For a long time now, we have been awaiting the end of the world. Indeed, the promise of the end of the world has been for quite a while the archetype of all our promises. Every promise made waits for a day, for the last and final day, for the deadline, which is in fact the day of the end of the promise, the day of the end of the end. Even promises of love—love that cannot wait and that strives for eternity, even if the striving itself takes but an instant—even these promises are made following the formula suggested by Peter Handke: “till the day you do part.”1 We are still awaiting the end, either of the world or of our being haunted by the end.
The book of John titled “Apocalypse,” which has been read for centuries as one of the major narratives about the end of the world, is indeed a narrative revealing the world’s finitude. What this book “reports” is not only the end to come but also how the promise of the end of the world makes possible the counting of time in epochs and kingdoms, the calculation of time according to the idea of a chronological succession of before and after, and hence the birth of a certain meaning of history that has dominated the Western world as a world of domination. It is on the basis of the promise of the end of the world that finitude becomes on the one hand a question of arithmetic counting and moral accounting and on the other a question of history. From the perspective of the end of the world, everything that came before, along with the whole of history (that is, all the times), becomes visible at the same time. At the end of the world, the partition of time into different times is replaced by a scheme, whereby all times are joined together in a history, which itself cannot be divided and which is said to be the only possible and necessary one. The Apocalypse is the promise of a history without parts, without differences, without the “each one,” resembling all finitudes but excluding finitude itself and, above all, the day. This is the vision of Macbeth, who dreams to “be-all and end-all,”2 a formula through which Shakespeare showed how the mad desire to be-all couldn’t be dissociated from the violence of the will to end-all.
“Apocalypse,” the Book of Revelation, is narrated in a tone of exaltation before the end, the “apocalyptic tone” that Kant denounced in one of his short essays3 and that not even Derrida could get rid of in his thinking of the time “to-come.”4 This book is however not only a recitation in a certain tone. It is the presentation of what we should rather call a method, the apocalyptic method, which has been adopted since time immemorial in philosophy. What the apocalyptic method proposes is the path of and toward the end as the only way to regain a sense of the world, more meaningful than the world itself and thereby to ground a sense of history. This insight is also present in another text entitled “The End of All Things” (“Das Ende aller Dinge”).5 Kant saw quite well, albeit in a more implicit way, the methodological sense of postulating “the end of the world.” Keeping the ambiguity of the expression “the end of all things” that means both the end—finito, basta—of all things and the finality or the purpose of all things, Kant recognized how the threatening promise of the end is the “means” to arriving at the moral idea of a ultimate finality of all things, that culminates in the moral sense of the world. In this way, the apocalyptic method demonstrates how the promise of the end of the world reveals the finitude of the world, of history, and of world-history, not only as a line of counts and accounts but also as a line of finalities.
The apocalyptic method adopted since time immemorial in philosophy reveals the finitude of the world and of history though betrayal. The finitude of the world and of history is betrayed when it is “regained” by means of the demoralizing production of ends without end. And even when philosophy proposes a new formula for recovering the betrayed finitude of the world and of history6—as for instance, through the phenomenological formula announced by Edmund Husserl at the end of his Cartesian Meditations that reads: “I must lose the world by epoché, in order to regain it by a universal self-examination”7—the matrix of the apocalyptic method is reinforced. It seems that there is no way left to reveal the finitude of the world and history if not at the end of the world.
The purpose of the following reflection is to contribute to a critique of this “apocalyptic method” that promises a recovery of the world and of history after the loss or end of the world and of history. This will be done through a reflection of what is left of the discussions about the end of history, of what remains from ideas about history without end and of ends without history.
The discussion about the end of history is well known, and we have today a history of the end of history. Saying “history of the end of history,” we are recalling the ambiguity of the word “history,” which means both the narrative and the events, the saying and the said. This ambiguity can in English be minimized through the use of two very close but still distinct words: “story” and “history”: story without “h” and history with “h,” a subtle distinction related to aspirations and respirations.
In the stories told about the end of history, two meanings prevail: On the one hand, the end of history is supposed to mean the end of the big stories and narratives (la fin des grands récits, recalling Lyotard’s well-known expression8) and on the other, the end of historical transformations of history. The discourses about the end of history tell about the end of history as universal tale, and the end of history as historical transformation. La fin des grands récits became, however, itself a grand récit, and it belongs essentially together—as two hands do—with the claim about the end of history.
