Many present and past graduate students of the History of Consciousness program met over the weekend last week. They celebrated Donna Haraway’s retirement, the end of the year, and the unusual intellectual and political enterprise that goes under this beautiful name, history of consciousness.

I am thinking about History of Consciousness with Taubes, i.e. at the borders, or from the borders (*From cult to culture. Fragments toward a critique of historical reason,* Stanford, 2010). Dissolving borders. HoC was long a non-program (NOBrown: “There is no history of consciousness” in a letter to CF, if I remember correctly). Last week, we were asked, or we asked each other, a couple of seemingly simple questions: what brought you to HoC? i.e. a question on the existential ground of the individual which became a question on the Zeitgeist. What brought me? Circumstances? But the Hegelian Geist, I recognize, was hiding behind a going to Israel, meeting someone, following that person to the US, thankfully to a place with an ocean west of oneself rather than east, then come to UCSC. From my perspective just a place like any other, where you put your sack down. Not this anecdotally countercultural place that some thought it was. There was also a longer history: a sense of place (Brittany, the mad Celtic fringe) and time (the Augustinian map), language(s), of being beyond the old state-church conundrum, finding a *beruf*, call and service, early questions on the role of institutions, including the state and the church etc… Eventually my reactions to what was going on in Rennes university in 1969-71 and the political orientation of students there, leading to a secularized form of “churchyness” by going to Israel to learn Hebrew, after having been “dislocated” by two years in 1966-68 in East Jerusalem where I discovered the Palestinian question, political analysis, and reporting, through the likes of Eric Rouleau. HoC was no surprise, a natural lightness of being.

Second question: has HoC had an effect on your life (work) since? Historicizing question. HoC would have to exist as a weighty, institutional object to weigh on things and have an effect or effects, the stuff glory or re-puta-tion is made of. One hundred fifty graduates or so, some school presidents, writers, film makers, books, i.e. something inscribable and worthy of memorials. Of a theology too. Influences…. We are talking of a spiritual event à la Hegel or Taubes, a wind or breath, which you don’t know whence it comes and where it goes… I don’t want to name it. Memories? In my case, one is of Bateson drawing a squiggly line on the blackboard and asking us to describe it in a short writing exercise, or throwing a paper-wrapped crab on the table and asking us to reflect on life: how did we know that it had been alive?

No name. Hist Con artist as that crab today. Is there, was there a HoC? No, according to NOB, yes according to students, especially the more recent ones, involved in something like sociology of knowledge.

Last thing: part of the impulse for this memorializing was to react against any perception that the early period of the program (pre-1978?) had been something without being or spirit. It did have life, and then even more with HWhite, JClifford, DHaraway, FJameson for some time, TdeLauretis, ADavis, etc. Before 1978, it had been a student-directed collective at times, there were many conversations among students and faculty, some extraordinary seminars, and of course no expectation to have a career in academia or at least it was not the first line of thought.