Starting with the experience of the Community of “Living History” initiated by Marirì Martinengo, this article reflects on the epistemological and political intertwinings of history, historiography and political narratives.
“Stories play a very important role in History. A dialectical and profoundly political role: it is through the wide meshes of the narrated stories that the new, the “never-happened”, the unexpected and the “unprecedented” can be told, and thus change the categories of official History. The “unrepresentable” according to traditional categories becomes “representable”, thus understandable.
To reconnect History to stories is to unbalance toward the resistance to the centripetal force of ideological narratives – narratives that tend to close on a single absolutizing official History. On the contrary, if one considers official History as a fixed and conservative linearity that follows pre-established categories, and stories, the fruit of particular narratives, as the centrifugal multiplicity that transcends categories and welcomes the inexplicable, a History balanced between these two poles can emerge. A dialectical relationship, a reciprocal interweaving of identity and novelty, of conservation and change. Stories are part of History’s engine of change. They are what introduces novelty into preestablished narratives and forces the creation of new categories for understanding reality.
According to the Community of Living History, this action of rapprochement starts through the “starting from oneself” political practice. It means to give the word to the “guts” (las entrañas, as María Zambrano writes), to find the “words of silence” that can speak for the new historical subject: the woman and the truth inherent in her experience. Interweaving macro-history and micro-history, bringing the great narratives back to singular experiences, showing the back of the fabric, leaving holes and openings, making History traversable by people and the present, by the “new”.”
Originally published as:
C. Diotto, Una nuova pratica della Storia. Riflessioni su ‘La Spirale del Tempo. Storia vivente dentro di noi’ della Comunità della Storia vivente di Milano, Per Amore del Mondo n. 16 – 2019 Passaggio in altro, ISSN 2384-8944.
Photographer: Jocelyn Hsu (2021)
Caterina Diotto 