In different versions of this big story about the end of history, it is said that history ends when it reaches its end. Here, another ambiguity appears: the ambiguity of the word “end,” which means the conclusion but also the aim, the final point, and the finality. If history says transformations of time in time, and if it can have an end, then it presupposes a meaning of transformation as movement directed toward a final, ended or accomplished form. If transformation means to move toward a forme accomplie, then it belongs to the idea of history as transformation of time in time the end of history; that is, the reaching of a final form that does not need or allow further continuation. After reaching a final form, after formed, forms can possibly remain or decay, but they seem no longer able to continue to form. Putting in brackets the discussion about what is reached at the end of history, if it is the kingdom of salvation or secular all-compassing technical rationality, if post-communism or new-liberal global capitalism, what seems to be confirmed here is how a certain understanding of transformation at the basis of ideas about the end of history and of the world necessarily implies the end of history and of the world as the telos, or finality, of history and of the world.
The idea of transformation rearticulated again and again in the history of the very concept of history is based on two fundamental axioms (i.e., common notions): The first one is that to transform means to move from to; the second, that to transform means to behold a relation to an old form precisely when breaking this relation in a new form. Moving from to, transformation is a movement from a beginning to an end, from an origin to a destiny, from archaeo-logic to teleologic, from the logic of origins and beginnings to the logic of ends and finalities. Beholding a relation to the old form precisely when breaking this relation in a new form, transformation presents a mechanics, a dynamics, and an organics of forms. It presupposes a physics of formation that moves from formed forms toward forms to be formed. As archaeo-teleologic of formed forms, as movement from the already formed toward the to be formed, transformation is controlled through a mimetic comparative dialectics of forms that identifies and differentiates, that separates and unites the preformed and the post-formed, prefigurations and post-figurations, prototypes and aftertypes, Vorbilder and Nach- or Efterbilder, building what could be called under inspiration of Lacoue-Labarthe the big “typography” of Western and European understandings of transformation.9 This, let us call, “form-fixed” meaning of transformation and its mimetic and comparative dialectics remains itself untransformed along Western and European history. Maybe Goethe’s investigations on the metamorphosis of plants opened another path when he tried to unfold transformation from immemorial moving forms, from his Ur-Pflanz and Ur-phänomen.10 However, the archaeo-teleologic of transformation still remains the guideline of his attempts insofar as metamorphosis is thought as movement from a previous moving form to a posterior moving form. What remains untransformed is the priority of the form in relation to the forming, of the substance in relation to the movement. From Aristotle’s metaphysics of becoming to Goethe’s metamorphosis, the forming is conceived on the basis of the idea of a formed form, indeed of the idea as formed form. In this sense, form remains prior in relation to the forming, endorsing the metaphysical principle formulated by Aristotle that “actuality is prior to possibility.”11
“The apocalyptic tone” of discourses about “the end of history,” enounced even when denounced by Derrida12 and still re-announced for instance in Zizek’s discussions about the “apocalyptic zero-point of post-capitalist society,”13 is the tone of a revelation: the revelation that the finality of history is to reach a final form of history. This does not mean, however, that history disappears. It means rather that the final form of history is supposed to mean the form that encompasses all past and future forms of history, being the whole history about and of history. This is the core of the concept of the absolute, which reaches its most accomplished end-form in Hegel’s history of the absolute spirit as the spirit of the absolute of history. The “apocalyptic tone” is the tone that reveals that the finality of history is to overcome history. At the end of history, what becomes clear is that “nihilism is the destiny of reason” and “the murder of history is history itself,” as Camus formulated in his discussions about L’Homme révolté.14
The big récit about the end of history is similar but not at all the same as mythological narratives about the end of the world. Thus, in the big story about the end of history, the rest is not silence but, on the contrary, the world and the world in its noisiest form, a world in continuous transformation. Continuous transformation is however transformation fixed in transformation, and hence transformation that does not transform itself. If we would speak old Greek we could say: ou metamorfoseoumenon metamorfosei (“unmetamorphosized metamorphoser”), an updated version of Aristotle’s description of the divine principle of universal movement, ou kinoumenon kinei,15 (“the unmoved mover”). Continuous transformation means “untransformed transformer,” a transformation that transforms everything except transformation itself. That is why continuous transformation is at the end nothing but a status quo, fixity and stagnation.16 Continuous transformation is the murder of transformation.
