A leading intellectual member of France's Freudian school, Michel de Certeau combined principles from the disciplines of religion, history, and psychoanalysis in order to redefine historiography and rethink the categories of history. In The Writing of History, de Certeau examines the West's changing conceptions of the very role and nature of history itself, from the seventeenth-century attempts to formulate a "history of man" to Freud's Moses and Monotheism with which de Certeau interprets historical practice as a function of mankind's feelings of loss, mourning, and absence. Exhaustively researched and stunningly innovative, The Writing of History is a crucial introduction to de Certeau's work and is destined to become a classic of modern thought.
Introduction: Writings and Histories Part 1: Productions of Places 1. Making History: Problems of Method and Problems of Meaning 2. The Historiographical Operation Part II. Productions of Time: A Religious Archeology Introduction: Questions of Method 3. The Inversion of What Can Be Thought: Religious History in the Seventeenth Century 4. The Formality of Practices: From Religious Systems to the Ethics of the Enlightenment ( the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) Part III: Systems of Meaning: Speech and Writing 5. Ethno-Graphy: Speech, or the Space of the Other , by Jean de Lery 6. Language Altered: The Sorcerer's Speech 7. A Variant: Hagio-Graphical Edification Part IV. Freudian Writing 8. What Freud Makes of History: "A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis" 9. The Fiction of History: The Writing of Moses and MonotheismIndex
