Introduction: Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory

Abstract

In the last few decades, we have witnessed a rearticulation of the traditional relationship between the categories of past, present and future in Western societies. The English novelist J. G. Ballard anticipated and captured it well in his introduction to the French edition of his cult novel Crash: ‘Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present’ (Ballard [1974] 1985: 5). One of the most influential interpreters of this alteration, Francois Hartog, has called it a change of the ‘regime of historicity’ (Hartog 2003; cf. Delacroix et al. 2009; Hartog 2010). While for the past couple of centuries the dominant Western regime of historicity was future-oriented, the orientation has shifted during the last decades — the symbolic turning point selected by Hartog being the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 — with the future clearly relinquishing its position as the main tool for interpreting historical experience and giving way to a present-oriented regime that he terms ‘presentism’ (Hartog 2003: 111–62; cf. Hartog 2008, 2013: 28–33, 99–107).1 A presentist regime of historicity implies a new way of understanding temporality, an abandoning of the linear, causal and homogeneous conception of time characteristic of the previous, modernist regime of historicity.