What Aristotle described as dynamics of the universe, Marx recognized centuries later as the universal dynamics of capitalism, a dynamics that becomes clearer and clearer in our global world, the world that remains after the end of history, the world of continuous transformation. Thus capitalism can only become global and universal if transformation transforms everything all the time, more and more, faster and faster, saturating and undermining transformation. Transforming everything everywhere and all the time, faster and faster, global capitalism, to use the common label, produces and reproduces more than things. It produces productions, it reproduces reproduction, it represents representation, communicates communication, circulates circulation, et cetera. Indeed, in the world that remains after the presumed end of history, being means nothing; thus everything and everyone can and must be able to become whatsoever, wherever, whenever, functioning as resource for every kind of use and abuse. It is a world of global-reification happening through a double process of dis-ontologization and continuous re-ontologization: Nothing means nothing, and everything means everything. Here, everything happens, and nothing happens. This is the noise of the world that remains after the end of history, the noise of continuous transformation equaling stagnation, the noise of transformation deviated from transformation.
In Swedish, noise can be said with the word oväsen (Unwesen), which could be translated with Badiou’s term desêtre,17 but also with disaster,18 meaning deviated from its way. Indeed, what remains at the end of history is transformation deviated from transformation, history deviated from history, world deviated from the world. Rephrasing it: What remains at the end of history is continuous transformation undermining transformation, excess of history exterminating history, excess of world unworlding the world. In this sense, our world is the world of “criminals before history” (Hölderlin).19
The big story about the presumed end of history is the history about remainders and hence about ends that do not end, about ends without end. Thus, what is a remainder if not an end that did not end to end? In the attempt to express the experience of ends without end, our world—the remainder world after the presumed end of history—has been called post-historical world.20 We can refer here for instance to Jan Patočka’s discussions about post-history in his heretical essays about the philosophy of history.21 Our world, this remaining world has also been called postmodern, postcolonial, post-European, and post-communist. What these different uses and abuses of the prefix “post” aim to say is how the world that remains is the world of an after without further afters, an after the chronology of before and after. These titles bring unsolved difficulties to the flour of theoretical discussions because the “post” uses chronology in order to deny chronology when proposing a “movement against the flow of time,” as Boris Groys has formulated,22 a before that remains in front of and ahead of the end of history, presenting a movement from the future to the past rather than from the past to the future. That is why post-historical condition seems to equal pre-historical condition.23 What confuses is that “post-condition” is the condition of a postponed past, of a past that has passed but is still there. If the post-condition means the condition of an accomplished and ended form, it is an ended form that continues to end. The “post-condition” is not merely the condition of the end of utopias and hope for a transformation of world history. It is neither merely nostalgia nor “ostalgia.” It is the condition of an “endgame,” to use a title by Samuel Beckett, a condition that says as Clov: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” The “post” is an ambiguous way to say that the question is not about the “end” of history but about history as experience of an end that does not end to end and a beginning that does not begin to begin. The “post” is an ambiguous way to indicate the suspension of the meaning of history. In all these discussions, what is echoing is the fading away of the conviction about the meaning of history as revolutionary transformation. That what echoes is the untransformed meaning of transformation in all-compassing and continuous transformation. Echoing is the suspension of history in a history of suspensions. That is why the “tonality” and mode of contemporary history is the one of the non-happening of the happening of history. It is from this “hermeneutical situation,” so to speak, that contemporary philosophy of history is to be found rather in debates about the nature of the event than in debates about the “uses and abuses of history.”24 Thinking the event, however, the uses and abuses of history tend to be forgotten or reduced to discussions about collective and cultural memory, about who owns memory and history.
