Abstract

This dissertation examines the possibility that a relationship of derivation obtains between the historicality of human beings and that of collective or impersonal entities , and considers the ramifications of this possibility for historical understanding. The dissertation follows Jean Laplanche in arguing that the individual's historicality is defined by an ongoing work of "auto-theorization" that takes the form of a series of translations, detranslations, and retranslations. This translation model can be heuristically generalized in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of "binding"; what is "bound" in the individual's self-translation is the enigma of the individual's being-with-others, in time. ;Through close readings of works by Paul de Man, Jean Laplanche, and Michel de Certeau, the dissertation discusses the implications for history of what Laplanche has called "the constant threat of narcissistic closure". In Laplanche's work, this phrase indicates the tendency of a moment or condition of "exocentrism"---or openness to alterity---to be followed by an "ipsocentric" moment, in which an order is re-established by recuperating or excluding the other. This ontological-temporal structure finds its paradigm in Laplanche's model of the individual's "auto-theorization" or "ontogenesis", but can be identified as characterizing the historicality of a wide range of entities. As the dissertation demonstrates through interpretations of de Man and Laplanche, the same structure is at work in the history of literature, literary criticism, and psychoanalytic theory. ;Laplanche's attentiveness to the tension between exocentrism and ipsocentrism in psychoanalytic theory, and in the psychoanalytic object itself, leads him to propose a "Copernican Revolution" for psychoanalysis that would acknowledge the primacy of the other in the constitution and maintenance of individual identity. Through a reading of Certeau's work on the historiographical institution that foregrounds the antinomy between ethics and dogmatism, the dissertation suggests the possibility of a comparable "Copernican Revolution" for history, one that would make "openness to the other" the condition of possibility for a distinction between history and ideology