Being Contemporaneous in the west or how to create boundaries

MUDROVCIC, MARÍA INÉS

Estocolmo

Conferencia; 3rd Conference International Network for Theory of historory; 2018

INTH

Modern philosophy always prioritized time over space. By western definitions, time is something other than space. This distinction between time and space seem to deepen when we refer to human time. Lived time or human time seems to occur separately from space. Historical knowledge has replicated this situation. Historical knowledge has been characterized as the knowledge of the human past. The knowledge of some kind of temporal dimension of human experience in the world. If the question of what historical time is, has recently entered into the debate amongst philosophers and theorists of history, the question of its relation to space has been barely ignored. One point of the debate on this issue has been the discussion around the "so-called" metaphor of temporal distance. M. Salber Phillips´ chapter, "History, Memory and Historical Distance" in P. Seixas´book published in 2004 and the Theme Issue of History and Theory in 2011 untitled "historical Distance: Reflections on a Metaphor are two main references which try to explain how and why historians usually use a spatial language to refer to historical time. Commenting on Phillips´ chapter before this last Issue of History and Theory was published, H. White, wrote to me in 2010: "Temporal distance is a contradiction in terms. He is using distance for "space". Temporal space? Spatial time?... The term "temporal distance" (insofar as it means "temporal space") is simply an anomaly". For White, the expression ?historical distance? did not even reach the rank of metaphor.