Books / Special Issues by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
Cambridge University Press, 2023 [Preview] Free access until 28 August 2023 at the CUP website: h... more Cambridge University Press, 2023 [Preview] Free access until 28 August 2023 at the CUP website: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/fabric-of-historical-time/8A0BFF220A5C4F280CB62E34DE40A8C9
Historical time is a notoriously elusive notion. Yet, as societies attempt to make sense of rapidly changing worlds, it gains a new significance in the twenty-first century. This Element sketches a theory of historical time as based on a distinction between temporality and historicity. It approaches the fabric of historical time as varying relational arrangements and interactions of multiple temporalities and historicities. In the fabric, kinds of temporalities and historicities emerge, come to being, fade out, transform, cease to exist, merge, coexist, overlap, arrange and rearrange in constellations, and clash and conflict in a dynamic without a predetermined plot. The Element pays special attention to the more-than-human temporalities of the Anthropocene, the technology-fueled historicities of runaway changes, and the conflicts in the fabric of historical time at the intersections of technological, ecological, and social change.
Z. B. Simon and L. Deile (eds.), Historical Understanding: Past, Present, and Future. London, Blo... more Z. B. Simon and L. Deile (eds.), Historical Understanding: Past, Present, and Future. London, Bloomsbury, 2022.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/historical-understanding-9781350168794/
The first decades of the new century shake old certainties. In a whirlwind of profound changes, do we have more history or less? Does history overwhelm us in all domains of life or is historical understanding in yet another crisis? The answers do not come easily. The recent demise of humanities education, the technological alterations of our social lifeworlds and the human condition, the anthropogenic changes in the Earth system, the growing sense of memory, trauma and historical injustice as alternative approaches to the past, seem to entail contradictions and complexities that do not fit very well with our existing notions of historical understanding. Historical thought as we know it is facing manifold challenges, and we struggle to grasp a larger picture that could encompass them.
Boasting a range of contributions from leading scholars, this volume attempts just that. In an innovative collection of short essays, Historical Understanding explores the current shape of historical understanding today, by surveying a variety of historical relations to the past, present, and future in the face of socio-political, ecological and technological upheavals.
This book is an invaluable research tool for students and researchers alike, presenting a kaleidoscope-like overview of manifold new ways which we navigate “historically” in coping with present-day challenges, both in wider society and in historiography
Palgrave 2020 [Preview] Download the full book via SpringerLink: https://link.springer.com/book/1... more Palgrave 2020 [Preview] Download the full book via SpringerLink: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-47805-6
This book is a unique attempt to capture the growing societal experience of living in an age unlike anything the world has ever seen. Fueled by the perception of acquiring unprecedented powers through technologies that entangle the human and the natural worlds, human beings have become agents of a new kind of transformative event. The ongoing sixth mass extinction of species, the prospect of a technological singularity, and the potential crossing of planetary boundaries are expected to trigger transformations on a planetary scale that we deem catastrophic and try to avoid. In making sense of these prospects, Simon's book sketches the rise of a new epochal thinking, introduces the epochal event as an emerging category of a renewed historical thought, and makes the case for the necessity of bringing together the work of the human and the natural sciences in developing knowledge of a more-than-human world.
