Forms of historicity

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger.

The end of revolution. The transformation in the conception and way of living the making of history in the Italian social movements of the 70s

This article focuses on the Italian social movements of the 70s in order to grasp a crucial transformation in the conception as well as in the way of living the making of History. This transformation consists in the crisis of the 20th-century idea of «Revolution» like a horizon of expectation. The author points out three major factors contributing to such a transformation. First, the change in the conception of «working class», which is observed in the various components of the Operaism. Second, the rise of the Feminist principle «the personal is political» far beyond the Feminism movement. Third, the criticism and new articulation of the equivalence between power and government bodies. As the author underlines, this transformation is far from being linear. This is what he shows by analyzing the controversial status of the political violence with reference to the riots and their political interpretations in this horizon characterized by the crises of the 20th-century idea of «Revolution». Finally, the author examines the contemporary debates occasioned by the most important political pop festival of the decade - the «Parco Lambro» (Milano, 1976) - and the contradictions that this event brought to light.

L’articolo si concentra sui movimenti sociali italiani degli anni Settanta per cogliere un momento cruciale della trasformazione del modo di pensare e vivere il farsi della storia. Tale trasformazione prende la forma del venir meno dell’idea novecentesca di rivoluzione come orizzonte d’attesa. In particolare l’autore individua tre luoghi prioritari di questa trasformazione: l’evoluzione della concezione della classe operaia, ciò che è colto nell’eterogenea area dell’operaismo, l’imporsi del principio femminista «il personale è politico», l’articolazione di un’idea di potere che supera l’equivalenza fra potere e organi dello Stato. L’autore sottolinea anche quanto la trasformazione del modo di pensare e vivere il farsi della storia non sia lineare, ma attraversata da contraddizioni: a questo fine si sofferma sul controverso statuto della violenza politica, quale emerge nel caso specifico degli scontri di piazza e delle loro interpretazioni politiche in questo orizzonte caratterizzato dal venire meno dell’idea novecentesca di rivoluzione. Infine l’autore analizza i dibattiti contemporanei sul più importante festival musicale e politico del decennio, parco Lambro (Milano 1976), e sulle contraddizioni che questo evento portò alla luce.

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Post-Ottoman temporal topologies—cases where the past, present, and future may be bent around one another rather than ordered linearly—may produce uncanny histories. The uncanny is activated , as Freud noted, when something secret comes to light, but also when the expectations of a given genre are exceeded. In these cases, the genre of historicism has been violated. Rather than contending that the post-Ottoman world is entirely different from Western Europe, the examples here alert one to the presence of uncanny histories in many other places since historicism has nowhere managed to eradicate its alternatives. Unsettled pasts of violence and displacement and presents beset by ongoing tensions (political, economic, religious/ethnic) do contribute, however, to a particular vitality and saliency of uncanny histories in the post-Ottoman sphere.

This article seeks to clarify the concept of “historicity” and how it might guide ethnographic research. The argument is developed with particular reference to the eight studies of historicity in diverse societies ranging from the Pacific to North America contained in this special issue. The authors contend that the standard Western concept of “history” is culturally particular and not necessarily the best tool for cross-cultural investigations. Western history is generally predicated on the principle of historicism: the idea that the “past” is separated from the present. People around the world, including Western historians, recognize,
however, that the past, present and future are mutually implicated. The notion of “historicity” is intended to open out the temporal focus to a “past-present-future”. Studies of historicity address the diverse modes through which people form their presents in world societies.

Definitions of magic are often circular and limited to rationalist parameters. They tend to embrace a set of beliefs about the irrational possibilities of control over unseen and supernatural sources, succinctly described by Keith Thomas as “the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxieties.” For more than a century, foundational anthropological theories mapped magic against religion and science to explain the “prevalence and persistence of occult beliefs and practices” as a functional social or psychological category in which “no action is inherently magical.” But magic remains complicated and often ambiguous.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/850629

This is an extensive introduction to the third volume of the John, Jesus, and History Series (Atlanta: SBL Press, forthcoming in early 2016) written by Jaime Clark-Soles and Paul N. Anderson. A total of twelve volumes of collected essays are projected as the fruit of this international project, now in its 15th year at the national Society of Biblical Literature meetings.

