'The pastness of the past'
reflections on the politics of historicization and the crisis of historicist pastness
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5216/rth.v24i1.69673Keywords:
passeidade, Historicismo, temporalidadeAbstract
It is well known that the notion of the pastness of the past is a central idea that supports the historicist worldview. Recently, however, the pastness of the past has become a major academic and political concern. Against the background of a growing transnational attention to memory and historical injustice, many commentators have noted a blurring of the distinction between past and present and a crisis of historicist pastness. While I certainly don't agree that we can simply rid ourselves of the pastness of the past entirely, I do advocate a radical rethinking of it. Such rethinking can help us critically re-engage with historicism as a practice that can be emancipatory as well as oppressive. This rethinking may also allow for a more nuanced analysis of some important policy challenges, including those related to memory and so-called retrospective politics. In the first part of this article, I discuss how the historicist notion of pastness has been increasingly called into question. In the second part of the text, I present some reflections on how to critically rethink the pastness of the past.
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