinction between strategy and tactics often grows fuzzy, as for instance when Certeau describes a housewife shopping in a supermarket as operating tac-

tically when she makes decisions based on "heterogeneous and mobile data"

(what she has at home, who she has to feed [xix]), or when he characterizes con- temporary marginality as "no longer limited to minority groups," but "rather massive and pervasive," even "becoming universal" (xvii). But in his eyes these ambiguities are resolved in ways that preserve the weak/strong dichotomy, because he regards all consumers as potentially dominated by the system of pro-

6. The Practice of Everyday Life, xix; some of this is repeated on 36-37. (The title given to the English translation fails to preserve the reference to inventiveness created by the French one.)

406 JERROLD SEIGEL

duction and advertising that seeks to form their tastes and decisions, so that even a housewife with middle-class resources needs to employ weapons of the weak when she shops. Certeau envisions his own intellectual practice in these same terms, characterizing his relationship to established forms of knowledge and research as "working with its machines and making use of its scraps" so as to "divert the time owed to the institution" and "subvert the law that, in the scien- tific factory, puts work at the service of the machine" and destroys creativity. His

goal is "to make a kind of perruque of writing itself' (27-28). Like his historical epistemology, therefore, Certeau's vision of inventiveness

in everyday life identifies abilities that in principle any individual might employ (especially since practically all people find themselves in a subordinate position at one moment of their lives or another), while seeking all the same to assign such powers to those who have no "proper" place inside the world of established institutions and relationships. Such thinking is both puzzling and questionable. Are young computer programmers with degrees who find new ways to combine codes, and thus challenge dominant forms of software, examples of strategic practice or tactical? Is the work of computer hackers who send viruses over the internet more creative than that of engineers who work for Microsoft? Is a sci- entist whose work earns a Nobel Prize for work done in a big commercial or uni-

versity laboratory less creative than a tinkerer in a garage? Is a mayor of Paris who diverts funds from city revenues to his family by hiring his relatives in posi- tions with no responsibilities acting less "creatively" than a worker who pro- duces his perruques with company materials on company time? Certeau's intense identification with outsiders and marginal people seems to flow from

deep moral and social commitments, but it leads him onto swampy ground. It thus becomes particularly revealing to recognize how deeply all these atti-

tudes are rooted in the readings of mystical texts and practices that were Certeau's first historical work. The essays of Guy Petitdemange and Olivier

Mongin in Les chemins d'histoire help to make these connections clear. Quoting from two seventeenth-century mystical writers whose works and letters Certeau edited, Pierre Favre and Jean-Joseph Surin, Petitdemange cites texts that resound in many of Certeau's dealings with other subjects. In a well-known letter of 1630, Surin described the deep impact made on him by a boy he met on a journey, a

rough, illiterate nineteen-year-old "who had never been taught by anyone but God." He had the heart of a solitary stranger, "incapable of accommodating or

shaping himself to the customs of this world which we consider as an exile." Certeau provided a gallery of such figures in his book La Fable mystique, trac-

ing out a portrait of "the other" not as demanding from us generous or charitable

feelings, but speaking in a savage language that works to wear away and dispos- sess us of "every set identity, for ourselves or for others." To Certeau what mys- tical practice taught was a perpetual seeking for something beyond the here and now, a persisting dissatisfaction with any object or relationship that might tie us to things as they presently exist, a way of being in the world that makes differ- ence, foreignness, radical otherness the ground of all our relations and experi- ences. "That person is a mystic," Certeau wrote, "who cannot cease to move on [qui ne peut s'arrdter de marcher], and who, in the certitude of what he lacks,

MYSTICISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY 407

knows about every place and every object that this is not it, that one cannot reside here or content oneself with this."7 For a Catholic mystic, the objects of this per- petual dissatisfaction had to include the Church itself, and toward it Certeau

developed an attitude that was paradigmatic of his stance toward every human institution. Olivier Mongin, taking up one of Certeau's most convoluted and dif- ficult texts (a commentary on Freud's analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber's para- noia), finds its nub in the idea that the only good institutions are those that rec-

ognize their own rottenness and corruption. People who know that they will never be content with any worldly attachment join such institutions all the same because they provide the only available protection from the delirium, even the madness, that comes from being driven always beyond what exists. Such persons will neither try to restore the institution they join to an original purity nor seek to conserve it as it is, but, looking its unavoidable corruption in the face, they will use it as a frame for seeking what they know it cannot provide. "Perhaps the

approach to take," Certeau wrote, "is the one temporarily traced in times past by St. Teresa and others, who wanted to join a corrupt order, and therefore sought from it neither identity nor recognition, but only the alteration of their necessary delirium."8

Mongin properly recognizes in this attitude the model for Certeau's mode of

living in urban space (finding unpredictable paths through it, inspired by the sense of foreignness that animates those to whom it offers no "proper" place), and more generally the modes of practice he calls "tactical" in L'invention du

quotidien. Mystics, we might say (I do not know whether Certeau ever made this

comparison or not), employ the materials of orthodox Christian teaching in ways that recall the subversive diversions effected by Brazilian peasants; mystical practice is a kind of perruque. The same attitude toward an institution to which one belongs in a way that seeks "neither identity nor recognition" reappears in Certeau's historical epistemology, which rests on nothing so much as demanding of historians that they acknowledge an incurable rottenness at the heart of their

profession (in the very project of distinguishing history from fiction), thus estab-

lishing with it a relationship of simultaneous involvement and distance like the one St. Teresa had with the ordinary practices of the Church.

