СОБЫТИЕ: ИСТОРИЯ ВНЕ СЮЖЕТА

Abstract

The author is looking for an opportunity to analyze the nature of a historical event, free from deterministic and constructivist premises of scientifical thinking, and not reducible to the logic and pragmatics of the structuralist and narrativist approaches. It starts from Heidegger’s understanding of it as “un-overpassed” (das Unumgängliche) scientific historiography and the so-called “unhidden” truth (aletheia). Since within the Heideggerian “being-historical thinking” the event reveals its derivative from the narrative structure of the “history of being”, an attempt is made to clarify the properties of the historical event with the help of its neopragmatist interpretation proposed in the works of R. Rorty. The latter sees the merit of Heidegger in the discovery of the contingency of any human project. However, Heidegger, according to Rorty, was not up to the mark of his discovery. He lacked the self-irony to refrain from presenting his own, finite and contingent, history of Western thought in terms of the “history of being” and the “event” of his truth. At the same time, Rorty does not hide his skepticism about the ability of philosophers to do without the “fateful” historical meaning. Rorty does not provide for any specificity of the historical event, reducing it without a trace in favor of private “selfcreation” carried out by means of fictional narrative. Therefore, the author finds the work “The Effect of Reality in Historical Writing” by F. Ankersmit more suitable for clarifying the contingent nature of a historical event, according to which the “non-functionality” of the details of ekphrasis can radically change the meaning of the historical narrative and even abolish the distance separating the past from the present. The text ends with a brief overview of the conceptions of historical event, which are developed in modern historical theory independently of Ankersmit, but reveal a similar view of the contingency of this event.