Contexts of interpretation are at least three-fold; those of writing, reception, and critical reading. - Dominick LaCapra

Rhetoric includes “performative” uses of language that make a difference in one’s relation to the object of study. This does not mean that the historian is obliged to resort to explicit moral judgments, overt didacticism in drawing lessons, or “show and tell” sessions in which one’s values or autobiographical propensities are bared to one’s audience. The more direct forms of public exposure generally serve a purgative function and rarely inform an account in a telling or transformative way.

Genealogical history in both Tocqueville and Foucault begins with an important if not burning issue in the present and traces it back to its often concealed or repressed roots in the past. The purpose of such inquiry is not purely antiquarian. History for both men involves an at times intense involvement or implication of the historian in the object studied and an active exchange between the present and the past in ways that may be useful in shaping the future.

Rhetoric raises the issues of ambivalence and role tension in language use and their relation to the interaction of discursive modes. With respect to historiography, one obvious problem is the relation between a sympathetic rendering of the past, requiring a measure of identification, and critical distance from it in the interest of both scientific objectivity and critical judgment. A parallel problem is the role of the rhetorical in making all history a living memory that may (as Michelet desired) resurrect the dead and disclose their significance for the present and future. These problems indicate that historiography is itself a tensely mixed mode of language use involving both documentary or “scientific” knowledge and rhetoric in a broader and unavoidably problematic notion of cognition.