Search Results

Introduction

Katherine Clarke

in Making Time for the Past: Local History and the Polis

This chapter discusses different forms of temporal calibration and articulation, as well as the complementary nature of natural time and culturally-determined time. After introducing some ... More

This chapter discusses different forms of temporal calibration and articulation, as well as the complementary nature of natural time and culturally-determined time. After introducing some philosophical problems concerning the nature of time, it examines evidence for the proposition that time as a malleable and constructed concept was familiar within the everyday life of the Greek polis, through the plays of Aristophanes and publicly displayed inscriptions. The connections between time as mapped out on a recurring annual cycle through the calendar and historical time which spans the past of a place are also considered.Less

In Body

Tilo Schabert

in The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence

The very fact that human beings share a space, in which their bodies, as physical masses, cannot occupy the same place, raises the need for political existence. This is because bodily existence is ... More

The very fact that human beings share a space, in which their bodies, as physical masses, cannot occupy the same place, raises the need for political existence. This is because bodily existence is directly tied to the emergence of relations of power. Bodily existence makes human beings not only subjects of power, but also objects of power. This fact necessitates a civilization, i.e., a second birth of human beings. These connections are best seen when we compare the human situation to that of angels. It is because human beings, unlike angels, have an (empirical) body, that they require a political order. Such a political order is thus to be contrasted both with a-historical paradisiacal conditions, as well as with the para-empirical notion of a “natural man,” as Ibn Khaldûn has shown through his distinction between a “hypothetically” and an “empirically” proceeding political science.Less

Introduction

Susan Potter

in Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema

This chapter situates the book as a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. The study is described as a post-Foucauldian history of sexuality that aims to sustain the ... More

This chapter situates the book as a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. The study is described as a post-Foucauldian history of sexuality that aims to sustain the radical implications of Foucault’s foundational work in History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Volume 1. The chapter articulates the book’s approach in terms of queer historiography. One of its key strategies is the endeavor to suspend present-day sexual knowledges in the encounter with early films and other extrafilmic archival materials. To presume, at least before critical work commences, the sexual opacity of early cinema is to start from the position that the past is different from the present, particularly in terms of sexual subjectivity, but not to accede to a homophobic denial of the historical existence of same-sex desire or queer ways of living and being. The chapter explores the consequences of this approach for critical modes of identification, and queer articulations of historical time, in the context of recent debates concerning queer temporality.Less

Speculating on the Past, the Impact of the Present: Hegel and His Time(s)

Sarah Clift

in Committing the Future to Memory: History, Experience, Trauma

This chapter addresses issues related to the future and to necessity and contingency in Hegel’s speculative philosophy. It focuses on the Philosophy of History but also engages relevant sections of ... More

This chapter addresses issues related to the future and to necessity and contingency in Hegel’s speculative philosophy. It focuses on the Philosophy of History but also engages relevant sections of Hegel’s Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit. Working from the contention made famous by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, namely, that Hegel had no time for the future, the chapter generates a close reading of Hegel’s articulation of time as historical succession (Heidegger’s so-called “vulgar time”) and registers a multiplicity of times in history. This multiplicity is dictated by the jostling of different epochs in relation to each other-each of which is available to the present as philosophical knowledge-but it is also not reducible to historical succession. In order to provide an account for this temporality in excess of temporal succession, the chapter considers the relation between necessity and contingency. By complicating interpretations that subject contingency to necessity’s sublation (Charles Taylor, for instance, or Stanley Rosen), and seeking recourse to seminal commentaries by John Burbidge and Catherine Malabou, the chapter captures the sense in which necessity and contingency are not in a relation of precedence, anteriority, or hierarchy but that the two are inseparably linked.Less

Variable Stages

Penelope J. Corfield

in Time and the Shape of History

This chapter examines stage theories, which divide historical time into tidy stages as a way of looking back at the past and sometimes forecasting the future. It discusses the characteristic problem ... More

This chapter examines stage theories, which divide historical time into tidy stages as a way of looking back at the past and sometimes forecasting the future. It discusses the characteristic problem of stage theories with the obverse of excess fragmentation and offers criticism on Marxist stages. It analyzes some of the most popular numbering schemes which provide convenient stepping stones to travel mentally up and down the centuries and argues that such divisions are suggestive about long-term changes but can lead to crude categories that then become stretched too thin.Less

