Anna Krylova, Foucault, Poststructuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History” 

Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with poststructuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the “cultural turn,” and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography—without the help of such paramount concepts of poststructuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, etc.  Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the poststructuralist conceptual promise and outcome. This essay questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the essay asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of radical contingency and variability of the poststructuralist view of history but with something more fundamental to it—its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Bio:
Anna Yu. Krylova is an associate professor of modern Russian history at Duke University. She is the author of Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press, 2010), the winner of the 2011 AHA Herbert Baxter Adams Prize. She is currently finishing a collection of essays on historical theory and methodology. Her most recent publications include “Agency and History,” American Historical Review, June 2023; “Marx and the Many Lives of Marxism in 20th the 21st Centuries,” Social History, forthcoming 2023; “Legacies of the Cold War and the Future of Gender in Feminist Histories of Socialism,” in The Routledge International Handbook to Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (2021); “Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method,” Gender and History, August