I take the main thrust of Stephen Best’s None Like Us to be that the past cannot and should not in any straightforward be a source of “lessons” for the present. As Reinhart Koselleck put it in an essay he wrote in a Festschrift for Karl Löwith, today the old Ciceronian adage, historia magistra vitae, is dissolved “within the horizon of modern, dynamic history” (Sediments of Time, 264–65). Or as Löwith himself put it, “we find ourselves more or less at the end of the modern rope” (Meaning in History, 3) such that history cannot be a straightforward source of models for our political present (no more monumental history, to put it in Nietzche’s terms). For Löwith, Koselleck, and a whole host of other postwar German thinkers, it was the experience of the Third Reich that marked a “break in tradition” (Arendt) after which the idea of progress in history simply cannot be entertained any longer; for Best, that which “breaks the modern rope” is the transatlantic slave trade. But in both cases, the ways in which these historical events intertwine with the thinkability of history as a source for political action today is… complicated, to say the least.
Best critiques the idea that the past is ours to simply learn from, whether to redeem or to redress. He is particularly concerned with the relationship history has to politics of the present. As Best puts it:
The idea of continuity between the slave past and our present provides a framework for conceptions of black collectivity and community across time. This idea, a proxy for race, nests within it a significant thesis: the present most African Americans experience was forged at some historical nexus when slavery and race conjoined. … If we take slavery’s dispossessions to live on into the twenty-first century, divesting history of movement and change, then what form can effective political agency take? Why must our relation to the past be ethical in the first place — and is it possible to have a relation to the past that is not predicated on ethics? (64)
To rephrase: Best is concerned about the way in which a particular past, the “historical nexus when slavery and race conjoined,” becomes an ineluctable horizon for politics today. What Best wants to do is to clear a space for “effective political agency” that is not predicated on theses of continuity or organic ties to a collective past. To put it more simply: Best wants a kind of politics that deals with history outside the framework of “collective memory.” If we wanted to speak with Wittgenstein and Cavell (in a way that Best invites us to do elsewhere [None Like Us, 43]), we might talk about this as the task of knitting together a “thin net over the abyss,” those “very shaky foundations” upon which we feel “terrified that maybe language (and understanding, and knowledge) rests” (Claim of Reason, 178). Or, to put it in David Scott’s terms (another body of work that I read as foundational to None Like Us) Best is most basically concerned with “the conceptual problem of political presents and with how reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures are thought out in relation to them” (Conscripts of Modernity, 1).
So, what is Best’s distinctive proposal? His explicit aim is to “run against the grain of work advanced under the banners of ‘recovery’ and ‘melancholy'” by “specify[ing] some of the limits to these modes of critique and to propose other ways to think about loss” (65). I want to pick up one strand of this project, which I hope we can further unpack together: Best’s particular reading of Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” The passage Best focuses on goes as follows:
A historical phenomenon, known clearly and completely and resolved into a phenomenon of knowledge, is, for him who has perceived it, dead: for he has recognized in it the delusion, the injustice, the blind passion, and in general the whole earthly and darkening horizon of this phenomenon, and has thereby also understood its power in history. This power has now lost its hold over him insofar as he is a man of knowledge: but perhaps it has not done so insofar as he is a man involved in life. (Untimely Meditations, ed. Breazeale, 67)
Best’s summary of the “project” he finds in Nietzsche’s text is that he seeks to “unburden history writing of both presentism and teleology” (95). Trying to understand what it means to be “untimely” prompts Best to ask: “what specific orientation toward the past allows it to remain still alive to my critical senses? What orientation forestalls the moment in which a ‘historical phenomenon’ resolves into a ‘phenomenon of knowledge’?” (96)
Once again, to provide an answer Best turns to Stanley Cavell — this time his essay “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.” Best writes:
There is non-appropriable or missed experience that will always evade our attempts to grasp it. … To try to articulate what I am thinking here, I find Stanley Cavell helpful. … When we insist that the past has to be made relevant to the present, or understand it as already so relevant, we fall into the typical error of parents and children — “taking difference from each other to threaten, or promise, severance from one another.” But we are severed. To confirm that is “neither a blessing nor a curse”; it is simply a fact. To deny that, however, is to give up not only knowledge of the position of others, but also “the means of locating one’s own.” Our charge in dealing with figures from the slave past, whatever our critical orientation, is to make their present theirs, and (if I might hijack Cavell’s language here) “it is only in this perception of them as separate from me that I make them present. That I make them other, and face them.” (98)
The “problem of other minds,” in the end, is just that: others are, irreducibly, there, and separate from me. To maintain this separateness forestalls the collapse of history into a “phenomenon of knowledge.” The challenge is to nonetheless maintain the power of the past insofar as “man is involved in life.”
At this point, I find myself agreeing with Best: “To be honest, I must admit to feeling a bit stuck” (100). If Best’s aim had been to “specify some of the limits to these modes of critique” in Black Studies, perhaps too we could say with Wittgenstein that “This running against the walls of our cage [of limits, of “the boundaries of language”] is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless. … But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” (Lecture on Ethics, 19) Perhaps it is best at this point, in closing, to once again quote Wittgenstein, who said: “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.” (Philosophical Investigations, §133)
