"The Event and its Terrors: Memory, Transformation and Death in Accounts of the Irish Famine" by Stuart John McLean

Stuart John McLean

Deposited 1999

Abstract
This dissertation examines the proposition that historical knowledge in the modern West is founded upon the silencing and sublation of other modes of enunciation. In transmuting the presumed givens of historical fact into discursively knowable form, the historian is engaged in an enterprise whereby singularities and contingencies are recuperated as moments of a historical process, the implied teleology of which is seen to reside in the activity of autonomous human subjects. The assumption that history is to be understood as the unfolding of a humanly constructed project thus begs the question of how the human itself is to be defined. Moreover, it raises the spectre of the non-human as a disruptive alien presence within historiographical discourse, the repudiation of which is, arguably, the political price paid by historical understanding in securing its own authority and ascendancy. Focussing on the cultural forms through which death and catastrophe are imagined, in the Ireland of the 1840s and subsequently, it will be argued that the latter derive their power from an appeal to a collective past antecedent to symbolisation, the “prehistory” from which the modern subject struggles to detach itself, yet which continues to undergird the possibility of culture-making and historical agency. The rethinking of such categories as nature and history, the human and the non-human, therefore remains a task of overwhelming contemporary urgency, in so far as it offers the possibility of conceiving a politics and ethics no longer predicated on the hypostatising of culturally specific configurations of subjectivity.