It might be expected that practitioners of contemporary magico-religious
traditions consider they have a special relationship with the Museum
of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall. In this ethnographic article I
examine how visiting practitioners in search of familiarity and authority
approach the collection in a sensory and emotional manner that generates
dialogic relationships between people, places, and things. While much
museological debate acknowledges dynamic relationships between
people and things, for contemporary witches these objects are literally
alive in an inspirited world. This has a bearing on how they apprehend
the museum as a space for multiple forms of engagement.

Introduction
François Hartog coined the term “regimes of historicity” in a critical note entitled “Marshall
Sahlins et l´antropologie de l´histoire” (1983) on Marshall Sahlins’s lecture that was published in
the American Anthropological Journal. This notion was born from the encounter between history
and anthropology. Hartog and Gérard Lenclud defined it for the first time in 1993 as “the type of
relation that every society has with its past, the way that it is treated by it and how she treats it to
use it and build this thing that we call history” and subsequently added that the regime of
historicity “refers to the modality of a self-consciousness of a human community” (Hartog and
Lenclud 1993: 26, my translation). In 2003, Hartog developed this concept in his key book on this
topic Régimes d´historicité: Présentisme et experiences du temps, and he defined it as “the ways
in which these universal categories or forms we call ‘the past’, ‘the present’, and ‘the future’ are
articulated,” namely, the ways that societies in different times and in different spaces organize
the past, present, and future.

This essay probes the critical import of Latin American decolonial thought from the perspective of the dialectical legacy of Critical Theory in the works of Theodor W. Adorno and Roberto Schwarz. It critically interrogates the decolonizing motif as it relates to intellectual discourses and bodies of work. This argument is pursued through a critique of the rather indiscriminate critique of Eurocentricism, an elucidation of the ways in which decolonial thought thematize colonialism and constitutes a regression in terms of how colonialism has been conceptualized, and in terms of how decolonial accounts fundamentally misrecognize and distort the historicity of thought. It concludes with an original formulation of dialectical account of the historicity of thought that adequately accounts for historical sedimentations, genesis and validity, and formulates a dialectical account of originality.

Published in Constellations 25 (March 2018): 54-70

Historicity is a key epistemological component of the definition of “science” proposed by authors such as Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, and partially accepted by the Brazilian Collective Health builders. What we call the “historicity awareness” of Collective Health is the field’s recognition that there is no knowledge of health without history and that its history interferes with its results, with the conceptualization of its objects, its cognitive and technological practices, and the feasibility of its promises of enhancing the quality of life towards an equal society. This helps explain why Humanities in general and History, in particular, are ubiquitous to Health Education, where they are known as Health and Medical Humanities or, as is more usual in Brazil, Human and Social Sciences in Health. They helped to imagine an equitable health care system of which the concrete manifestation, however imperfect, is the Brazilian Unified National Health System, the SUS. Health Humanities, Medical Humanities, and History of Science and Technology are all interdisciplinary fields that challenge historiography and theory of history to look beyond the borders of our normative understanding of the historian’s professional identity – which legitimacy is achieved through specific academic training – to properly evaluate the multiple expressions of society’s relationships and engagements with history and time.

When studying how human beings can make something that is absent present through signs, semioticians have mainly focused on the way human beings make the past present. In this monographic section of the journal, we offer a reflection on ways of making the future present. Our approach to temporality is relational and evenemential: to study semiotic forms in the representation of the future means to investigate its modes of existence and its relationship with past and present events. We will introduce the topic by illustrating, first, the evenemential and relational approach to the study of temporality; second, we will outline a semiotic approach to the analysis of the future as a time of history, drawing on the epistemological reflections of Charles Sanders Peirce and Jurij Lotman; third, we will offer an example and a general reflection on regimes of temporality and historicity in texts. We will conclude by giving an overview of the contributions we have the honour to include in this monographic section.

In this paper I look at two kinds of what I call paper organisms. First, I suggest to understand the archives of the State as paper organisms that, according to Prussian archival science, emerged from bureaucratic practice. Second, I take a closer look at the living organism that introde the archival body from the inside, the bacteria, fungi, and other micro-organism that make paper rot and decay. Following a suggestion by Georges Devereux, I further plea for an apporach to the history of archives that embraces the inanimate character of the body of mute materials in order to understand the strategies of animation and the heurmeneutics that hallucinate about the voices from the past that seemingly speak to the archivist and historian who reads archival documents. Finally, I suggest to understand paper organisms as concrete and solid metaphors for the embodiment of historical time. Along the lines of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's notion of historictiy he introdcued to the study of inscriptions and traces in experimental systems in the laboratory sciences, I suppose to use the materiality of archives as starting point for rethinking Reinhart Koselleck's theory of historical time. Ultimately, the article aims at a local, concrete, and materialist understanding of historical time in the plural that does not only understand the archive as disposible space for the production of historical evidence but a concrete place for rethinking history in critical terms.