Philosophical debates about the nature of the event are debates about the meaning of this “non”-happening of the happening of history, even if not formulated in these terms.25 They discuss the nothing happening when everything appears absolutely submitted to restless happenings and further about the realization that something is about to happen but has still not happened. Here the ambiguity of the word “event” becomes transparent: “Event” says, on the one hand, the events, the occurrences, the facts, and in this sense what has already happened—every fact is, as fact, fait accompli. On the other hand, “event” says the “to come,” the advent, l’advenant.26 The event means the simultaneity of both what has already happened and what has not yet happened. In order to grasp this unnamable and ungraspable simultaneity of the already and the not yet, of the events of the world and the not yet event of another world, the event is said to be what can only be seized “afterwhile” (nachträglich), sharing with a melody and a comet this afterwhile way of being forward. In its afterwhileness, the event appears as what made history insofar as it interrupted the flow of time and history. The event has been described as thread, caesura, and disaster that neither separates nor unites times but instead interrupts and deviates time from time, introducing history in non-history. The difficulty or rather impossibility to apprehend, to name, and even to say the event, has been connected to the difficulty to seize the imminence as such, where the “it is about to happen,” “it is about to come” can only be grasped afterward. The event is “untimely,” as Nietzsche phrased it, and disastrous, as Blanchot added. The difficulty lies in how to grasp the negative, the non-happening and eventlessness as history and thereby to liberate history from the happening of events. Even if different philosophies of the event recognize the positivity of non-happening by interpreting the “non” as “about to come,” as “openness of meaning,” as “horizon of possibility” rather than as condition, what remains unthought is the uncanny experience that the non-happening of the happening of history is happening.
The non-happening is happening. Indeed, an end that does not end to end, a beginning that does not begin to begin—these paradoxical formulations describe through complexity the simplicity of a happening. Thus an end that does not end to end is an end that is-ending, and a beginning that does not begin to begin is a beginning that is-beginning. At stake here is the gerundive aspect of the happening, its carrying on, gerere, even called “continuous form” in English grammar. At stake is neither the have happened nor the about to happen but the is-happening, this continuity itself mostly discontinuous and even infinitive (in English the gerundive is also an infinitive). The difficulty of saying and thinking the is-happening does not lie merely in the claim that ends equal beginnings and that beginnings cannot be separated from ends, so that it appears as if nothing happened. The difficulty lies above all in the fact that the is-happening is not something that happens, and in this sense it cannot be considered as “present tense.” The is-happening is not a happening. Everywhere in our global world, of the world that has been described as a remainder after the presumed end of history, we experience that the non-happening is happening and that the is-happening is not something that happens.
The happening of the non-happening of history demands a thought in gerundive, a thought of the is-happening. This thought demands however an exercise of seeing in thick, obscuring mist, of seeing in a fog, what in Swedish can be said with the word “dis.” The non-etymological but sounding likeness between dis, fog, and the Latin prefix dis, which means “apart,” “asunder,” fits to our discussion here. We could say that the thought of the gerundive demands a thought from a “dis-horizon”—from the horizon of the obscuring mist of our today, where distinctions are mixed and rendered ambiguous, and clear positions appear apart and asunder. A dis-horizon is a leaving behind the horizon from which ends and beginnings are seen as things, facts, occurrences, “events” that end or begin or not. From a dis-horizon neither last ends nor other beginnings can be seen, at least a last end and the “other beginning” in the sense of what comes before a beginning and after an end. What can be seen is the is-ending, the is-beginning, the is-happening—an end without end, a beginning without beginning. What is seen from a dis-horizon is the ending while it is ending, the beginning while it is beginning, the happening while it is happening. Indeed, what is seen is neither ends nor beginnings but the meanwhileness and in-betweenness, where the fundamental experience is the one of being “with-out,” in both sense of being with the without and without the with. This gaze is a gaze from within the meanwhile of the happening, and hence from such a proximity—the “nearly finished” of Beckett—that there is no distance between the view and the viewed. Something in this direction is already indicated in the old German word Er-äugnis, literally a deep eyeing, which Heidegger proposes as the thinking etymology of the German word for “event,” Er-eignis. It is a view in dis-horizon that can hardly still be called a vision but should perhaps be described more as an attunement or touch, in the sense that Jean-Luc Nancy has thought it in his discussions with Jacques Derrida.27 It is the being touched of the is-happening and not of what happens. The view from a dis-horizon—from Er-äugnis—is a view that un-views the formed for the sake of viewing in the formed the coming to a form. It can be called a dis-formative view rather than a de-formative or formative vision. It can be called a vision or thought through sketches.