A Dead-End: Roadblock Movies

Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi

in Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory

The 1990s were marked by the effects of the First Intifada and the economic recession that succeeded it, the wake of the Gulf War, and the continuing closure that was enforced on Palestinian ... More

The 1990s were marked by the effects of the First Intifada and the economic recession that succeeded it, the wake of the Gulf War, and the continuing closure that was enforced on Palestinian residents, as also by the Second Intifada and the Israeli invasion of West Bank cities. From that decade on, the more the social, political, and economic situation deteriorated, and the chaos and destruction increased, the more Palestinian cinema was recruited in favour of the national struggle that called for unity. As a result, Palestinian filmmakers found it complicated to maintain the heterogeneous “third” space and the complex historical time that both expresses the trauma and copes with it. The chapter describes the difficulties facing these filmmakers, among them: Subhi a-Zubeidi, Azza al-Hassan, Tawfik Abu Wa'el, Muhammad Bakri, Hani Abu-Assad, Liana Badr, Azza alHassan, Ahmad Habash.Less

Discomforts of Temporal Anomie

Jeffrey C. Kinkley

in Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels

This chapter critiques the ambiguity of chronology in some Chinese historical literature. China's new historical works often deny the reader or viewer clear chronological bearings. They display four ... More

This chapter critiques the ambiguity of chronology in some Chinese historical literature. China's new historical works often deny the reader or viewer clear chronological bearings. They display four potentially unsettling treatments of historical time: protracted ambiguity about the temporal setting of the era being recollected, or the era from which it is being recalled; defamiliarization of a temporal setting that is specified, making the context and meaning of history appear altered, unknowable, or allegorical; conscious elevation of the historical narrative to the level of myth or legend; and defamiliarization of past and present through visions of life as a repetition of past events.Less

Whose Ancients & Moderns?

Larry F. Norman

in The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France

From the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries—at the heart of what is called the French neoclassical age—poets, critics, and philosophers radically rethought how history shapes ... More

From the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries—at the heart of what is called the French neoclassical age—poets, critics, and philosophers radically rethought how history shapes literature. Key to this rethinking was a new, and often disturbing, understanding of the cultures of antiquity that had been considered the foundation for later modern achievements. It is one of history's ironies that the modern period characterized as “classical” (or “neoclassical”) came to adopt a sharply critical distance in regard to the very Greco-Roman past that it apparently so admired. To understand the “shock of the ancient” is to wrestle with this basic paradox: the fracturing of historical time that fundamentally defamiliarizes classical antiquity was the work of an age that also often wished to coexist with that increasingly remote era.Less

Music, Time, and Philosophy

Benedict Taylor

in The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era

This extended chapter, consisting of three interrelated parts, forms the philosophical heart of the book. The first section completes the exposition of the historical state of musical temporality ... More

This extended chapter, consisting of three interrelated parts, forms the philosophical heart of the book. The first section completes the exposition of the historical state of musical temporality initiated in the first chapter, outlining how music, by the early nineteenth century, came to be heard as the most temporal of the arts. This is followed by a philosophical explication of just why music was considered uniquely capable of uncovering the aporias of temporality, setting up the philosophical basis for the remaining four chapters. A key contention is the idea that music may have been as useful for philosophers as a means to illustrate conceptions of time as much as philosophy may be useful for understanding music. This thesis is developed in the final section, which argues that music may provide, if not a conclusive philosophical solution, at least the most powerful aesthetic reconciliation of intractable problems in the philosophy of time.Less

Jewish History Under the Sign of Secularization: Berthold Auerbach's Spinoza (1837)

Jonathan Skolnik

in Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824-1955

This chapter argues that Jewish historical fiction arose in direct response to the secularization of Jewish history, a process that can never be total in relation to Jewish culture. It is hardly a ... More

This chapter argues that Jewish historical fiction arose in direct response to the secularization of Jewish history, a process that can never be total in relation to Jewish culture. It is hardly a coincidence that the first major German-Jewish historical novel, by Berthold Auerbach (1837), takes Baruch Spinoza as its subject. Auerbach, a major popularizer of Spinoza, deftly uses dissimilation to establish a space for Jewish identity as part of an ethos of universal humanism and German cultural nationalism. Auerbach's novel weaves chapters from the Sephardic-Jewish past into a narrative familiar to readers of the German classics, and can only be understood as a response to texts by Goethe and Gutzkow.Less