Alberto MONTANER, «Historicidad medieval y protomoderna: lo auténtico sobre lo verídico», e-Spania: Revue interdisciplinaire d’études hispaniques médiévales et modernes [ISSN 1951-6169], vol. 19 (octobre 2014), accesible en línea en <http://e-spania.revues.org/24054>; DOI: 10.4000/e-spania.24054.

A common ground of all the new literature on time and historicity is the actual dethroning of the future from the status it acquired during the period conventionally classified as Modern history. In the last two decades the literature on the relations between the present and the past has centered reflection on the cultural trends in the globalized world, hegemonizing when not outflanking the relevance of prognosis for collective wellbeing. My overall critique is that this literature is not addressing the transformations in time structures from the adequate historical perspective. My contest is that, in a modern society as much as in any culture evolving out of its framework, time structures need to be understood in the first place through the way the future, not the past or the present is instituted and experienced. Only once the status and role of the future is settled or re-signified from a critical chronosophy, the whole structure of time —the relations between past and present, and between these two and the future— can be properly accounted for.
This paper starts with a critical approach to the epistemological limitations and ideological underpinnings of Hartog´s category of ‘regime of memory’ and its current manifestation —that of ’presentism‘. It also deals with the difficulties inherent in speaking about the present from a temporal viewpoint. For addressing the status of the future in postmodern culture I draw from the scholarly tradition of thought on utopia and profit from Karl Mannheim´s insights: my view is that the literature on the new historicity has left unattended the complex role acquired by utopia in a context of crisis such as our era of globalization. In order to strengthen the indispensable distinction between instituted and experienced time in a postmodern culture, I address the literature on memory, but from a perspective alternative to the conventional one adopted by most historian-cronosophes, and present it as the current refuge for recovering the link between theory and practice for social transformation.

Auteur d’une œuvre historiographique majeure, et certainement l’une des plus ambitieuses tentatives d’anthropologie historique du fait religieux en Europe, l’historien Alphonse Dupront (1905-1990) reste encore, près d’un quart de siècle après sa disparition, une figure mystérieuse. Avant tout connu pour son étude du mythe de croisade, Alphonse Dupront n’a cessé de dérouter ses lecteurs par des textes dont le style et l’exigence interprétative ont provoqué, et provoquent toujours, autant d’incompréhensions et de perplexités que d’admiration et parfois même de saisissement. Il y a une énigme Alphonse Dupront : l’ambition de cette biographie intellectuelle, la première qui lui soit consacrée, est de recomposer la trajectoire institutionnelle du professeur et de l’administrateur et de replacer en son temps la genèse de la réflexion de l’historien et du penseur.
Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi a voulu ici produire un essai d’archéologie intellectuelle qui permette de mieux comprendre, en réinsérant la méditation dupronienne dans les débats philosophiques et historiographiques qui lui étaient contemporains, comment Dupront en est venu à élaborer une approche et une écriture historiennes aussi singulières que les siennes. Sans s’opposer aux impératifs définis par l’École des Annales, la démarche d’Alphonse Dupront se singularise par la conviction qu’il convient de préserver la dimension événementielle de l’histoire et par la volonté de reconnaître la validité que la subjectivité de l’historien confère à ses analyses.

A partir du cas de l'abbé Grégoire, cet article étudie le régime de temporalité de la Révolution française, en insistant sur la question de la discordance entre le temps des lumières et celui de la morale. Il est à paraître en octobre 2020 dans François Jarrige et Julien Vincent (dir.), "La modernité dure longemps" : penser la discordance des temps avec Christophe Charle, Éditions de la Sorbonne.

