Spectrality and Historical Interpretation. In Search of a Category of Counter-Time

• Authors: Maciej Bugajewski

Abstracts

EN

In this article, I will sketch a particular way of thinking about existence in time, the consequence of which would be practicing historiography as a response to the voices of the dead coming from the past. This theoretical conception of history tries to understand history not so much as an unfolding process of succession over time but as some community of the living and the dead. If the voices of the dead, defined in terms of spectrality, are to be active somehow in the present, they cannot be prematurely suppressed by gestures of closing the past understood as blocking the transmission of these voices to the future. After analyzing the problem of false closures in history, I am trying to understand spectrality that would combine both past and present activity. The article aims to propose tasks for a historiography that would consist in regaining in con-temporary culture the ability to hear the voice, the gaze, and the expectations coming from the past, present in various forms which can be grasped by an encompassing notion of spectrality. Reflection on spectrality brings us closer to the meaning of the concept of counter‑time.

Keywords

EN

historiography; theory of history; spectrality; evil; counter‑time

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk
• Journal: Historyka. Studia Metodologiczne
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 51
• Issue: Spec. iss.
• Pages: 7-16

Dates

published

2021

Contributors

author

Maciej Bugajewski

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

Identifiers

DOI

10.24425/hsm.2021.138876

Biblioteka Nauki

20311949