UNSPECIFIED. (2001) Before the dogcatcher's van: History and subjectivity in Francis Barker. TEXTUAL PRACTICE, 15 (3). pp. 431-446. ISSN 0950-236X

Abstract

In this article, I offer an overview of the work of Francis Barker, paying particular attention to his diagnosis and critique of modern (bourgeois) subjectivity. I examine Barker's commentary on the violence that attended the birth of the modern, and on the continuing implications of that violence in the era of modernity. I am especially interested in the politics of remembrance in Barker's work (his attempt to think through the question of what it means today that so many people were killed on state authority in the passage to modernity) and in his discussion of the ways in which, through means of a socially sanctioned form of forgetting called 'tradition', the ineluctable violence of culture has typically been occluded. In analysing the politics of remembrance and of forgetting in Barker's work, I situate his writing alongside that of Theodore W. Adorno (above all in Negative Dialectics) and Walter Benjamin (in his 'Theses on the philosophy of history').

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