En este trabajo intento abordar la importancia que posee el análisis del presente para una teoría del tiempo histórico. A tal fin, abordo la noción de “políticas del tiempo” como actos que realizamos en el presente y que determinan quiénes lo habitan. En primer lugar, intento mostrar cómo en el siglo XIX y, en Occidente, el presente comenzó a ser experimentado como “contemporáneo”. En segundo lugar, discuto los presupuestos que subyacen a esta experiencia de lo contemporáneo y de qué forma produce una discriminación sincrónica (los “primitivos” o “salvajes” de la antropología) y diacrónica (los “muertos” del pasado histórico).

This paper reconsiders the so far undervalued importance of Carla Accardi’s solo exhibition Origine, mounted in May 1976 at a women’s cooperative co-founded by the artist at Via Beato Angelico 18 in Rome. At its all but neutral location, I argue, the self-curated exhibition, encompassing a larger display of Accardi’s work, rendered visible the private and political entanglement of her artistic practice, significantly expanding its potential meaning. In engaging with the exhibition’s precarious documentation and critical coverage, I will demonstrate that on this occasion, rather than providing a conventional overview of stylistic developments, Accardi temporarily staged, in Foucault’s sense, a context of origin for her becoming in the present: as woman and artist.

Le présent article s’attache à montrer l’influence du bergsonisme et des thèses historiographiques de Charles Péguy sur l’œuvre d’Alphonse Dupront (1905-1990). Il semble que Dupront ait puisé chez Bergson et chez Péguy les sources de son évidente méfiance à l’égard d’une science exagérément positive, trop confiante dans sa prétendue capacité à épuiser la complexité d’une réalité vivante, et donc fuyante. Imbu des prescriptions bergsoniennes, Dupront s’est résolument voulu historien de la durée bien plus qu’un laborieux artisan du temps chronologique après tant d’autres.

Si sa quanto complesso sia il fenomeno del modernismo, specialmente quando si considera tutta la zona europea, con le sue differenze linguistiche e culturali. Parlando della complessità del modernismo non voglio però riferirmi a una cosa così ovvia. Vorrei piuttosto parlare di ‘una’ complessità del modernismo, cioè una particolare complessità, che è, credo, una complessità fondamentale di questo periodo, che ha molto a che fare con le concezioni della storia e del tempo diffuse tra gli scrittori modernisti: concezioni della loro genealogia, del passato, del presente e del futuro della letteratura, o anche dell’assenza di un tale futuro. E lo vorrei mostrare qui attraverso l’esempio della letteratura francese.

Among the most important French historians of the 20th Century, Alphonse Dupront (1905-1990) is, without any doubt, one of the most singular. While the French historiography strongly rejected – under the influence of Lucien Febvre’s and Marc Bloch’s methodological assumptions – the theoretical principles defended by the positivistic historians, Dupront, mostly influenced by Charles Péguy (1873-1914) and the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), tried to rehabilitate in his Mythe de croisade the event in a form of historical writing which wasn’t positivistic but took also a different way from the Annales School.
Parmi les historiens français les plus importants du XXe siècle, Alphonse Dupront (1905-1990) est sans aucun doute l’un des plus singuliers. Alors que l’historiographie française a fermement rejeté – sous l’influence des conceptions méthodologiques de Lucien Febvre et de Marc Bloch – les principes théoriques défendus par les historiens positivistes, Dupront, inspiré principalement par Charles Péguy (1873-1914) et le philosophe Henri Bergson (1859-1941), a essayé, dans Le mythe de croisade, de réhabiliter l’événement en élaborant une forme d’écriture historique antipositiviste, mais sans rapports, ou sinon indirect, avec les choix épistémologiques opérés par l’École des Annales.

Conclusion du séminaire de doctorants de l'école doctorale de Paris consacré au thème Nature et société et coordonné par Camille Lorenzi et Luis Teixeira. Considérations méthodologiques sur l'approche des faits "naturels" et des faits "sociaux" par l'historien. Un travail pluridisciplinaire est nécessaire, mais aussi un recul important sur nos concepts et une clarification des définitions mobilisées. A partir des travaux de Michel Lussault en géographie, on propose le terme d'opérateur historique pour prendre en compte les faits naturels en échappant à la fois au déni et au déterminisme. La question de la naturalité de l'homme est aussi soulevée par les travaux récents des anthropologues (M. Bloch, P. Descola). Les rapports entre "nature" et "société" engagent aussi la question de la temporalité et de l'historicité et la nécessité d'approfondir et d'affiner la question des régimes d'historicité, que l'on préférera peut-être qualifier d'imaginaire ou de schèmes de l'historicité.