A Theory of History Issue? Reassessing Denialism Through a Brief Reading of Jacques Rancière

The effort to offer truthful narratives about the past, based on documentary evidence and methodological guidance, involves identifying the assumptions present in historiographical practice. However, the persistence of negationist positions calls for reassessing this problem from a different angle than the one used in our usual practice.

One of the possible ways of telling a history of historiography would be to list its crises, which is to say a history of the moments when the discipline was challenged regarding both its epistemic foundations as well as the knowledge it produces. In our time, historians have constantly faced increasingly organised forms of discourse that either deny or banalise certain events from the past. A history of contemporary denialism should consider its transnational character, as well as the wide range of actors involved in it, the processes by which it circulates – especially in digital media – and the responses produced by the community of historians.¹ This text reflects on this last aspect in particular.

The challenge of dealing with historical negationists has left behind an extensive bibliography in many languages, providing intellectual nourishment to successive generations of historians in the debates surrounding notions of truth, historical fact, and the representation of the past. An attempt to historicise this production would certainly include, among its milestones, the fundamental texts represented by Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s reply to Robert Faurisson – the most widely known French denialist who, in the late 1970s, became unexpectedly famous after being published in the pages of Le Monde.² Up to that point, attempts to rehabilitate Nazism by denying Hitler’s crimes were concentrated in small groups and marginal publications. With Faurisson, the phenomenon could no longer be ignored.

Vidal-Naquet understood his task to be at once methodological and ethical. With respect to methodology, in his words the task was to seek out the “terrain of positive history”, or the ground which, in Ranke’s terms, should be assessed based on fidelity to the facts exactly as they occurred, in which truthfulness opposes falsehood independent of any interpretation.³ Such emphasis would help deconstruct negationist arguments and expose their lies. With respect to ethics, the French historian rejected the moral possibility of debating with negationists, since no discussion would be possible when the basic principles of intellectual honesty and respect for truth are blatantly violated. One should participate in debates on negationism by dissecting its lies, but should never debate with negationists. Vidal-Naquet’s reply therefore assumes the twin aspects of incontestable attestation and moral protest.⁴

Discussions with or on negationists have never constituted a well-defined frontier, despite Vidal-Naquet’s warnings. More lasting were his appeals that the fallacies and lies expressed by Holocaust deniers could be systematically dismantled by reasserting documentary proof and the value of the historical method. Such history-based rationality was also widely applied to the scrutiny of many other forms of historical negationism professed by groups on the far right across the globe. However, negationist uses of the past and its falsifications have seemingly risen to unprecedented levels in recent decades, and lending clear importance to diagnosing the emergence of a widespread crisis of truth.⁵ 

As Berel Lang has shown, it is precisely the persistence of the negationist position that requires reassessing the problem from an angle that is different than our usual practice. For Lang, the task involves considering the “dense” meaning of negationism from both a rhetorical and epistemological standpoint, “attempting to locate the phenomenon in the field of historical discourse in relation to facts, counterfacts and questions ignored or slighted in their substructure – including moral assumptions”.⁶ His proposal subsequently considers the problem of negationism as something more than a moral insult.

Such a “distinct angle” is also characteristic of Jacques Rancière’s work, whose reception among historians has always been controversial.⁷ The same would be true of his reflections on negationism, which are firstly linked to a complex analysis of the nihilism so present in contemporary political imagination. In short, according to the French philosopher, our time relies on a fragile democratic repertoire, in which the forms of political subjectivation by those “without a part” are constantly annulled due to the prevalence of a generic concept of humanity. This is our possible realism, and realism is, above all, “a specific form of discernment according to which only what may be constituted as a possibility deserves the status of a reliable entity”.⁸ The state of contemporary politics – and of our political science and philosophy – would therefore be perfectly in keeping with the revisionism that posits the “admissible real only as the actualisation of something possible”.⁹ According to Rancière, what is denounceable today is, at best, the illusion of the event, which is to say the illusion of the advent of something impossible.

And how does a genocide become unthinkable? Holocaust denialists, Paul Rassinier in particular, have resorted to the “classical sophist paradoxes of unending enumeration and division ad infinitum”.¹⁰ In other words, the issue at hand was repeatedly questioning the intellectual authorship and materiality of the extermination, thereby rendering the genocide itself non-existent, since one could always argue for the effective absence of a particular link in its chain – and even if all links were available, one could argue for the impossibility of their concatenation. As a result, the sequence of causes and effects would remain incomplete, and the Holocaust could not be demonstrated as an objective process originating from a subjective will.

According to Rancière, denialism asserts its strength with each document refuting the Holocaust and challenging its reality. As a matter of fact, there is a direct relation. How could one otherwise explain the fact that negationist arguments are bolstered as false evidence is unmasked? According to Rancière, this is because they touch “the very regime of belief, according to which a series of facts is established as a singular event, and as an event subsumed in the category of the possible”.¹¹ Historians have never been able to provide a response for this instrument of negationist discourse. Rancière also draws attention to yet another aspect: “The impossibility of establishing the event of extermination in its totality is supported by the impossibility of thinking the extermination as belonging to the reality of one’s time”.¹² The concatenation of doubts regarding the causes of the genocide could never be consolidated as a “single sufficient principle of reason”, since such reason would be taken for something not from our time¹³ Having reached the end of such concatenation, historians would find themselves standing before the question that binds the whole process to the time of the possible: would modern, industrial rationality, which belongs to the 20^th century, admit that a major state had indulged in the mass destruction of a group it considered to be a foe?

