Encounter, Agency and Feeling: Few Remarks on (the critique of) The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism and Andalucia (2020)

In a highly critical review of The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalucia (2020), Maribel Fierro writes,

Fierro characterizes The Feeling of History as “an odd book to review from an academic point of view, as it is really more of an ideological manifesto for what the author calls “Andalucismo” than an informed and balanced work of scholarship.”² However, as I do not want to repeat how scholarship, especially historical scholarship, should not be regarded as an exercise outside the ideological entanglements, my aim here is to explore the connection between history and emotion as vividly articulated in Hirschkind’s The Feeling of History and severely criticized by scholars like Maribel Fierro and Alejandro García-Sanjuán. In Alejandro García-Sanjuán’s scathing rebuttal of the The Feeling of History the distinction between emotion and history was made much more visible. He writes, “emotional envisionings of the past are radically opposed to the academic study of history: historical knowledge is built not on feelings but on documents, data, and sources.”³ In short, the criticisms of The Feeling of History, largely shared by certain historians of Spain, commonly operate in the distinction between history and emotions, the denial of which is foundational to Hirschkind’s book.⁴

The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalucia is a detailed exploration of the ways in which the medieval Muslim Iberia is lived, felt, and thought about by a group of people Hirschkind calls andalucistas. He describes andalucistas as a group consisting of historians, journalists, political activists, writers, artists, and musicians, who advocated for a connection between the medieval Muslim kingdoms of al-Andalus and present-day Andalusia. Andalucismo is a particular tradition that enables a certain ethical, political, and aesthetic connection between contemporary Andalusia and al-Andalus (medieval Islamic Iberia). The contemporary contour of Spanish nationalism performs an erasure of the past lived by andalucistas, according to Hirschkind. He writes, “The continuous erasure of this inheritance, its transformation into a museum piece by modern historical discourse, are ideological procedures designed to shore up Europe’s temporal and geographic borders”.⁵ Continuing, Hirschkind argues the task of the andalucistas is a kind of: “historical therapeutics, a reorientation of cultural and political subjectivity through an excavation of a buried past.”⁶ The academic history, according to Hirschkind, is not only a denial of such connections lived by andalucistas, but also an act of abstraction that chips into making it a monument stuck in the past. In order to tease this out, while broadening the connection between Andalusia and al-Andalus, Hirschkind demonstrates across four chapters the various artistic, architectural, biographic, and political repositories of andalucistas.

The first chapter revolves around the careers of twentieth- century Arabist and writer, Rodolfo Gil Benumeya, and the contemporary lawyer, Antonio Manuel Rodriguez, in order to make perceptible the geographic and the political imaginary of andalucistas. In the process, Hirschkind registers the geo-conceptual periphery of the tradition of Andalucismo. Towards the end of the chapter, Hirschkind examines the controversies surrounding the famous Mezquita-Catedral of Córdoba. He particularly notes how the church opposed the Muslim claims to a space of worship in the building by invoking Reconquista and making arrangements which eliminated all remaining Islamic signs from the building. In this episode, as Hirschkind identifies, modern Spain ingeminated a certain unity of the secular and the ecclesial.

The second chapter examines the debates stirred up by Emilio González Ferrín, a scholar of Islamic studies who argued that the history of the Muslim conquest of Spain was an invention of ninth-century Christian ideologues. Hirschkind is particularly concentrated on how González Ferrín situates Islam within the historical ecology of the myriad cultural subjects such as: “Jews, neo-Muslims, non-dogmatic Christian movements such as Nestorianism, Arianism, Donatism, Pricilianism drawn together by their common opposition to the dominant Trinitarian orthodoxy.”⁷ González Ferrín’s argument was developed in opposition to the popular and nationalistic portrayal of Muslims as invaders in Spanish history. The third chapter devotes its attention to flamenco and Arabo-Andalusi music in order to make visible the legacy of al-Andalus as variously present in contemporary Spain. These music traditions, Hirschkind observes, articulate a transgressive historical space. Hirschkind writes, “The ethical and aesthetic sensibilities it mobilizes work away at the barrier that exiles al-Andalus from contemporary Andalusia, setting in motion forms of attachment and belonging that rub up against the norms of Spanish and European identity”.⁸ In the final chapter, Hirschkind explores the remnants of the Muslim Spain that engrossed the city of Granada through the writings of Ángel Ganivet, Federico García Lorca, and Jośe Migual Puerta Vílchez. The city of Granada is framed here, apparent in Ganivet’s writings, as a chronotope of ruin and loss.⁹

As noted previously, several reviews of Hirschkind’s work were highly critical, but I argue that these provocations indicate how Hirschkind challenges the logic of historical scholarship. Furthermore, my own reading of The Feeling of History explores the connection between history, emotions and agency drawing upon the idea of ‘encounter’. I also demonstrate how History requires a theoretical abstraction that is clearly distinguished from emotions. In the process, I highlight the foundational challenge that Hirschkind undertakes against this conceptualization of History which is predicated on an abstraction and, by extension, elaborate on the concept of feeling.

