Sources of History: Myth and Image

Abstract

In contemporary human sciences in general, and study of religion in particular, history is a discourse of immense power and reach. But its role is paradoxical, for although it is charged with dissolving uniqueness or transcendence of any given point of view, its own supremacy is often taken for granted, even in post-Foucauldian world where it is common to attack objectivist aspirations of historicist discourse. What I call for is not simply a more self-conscious concept of history but an investigation of what one might call, following Wallace Stevens, the substance of [its] region: history and scope of history itself as one particular way of being in, and seeing, world. This is decidedly not to concede that there is something that escapes history but rather to pay closer attention to myth that there is something that does, and to ways in which this myth-far from being a mistake-is crucial to conceiving of borders of history even insofar as everything comes (as everything does) under its critical gaze.