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030478049
Reviews
"Zoltán Simon continues his quest to develop an understanding of our predicament of anthropogenic-technological transformations that is both untimely and timely, in the best Nietzschean sense-both radically different from existing theories and exactly what we need in the present moment. In The Epochal Event, he offers us a tool to engage meaningfully and critically with the effects of human planetary-scale agency, and points out a new direction for historical thinking to contribute to the omni-disciplinary endeavor to save the planet and our futures." - Helge Jordheim, Professor in Cultural History and Museology, University of Oslo, Norway
"This book offers much needed conceptual orientation about our current situation, the complexity of which we haven't understood yet. It makes us see how contemporary historiography can approach the affordances of our time in their intricate entanglement. If one wants to get a sense for the epochal significance of the Anthropocene-thesis in its ontological and political bearings, here is a well-argued statement." - Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Professor MSO in Philosophy, Aarhus University, Denmark
London: Bloomsbury, 2019 June
[Introductory chapter preview]
Book info:
Our understanding ... more London: Bloomsbury, 2019 June
[Introductory chapter preview]
Book info:
Our understanding of ourselves and the world as historical has drastically changed since the postwar period, yet this emerging historical sensibility has not been appropriately explained in a coherent theory of history. In this book, Zoltán Simon argues that instead of seeing the past, the present and the future together on a temporal continuum as history, we now expect unprecedented change to happen in the future (in visions of the future of technology, ecology and nuclear warfare) and we look at the past by assuming that such changes have already happened.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/history-in-times-of-unprecedented-change-9781350095052/
Reviews:
“Among an expanding literature, Zoltan Simon's challenging book will quickly become a landmark. A clear vision of what is at stake, a well informed and precise inquiry starting from a fascinating question: how to think the novelty of an “unprecedented event” or “unprecedented change", such as the anthropogenic one? And an ambitious proposal to rethink the very concept of history.” – François Hartog, Chair of Modern and Antique Historiography, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), France
“The idea that the devastating wars of the twentieth century and the unprecedented growth of technology and environmental concerns of the twenty-first have, taken together, permanently destroyed the appeal of history in the West, has been dominant for a while. Simon mounts a vigorous, provocative, and imaginative challenge to that thesis. A powerful intervention that will rekindle debates about history and its nature in our uncertain times.” – Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, University of Chicago, USA
“In a world that seems both bewildered by and disassociated from history, Zoltan Simon brings a sharp and deep argument in favour of philosophy of history that embraces disruption. His is a deft and thought-provoking account of why novelty, historical ownership and singularity need to be understood on more than narrative terms. This will be an invaluable book for anyone wanting to dig into and to break past the sense that theory cannot speak in a world of so many fractured voices.” – Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Professor of History, Australian National University, Australia
“History understood as knowledge of the past can never be the same after reading Zoltan Boldizsar Simon's book. It offers a future-oriented perspective on historical thinking which is challenged by times of unprecedented change. We are living through an epochal transformation marked by nuclear warfare, anthropogenic climate change, bioengineering and radical enhancement. How can history as a conceptual strategy help us to cope with these novelties? How might the future be pre-figured through a different approach to historical change? And how would this reorient theories of historical writing? In exploring these questions, the author presents a thought-provoking book that belongs to the emerging fields of anthropocene and posthumanist history. It is a must read for anyone interested in critical history as realistic scientific-fiction.” – Ewa Domanska, President of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography, Professor of Human Sciences, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland
“History is in trouble, or even in crisis. At present, this is almost a truism. What sets Zoltan Boldizsar Simon's book apart from other publications making the same claim, in the footsteps of Francois Hartog, Aleida Assmann and others, is that he actually knows why. His theory of unprecedented changes presents a radical - indeed unprecedented - attack on history as developmental process and narrative form, penned by one of the most original new voices in the theory of history.” – Helge Jordheim, Professor of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway
Papers by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
History and Theory, 2024
With a touch of irony, the project-closing piece of the "Historical Futures" collective research ... more With a touch of irony, the project-closing piece of the "Historical Futures" collective research endeavor pulls together the threads of its four years of explorative work by showcasing an opening of historical futures. Against the persisting myth of the closure of the future in contemporary societies, it claims that, as long as the future remains contested by virtue of the multiplicity of historical futures that societal practices and discourses entail or advocate, there can be no closure of the future. In support of this claim, the project-closing piece outlines the reasons why the future is more radically open than ever and surveys the findings of the project contributions with the frame provided by the contemporary opening of historical futures.
Les Temps qui restent, 2024
Frontiers of Narrative Studies, 2023
The article explores the exhaustion of narrative as a cognitive instrument in trying to make sens... more The article explores the exhaustion of narrative as a cognitive instrument in trying to make sense of the "disconnective futures" of the Anthropocene and runaway technological imaginaries. Having its point of departure in the organic ties between narrative form and modern historical understanding, the article's argument begins by sketching how the modern idea of a historical process entails constant crises of uncertainty, on the one hand, and functions simultaneously as the manager of the very crises it brings about, on the other. The means of this crisis management consists of crafting historical narratives which tame uncertainty and smooth ruptures in time into deeper continuities. It is this narrative crisis management of establishing connections between past, present, and futures, which breaks down when encountering the temporal disconnections of the Anthropocene and technological prospects. Narrative crisis management was created to attend to crises of uncertainty, but it is inadequate to cope with disconnective futures which are not merely uncertain, but unfathomable. Based on a distinction between uncertainty and unfathomability, the article argues that efforts to project narrative connections over disconnective futures produce cognitive failures, and concludes on a note of potential resolutions, hinting at the development of non-narrative and yet historically-minded cognitive instruments attuned to making sense of temporal disconnections.
Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method, 2023
Simon, Z.B. (2023). The End of History and the End of the World. In Bloomsbury History Theory and... more Simon, Z.B. (2023). The End of History and the End of the World. In Bloomsbury History Theory and Method. London: Bloomsbury. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350887619.225
“End of history” theories came in many shapes in the last decades of the previous century. Just as many shapes as do the various claims about the revival of history in midst of the political turmoils and human-induced environmental crises of the new century. This article argues that neither “end of history” theories nor their counterparts are able to adequately capture the contemporary shapes of historical thought due to the fact that they both consider the idea of “history” in solitary confinement. Based on the contention that ideas can properly be understood only in relation to other ideas, the article will outline a transformation of historical thought by sketching a change in the relation between the ideas of “the end of history” and the “end of the world.” After highlighting the modern constellation in which claims about the end of history were typically accompanied by the view that the world continues to exist, it will explore the rather curious contemporary constellation in which history is expected to continue even after the world is expected to come to an end.
Tuna: Ajalookultuuri ajalugu, 2023
Estonian translation of the article first published in English in 2020, More-than-Human History: ... more Estonian translation of the article first published in English in 2020, More-than-Human History: Philosophy of History at the Time of the Anthropocene.
History and Theory, 2023
History and Theory 62:2 (2023), 320-333.
Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Plan... more History and Theory 62:2 (2023), 320-333.
Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is, in three respects, far more than a synthesis of over a decade of pioneering conceptual work aimed at making sense of the Anthropocene/planetary predicament and its implications for historical understanding. First, the book makes visible an intellectual trajectory in which Chakrabarty's conceptual struggles with the Anthropocene gradually move from the centrality of the notion of the Anthropocene toward the centrality of the notion of the planet. Second, it highlights the relational complexities with which one needs to grapple when trying to make sense of the current predicament. Third, and finally, the book showcases a series of often overlapping conceptual distinctions that Chakrabarty has developed while navigating these complexities. Through a discussion of the above key aspects, this review essay highlights the achievements of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and critically engages with its central themes. In dialogue with the book, it pays special attention to exploring the respective benefits and drawbacks of the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet, and to the character and role of human agency in the Anthropocene/planetary predicament. Finally, the essay concludes with a few thoughts concerning the question of what kind of a reinvention of historical understanding might be triggered, respectively, by the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet.
Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár, "Does the Past Still Matter?" In Paul M. Dover (ed.), Engaging with the ... more Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár, "Does the Past Still Matter?" In Paul M. Dover (ed.), Engaging with the Past and Present: The Relationship between Past and Present across the Disciplines (London and New York: Routledge, 2023), 43-55.
Against the backdrop of the growing footprint of the future in contemporary lifeworlds (caught in the midst of rapid ecological and technological transformations), the chapter asks the question of whether the past still matters. It contends that the past matters inasmuch as contemporary societies do, in fact, make the past matter by relating pasts to presents and anticipated futures in societal practices and discourses ranging from the persistence of colonial practices to the burden of nuclear waste. In exploring the ways in which the past is made to matter, the chapter conceptualizes a variety of pasts, such as the unfolding past, the recurring past, the present past, the associated past, the inherited past, the ahistorical past, and the cultivated past.
Simon, Z. B. (2022). Why We Can’t Know Anything about a Truly Posthuman Future. In Freddy Paul Gr... more Simon, Z. B. (2022). Why We Can’t Know Anything about a Truly Posthuman Future. In Freddy Paul Grunert et al. (eds.), HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence. European Commission, 179-183.
