On the Leviathan history
The stories that inhale laughing gas
Since the emergence of the biopolitique Westphalian nation-state, which killed God and replaced Him with itself, the interest in history and antiquities has been one of the most obvious distinctions between it and the types of states and forms of governance that preceded it. This interest was largely perceived as an attempt to commune with the spirit -Hegelian- of the ancestors (specifically the post-metaphysical invocation), which is a biopolitique act upon history and nation. Then -in a dramatic reversal- it became no longer acceptable to say that al-Ma’mun, as al-Mas’udi relates, tampered with the pyramids and dug into them, a story that will dismay most admirers of the “House of Wisdom”.
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The problem begins with the fact that human beings are selective in their memory and, in their unconscious, are biased toward their happy moments -even if this means magnifying victories, whether useless or even, in some manner, defeats. Yet the problem grows bigger when we observe those tasked with understanding this “spirit.” These individuals generally introduce exclusionary and class-based ideological dimensions, grounded invisibly in their understanding, alongside a modernist conception of these antiquities, adding to the account that the care of history and antiquities requires a level of education and economic welfare -given that any job in the antiquities field does not suffice to yield a decent material return (excluding, of course, the antiquities trade), it would be easy to assume that these strata would most often consist of the urban bourgeois intelligentsia, influential in decision-making and possessing transnational metropolitan connections, who -regardless of their religious and cultural perspectives- would, on the basis of the traits mentioned above, possess a specific understanding of history and antiquities that renders their class repeatedly, and a vast portion of practically invoked history the history of their class and people, biased toward its interests, whether deliberately or inadvertently. The outcome, then -if we add the evident Orientalist influence- would be a comprehensive distortion, consigning dissenters to oblivion and silencing them ethically.
The point here is that this deliberate distortion of history resembles election-campaign propaganda more than it resembles critical postmodern authoritarian studies. It is easy for any researcher to know that the matter is not how it has been written in official books, nor is it a Rousseauian dream; and it does not require an earthquake in Lisbon for us to ascertain that history has been coloured -tragically- with a Candidesque irony.