Here, we enter another area in Rancière’s reflections on history, which is the topic of anachronism, or the premise that an event is only thinkable in its own time. We know how much this topic has been presented as an unavoidable rule in historical practice, an attestation of methodological accuracy, in short, a cornerstone of the disciplinary stronghold. But it also represents an organicist sociological truth, which postulates that society is a body governed by common mentalities and beliefs. Hence, “the necessary adhesion of all individual thought to the common regime of beliefs of their epoch became merely the empty space of a negative ontological argument: what is not possible according to one’s time is impossible”.¹⁴

It is therefore not surprising that negationists argue that our modern reason would be an obstacle to the idea of mass extermination by an industrial state. Historians find themselves in the dilemma of not being able to fully refute this untruthful argument, because they are unable to refute the idea of truth sustaining it. We are subsequently faced with a problem that goes beyond negationist perversity. Rancière concludes, rather disconcertingly, that this provides an explanation for laws prohibiting denial in many countries. They act as a form of delegation: such laws perform the refutation that historians are unable to provide.

Rancière’s criticism of responses to negationism by the historian community is undoubtedly characterised by the record of its specificity, in the forms through which the so-called New History of the Annales reflected on the notion of event, as well as its record in the course of time as a possibility. Transferring such criticism to other intellectual and political spaces in which contemporary forms of negationism are proliferating would lead to countless risks, which any cautious analyst should avoid. On the other hand, the French philosopher explores certain aspects in the work of historians, which are not always explicitly visible, and helps us grasp the underlying structure of negationist arguments. As Hayden White¹⁵ and others have stressed, such structure entails not only mobilising expertise from the historiographical field itself, but also applying a scientific varnish to lies regarding the past. As I see it, the essential feature that we may extract from Rancière’s criticism is that the central problem that negationist fallacies pose for historians resides in our “own mode of belief in the real, in which our politics and science are implied”.¹⁶ This is not connected to any inability to provide evidence or elements to refute such lies. It instead involves the problem that negationism as a way of thinking rests on the same rationality of learned historical science. Looking at the negationist phenomenon without dismissing it as sheer bad faith or disinformation may also avoid the perverse logic identified by Marc Nichanian¹⁷, namely that readily complying with the denialist rhetoric of providing evidence for the rejected truth. Above all, it could lead to enhanced self-reflection along the path to building narratives of the past, which may be better guided both in theoretical and epistemological terms.

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Alexandre Avelar is a Professor at the Federal University of Uberlândia (Brazil), as well as a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). His fields of research are intellectual history and the philosophy of history. He recently published the article: “Arlette Farge,” Bloomsbury Theory: History & Method – Key Thinkers (2024).

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1. Berber Bevernage, “Denial in the Age of Apologie: Some Reflection on Recent Trends in Historical Denialism,” South Central Review 39, no. 2-3 (2022), 44-59. [↩]
2. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les assassins de la mémoire. “Un Eichmann de papier” et autres essais sur le révisionnisme. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1987. [↩]
3. Ibid., 30. [↩]
4. Paul Ricouer, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil, 2000, 334. [↩]
5. See Gil Eyal, The crisis of expertise. Cambridge, New York: Polity Press, 2019; Keith Kahn-Harris, Denial. The unspeakable truth. Mirefoot, Kendal, Cumbria: Notting Hill Editions, 2018; Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018; Marius Gudonis et al. (eds), History in a post-truth world. New York and London: Routledge, 2021; Steven Shapin, “Is there a crisis of truth?,” Los Angeles Review of Books (02.12.2019), URL: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/is-there-a-crisis-of-truth/ (28.02.2024). [↩]
6. Berel Lang, “Six questions on (or about) Holocaust denial,” History and Theory 49, no. 2 (2010), 158. [↩]
7. Jacques Rancière, “Entretien”, Le Grand Continent, URL: https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2024/02/09/jacques-ranciere-et-lhistoire-volume-1 and https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2024/02/09/jacques-ranciere-et-lhistoire-volume-2 (02/05/2024). [↩]
8. Jacques Rancière, “Os enunciados do fim e do nada,” in Políticas da escrita. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2017, 269-300, here 281. [↩]
9. Ibid., 283. [↩]
10. Jacques Rancière, “Politics in its nihilistic age,” in Disagreement: politics and philosophy. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999, 123-140, here 128. [↩]
11. Ibid., 129. [↩]
12. Ibid., 131. [↩]
13. Ibid. [↩]
14. Ibid., 132. [↩]
15. Hayden White, “The politics of historical interpretation: discipline and de-sublimation,” in The content of the form: narrative discourse and historical interpretation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, 58-82. [↩]
16. Jacques Rancière, “Os enunciados do fim e do nada”, 286. [↩]
17. Marc Nichanian, La perversion historiographique: une réflexion arménienne. Paris: Lignes, 2006. [↩]

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