Yes, we can say that the historian’s craftsmanship is après-coup (or Nachträglichkeit) in a meaningful sense. Here’s why this analogy works:
1. History as Retrospective Meaning-Making:
• Similar to the psychoanalytic concept of après-coup, where the meaning of a past event is retroactively shaped by later experiences, historians craft their narratives by interpreting past events through the lens of contemporary questions, knowledge, and values.
• The process of historical interpretation involves continuously revisiting and reinterpreting the past, reshaping its significance in light of new evidence or perspectives. This is fundamentally après-coup in nature.
2. Nonlinear Understanding of Time:
• History, like the unconscious, is not purely chronological. The significance of historical events often becomes clear only in light of subsequent developments. For instance, the French Revolution’s meaning has been understood differently over centuries depending on the concerns of each era.
• Historians “read back” from the present to make sense of the past, much like how psychoanalysis retroactively reinterprets early experiences based on later insights.
3. The Interplay of Event and Interpretation:
• Marc Bloch, a historian you admire, exemplifies this idea in his insistence that historians are not mere collectors of facts but interpreters who must understand past events within the context of human experience. His work during WWII, for example, showed how immediate, lived experiences reshaped his interpretation of history.
• Après-coup is about how the event and its interpretation are inseparably linked, mirroring the historian’s role in reconstructing the past to make sense of it in the present.
4. The Historian’s Craft as Repetition with Difference:
• Historians revisit the same events or periods, but each time they bring new questions, methodologies, or theoretical frameworks, much like the psychoanalytic process of revisiting the past to uncover its layered meanings. This process is inherently nachträglich—a constant reworking of significance.
5. Trauma, Memory, and Historical Understanding:
• Just as après-coup explains how traumatic memories are revisited and re-signified, historical events—especially traumatic ones like wars, revolutions, or genocides—are understood differently as societies attempt to process their collective memory.
• The historian acts as a mediator of this process, working within the dynamics of remembering and forgetting to construct a narrative that both reflects and reshapes collective understanding.
Conclusion:
The historian’s craftsmanship mirrors après-coup because it is not merely about uncovering “what happened” but about interpreting and re-signifying events through a dialogic process between the past and the present. History, much like the unconscious, reveals its meanings retroactively, making the historian’s role one of continuous reinterpretation and narrative construction.
