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ABSTRACT
Starting from J. Fabian’s critique of anthropology and its study of the ‘primitive’ Other, Fernando Esposito discusses R. Koselleck’s work as a critique of historical practice, not least the practice of periodization. While often understood as ‘merely’ a contribution to the question of temporalities, Koselleck actually aimed to develop a new way of writing and understanding history. Seen in this light, his work on historical time is really about a fundamental theoretical reorientation of the discipline. This fundamental reinvention of history was the central problem Koselleck wrestled with. Based on his personal experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War, he came to the conviction that history had no meaning and no goal, and therefore undertook a historicization of historicism, i.e. a re-evaluation of the way history had been written up to his own times. Koselleck’s historicization of historicism was a decisive chronopolitical act. It was catalyzed by his intention to debunk an unhistorical understanding of history and to replace it with a self-reflective, truly historicist historicism, a metahistory reflecting upon the ‘conditions of possible histories’.
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Notes
1 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 29.
2 Fabian, Time and the Other, 17–8.
3 Cf. Chakrabarty, ‘Where is the Now?’, 458–62.
4 Hobsbawm, ‘Should the Poor Organize?’, 44.
5 Cf. Lorenz, ‘“The Times They Are a-Changin”’, 109–31.
6 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 22.
7 Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century’, 809.
8 Cf. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity and Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint?.
9 Iggers, ‘Historicism’, 133. Following Iggers as well as Otto Gerhard Oexle (and Ernst Troeltsch), I understand historicism as the ‘process of the “fundamental historicization of our knowledge and thinking” […], the insight that everything and anything is a product of history [geschichtlich geworden] and is historically mediated.’ Oexle, ‘Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeichen des Historismus’, 17.
10 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 3.
11 Foucault, The Order of Things, xxii.
12 Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present, xiii.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 74.
16 Cf. e.g. Chakrabarty, ‘The Muddle of Modernity’, 663–75 and Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty.
17 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 29.
18 Cf. Esposito and Becker, ‘The Time of Politics, the Politics of Time’.
19 Gumbrecht, ‘Posthistoire Now’, 24. On periodization and politics cf.: Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty.
20 On ‘essentially contested concepts’ cf.: Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, 167–98. In regard to modernity cf.: Knöbl, ‘Die Epoche, die es nicht gab’, 47–79. Further helpful overview can be found in: Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 113–49; Jaeger, Knöbl, and Schneider, Handbuch Moderneforschung, and Stråth and Wagner, European Modernity.
21 Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution; Polanyi, The Great Transformation. Cf. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, 58–67 and Conrad, ‘A Cultural History of Global Transformation’, 411–659.
22 Cf. e.g.: Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 49–83 and Conrad, ‘Enlightenment in Global History’, 999–1027.
23 Cf. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 80–2 (et seqq).
24 Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, 63.
25 Herbert, ‘Europe in High Modernity’, 10.
26 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 110.
27 Cf. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 223; François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs, 343; Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 13.
28 Cf. Lorenz, ‘Der letzte Fetisch’, 78–80.
29 On this and the following cf.: Hoffmann, Riss, 30–83.
30 Koselleck, ‘Historia Magistra Vitae’, 40.
31 Koselleck, ‘Modernity and the Planes of Historicity’, 21.
32 Koselleck, ‘The Eighteenth Century’, 168.
33 Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte, 9.
34 Gumbrecht, ‘Modern, Modernität, Moderne’, 105, 109.
35 Lyotard, ‘Note on the Meaning of ‘Post-’, 76.
36 Cf. Barbiero, ‘A Weakness for Heidegger’, 159–72.
37 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 3, 4, 168.
38 Osborne, The Politics of Time, xii.
39 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 110.
40 Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 3, 5.
41 Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, 5.
42 Rosa, Social Acceleration, 313.
43 Hunt, Measuring Time, 75.
44 Gumbrecht, ‘Gegenwart’, 772.
45 Ibid., 773.
46 Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint?, 288, 19. On Assmann, Gumbrecht and Poetik and Hermeneutik see: Boden and Zill, Poetik und Hermeneutik.
47 Iggers, ‘Historicism’, 133.
48 In regard to the ongoing Koselleck boom cf. the works on Koselleck published on the occasion of his centenary ‘birthday’, as well as from his estate and their broad reception in the feuilletons: Hoffmann, Riss; Jureit, Erinnern als Überschritt; Koselleck, Geronnene Lava; Blumenberg and Koselleck, Briefwechsel 1965–1994.
