Formulation of the claim
Positivist historicity is unable to recover lived reality in its density.
Explanation
Arkoun here criticizes the mere reliance on archives and facts as if it were a sufficient path to understanding history. The problem is not the gathering of historical material, but the assumption that what documents have preserved alone reveals human experience as it was lived.
This critique shows that what was subjected to censorship or remained unspoken still constitutes part of historical reality, even if it is not available in the written record. For this reason, a positivist reading does not restore the density of lived reality, because it confines history to what could be written down and preserved.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom falls within Arkoun’s objection to approaches that reduce history to data that can be collected and described only. It supports his broader thesis about the need to go beyond a reading that confines itself to the documentary surface, toward a wider understanding of what is formed in historical experience through silence, the forbidden, and the unsaid.
Limits of the claim
This critique does not mean rejecting the archive or diminishing the value of historical facts, but rather refusing to make them the sole criterion of understanding. Nor should the claim be burdened with more than it can bear in terms of precise methodological detail beyond this passage.