Contenu du sommaire : Spécial : Historicités du 20e siècle

Historicities of the 20th Century : Some Reflections on a Notion. This text analyzes the definitions of the notion “historicities”, explores how the social sciences in general and history in particular uses or could use it and considers what has been called “presentism”. While the definition is not at all fixed, historicity can be understood as how the players of a society or a community fit their present into a history, how they think it as situated in a time that is not neutral but signifying, by the conception they have of it, the interpretations they give and the accounts they make of it. Historicity implies a moving and changing consciousness of the past and the future, shaped by the present. It is thus important to emphasize the plurality of types of historicities and thus of their coexistence. The forms of dominant historicities and the resistance that can be brought to bear on them must also be considered.

History and Competitive Temporalities : The Case of East Asia. Narratives of the past are perhaps necessary in all collectivities that seek to constitute themselves as such. Before the modern nation-state, however, these narratives not only embedded differences and contestations, they also bore a relationship to universal or cosmological time and ideals. The emergence of the modern disenchanted polity converged with the rise of competitive capitalist states which viewed all resources and bio-power in its territory as susceptible to mobilization. The reified idea of bounded, linear histories of the state, nation and civilization was crucial for this mobilization. A good case can be made that the most significant Eurasian historical developments were circulatory and shared. This paper looks at East Asian historicities from a circulatory perspective showing the pathways through which global and regional circulatory forces were converted into tunneled histories of sovereign nations engaged in aggressively competitive relations with each other.

Nazi Historicity: Time of Nature and Abolition of History. From afar, the Nazi plan could be perceived as a projection towards a millennium of modernity and domination. Closer up, one understands that the Nazi conception of time was more retrospective than prospective: the “new man” was the product of a eugenicist archeology, and the ultimate aim of the Nazi plan was to bring history to an end, to the passage of time, by eliminating once and for all the eternal enemy of the Nordic race. The ideal Nazi time was immobility, an eschatological time, without either war or movement, which is literally a withdrawal from history to go back to the routine and repetitive time of nature.

European Construction, Democracy, Historicity. European construction is part of a historical process characterized by new forms of global governance and the emergence of a representation that thrusts the questions of life and survival into the heart of politics. The perception that the future is uncertain is at the center of the new regime of “global politics”. European construction illustrates the possibilities and structural uncertainty of a process marked by the introduction of an ambivalent relationship between the present and the future. The structural incompleteness of the European project reflects the complexity and contradictions of the dynamics of enlargement and integration.

Financial Crises as Conflicts of Temporalities. The traditional assumption of economists concerning the uniqueness of economic time is extremely prejudicial to the intelligibility of financial and economic crises. By contrast, taking into account the heterogeneity of temporalities that merge in the economic sphere illuminates the variety of crises that shape the evolution of modern societies. Both great and minor crises can then be interpreted as the expression of a conflict between at least two temporalities: that of finance versus that of the economy, between economic time and demography or that of the discovery and the exploitation of raw materials, not to mention the time of ecology. Financial crises also exhibit phenomena of memory, learning and forgetting, which may explain their recurrence and introduce another dimension of temporality. Lastly, great crises such as that of 1929 and the current crisis are also bifurcations, thus markers in the periodization of the long history of capitalism.

Historical Movement and Suspended History: the Relationship between Social Change and the Experience of History. The core-argument of this paper is that there is an inherent link between the pace of social change and the human experience of history. If the pace of change is slow, the world stays essentially the same for the three generations which share a life-world. In such a world, there is no history in the singular, but only a multiplicity of historical “stories”. As the pace of change picks up and reaches the rate of generational exchange, grandparents and grandchildren notice that they live in different worlds, that the past is different from the future. In such a world, where generations become the bearers of innovation, history appears to have a direction. However, in the late-modern age of the 21st century, we have reached an intra-generational pace of change: the world does not even remain the same for one generation, it changes every couple of years. By consequence, history loses its direction: the frantic pace of change appears to be contingent, fragmented and episodic. Hence, the sense of historical movement is lost and replaced by the paradoxical experience of essential inertia. As can be seen from current political events, this has far-reaching consequences for the possibility and plausibility of democratic politics.

Messianic Time and Revolutionary Historicity for Walter Benjamin. We are used to putting the various philosophies of history into categories such as progressive or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic for the past. Walter Benjamin doesn't fit into these categories. He was a revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, a Marxist adversary of “progressivism”, a nostalgic of the past who dreamt of the future, a romantic who supported materialism. He is, in all meanings of the word, unclassifiable. It is not a question of paradoxical thinking: Marxism and theology, messianic time and revolutionary historicity are two expressions of one profoundly original, innovative and consistent thinking.

