Anachronism, Failure and Afterlife

DANIEL BRAUER, ALBERTO DAMIANI, FRANCISCO NAISHTAT, IRENE DEPETRIS CHAUVIN, RICARDO ORZESZKO, SILVINA VIDAL

Estocolmo

Conferencia; 3rd International Network for Theory of History Conference August 20-22 Södertörn University Stockholm; 2018

International Network for Theory of History (INTH) and Södertörn University

Since the first generation of the Annales Historiographical French School, anachronismhas been considered to be the most unforgivable sin for historic knowledge. Meanwhiletwentieth-century structuralism has familiarized us with an understanding of epochs asconsisting of defined borders. As these boundaries need to be respected in order to fulfilthe aims of historiographical research, they can be considered a kind of category of thehistorical a priori (Foucault). However, Walter Benjamin stressed not just a certaininevitability of anachronism, but also its potentiality. Making use of Warburg?s conceptof the afterlife (Nachleben), as well as the notion of a trace [Spur], Benjamin consideredhow the markings that characterize different historical periods can also reveal the pastitself as a figure capable of disrupting the present time and its relation with itself. Thedisruptive strength of Nachleben and Spur reclaims an experience with the past that, farfrom abolishing anachronism, relies on its productive potentiality.This need not implycontinuity, identity or totalization, but should rather be thought of in terms ofdisplacement, differentiation and translation. This approach can be seen in the writings of Didi-Huberman who, developing Benjamin ́s intuitions, focuses upon the inevitability and productivity of anachronism as the starting point for the conceptualization of a methodology suitable for history. Here we encounterthe idea of the ?simultaneity of the non simultaneous? (Ungleichzeitigkeit desGleichzeitigen) as introduced by Ernst Bloch, and developed by Reinhart Koselleck, and more recently by Berber Bevernage. Understood in this sense, ?productive anachronism? reveals the extent to which the act of taking place, making place, as well as the experience of the loss of place, can be situated within a polarized force-field, between the historical a priori (synchronic level) and a diachronic level. This implies, in turn, that it is not enough to understand the figure of displacement in purely spatial terms. Rather displacement also implies the experience of a break in temporal continuity, a way of opening up towards productive anachronism, spectrality, translation and dissemination under conditions of a broken tradition. This breaking of transmission, however, emerges in tandem with a new framework for understanding the past ? that of the breaking of tradition. Within this new framework of a secularized breaking of tradition, the main political dangers become the breaking of transmission and the fall of experience. This condition leads us towards the issues of life, survival and afterlife that are the main themes of this panel. We conclude by considering how such an understanding of historicality and finitude may enable us to shift from the heideggerian figure of beingtowards- death, towards a more trans-individual understanding of the past as figured by loss, afterlife and traumatic transmission.