ISIS, 2022
This programmatic essay argues that meaningful historical engagement with the Anthropocene begins... more This programmatic essay argues that meaningful historical engagement with the Anthropocene begins with recognizing that the concept arises not only from geology but also from Earth System science (ESS), which has evolved to incorporate both physical systems and human systems in an integrated view of our planet. It makes the case that this holistic understanding alters both the science and the history of the Anthropocene by introducing a novel form of human agency: Earth System agency. This radical new form of agency does not eclipse the individual and collective forms of agency that have always interacted with the environment but adds to them in complex and sometimes uncomfortable ways. It challenges us to develop a science-induced Anthropocene historiography and a humanities-induced Anthropocene science. The history of science is well positioned to play a dialectical role in developing a "critical friendship" between Anthropocene history and Anthropocene science-a process in which the history of science will likely be transformed as well. Our collaboration was entirely mutual; we flipped a coin to settle the order of names for the byline. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is a historian and historical theorist at Bielefeld University. He has been an assistant professor at Leiden University and a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His recent work explores the challenges posed by technology and the Anthropocene to the human condition and modern historical thinking. He has published in journals ranging from History of the Human Sciences and the European Journal of Social Theory to the Anthropocene Review and Time and Society, and he is the author of History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury, 2019) and The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds (Palgrave, 2020). Most recently, from 2021 onward, joining forces with Marek Tamm and the journal History and Theory, he co-conducts the collective project and serial publishing experiment "Historical Futures.
Isis, 2022
This programmatic essay argues that meaningful historical engagement with the Anthropocene begins... more This programmatic essay argues that meaningful historical engagement with the Anthropocene begins with recognizing that the concept arises not only from geology but also from Earth System science (ESS), which has evolved to incorporate both physical systems and human systems in an integrated view of our planet. It makes the case that this holistic understanding alters both the science and the history of the Anthropocene by introducing a novel form of human agency: Earth System agency. This radical new form of agency does not eclipse the individual and collective forms of agency that have always interacted with the environment but adds to them in complex and sometimes uncomfortable ways. It challenges us to develop a science-induced Anthropocene historiography and a humanities-induced Anthropocene science. The history of science is well positioned to play a dialectical role in developing a "critical friendship" between Anthropocene history and Anthropocene science-a process in which the history of science will likely be transformed as well.
Simon, Z.B. 2022. Historical Understanding Today. In: Simon, Z.B. and Deile, L. (eds.), Historic... more Simon, Z.B. 2022. Historical Understanding Today. In: Simon, Z.B. and Deile, L. (eds.), Historical Understanding: Past, Present and Future. London: Bloomsbury, 1-12.
Simon, Z.B. 2022. Planetary Futures, Planetary History. In: Simon, Z.B. and Deile, L. (eds.), His... more Simon, Z.B. 2022. Planetary Futures, Planetary History. In: Simon, Z.B. and Deile, L. (eds.), Historical Understanding: Past, Present and Future. London: Bloomsbury, 119-129.
With our futures gaining a planetary character, our historical understanding cannot escape to be planetary too. Anthropocene and technological futures, however, pose a challenge to disciplinary history on three levels: that of epistemology, methodology, and worldview. The paper sketches the emerging planetary history as a response to the threefold challenge.
Rethinking History, 2021
In the form of a conversational exchange of ideas, Ewa Domańska, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek... more In the form of a conversational exchange of ideas, Ewa Domańska, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm reflect on the condition and role of historical knowledge in the Anthropocene. In the conversation on the potential of 'anthropocenic historical knowledge'-including the limitations and use of the term-each author offers and elaborates on one main theme for discussion, on which the other two co-authors reflect: Tamm begins by posing the question of the extension of 'the territory of the historian', Simon takes on the challenge by calling for the development of a 'scientific literacy', and Domańska pulls the threads together by advocating 'anticipatory knowledge'. In the conversation, each author reflects on all three themes that they present as fundamental tenets of a renewed historical knowledge attuned to the Anthropocene predicament.
Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method, 2021
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Books / Special Issues by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
Historical time is a notoriously elusive notion. Yet, as societies attempt to make sense of rapidly changing worlds, it gains a new significance in the twenty-first century. This Element sketches a theory of historical time as based on a distinction between temporality and historicity. It approaches the fabric of historical time as varying relational arrangements and interactions of multiple temporalities and historicities. In the fabric, kinds of temporalities and historicities emerge, come to being, fade out, transform, cease to exist, merge, coexist, overlap, arrange and rearrange in constellations, and clash and conflict in a dynamic without a predetermined plot. The Element pays special attention to the more-than-human temporalities of the Anthropocene, the technology-fueled historicities of runaway changes, and the conflicts in the fabric of historical time at the intersections of technological, ecological, and social change.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/historical-understanding-9781350168794/
The first decades of the new century shake old certainties. In a whirlwind of profound changes, do we have more history or less? Does history overwhelm us in all domains of life or is historical understanding in yet another crisis? The answers do not come easily. The recent demise of humanities education, the technological alterations of our social lifeworlds and the human condition, the anthropogenic changes in the Earth system, the growing sense of memory, trauma and historical injustice as alternative approaches to the past, seem to entail contradictions and complexities that do not fit very well with our existing notions of historical understanding. Historical thought as we know it is facing manifold challenges, and we struggle to grasp a larger picture that could encompass them.
