Contemporary sociocultural history was in part motivated by a justifiable revolt against an abstracted history of ideas. But it has often tended simp… - Dominick LaCapra

Historiography today is not in that state of fermentation to be found in fields such as literary criticism and Continental philosophy. Historians tend to pride themselves on their immunity to the wormlike doubt and self-reflective scrutiny that have appeared in other areas of inquiry, notably those infiltrated by recent French thought. Far from seeing recent critical initiatives as holding forth the angelic promise of a reformation or even a renaissance in historical studies, many historians have been seized with what might almost be called a counter-reformational zeal in reasserting orthodox procedures. But the contemporary historical profession is not a solid block, and even the most traditional scholars show an openness to at least a few newer movements. If one were to generalize somewhat rashly about prominent trends in the profession, one might list the following: an inclination to rely on a social definition of context as an explanatory matrix; a shift toward an interest in popular culture; a reconceptualization of culture in terms of collective discourses, mentalities, world views, and even “languages”; a redefinition of intellectual history as the study of social meaning as historically constituted; and an archivally based documentary realism that treats artifacts as quarries for facts in the reconstitution of societies and cultures of the past.

For Foucault the true voices of unreason in the modern period went underground in art and literature, and they lacked a sustaining sociocultural background. The unmoored voices of unreason in an obscure dialogue with reason seemed to come not out of the cosmos or even out of a more delimited cultural context but out of the void. Here Foucault refers to such iconic figures as Nietzsche, Holderlin, Artaud, and Sade. He tellingly contrasts the paintings of Bosch and Goya. In Bosch, unreason is a subterranean force of the cosmos; in Goya (at least in certain paintings), unreason erupts from an abyss.

At present, historians are quite willing to listen to neighbors in the social sciences, but the less manageable contributions of literary critics and philosophers are often met with extreme suspicion if not active resistance. Yet transference may be blindest when disciplinary or subdisciplinary boundaries and protocols of research become the foundations for a self-enclosed frame of reference that induces the methodological scapegoating—the exclusion or reduction—of phenomena and perspectives that cannot be fully adjusted to it. The problem of transference in all its dimensions arises in an especially pointed way, I think, in the relation of intellectual and sociocultural historians to one another as well as to their “objects” of study.