Would history dwell in the fringe of life? Essay on the possibilities of the historical discipline improving its methods from other theoretical interactions that challenge disciplinary boundaries

Abstract

This article, written as an essay, discusses methodological limitations that, hypothetically, can be overcome by the theoretical interaction between psychoanalysis and gender studies. The starting point is the foreign look of psychoanalysis over
historical knowledge, regarding the problem of the subject of knowledge and how it is apprehended by history researchers. Then, from the approximation between psychoanalysis and history, with the contribution of historian Joan Scott, the argument unfolds in the examination of the importance of the incommensurability between these two pieces of knowledge for a critique of the anachronism in some conceptions that rule a history nowadays understood as a discipline. Finally, the reference to the studies of the philosopher Judith Butler intends to demonstrate the importance of theories of the formation of the subject as one of the ways of entering gender studies as a wide-impact theory of history, able to reconfigure the theoretical debates of the area in the XXI century.