The History that Rescues and Redeems the Present

I ask myself in this text whether the figure of the setting out from the self –or, rather, the thought of experience- can untie the knot that is oppressing and obscuring present day scientific historiography, including the feminist historiography whose horizon of meaning is the principle of the equality of the sexes, that is, the history of gender. The knot of the light to which I refer consists of the fact that the feminist historiography of equality or of gender has not found, in order to express itself with originality, a new beginning, a beginning that might be its source of meaning, but that rather it has taken on as its own the beginning that belongs to western male historiography, a beginning that is of paternal genealogy, a genealogy that, since the erudite movement of the seventeenth century, has objectivity as its cornerstone. Not having found a new beginning has made the feminist historiography of equality or gender limit itself to repeating the already existing interpretations of the past, dialectically opposing to it human feminine experience, without opening up contradictions that might enrich and tune the vocabulary of the political; that is, without contributing to putting into words the conflicts between the sexes that can be documented in the present. Because of this, it has happened that the cry of pain, of protest and indignation given by the political movement of women in the nineteen sixties in the face of the absence of women in History, continues, thirty years later, in that historiography, with no more response than the corroboration of absence, which is the absence from the metanarratives and memory, not from documentation or from history. How to find a new beginning to the history that is written today? How to find in history a beginning that rescues and redeems me from traumas of the past such as the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, the disappeareances of women and men in dictatorships, the systematic rapes of women in many present day wars, including the rapes carried out by soldiers of the UN, of which my country is part? How to avoid revenge or political paralysis, keeping historical memory alive?