MEMORIAL TURN: CHALLENGES FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
RETURN TO THE TOPIC: WAR, CULTURE AND POLITICS
Keywords:
historical culture, memory, historiography, historical politics, historicity, timeAbstract
The article identifies and analyzes three challenges to the philosophy of history that arose due to the so-called memorial turn that occurred at the end of the 20th century. The first is the loss of the monopoly of academic historiography on historical truth and a defining attitude towards the past. The second is the insufficiency of the concept of “linear time” to explain the diversity of historical experience in different cultures and in different historical periods. The third is the problematization of the horizon of the future due to increased attention to the past. The challenges described determine the transformation of the philosophy of history from the theory of historiography to the philosophy of historical culture, historicity and the future, forming a new subject field that significantly distinguishes it from both the classical and postmodern stages.
Postmodern criticism of historical knowledge shifted the emphasis from epistemology to the analysis of the ways of representing the past in historical narrative, which resulted in the devaluation of the problematic of truth. The memorial turn, the main concept of which was memory, emphatically returns the importance of the question of truth to the philosophy of history but carries out this return outside the framework of academic historiography. Historical politics, which gives memory the status of an obligation, becomes another factor in determining the truth of the past. Therefore, the memorial turn visualizes the triad of historiography-memory-historical politics, each component of which claims its own truth of the past and the relationship between which is proposed to be defined as "historical culture".
The phenomenon of memory as the co-presence of the past in the present calls into question the objectivist "linear" understanding of time, which was the basis of modern historicism. At the same time, the problematic of the historicity of time itself and its connection with the historical nature of human experience is revealed. Cultural constructivism and hermeneutics constitute a range of modern approaches within which time is studied as “multilayered”, “heterogeneous”, “polychronic”, “plurihistorical”, etc. The consequence of this is the relativization of the phenomenon of time and the pluralization of historicities, the analysis of which is increasingly focused on by modern philosophy of history.
The deficit of the future, evidenced by the memorial turn, only illustrates the actual rejection of the philosophy of history from utopian thinking. However, the plurality of historicities inevitably relativizes the time of the memorial turn itself as a predominantly European and “Western” historicity. Post-humanist and retrotopic historicities reopen the horizon of the future, returning the philosophy of history to considerations about the future as a source of historical eventfulness and any historicity in general.
References
Ankersmit, F.R. (1983). Narrative Logic. A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language.The Hague; Boston; London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Ankersmit, F.R. (1998). Interview. In: Encounters. Philosophy of History after Postmodernism. Charlottesville; London: The University Press of Virginia, 67–99.
Ankersmit, F.R. (2009). The Postmodernist “Privatization” of the Past. Historical Representation. [In Ukrainian]. Ukraina Moderna, 4(15), 246–272.
Appleby, J., Hunt, L., Jacob, M. (1994). Telling the Truth about History. New York: W.W. Norton.
Assman, A. (2006). Der Lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: Verlag C.H. Beck oHG.
Assman, A. (2020). Is Time out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press; Cornell University Library.
Bauman, Z. (2017). Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bevernage, B. (2008). Time, Presence and Historical Injustice. History and Theory, 47, 2, 149–167.
Bevernage, B. (2012). From Philosophy of History to Philosophy of Historicities: Some Ideas on a Potential Future of Historical Theory. BMGN – The Low Countries Historical Review, 127(4), pp.113–120.
Bevernage, B. (2014). Transitional justice and historiography: challenges, dilemmas and possibilities. Macquarie Low Journal, 13, 7–24.
Bevernage, B. (2016). Tales of pastness and contemporaneity: on the politics of time in history and anthropology. Rethinking History, 1–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2016.1192257
Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fabian, J. (2014). Time and the Other. How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Grever, M., Adriaansen, R.-J. (2017). Historical Culture: A Concept Revisited. In: Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education (pp. 73–89). Palgrave Macmillan.
Gumbrecht, H.-U. (2014). Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1967). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Hartog, F. (2015). Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hölscher, L. (2013). Mysteries of Historical Order. Breaking up Time. Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future (pp. 134–151). Göttingen, Bristol: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Kozellek, R. (2005). Future Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. [In Ukranian]. Kyiv: Dukh i Litera.
Kozellek, R. (2006). Temporal Layers. Studies in the Theory of History. [In Ukranian]. Kyiv: Dukh i Litera.
Kymlicka, W. (2002). Contemporary Political Philosophy. An Introduction. 2nd. edn. New York: Oxford University Press.
Landwehr, A. (2018). Nostalgia and the Turbulence of Times. History and Theory, 57(2), 251–268.
Le Goff, J. (1992). History and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lorenz, C. ( 2014). Blurred Lines: History, Memory and the Experience of Time. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2(1), 43–62.
Lorenz, C. (2017). The Times They Are a-Changin. On Time, Space and Periodization in History. In: M. Carretero, S. Berger, M. Grever (Eds.), Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education (pp. 109–133). Houndmills: Palgrave.
Lorenz, C. (2019). Out of Time? Some Critical Reflections on François Hartog’s Presentism. Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Megill, A. (1998). Introduction. In: Encounters. Philosophy of History after Postmodernism (pp. 67–99). Charlottesville; London: The University Press of Virginia.
Olick, J.K. (2007). The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. New York: Routledge.
Olick, J.K. (2023). The Future of Mnemonic Turn. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 90(4), 781–807.
Osborne, P. (2013). The fiction of the contemporary. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (pp. 15–36). London: Verso.
Pihlainen, K. (2021). History Culture’ and the Continuing Crisis of History. Faravid: Journal for Historical and Archaeological Studies, 52, 17–35.
Proleiev, S., Zymovets, R., Kobets, R. (2023). Discourses in a Global World. Kyiv: Dukh i Litera.
Simon, Z.B. (2018). History Begins in the Future. On Historical Sensibility in the Age of Technology. In: The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility (pp. 192–209). Oxford; New York: Berghahn.
Simon, Z.B. (2024). Disconnective futures: Uncertainty, unfathomability, and the collapse of narrative crisis management. Frontiers of Narrative Studies, January, 208–231.
Simon, Z.B. (2026). Plurihistoricity. On the Historical Culture of Extinction, Justice, and the Historical Profession. London; New York: Routledge.
Tamm, M. (2022). Memory. The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory (pp. 544–557). London; New York: Routledge. Taylor & Francis Group.
Zymovets, R. (2025). “Mnemonic turns” in historical context. How cultures of memory influence modern world. [In Ukrainian]. Philosophical Thought, 3, 149–167.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