History is happening and not what happens. History is happening in the non-happening of history. This means that history is neither human nor nonhuman, neither of the spirit nor of nature. It means that history is of no one—the is-happening does not belong to anyone, and this is why each one is one insofar as each one belongs to the is-happening, to is-being. Philosophies of history, histories of philosophy, philosophy as history, and history as philosophy—in all these expressions, what remains unthought is that history is happening. Perhaps it is at this turning point of the world—where nothing happens in the restless economy and politics of happenings—perhaps it is in this undecided time where everything hesitates, even being, that a new sensibility for history and for the world and not merely another concept of history and of the world becomes possible. A sensibility to listen rather than to see how history is happening in the non-happening of history, a sensibility to listen to how history is with the without of history, how history is in exile from history in the is-happening of history emerging in multiple histories of exile, of abandons, of losses and farewell. At stake here is the birth of a sensibility for a transformed meaning of transformation in which it would make sense to say that a lost world is still a lost world, and that an exhausted word is still an exhausted word, a thought that T. S. Eliot expressed in the most precise way in his famous poem “Ash-Wednesday.”28
A thought of the happening of history in the non-happening of history is a thought of the is-being, a thought in gerundive. As such it is as well a thought of the world. It is a thought that does not arise from apocalyptic methods and tones. The apocalyptic tone is spreading today. We hear it everywhere, stated in different accents. It announces the affirmation of the apocalyptic method of giving meaning through destruction of meanings. It engages with a meaning of transformation that transforms the all for the sake of keeping untransformed the teleology of forms and meanings. The apocalyptic tone accompanies wars for and against capitalism, for and against the end of the world, for and against the death of God and a reencounter with the lost God. The sentiment of the world is the one of finding itself in the middle of a race speeding toward its end: The most threatening seems no longer to be the end of art, of history, of philosophy, of man, or even the end of the world, but the end of all resources pertaining to the world, the Earth, the planet.
To speak about the end of the world is to speak about the biodegradation of the world, of the Earth, of the planet, but nonetheless of history, as a result of the capitalist equation pronounced by Macbeth: be-all and end-all. It is to speak about the speed with which the excesses of exclusion and alienation, of inequality and injustice, move; it is to speak of such an accelerating speed that the oppositions between the human and the inhuman, the rational and the irrational, the alive and the dead, are annihilated. The sentiment of the world is one of already having arrived at end of the world. Everywhere it seems that the world has ended, albeit this time without any promise of the future, which, in its turn, has also been degraded.
The end of the world has indeed already arrived. It arrives every day. Not because the day of the end of the world—the coup de grâce of the world—has come. Quite differently, it arrived insofar as a day arrives every day, which also implies that the day ends every day. “Day” means nothing but arriving and ending every day, day by day. And if the end of anything, which also includes that of the world, is bound to the arrival of a day, we should then admit that the end of the world arrives every day: that every day the world ends. This is a way of saying that the world is finite, not because it cannot last but precisely because it is happening day by day, night by night. Nonetheless, worlds are ending for many. We are facing not the end of the world but the global violence of the end of worlds, in plural, the violence and violation against plural existence, against the each one of living beings. Indeed, every day we meet the refugees of the end of a world. The end of a world demands of us not to reveal it—how to reveal what is not hidden at all?—but to take care of it, so that each one of us would become the guardian of the is-happening of each one, of each world, of each history, a guardian of every day and every night.
Notes
1. Peter Handke, Till Day You Do Part or a Question of Light, translated by Mike Mitchell (London: Seagull Books, 2010).
2. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (eds.) (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 164: “With his surcease, success: that but this blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all, here / But here, upon this bank and shoal of time / we’d jump the life to come.”
3. Immanuel Kant, Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie (1786) (“On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy”), English translation by Peter Heath, in I. Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, Henry Allison and Peter Heath (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
4. See also Jacques Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1981), translated by John P. Leavy as “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (1984), pp. 3–37.
5. Kant, “Das Ende aller Dinge,” in Werke, vol. XI, W. Weischedel (ed.) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), English translation, “The End of All things,” in I. Kant, Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
6. For a discussion about “finite history,” see Jean-Luc Nancy, “Finite History,” in The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993).
7. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Philosophy, translated by Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1960).
8. Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1979); English translation, The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
9. Lacoue-Labarthe has discussed largely this mimetic logic of forms in his Typographies: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, Christopher Fynsk (ed.), introduction by Jacques Derrida (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). See also the works of Catherine Malabou on plasticity and metamorphosis, for instance, in Plasticité (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 1999); L’Avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique (Paris: Vrin, 1996); English translation, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, translated by Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2004).
