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Historicism is the
domestication of historicity. This Thing that doesn’t love a wall shows up in
the fissures that make the wall fall down: the slips of the tongue, the
hysterical psychosomatic symptoms that betray the supposed stability and
completion of the wall. To regards to the historicism-historicity opposition,
Zizek argues that “The most succinct definition of historicism is . . . :
historicity minus
the unhistorical kernel of the Real—and the function of the nostalgic
image is precisely to fill out the empty place of this exclusion, i.e., the
blind spot of historicism” (Enjoy Your Symptom 81). Let’s first look at historicity.
Dialectical historicity is characterized by a paradox: the object of study
“becomes” what it always already was. A classical example is
Marx’s paradoxical claim that, on the one hand, all previous history is
the history of class struggle and that, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie is
the first class as such. Only with the advent of the antagonism between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat (the first instance of class struggle proper)
can we then retroactively construct “all previous history” as what
it always already was (the history of class struggle). Historicism,
alternatively, flattens out this dialectical paradox by reducing it to a linear
succession of “epochs.” Historicism, then, constructs a historical
narrative which is blind to its own retroactive nature. In the light of
historicity any event is radically contingent, the moment of choice often
disturbingly open and indeterminate; but in the light of historicism such
choices are woven into the narrative of Necessity and causation. Historicism is
then the mode proper to subjectivization, whereby the confrontation with the
Real (radical contingency) is avoided through the narrative, Symbolic
construction of History.