The politics of time, the politics of history: who are my contemporaries?

ABSTRACT

The article focuses on the notion of the ‘politics of time’ from a performative point of view. I aim to show that periodization is a way we act upon time. The first part of the article argues that, during the nineteenth century, ‘contemporaneity’ began to be understood as ‘sharing the present’. I focus mainly on the writings of Taine and Tocqueville. I then show the normative presupposition underlying the ‘contemporaneity/non-contemporaneity issue’. Finally, I explore its consequences for a Western conception of the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics of time
• contemporaneity
• present
• temporal distance
• temporal otherness

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the various insightful and exacting comments on an earlier version of this article by Kalle Pihlainen, editor of Rethinking History. My thanks also to the anonymous referees of this journal and María Inés La Greca who helped me with the translation. The first version of this text was a lecture given at the Conference ‘IV Congreso Internacional de Filosofía de la Historia’ at the Buenos Aires University (UBA) on 8 November 2017, published in Spanish in ArtCultura vol. 20 (2018), no. 36: 7–14.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the CONICET; National University of Comahue.

Notes on contributors

María Inés Mudrovcic

María Inés Mudrovcic is Titular Professor of Philosophy of History in the Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Comahue (Argentina). She is the Director of the Research Centre of Philosophy of Social Sciences and Humanities and a Full Member of the Council of the Patagonian Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, National University of Comahue and Principal Researcher for CONICET (National Council of Scientific and Technological Studies). She has published Voltaire, el Iluminismo y la Historia (Buenos Aires: Fundec, 1996), Historia, Narración y Memoria. Los debates actuales en filosofía de la historia (Madrid: Akal, 2005), and edited Pasados recientes en conflicto. Representación, mito y política (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2009) and co-edited En busca del tiempo pasado. Temporalidad, historia y memoria (México: Siglo XXI, 2013). She has written a variety of articles in different journals of philosophy and theory of history.