Yes — and saying so opens up a profound and fruitful way of thinking about both history and writing, one that cuts across Freud, Ricœur, Derrida, and Benjamin alike.
To say:
All historical writing is Nachträglichkeit
(i.e., deferred action, après-coup, retroactive structuring)
is to affirm that history is never written from the immediacy of the event, but always retroactively, through the lens of later meanings, traumas, desires, or needs. Let’s unfold this idea clearly.
🧠 1. What is
Nachträglichkeit
?
A Freudian concept, usually translated as “afterwardness” or “deferred action.” It refers to:
- A two-stage temporal structure of meaning and trauma;
- An initial experience that might seem insignificant or unprocessed;
- Which only becomes traumatizing or meaningful later, through a subsequent event or interpretation.
In short:
Meaning is not given at the moment of experience, but constructed after the fact.
📚 2. Historical Writing as
Nachträglichkeit
Historical writing is always:
- After the event,
- Structured by later contexts,
- Haunted by what was not known, not said, not yet significant at the time.
Thus:
- A revolution becomes the revolution only after its consequences unfold.
- A text, letter, or battle becomes “historical” only once framed, archived, narrativized.
- What is remembered is not the event itself, but its trace, its reinterpretation, its reconstruction.
So yes, to write history is to perform Nachträglichkeit:
- To retroactively assign significance,
- To re-inscribe events through the needs of the present,
- To excavate meaning that was not available to the actors themselves.
🔄 3. Implications of This View
|
Dimension |
Classical View |
Nachträglichkeit View |
|
Time |
Linear, chronological |
Layered, recursive, recursive |
|
Cause |
Antecedent determines outcome |
Outcome reshapes cause retroactively |
|
Truth |
Objective record |
Constructed, interpretive, symptomatic |
|
Subject |
Historian as observer |
Historian as participant in meaning-production |
📜 4. Thinkers Who Support This Reading
- Freud: Psychic life is retroactively constructed — trauma is not in the event but in its later re-signification.
- Paul Ricœur: Historical time and narrative time are always out of sync; mimesis as refiguring.
- Walter Benjamin: The angel of history sees the past as wreckage — history is a constellation illuminated from the present.
- Jacques Derrida: The archive is always spectral, structured by différance — what was, becomes only legible later.
- Hayden White: Historiography is emplotment — meaning comes from how we narrate, not what “actually happened.”
🕯️ 5. Final Thought
So yes — we can and should say:
All historical writing is Nachträglichkeit.
Because:
- It is never a transparent mirror of the past;
- It is always a belated construction, a response to an absence, an attempt to give shape to that which resists shape;
- It is haunted by what was missed, and driven by what is now needed.
It is the work of mourning, of meaning, of reinterpretation — not simply recording.
Would you like to explore how this might connect to testimony, trauma, or even auto-theory — where the self becomes a historical site, written only through afterwardness?