Boasting a range of contributions from leading scholars, this volume attempts just that. In an innovative collection of short essays, Historical Understanding explores the current shape of historical understanding today, by surveying a variety of historical relations to the past, present, and future in the face of socio-political, ecological and technological upheavals.
This book is an invaluable research tool for students and researchers alike, presenting a kaleidoscope-like overview of manifold new ways which we navigate “historically” in coping with present-day challenges, both in wider society and in historiography
The authors of the special issue include: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ewa Domanska, Sheila Jasanoff, Bruno Latour, Libby Robin and Hava-Tirosh Samuelson.
This book is a unique attempt to capture the growing societal experience of living in an age unlike anything the world has ever seen. Fueled by the perception of acquiring unprecedented powers through technologies that entangle the human and the natural worlds, human beings have become agents of a new kind of transformative event. The ongoing sixth mass extinction of species, the prospect of a technological singularity, and the potential crossing of planetary boundaries are expected to trigger transformations on a planetary scale that we deem catastrophic and try to avoid. In making sense of these prospects, Simon's book sketches the rise of a new epochal thinking, introduces the epochal event as an emerging category of a renewed historical thought, and makes the case for the necessity of bringing together the work of the human and the natural sciences in developing knowledge of a more-than-human world.
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030478049
Reviews
"Zoltán Simon continues his quest to develop an understanding of our predicament of anthropogenic-technological transformations that is both untimely and timely, in the best Nietzschean sense-both radically different from existing theories and exactly what we need in the present moment. In The Epochal Event, he offers us a tool to engage meaningfully and critically with the effects of human planetary-scale agency, and points out a new direction for historical thinking to contribute to the omni-disciplinary endeavor to save the planet and our futures." - Helge Jordheim, Professor in Cultural History and Museology, University of Oslo, Norway
"This book offers much needed conceptual orientation about our current situation, the complexity of which we haven't understood yet. It makes us see how contemporary historiography can approach the affordances of our time in their intricate entanglement. If one wants to get a sense for the epochal significance of the Anthropocene-thesis in its ontological and political bearings, here is a well-argued statement." - Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Professor MSO in Philosophy, Aarhus University, Denmark
[Introductory chapter preview]
Book info:
Our understanding of ourselves and the world as historical has drastically changed since the postwar period, yet this emerging historical sensibility has not been appropriately explained in a coherent theory of history. In this book, Zoltán Simon argues that instead of seeing the past, the present and the future together on a temporal continuum as history, we now expect unprecedented change to happen in the future (in visions of the future of technology, ecology and nuclear warfare) and we look at the past by assuming that such changes have already happened.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/history-in-times-of-unprecedented-change-9781350095052/
Reviews:
“Among an expanding literature, Zoltan Simon's challenging book will quickly become a landmark. A clear vision of what is at stake, a well informed and precise inquiry starting from a fascinating question: how to think the novelty of an “unprecedented event” or “unprecedented change", such as the anthropogenic one? And an ambitious proposal to rethink the very concept of history.” – François Hartog, Chair of Modern and Antique Historiography, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), France
“The idea that the devastating wars of the twentieth century and the unprecedented growth of technology and environmental concerns of the twenty-first have, taken together, permanently destroyed the appeal of history in the West, has been dominant for a while. Simon mounts a vigorous, provocative, and imaginative challenge to that thesis. A powerful intervention that will rekindle debates about history and its nature in our uncertain times.” – Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, University of Chicago, USA
“In a world that seems both bewildered by and disassociated from history, Zoltan Simon brings a sharp and deep argument in favour of philosophy of history that embraces disruption. His is a deft and thought-provoking account of why novelty, historical ownership and singularity need to be understood on more than narrative terms. This will be an invaluable book for anyone wanting to dig into and to break past the sense that theory cannot speak in a world of so many fractured voices.” – Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Professor of History, Australian National University, Australia