49 Cf. Koselleck, ‘“Space of Experience”’, 255–75.
50 On Koselleck‘s belated reception in the Anglophone world and current success cf.: Hoffmann, Riss, 241–311.
51 Cf. Olsen, History in the Plural, 240.
52 White, ‘Review of Futures Past’, 1175.
53 Yet, it does appear in crucial arguments, for example in: Koselleck, ‘Richtlinien’, 81–2. Cf. Schneider, ‘Spurensuche’, 68–72.
54 Carr, ‘Review of Futures Past’, 203–4.
55 Dipper and Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte, begriffene Geschichte’, 201.
56 Makropoulos, ‘Historische Semantik’, 512.
57 For an overview cf. Fryxell, ‘Time and the Modern’, 285–98; Tamm and Olivier, Rethinking Historical Time.
58 It is one of the great merits of Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann’s new book to have elaborated the centrality of these experiences for Koselleck’s intellectual biography, cf.: Hoffmann, Riss, 30–111. Cf. also: Morina, ‘Reinhart Koselleck und das Überleben’, 435–50 and Jeismann, ‘Wer bleibt, der schreibt’, 69–80.
59 Johnson and Koselleck, ‘Recollections of the Third Reich’. Cf. Fillafer, ‘The enlightenment on trial’, 325 et seqq.
60 Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 179, 423. Cf. Hoffmann, Riss, 55–7.
61 Koselleck, ‘Dankrede am 23. November 2004’, 58–9.
62 On Koselleck’s ‘sources of inspiration’ cf.: Dipper and Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte, begriffene Geschichte’, 187. On the influence of these sources on Koselleck as well as on Hannah Arendt cf. also: Hoffmann, ‘Koselleck, Arendt, and the Anthropology’, 212–36.
63 Cf. Kershaw, ‘“Working Towards the Führer”’, 117–18.
64 On the first crisis of historicism see: Troeltsch, ‘Die Krisis des Historismus’, 437–55. Cf. also Oexle, ‘Krise des Historismus – Krise der Wirklichkeit. Eine Problemgeschichte der Moderne’, 11–116, and Bambach, Heidegger.
65 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 223.
66 Cf. his letter to Carl Schmitt from January 1953: Koselleck, ‘Letter to Carl Schmitt, 11. English translation to be found in: Olsen, History in the Plural, 64.
67 Cf. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 32.
68 Iggers, ‘Historicism’, 133.
69 Cf. Koselleck, ‘Letter to Carl Schmitt’, 11, where Koselleck states in the letter to Carl Schmitt that it is necessary to ‘break through to a historical ontology, which is not merely the latest methodological approach, but the beginning of a conceptualization, which makes it possible to cut the historical philosophy off from its water supply and consequently give an answer to our concrete situation’. Cf. Olsen, History in the Plural, 50 et seqq., 64.
70 On Koselleck’s self-reflexive historicism cf.: Tietze, ‘Kosellecks reflektierter Historismus’, 302–46.
71 Missfelder, ‘Weltbürgerkrieg und Wiederholungsstruktur’, 284.
72 Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 180.
73 Koselleck, ‘Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte’, 31.
74 On the ‘Sattelzeit’ or ‘saddle period’ cf.: Fulda, ‘Sattelzeit’, 1–16 and Mrozek, ‘Die sogenannte Sattelzeit’, 133–53.
75 Droysen, Historik, 371.
76 Cf. Knöbl, ‘Die Epoche, die es nicht gab’.
77 On hauntology and ‘presence in absentia’ cf.: Derrida, Specters of Marx as well as: Kleinberg, Haunting History.
78 Cf. Knöbl, ‘Beobachtungen zum Begriff der Moderne’, 77.
79 Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, 5.
80 Hirschler and Savant, ‘Introduction – What Is in a Period?’, 17.
81 Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 25.
82 Cf. Edelstein, Geroulanos, and Wheatley, ‘Chronocenosis’, 1–49 as well as Esposito and Becker, ‘The Time of Politics, the Politics of Time’.
83 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7.
84 Koselleck, ‘“Neuzeit”’, 224.
85 Ibid., 236.
86 For a critique of Koselleck’s ‘medievalism’ based on his article ‘Modernity and the Planes of Historicity’ see Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, 87–95.
87 On ‘pluritemporality’ cf. Landwehr, Die anwesende Abwesenheit, 156.
88 Reinart Koselleck, ‘Wie neu ist die Neuzeit’, 238–39. Cf. Jordheim, ‘Against Periodization’, 151–71.
89 Koselleck, ‘Historik and Hermeneutics’, 42.
90 Cf. Dipper and Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte, begriffene Geschichte’, 201–2.
91 Cf. Lyotard, ‘Re-Writing Modernity’, 3–9.
92 Gumbrecht, ‘Posthistoire Now’, 24.