Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguis-tic Turn

This essay examines what remains of the Linguistic turn (LT) after Hay-den White, in the two meanings of the preposition “after”: “subsequent to” and “according to”. For White, the LT (under the umbrella of post-modernism) has made it possible to transcend a number of distinctions, such as those between text and context, fact and fiction, and history and literature. Those distinctions, however, are still defended by a large part of the historical community, including by scholars involved in exper-imental works, such as I. Jablonka. Furthermore, some philosophers hold the debates about the LT to be irrelevant. The specificity of history, for them, does not reside in its formal aspects (e.g., its use of narra-tive), but in its relations to evidence. History, like all scientific disciplines, must validate its statements, namely, establish that they are well founded and justified.