Though not in the spirit in which Fierro and García-Sanjuán wrote, Patrick Eisenlohr, in a more sympathetic review of The Feeling of History, warned readers of the potential appropriation of history through feelings by right-wing groups everywhere. In a roundtable discussion of the book, Eisenlohr writes:

It is indeed unfair to read this note of warning alongside the articles by Fierro and García-Sanjuán, since Eisenlohr did not intend a programmed criticism of the book. Nevertheless, one could see that it does not lie fully outside the concerns that constitute the historical sensibility that Fierro and García-Sanjuán share. These common concerns indicate the discipline’s fear of objective scholarship being contaminated by an emotional engagement with the past. What does constitute an emotional engagement with the past? Hirschkind writes, “but the past that andalucistas find themselves to inhabit, feel themselves passionately compelled to acknowledge, does not anchor a pregiven identity so much as unsettle the grounds on which existing identity formations rest.”¹¹ In other words, an engagement with the past in a passionate way can also disturb the grounds on which identities reiterate themselves.

Before elaborating on the point about the emotional engagement with the past further, it is worth examining a critical response from Fierro on the same. After citing the exact same sentence, he writes:

This reminder of Hirschkind’s article on the case of Nasr Hāmid Abū Zayd here is timely, since in that article Fierro might find Hirschkind’s response to his own complaint.¹³ In my reading, Hirschkind’s core argument in “Heresy or Hermeneutics” is that Hāmid Abū Zayd’s approach to Quran was based on a certain historicist spirit, as Abū Zayd isolates Quran as a ‘readable text’, or perhaps as a signifier subject to historical agency, from the tradition of how to read and live Quran.¹⁴ Reducing this argument made by Hirschkind to an assumption of identity that was posed against historical interpretation that unsettles the grounds of such identities is no less than groundless. Hirschkind claims that the past that andalucistas inhabit is particularly capable of unsettling the grounds of existing identities. This is not only important in the context of Spanish nationalism founded at the erasure of such a past, but also shows the capacity of the “past” to “unsettle”. Moreover, it also demonstrates the capacity of andalucistas to be affected and unsettled by that “past”. A historicist approach that focuses on the stories of the past may be unable to make sense of how the “past” affects and unsettles the “present” and vice versa. Ananda Abeysekara calls it “encounter”.¹⁵ Hirschkind quotes Abeysekara here, writing: “the question of how one remembers the past is a question of how one encounters temporality within the sensibilities of the present. That encounter of temporality is not merely a subjective experience of history; it is an encounter with the conditions of power”.¹⁶

The encounter of temporality should not be misconstrued as meaning that the encounter takes place between a subject and a time that is commonly characterized as past, but also, and this is important, the subject encounters the “past” within its own temporality which is constituted within existing conditions of power. This is why Abeysekara makes it clear that: “the temporality of religion cannot be easily understood without a consideration of the temporality of sensibilities that constitute a form of life. The temporality of sensibilities constitutes, in effect, the sensibilities of temporality; the sensibilities are modes of encountering and inhabiting the present’s relation to past and the future.”¹⁷ A reconsideration of the past in this way presses us to find a specific form of life that is lived, and instructs subjects to live in a way that cannot be captured by the logic of historical scholarship. This is why Eisenlohr’s scholarly anxiety about “feeling” and “history” is not to be addressed in a way in which “feeling” and “reason” still sustain as pre-inscribed ontologies. In other words, Hirschkind’s idea of “feeling” is not a particular ontology as separated from reason, instead, it is a form of encountering a temporality of sensibilities. To feel, in this scheme, means, to be affected. To be passionate about the past means, in this context, preparing oneself to listen to the sensibilities of temporality. On the other hand, right-wing groups, ethnonationalists and fascists such as Spanish nationalists in Spain and Hindutva groups in India, capitalize on a specific objectification of the past, which can be articulated and claimed in the present, which is in a sense, a secular approach to the past as it clearly operates in the abstraction of history. This is concretely different from “feeling”, as conceived by Hirschkind and understood by Abeysekara with his notion of “encounter”. This is not to reassure Eisenlohr nor to respond to Fierro and García-Sanjuán’s programmed criticism, rather it is to make visible how the scholarly geography in which Hirschkind operates is radically different from his critics.