But it is in Certeau's reading of Freud and Lacan that his notion of the mystic as always in motion, never accepting this or that as the goal of the human quest, finds its most remarkable transformation. The Lacanian return to Freud was a

recognition of the unappeasability of desire, in particular the desire for the truth of one's own selfhood. Neither in any object nor in oneself as subject could there be a stable point of rest, since the individual is always led beyond them to some Other. Certeau found many points of reference for the idea of otherness to which he constantly returned, but one of the most resonant was the essential otherness of the Lacanian self, lodged in the moment of misrecognition provided by the

7. Michel de Certeau, La Fable mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 411; cited in Petitdemange, "Le Deuil impossible de la mystique," in Les chemins d'histoire, 49.

8. Olivier Mongin, "Une figure singulibre de la pensde," in Les chemins de l'histoire, 35; Certeau's text, originally published in 1977, appears as "The Institution of Rot," in Heterologies, 35-46. The ref- erence to St. Teresa (which Mongin does not quite quote) is on 46.

408 JERROLD SEIGEL

"mirror stage," when a person first takes the reflection of her or his own body to

signify the presence of a stable, coherent being undiscoverable inside the chaos of desire. To free people of this false sense that they are subjects able to find sat- isfaction in an object was a chief goal of Lacanian therapy, whose techniques were calculated to dispossess patients of their confidence in the therapist as the

"subject supposed to know" (sujet suppose savoir), and of the mirror-stage residue that put them in quest of a discoverable and stable core of their own sub-

jectivity. From Lacan we learn, in Certeau's formula, that "the other always insti- tutes the subject by alienating it." Read through Lacan's lens, Freud's texts teach this truth because they "do not designate a past to be rediscovered. They articu- late what, in different scenes in the psychic structure, does not cease being the return to that Other which constitutes the subject as a relationship to an impossi- ble object."9

Certeau found a crucial demonstration of this pattern, in which human subjects seek satisfaction for their desires in a stable object whose deeper meaning emerges only in revealing that it cannot satisfy them, in the Lacanian equivalent of the Church, the Ecole Freudienne, founded in 1964, and dissolved in 1980. The lesson of its history was that Lacan's "institutional adventure, this trip of his desire, must have itself terminated by this 'failing.': this is not that." The Lacanian institution was like the Christian one: the truth its founder revealed to his followers was one he could enact only by removing himself from its pres- ence, so that they would learn always to seek him somewhere else. "If it is true, according to Freud, that the tradition does not stop cheating on its founder, will Lacan still be heard in those places where one claims possession of his heritage and his name, or will he return under other names?"10

Because it is these themes of unappeasibility, absence, the "rottenness" of

institutions, the otherness of the subject, the fictionality of truth claims, that give persisting structure to Certeau's writing, the most telling essays in Les Chemins d'histoire are those by Olivier Mongin and Guy Petitdemange, both of which

highlight the relations between his apparently secular interests and his original mystical inspiration. As Mongin points out, Certeau's historical passions were above all aroused by the "rupture" that, from the seventeenth century, displaced Christianity from its central place in European society and culture, and by the "debt" he was sure that modems all the same owed to their forsaken heritage. "If

rupture there is, there is no less a debt, this is the fundamental plot that modem history ceaselessly re-teaches us."'1 It was just such a compound of rupture and debt that lay behind Certeau's comparisons of contemporary historians to court

historiographers, making obeisance to new forms of power, and behind his insis- tence that the pretended break between history and fiction left a similar indebt- edness behind. It was this posture, rather than any actual argument, that underlay the radical and arbitrary assertion that only those who have no "proper" place inside an institution-whether it be the historical profession or society as a whole--can achieve reflective distance from its practices. The very attractive-

9. Certeau, "Lacan: An Ethics of Speech," in Heterologies, 58. 10. Ibid., 64. The link between Lacan and Christianity was explicit; see 59. 11. Mongin, "Une figure singulihre," 33.

MYSTICISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY 409

ness of Certeau's writings to a number of established historians, some of them contributors to Les chemins d'histoire, belies his brief for the epistemological privilege of radical otherness.

For these reasons the editors' claim that Certeau's historical epistemology makes him increasingly relevant to those who may read his work today seems to me at best questionable. His writings make a powerful appeal, but it is one that arises from a certain poetic quality (the same feature that often makes them obscure), and from the courageous and imaginative persistence with which he

pursued a constant vision across many regions of life and thinking. Certeau's moral seriousness deserves our respect, but his thinking also merits at least as much skepticism as he seeks to direct at actual historical practice.

JERROLD SEIGEL

New York University