10. Johan Wolfgang Goethe and Gordon L. Miller, Metamorphosis of Plants (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
11. Aristotle, Metaphysics, p. 1049b 4ff.
12. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994) and, above all, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” in Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer 1984), pp. 20–31.
13. Slavov Zizek, Living in the End Times (London and New York: Verso, 2010, 2011).
14. Albert Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 353f.
15. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 12, p. 1072 a 24–25.
16. See Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), “absolute change equals stasis,” p. 19.
17. Alain Badiou, Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992), “Mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre.”
18. Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).
19. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Communismus der Geister,” in Sämtliche Werke. Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer/Cotta Verlag, 1961), p. 1.
20. The expression “post-historical” becomes frequent in the 1970s, coincidentally used by both Jan Patočka and J. F. Lyotard. See also Vilém Flusser, Pós-historia, published in 1983 in Portuguese in Brazil, and recently translated into English (Letterpress Cover, 2013).
21. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Chicago: Open Court, 1996). See also Derrida’s commentaries on these essays by Patočka in Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999); English translation, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995).
22. Boris Groys, “Zurück aus der Zukunft,” in Osteuropäische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005).
23. See here again Jan Patočka, Heretrical Essays in the Philosophy of History. In regard to how the concepts of pre-historical and post-historical coincide, see also discussions about how the idea of historylessness (Geschichtlosigkeit) attributed by Hegel and many other European philosophers to the primitives relates to the state of lack or loss of history in post-industrial societies, as for instance in Arnold Gehlen, Studien zur Anthropologie und Soziologie (Neuwied Luchterhand, 1963).
24. The question of the meaning of history in contemporary philosophy confronts different positions. Some defend that only history can save us, others that history has destroyed us. These positions can be defended or refuted with very different arguments. Moreover, there are also claims that history can neither save us nor destroy us because history has reached its end. Even without choosing these positions, philosophical discussions on the meaning of history have to admit the necessity of facing the question about the “loss” of the meaning of history and about the “void” of a contemporary philosophy of history. This admission can produce the need both for a renewed discussion about the meaning of history or for transforming the discussion about the meaning of history into a discussion on memory and representations of history, something that has been the focus of the research program “Time, Memory and Representation,” coordinated by Hans Ruin (www.histcon.se). To say that history has lost its meaning can be understood in different senses. It can be understood in the sense that history has lost its traditional or hegemonic meanings; as such, every transformation of meaning implies a loss of meaning, a loss of a former or previous meaning. So, for instance, the modern meaning of history as revolutionary transformation appears as the loss of meaning of history as change understood from our ideas of natural and cosmic changes (ancient ontology and cosmology) and further of creational views on becoming (medieval theology). History can be defined here as birth of meaning from a loss of meaning. The loss of the meaning of history can also be understood in the sense that to ask about the meaning of history has lost its meaning, that this question is meaningless insofar as history has to be defined as a relation to the past and hence as a relation to what can never be lost. The past can be refused and refuted, it can be adored and monumentalized, it can be a specter that haunts us or a memory that protects us. It can be repressed and become oppressive, it can be what has to be forgotten or what has to be remembered, what has to be denied or affirmed; but whatsoever value the past can receive, history as relation to the past cannot be ignored. However and despite all these meanings, the loss of the past cannot be lost. Besides the two classical philosophical basic texts by Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” 2. Unzeitgemässige Betrachtungen; and Heidegger, Being and Time, §65–81, see also Hannah Arendt, The Concept of History, and the important contribution by Karl Löwith, The Meaning in History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1949) and Ges. Ab. zur Kritik der geschichtliche Existenz, 1960. Here belong of course the works by Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. See also Françoise Proust, L’Histoire à contretemps: Le temps historique chez Walter Benjamin (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1994).
25. See, for instance, Alain Badiou, Le reveil de l’histoire, Circonstances 6 (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Lignes, 2011); Etienne Balibar, Saeculum, Culture, Religion, Idéologie (Paris: Galilée, 2012); Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Équivalence des catastrophes (Après Fukushima) (Paris: Galilée, 2012).
26. Claude Romano, L’événement et le monde (Paris: Puf, 1999); English version, Event and World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).
27. Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000).
28. See T. S. Eliot, “Ash-Wednesday,” in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936), p. 83ff.