The usual argument about identity is that while being consolidated by the past it presupposes an understanding of identity as a subject that is independent of the sensibilities of the time, yet is able to affect, author, and own time which is conceived in a particular way. This is a conventional conceptualization of agency, that is largely inspired by subaltern studies scholarship, which is criticized by Talal Asad. In Genealogies, Asad writes:

Note that Asad here corners the conception of the ‘author that narrates’ rather than the ‘author that authorizes’. This distinction is important to understand his critique of agency. Because, “authorization”, as Abeysekara tells us, following Asad,¹⁹ requires a sustained force of power within a tradition. Power authorizes, as well as is authorized, within a particular tradition. An authorization of power is quite different from an individual authoring a narrative. The latter is a presupposition that is at the heart of the conception of agency. This conceptualization of agency of which Asad and Abeysekara are equally critical, also presupposes a coherent, linear, and unbroken connection between subject and action (therefore the subject’s action). In other words, the apostrophe of s in the subject’s action here makes possible a linear and unbroken connection whereby a claim that puts author over her action. In other words, the action is imagined to be already in possession of the author.

This conceptualization of agency of the subject is distinct from “authorization” in which a power enables/is enabled by an action in a tradition. Abeysekara helps us discern this more clearly when he writes elsewhere:

Distinguishing between authorization/capacity/power and agency is significant and therefore a narrative of the past that is singularly (or collectively) authored by an agent(s) is only predicated upon the assumption of a coherent and unbroken connection between subject and action. A conception of “encounter” is therefore an insistence on the ambivalent and contingent mediation between action and subject; in fact, sometimes, the subject is a (product of) action, as Asad argues. Even if one wants to think of this connection as coherent enough, she must have an understanding of a specific discourse that provides/authorizes such connections in the given circumstance. The capacity that Abeysekara draws does not imply an action attributed to a subject, but it is a product of a specific tradition, which is a temporality of power. As Abeysekara says, “capacity, as a form of power, which always presupposes a form of life; that is to say, the capacity to know, feel, and do something, for example, does not exist in a vacuum but is part of a way of living in a tradition”.²¹ A tradition, or a temporality of power, enables a subject to act in specific ways, thus traditions make the connection between subject and action coherent in specific circumstances. Similarly, an encounter affects sensibilities of temporality in which the subject’s capacity to act is transformed. That change also involves altering the existing conditions of power and horizon of time the subject inhabits.

Now, I want to return to the question of andalucistas. One can see how andalucistas in Granada transforms or challenges the existing conditions of power by way of listening to a past that is too strenuous to listen to for the narratives of the present. Hirschkind writes by way of drawing on Wittgenstein:

While one may find uncomfortable Hirschkind’s use of “reality” as he talks about language, it is helpful to keep in mind how reality is not fully outside the domain of time that enables one to speak to that “reality” within the limits of that time. Hirschkind, drawing on Stephen Mulhall, suggests that such force of reality at times makes us incomprehensible to others as well as to ourselves. Hirschkind continues: “it is this incomprehension, I want to suggest, that we encounter in the rhetoric and poetics of Andalucismo. In such instances, what may be needed, Wittgenstein suggests, is not explanation but something more like presentation—a way of allowing things to be seen and grasped for what they are and mean to us”.²³ This is what Abeysekara, following Asad, calls “capacity” which should not be misconstrued as “agency”. The problem with the anxieties over feelings, as we found in Fierro and García-Sanjuán, as well as in Eisenlohr, is that those anxieties emanate from a misconception of the subject as someone who stands over the past, or who already surpassed the past, and now stands in the relief (or the horror) of the present.

The tradition of Andalucismo on the other hand demands an “attunement”²⁴ of the subject. Attunement here refers to a cultivated capacity to listen and, thereby, allow the past to challenge and alter the conditions of power by which the subject is produced. Hirschkind calls this act of encounter feeling. The notion of history that Fierro and García-Sanjuán put forth in their critique²⁵ of Hirschkind’s book is based on the distinction between “feeling” and “reason” as the disciplinary requirement of historical scholarship. It is no less than the understanding of history of this kind that triggers the anxiety about the “ethnonationalist and fascist politics relying on feelings of history”.²⁶ Finally, ending his book with a poignant parallel with mirror therapy Hirschkind appears to draw from Jesus Armesto’s Las llaves de la memoria (2016) and Kader Attia’s Réfléchir la mémoire (2016). Hirschkind writes:

This parallel with mirror therapy positions the andalucistas in a geography of loss, yet seeks an encounter in order for themselves to feel the lost limb. The feeling of the phantom limb is the feeling of history as a construction of the sensibility of the loss and for the past. To sense the loss, one must feel what was lost. The loss is therefore constitutive of the sense of the past. This is not to understand the andalucistas permanently dispossessed of the past and placed in a perpetual state of grief; rather, by attempting to capture it into the present: one performs an act that is rebellious and melancholic at the same time. The idea of “encounter” cannot find a better parallel!