The Writing of History

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.

Michel de Certeau taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris and at the University of California, San Diego, where he was also chairman of the literature department. He authored over a dozen books, including The Mystical Fable, Heterologies: Discourses on the Other, and The Practice of Everyday Life. Tom Conley, Professor of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, is the author of Film Hieroglyphics and The Graphic Unconscious. He has also translated Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.