Death of the king, incorporation of power and historical representation: between a poetics of absence and a poetics of knowledge?

Abstract

The present article analyzes studies about themes such as the death of the king, the ways for incorporating power and the forms of historical representation. These serve as a starting point for a reflection about historiography as a form of discourse characterized by certain poetic configuration and by its fundaments as rites of remembrance. The first aspect relates it to political imagination and the second one to practices through which man attributes sense to demands by belonging to imaginary collective bodies. Despite the dialogue established with diverse authors, such as Louis Marin, Claude Lefort and Mona Ozouf, the interrogations by Jacques Rancière about a «poetics of knowledge» and by Fernando Catroga about a «poetics of absence» become central.