Hartog F. Historicity. Presentism and the experience of time

New York: Columbia University Press, 2015 — 288 p. — ISBN10: 0231163762; ISBN13: 978-0231163767. Translated by Saskia Brown.François Hartog explores crucial moments of change in society's "regimes of historicity," or its ways of relating to the past, present, and future. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, Reinhart Koselleck, and Paul Ricoeur, Hartog analyzes a broad range of texts, positioning The Odyssey as a work on the threshold of historical consciousness and contrasting it with an investigation of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's concept of "heroic history." He tracks changing perspectives on time in Chateaubriand's Historical Essay and Travels in America and sets them alongside other writings from the French Revolution. He revisits the insights of the French Annales School and situates Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory within a history of heritage and today's presentism, from which he addresses Jonas's notion of our responsibility for the future. Our presentist present is by no means uniform or clear-cut, and it is experienced very differently depending on the position we occupy in society. We are caught up in global movement and accelerated flows, or else condemned to the life of casual workers, living from hand to mouth in a stagnant present, with no recognized past, and no real future either (since the temporality of plans and projects is inaccessible). The present is therefore experienced as emancipation or enclosure, and the perspective of the future is no longer reassuring, since it is perceived not as a promise, but as a threat. Hartog's resonant readings show us how the motor of history(-writing) has stalled and help us understand the contradictory qualities of our contemporary presentist relation to time.Introduction: Orders of Time and Regimes of Historicity.
Orders of Time and Regimes of Historicity.
Gaps.
From the Pacific to Berlin.
Universal Histories.
Regimes of Historicity.
Orders of time 1.
Making History: Sahlins’s Islands.
The Heroic Regime.
From Myth to Event.
Working Misunderstandings: From Event to Myth.
Anthropology and Forms of Temporality.
From Odysseus’s Tears to Augustine’s Meditations.
Each Day Is the First Day.
Odysseus’s Tears.
The Sirens’ Call to Oblivion.
Odysseus Has Not Read Augustine.
Chateaubriand, Between Old and New Regimes of Historicity.
The Young Chateaubriand’s Journey.
Historia magistra vitae.
The American Trunk.
The Experience of Time.
The Time of Traveling and Time in the Travels.
Ruins.
Orders of time 2.
Memory, History, and the Present.
The Modern Regime’s Crises.
The Rise of Presentism.
The Fault Lines of the Present.
Memory and History.
National Histories.
Commemorations.
The Moment of the Lieux de mémoire.
Heritage and the Present.
A History of the Concept of Heritage.
Antiquity.
Rome.
The French Revolution.
Toward Universalization.
The Time of the Environment.
Our Doubly Indebted Present: The Reign of Presentism.