THE HISTORIOGRAPHIC PERVERSION
The Times Higher Education Supplement
November 26, 2009
BYLINE: Piotr A. Cieplak
SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. 50 No. 1924
The Historiographic Perversion. By Marc Nichanian. Translated by Gil
Anidjar. Columbia University Press. 216pp, £ 20.50 ISBN 9780231149082
Published 20 October 2009
While the mass killings of the Armenians in 1915, which claimed more
than 1 million lives, have been recognised as a genocide by many
historians and more than 20 governments around the world, there is
still a great deal of controversy surrounding the nature of the event,
the terminology that should be used to discuss it, and issues of guilt
and responsibility. Turkey’s refusal to recognise and acknowledge the
Ottoman Empire’s genocidal will and the fact that the term "genocide"
implies not only victims but clearly defined perpetrators, means that
debates on the event have been influenced by a variety of national
and global political interests.
Marc Nichanian’s The Historiographic Perversion is not a
straightforward polemic about the nature of The Catastrophe, as the
Armenian genocide is often referred to. Instead, the book looks at
the tragedy in the context of more fundamental issues about the use
and significance of historical evidence as well as raising questions
about what constitutes historical reality and what is a historical,
or indeed any other, fact.
Nichanian takes the widely publicised controversy in France about
the Armenian genocide as his starting point. In 1994, Bernard Lewis,
a renowned American historian, appeared before a French civil court
accused of denying the genocide. Nichanian writes: "In short, a state
court was asking a historian to give an account of his conception of
truth in history. What a scandal!" The second event that Nichanian
considers in conjunction with the trial is the case of another
historian, Gilles Veinstein, whose election to the College de France
was marred by accusations of negationism in relation to the articles
he had written in Lewis’ defence.
Nichanian’s analysis of the trial, the controversy and their impact
on the public and intellectual circles is, however, only a part of
a much wider inquiry. The premise of The Historiographic Perversion
revolves around the aforementioned question of what constitutes a
historical fact and who should have the final say in determining its
veracity; a historian or a court of law, or perhaps neither? Nichanian
writes that the cases of Lewis and Veinstein "made it possible for
me to understand that an event could fail to be a fact and that new
categories were necessary in order to think (of) the ‘genocides’
of the 20th century together with the unsettling events that have
accompanied and followed them".
Those accompanying and following events are of special interest in The
Historiographic Perversion. Reaching beyond issues of negationism or
responsibility, Nichanian provides a perceptive and complex exploration
of the significance of the archive, especially the destruction of the
archive as an integral part of the genocidal will, and the role and
place of testimony in the legal, historical and cultural evidential
framework that defines an event, historical and otherwise.
The Historiographic Perversion is impressively well informed and
engaged theoretically. Translated by Gil Anidjar, it is an extremely
competent, eloquent and beautifully written work. Sometimes the
theoretical complexity of the argument becomes confusing, but it
never prevents the author’s message from getting through. A powerful
and personal book, it displays, through its evocative brilliance and
discipline of logic, Nichanian’s long-lasting engagement with the
significance and context of the Armenian genocide.
Piotr A. Cieplak is a doctoral researcher in the department of French,
University of Cambridge.