Dwelling in Time: Figurations of Geohistory

in The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism

This chapter charts the convergence of geography and history, an inextricable intertwinement of geographic space and historical time during the period that has usually been seen as characterized by ... More

This chapter charts the convergence of geography and history, an inextricable intertwinement of geographic space and historical time during the period that has usually been seen as characterized by the absolute dominance of the historical paradigm. It argues for the emergence of geohistory at around 1800. Taking into account the philosophy of history, geographic science, and poetry, this chapter holds that it was precisely the theoretical precursors of historism from Herder to Friedrich Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt who laid the foundation of geohistorical thinking. It describes a radically new picture of modern historical thought, contending that historism and geohistorical thinking represented its two complementary strands.Less

Back Home: The Provincial Lives of Turgenev’s Cosmopolitans

Anne Lounsbery

in Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800-1917

This chapter explains how Ivan Turgenev's oeuvre forms a crucial part of the provincial trope, with its focus on the relationship between provintsiia and the problem, or the hope, of a specifically ... More

This chapter explains how Ivan Turgenev's oeuvre forms a crucial part of the provincial trope, with its focus on the relationship between provintsiia and the problem, or the hope, of a specifically Russian temporality. When Turgenev is writing about Russian space, he often seems to be thinking just as much about Russian time, often posing or implying the question, “Is Russia 'behind'?” Analyzing spatial relationships in his texts reveals how these relationships condition ways of thinking about historical time (what counts as ahead and what counts as behind, for example). In Turgenev's view, it seems, Russia is not “modern,” but it is not simply “backward,” either. Hence his focus on the gentry estate: estates were places where Russian elites could work to rethink their relationship to historical time, moving beyond the assumption that centers (capitals) are ahead and peripheries (provinces) are behind.Less

Escape Velocity: Ancient History and the Empire of Time

Duncan Bell

in Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire

This chapter examines how historical time was conceptualized in imperial debate. It explores two broad variations that were articulated across the human sciences and in public debate, focusing in ... More

This chapter examines how historical time was conceptualized in imperial debate. It explores two broad variations that were articulated across the human sciences and in public debate, focusing in particular on the writings of historians. In the first, the modern British empire was figured as uniquely progressive, as capable—either in actuality or in potentia—of avoiding the social, economic, and political dynamics that had annihilated all previous specimens. This argument was most frequently employed in relation to India. The other strategy was to insist that the empire (or a part of it) was not really an empire at all, but rather a new form of political order that could circumvent the entropic degeneration of traditional imperial forms. To think otherwise was to make a category mistake. This argument was often applied to Britain and its settler colonies from the 1870s onwards. “Greater Britain,” as the settler colonial assemblage was often termed, could attain permanence, a kind of historical grace.Less

Temporal Articulations

Jeffrey Andrew Barash

in Collective Memory and the Historical Past

Collective memory is the matrix of cohesion of social groups, however vast they may be, through which group continuity in time is at once attested and reaffirmed. If it is also in time that mutation ... More

Collective memory is the matrix of cohesion of social groups, however vast they may be, through which group continuity in time is at once attested and reaffirmed. If it is also in time that mutation and discontinuity with the past occur and are later grasped, group perception of discontinuity nonetheless presupposes an underlying continuity or sameness in the remembering collectivity in relation to which discontinuity may be placed in relief. The present chapter focuses on the temporal conditions of this cohesion which are analyzed in terms of the reiterative time of habitual, socially instituted forms of interaction, the commemorative time of unique, socially significant events, and the time of the êthos or habitus in which long-term continuities are forged and reelaborated. If all three of these temporal articulations structure socially meaningful action, each of them also comports a passive dimension which this chapter aims to place in relief. The patterning of social activity according to these articulations establishes lines of continuity between past and present in view of a common future. As numerous examples cited in this chapter illustrate, interpretation of the continuity of collective memory has become a source of illusions of social homogeneity and of contemporary political mythologies.Less