Maintaining History in Movement: Carl Schmitt, Thinker of Modern Historicity. This article is a contribution to the systematic understanding of Schmittien thinking on the notions of historicity and modernity that have weighed heavily on German historians born between the world wars. Schmitt's political theory using the friend-enemy pair is based on a particular conception of history and the modern era. Schmitt describes modernity whose meaning would determine the clarity and intensity of history itself, as a declining period, ending in the advent of neutralizations and depolitizations carried along by liberalism. To resist this “acceleration” of time spiritually, there is no other alternative but to draw from the source of a mythical and theological conceptuality, the only one that can maintain history in movement.

The Structuralist Moment or Clio in Exile. This paper addresses the question of the shift towards a new “regime of historicity” and posits that the triumphant moment of a paradigm that succeeded in unifying all the social sciences, structuralism, occurred in the 1960s. Its success was due to several factors: the rise of the figure of the other on the historical stage, embodied by people from the third world who fought for their independence and rejected the western transplant. It was also due to the crisis of revolutionary eschatologies stemming from the discoveries of the Gulag. The result is a fallback on scientism, a radical challenge of a western-centered telos, and a dismissal of all forms of temporal logic. Thus, Clio is temporarily exiled and historians themselves are turning towards long time frames, opting for an almost static time.

Jean-Luc Godard and Criticism of Historical Time. In Jean-Luc Godard's cinema, which has been presented as the cinema of the present, as contemporary, par excellence, marking the signs and modes of current events, a fault line has opened onto the past. Godard's cinema and creative psyche have fallen into it as of the 1980s and the artist has never stopped thinking “the death of cinema”. Thus, the past never stops rising up and then rising up again in Godardian films, traces of his own history in the century, from the child and young man that he was, but equally a very ambitious cinematographic project. This place is held by the Histoire(s) du cinéma that have transformed Godard into a historian, which is certainly strange, and have him working on the very stuff of represented memory, that of war and extermination, of totalitarianisms and corruption of capitalism, of recent wars and the selling out of cinema.

War as Experience of Time and Time as War Experience: Hypotheses for a History of French Soldiers' Relation to Time in World War. This article deals with the interest in and possibility of a history of French soldiers' relationship to time in World War I. It focuses first on the question of sources. It shows that accounts like personal diaries, letters and poems, indispensable sources for this type of history, generate powerful effects that must be taken into account. However, it seems necessary to question the existence or not of micro-regimes of historicities linked to war experience. The article shows that war experience at the front is also a particular experience of time in which an immobile time and projections into the future can occur together and sometimes contain great expectations. It also emphasizes the importance of apprehending war as a temporal parenthesis for the soldiers. It is possible that this relationship to time that the soldiers both undergo and work out themselves explains one of the reasons for their tenacity at the front.

Historicity in Sephardic Areas or the Importance of Spatiality. While one particularity of Jewish historicity is that it is supposed to have invented an oriented timeline and that the works of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem reinvested the forms of messianic time, this article deals with the limits of such a perspective regarding the Jewish Sephardim in the Eastern Mediterranean. The study is based on religious and historiographical expression during the decade prior to the Second World War. On one hand, in a journal reflecting the views of notables from the former Ottoman Empire settled in France (Le Judaïsme Sépharadi), and on the other, in the work of historians of Thessaloniki and Istanbul, Joseph Néhama and Abraham Galanté. This is an attempt to produce a specific model of historicity from which the primacy of the category of space (within Sephardic networks) in the interpretation of time emerges.

"Back in the Good Old Days of France”: Collective Identities and the Algerian Colonial Situation. Colonial Algeria was marked by the coexistence of multiple temporalities. In order to locate them and restore their meaning, it is necessary to find the right analytical grid of these temporalities by considering, in particular, the place of the group in the colonial world. While controlling time was essential in the colonial project, distinct temporalities obviously existed and challenged the very construction of the colonial world as each side maintained its own temporalities, the basis of personal identity. In this respect, the choice of armed struggle by the PPA/MTLD and then the FLN can be reinterpreted as taking control of time.

Politicized Time: Political Stakes of Historical Consciousness in May-June 1968. This article revisits May-June 1968 in terms of the various players' historical consciousness of the event and their relationship to the interwoven temporalities they had. It deals with the particular attention given to lived time as “quality time”, between a feeling of urgency and the impression of living a suspended moment. Nevertheless, these very temporalities are part of the consciousness that history is going through, and it is necessary to think about this historical condition in which the past is an inheritance that makes thinking the future better. Indeed, the historical references used here are not cut and dried: they mark an appointment with history and with the event, which makes it a living past.