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François Hartog. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time .

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 121; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/121.2.535

1937-5239

Stefan‐Ludwig Hoffmann,

Communism, Protests, Social Movements

In this short and elegant book, François Hartog proposes a deceptively simple argument for an intrinsically complicated subject matter. The subject of the book is the history of different “regimes of historicity,” i.e., the ways in which the relationship between past, present, and future was understood at moments of crisis in history. The argument goes roughly like this: until the French Revolution, the past was seen as informing the present. In the modern era, approximately between 1789 and 1989, the present and the past were conceived in terms of the future. In contrast, our contemporary experience of time is essentially “presentist.” The present regenerates the past and the future only to valorize the immediate. In our “crisis of time,” the present has become “omnipresent.” Hartog is perhaps the most important historian of historiography today. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time builds on his previous books, only two of which have been translated into English: The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (1988) and Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece (2001). Regimes of Historicity itself travels through time to visit moments of historical crisis “as they have arisen whenever the way in which past, present, and future are articulated no longer seems self-evident,” from the ancient world to contemporary France (16). Along the way, Hartog briefly discusses notions of time and history by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, and Reinhart Koselleck, among others. Like Koselleck, Hartog is interested in the temporal conditions of possible histories. Still, his intervention with this book is not primarily theoretical or historiographical. Unusual for a historian, Regimes of Historicity argues most sharply and convincingly where it reflects on the “presentism” of our time, “the sense that only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now” (xv). It is the contemporary crisis of time that directs Hartog’s explorations of past regimes of historicity.