‘Diamonds by which the eye is charmed’: Facets of Romantic Historiography in the Works of Richard Parkes Bonington

Rosemary Mitchell

in Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–1845

This chapter considers Richard Parkes Bonington’s use of ‘time-tropes’ or layers of time as a way of showing depth and movement in what was often considered a static art form: historical painting. ... More

This chapter considers Richard Parkes Bonington’s use of ‘time-tropes’ or layers of time as a way of showing depth and movement in what was often considered a static art form: historical painting. Arguing that Bonington’s watercolours evince a fascination with both the passing and the representation of time, the chapter demonstrates that his works tend to resist generic classification and formal boundaries by being both historically specific and transcendental or timeless. The chapter subverts tidy expectations of Romantic historiography by contending that representations of history in the period are not confined to sentimental moments of ‘affective proximity’, but rather use such moments to offer complex reflections on the nature of history itself. By focusing on ‘optic dispersal’ or, in other words, on the provisional and speculative in Bonington’s work, the chapter demonstrates the extent to which he engages with the complex paradoxes of historical experience and representation.Less

7:47 a.m. (The Traumatic Visual Vocabulary of Maurice Benayoun’s So.So.So. Somebody, Somewhere, Some Time) (2011)¹

Kristine Stiles

in Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma

This chapter examines Maurice Benayoun's futurological imaging of trauma in virtual reality by focusing on his 1992 interactive installation So.So.So Somebody Somewhere Sometime. So.So.So. takes ... More

This chapter examines Maurice Benayoun's futurological imaging of trauma in virtual reality by focusing on his 1992 interactive installation So.So.So Somebody Somewhere Sometime. So.So.So. takes place at 7:47 a.m., the precise moment when, according to Benayoun, “everything starts to go awry...in a crisis-ridden world seeping into our daily lives.” The time 7:47 a.m. is “Time,” which functions as a verb in the title. It ignites simultaneous but different experiences in three locales: Paris, Rungis, and Praslin. The accumulation of historical time pervades So.So.So. as adverbial and adjectival emphasis for how Benayoun uses the English word “so” to facilitate the work's repetitions and interruptions. The flashback and the palindrome are central to the traumatic visual and psychical operations of So.So.So.. The chapter considers the psychological processing of the fragmentary dynamics of traumatic memory in So.So.So..Less

The Province of Collective Memory and Its Theoretical Promise

Jeffrey Andrew Barash

in Collective Memory and the Historical Past

The different chapters of this book traverse an extensive territory encompassing a number of areas of investigation. Each of them aims to contribute to the elaboration of a philosophical basis for ... More

The different chapters of this book traverse an extensive territory encompassing a number of areas of investigation. Each of them aims to contribute to the elaboration of a philosophical basis for the concept of collective memory and to delimit the scope of this concept in relation to the historical past. The concluding section of this work presents an overview of the concept of collective memory in view of the broader aim that a theory of collective memory entails. This theory depends on the fundamental distinction elaborated between the temporal horizons of collective memory and the historical past. Where skepticism in the reality of this distinction is entertained and the hope of finding meaning in a real past is abandoned, this concluding section argues that the only remaining criterion is that of the timely standard of the present. Where the past in its essential alterity no longer provides a backdrop for critical evaluation of the present and current attitudes provide the sole measure for reality, it is above all the present that risks growing opaque to itself.Less

{ Introduction }: Roma Redux

Mark Storey

in Time and Antiquity in American Empire: Roma Redux

The introduction sets out the theoretical and historical stakes of the book. Opening with a cluster of Roman analogies stretching from the Iraq War to the American War of Independence, this chapter ... More

The introduction sets out the theoretical and historical stakes of the book. Opening with a cluster of Roman analogies stretching from the Iraq War to the American War of Independence, this chapter develops and explains the key questions that underpin the rest of the book. It offers extended rationales for its three keywords—empire, antiquity, and time—and makes claims for the methodological innovations it offers through its theorization of historical analogy. It situates the argument within the wider debates around temporality in American literary studies, postcolonial studies, and classical reception, as well as mobilizing its primary conceptual thinkers (namely, Reinhart Koselleck and Walter Benjamin). It closes by returning to the opening examples and putting the book’s main arguments into action.Less