History as a modern discipline emerging out of the revolution in the "human sciences" in the 19th century, is that body of learning which maintains its formal attention with exclusive direction towards the past. The notion of the past, considered in its most narrow sense, is always conceived in such a manner as to bear upon some fixed time, an antecedent time in relation to the subject which by its nature presumes the contiguity of the past abstracted from its subject. To the degree however that we speak of "history" as an idea, and not within the narrower confines of its specific disciplinary meaning, "history" always bears upon itself the marks of the subjective encounters with which that history was written. Twin encounters, these mutually conflicting senses of the term "history" between discipline and idea emerges into a space of conflict precisely where the problem of the historical aspect of "History" is concerned. For what defines the former and is stamped upon its image as a birthmark from the legacies of historical positivism and historicism of the 19th century, is a strict and scientific concern with the axiom that all science ought, by its nature and method, to detach itself as completely as possible from any and all subjective impulses, that is, that its results should be reproducible in principle by any subject. Yet, what is absolutely critical to the latter, the notion of history in its expansive sense as an "idea", is precisely the confrontation of all history as existing within the "life" of a given community and, by its existence within that aspect of a life, its agonistic struggle with all those images of life that the self-accounting life must direct itself against. Conceptually, then, the idea of history is always defined by its primarily subjective origins, its account of the self-triumph of the subject from which it is written, and the categories of intelligibility within which that subject both announces itself, and describes itself, in a dual-triumph of both its presence and victory in the theatre of time, a triumph that simultaneously announces the finite destruction of possibility as it pertains to the self-account of the defeated subject that can never be written. And yet, it is precisely here that the contradiction in the concepts of history emerges; for it is the case that, pertaining to method, the disciplinary approach of "History" is always directed towards the appropriation and interpretation of primary and secondary sources pertaining to some given period, the nature of which is precisely their determination and definition not by "History" as a discipline, which implies their prior existence, but by history as the idea which drapes these sources in raiments unfamiliar to historical objectivity. For it is the case that every source, rather than simply appearing as a complete self-account of its own time, always carries within itself the aspect of a fundamental incompleteness, one that is inevitably derived from the fact of its own provenance in a subjective victory over the account that is not written. Every historical text (and every text more broadly speaking), furnishes the condition of its possibility in the transcendence of the infinite possibilities of the account with which the subject is always confronted by the definition of the finite that must be, just as it is the case that the emergence of the Sun at dawn for the sceptical philosopher always consists in the miraculous fact that the sun might not rise. In the sense of history as an idea then, the historical source (that is, the self-account of the historical subject) is always attended to by the wet-nurse of subjectivity within the arms of which its possibility is manifest. All history as an idea, then, exists historically, that is to say, it exists within a notion of time in which its contingency is always given.
By contrast, however, all "History", conceived in its disciplinary sense, we have already conceived to direct itself towards the elimination of the subject from historical writing. It is taken as an elementary proposition that, regardless of the preserved role of the "specialist" in some given historical period, their work, in principle and given the common availability of the sources from which they have drawn, ought to be of the kind that it is reproducible by any educated person in the domain of history. Any aspect of uniqueness in the domain of historical writing is thereby circumscribed from the domain of history as having been conducted in bad-taste. The degree to which this is common for all branches of modern disciplinary learning conducts itself beyond the purview of this essay, yet invariably it too maintains its own historical character traits. To the degree that "History" in this disciplinary sense marks itself by its relentless hunger for objectivity, it aims to categorically destroy any and all traces of that subjective impulse from which all history, as an idea, is born. In other words, it aims to make itself, as a disciplinary body, fundamentally "a historical", a fact that becomes the mark of objectivity itself.
Subsequently, at least for the most general understandings of history, it is the case that history declares the region of its vision to be that which exists in a-historical time, a-historical time being treated as kind of temporality in which the subjective agony which alone can give rise to history has disappeared. History, then, seeks the supercession of all history, it aims to mark itself in transcendence of history, and sees history as an idea only from the position of its end. Paradoxically however, it is this statement of supercession, this self-account of a subjective impulse that seeks to elevate its victory over opposing voices to declare itself to be beyond the limit of historical history, that precisely confirms itself as belonging ultimately to history as an idea. It is the statement of victory which, by the necessity of its invocation and the summoning of scribes to attend to its work, marks itself continuously in an invisible struggle in which the adequacy of its self-account is perpetually put to the test. The historical subject of modernity, by denying its historicity through the language of objectivity, inexorably runs up against the wall of its own existence before history. Today, this impulse manifests itself with most clarity in the contemplative reverie with which modern society composes itself against the self-manufactured process of its own destruction, which it first confronts as being calamitous, then sees as being inevitable, and finally declares to be objective. In this sense reification, a concept analysed with surgical precision by the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, has assumed evermore a place of sanctity in the tabernacle of the contemporary conscience. Yet, where reification confront us as inadequate is precisely where the immanent contradiction between "History" and history as an idea begins. If, as it has been considered, "History", whilst declaring itself to be a-historical only does so by wearing the proverbial "emperor's new clothes" of the end of history, then the naked truth of this statement consists in its own negation, that is, the words of a subject that, in the denial of its own subjectivity, ties itself to the mast of the sinking ship of the society that it sees as its own body. It is the words of a subject that will fight no more, not because the struggle has ceased, but rather because it declares that the struggle has ceased. History's end, announced as a universal formula, reveals itself to be the particular sentiment of a people who no longer recognise themselves as existing before history, and for whom subsequently history is at an end, not in the end of history, but in the end of themselves who so made "History" as the language in which they could give its account. The "end of history" is finally revealed, as if by revelation, to be the "end of "History", and with it, the resurrection of the historical not as a field of contemplation, but as an arena of contention between the resurrected spirits of the world.
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