°History
Finishing off Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch for a review whose deadline is approaching faster than I’d hoped. But perhaps, if I have the time and inclination, something longer on epoche, subjectivity and historiography. Because aside from Federici’s account of the witch-hunts, the enclosures, the bloody legislation, the persistence of ‘primitive accumulation’, her critique of marxoid progressivism - all of which I’m more than sympathetic to and for that reason, for me at least, it will make for an uninteresting review -, I can’t seem to shake the voice of Walter Benjamin in the wings (he isn’t as far as I can tell, referenced by Federici). But there he is, whispering, or is it intoning: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Because it seems to me that this is exactly what Federici is doing.