“History understood as knowledge of the past can never be the same after reading Zoltan Boldizsar Simon's book. It offers a future-oriented perspective on historical thinking which is challenged by times of unprecedented change. We are living through an epochal transformation marked by nuclear warfare, anthropogenic climate change, bioengineering and radical enhancement. How can history as a conceptual strategy help us to cope with these novelties? How might the future be pre-figured through a different approach to historical change? And how would this reorient theories of historical writing? In exploring these questions, the author presents a thought-provoking book that belongs to the emerging fields of anthropocene and posthumanist history. It is a must read for anyone interested in critical history as realistic scientific-fiction.” – Ewa Domanska, President of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography, Professor of Human Sciences, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland
“History is in trouble, or even in crisis. At present, this is almost a truism. What sets Zoltan Boldizsar Simon's book apart from other publications making the same claim, in the footsteps of Francois Hartog, Aleida Assmann and others, is that he actually knows why. His theory of unprecedented changes presents a radical - indeed unprecedented - attack on history as developmental process and narrative form, penned by one of the most original new voices in the theory of history.” – Helge Jordheim, Professor of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway
Papers by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
The article is part of the dossier "Inheriting modern times," edited by Patrice Maniglier, in the opening issue of Les Temps qui restent. The new venue has emerged out of the ashes of Les Temps Modernes, the legendary journal founded by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in 1945.
“End of history” theories came in many shapes in the last decades of the previous century. Just as many shapes as do the various claims about the revival of history in midst of the political turmoils and human-induced environmental crises of the new century. This article argues that neither “end of history” theories nor their counterparts are able to adequately capture the contemporary shapes of historical thought due to the fact that they both consider the idea of “history” in solitary confinement. Based on the contention that ideas can properly be understood only in relation to other ideas, the article will outline a transformation of historical thought by sketching a change in the relation between the ideas of “the end of history” and the “end of the world.” After highlighting the modern constellation in which claims about the end of history were typically accompanied by the view that the world continues to exist, it will explore the rather curious contemporary constellation in which history is expected to continue even after the world is expected to come to an end.
Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is, in three respects, far more than a synthesis of over a decade of pioneering conceptual work aimed at making sense of the Anthropocene/planetary predicament and its implications for historical understanding. First, the book makes visible an intellectual trajectory in which Chakrabarty's conceptual struggles with the Anthropocene gradually move from the centrality of the notion of the Anthropocene toward the centrality of the notion of the planet. Second, it highlights the relational complexities with which one needs to grapple when trying to make sense of the current predicament. Third, and finally, the book showcases a series of often overlapping conceptual distinctions that Chakrabarty has developed while navigating these complexities. Through a discussion of the above key aspects, this review essay highlights the achievements of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and critically engages with its central themes. In dialogue with the book, it pays special attention to exploring the respective benefits and drawbacks of the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet, and to the character and role of human agency in the Anthropocene/planetary predicament. Finally, the essay concludes with a few thoughts concerning the question of what kind of a reinvention of historical understanding might be triggered, respectively, by the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet.
Against the backdrop of the growing footprint of the future in contemporary lifeworlds (caught in the midst of rapid ecological and technological transformations), the chapter asks the question of whether the past still matters. It contends that the past matters inasmuch as contemporary societies do, in fact, make the past matter by relating pasts to presents and anticipated futures in societal practices and discourses ranging from the persistence of colonial practices to the burden of nuclear waste. In exploring the ways in which the past is made to matter, the chapter conceptualizes a variety of pasts, such as the unfolding past, the recurring past, the present past, the associated past, the inherited past, the ahistorical past, and the cultivated past.
With our futures gaining a planetary character, our historical understanding cannot escape to be planetary too. Anthropocene and technological futures, however, pose a challenge to disciplinary history on three levels: that of epistemology, methodology, and worldview. The paper sketches the emerging planetary history as a response to the threefold challenge.
Historical time is a notoriously elusive notion. Yet, as societies attempt to make sense of rapidly changing worlds, it gains a new significance in the twenty-first century. This Element sketches a theory of historical time as based on a distinction between temporality and historicity. It approaches the fabric of historical time as varying relational arrangements and interactions of multiple temporalities and historicities. In the fabric, kinds of temporalities and historicities emerge, come to being, fade out, transform, cease to exist, merge, coexist, overlap, arrange and rearrange in constellations, and clash and conflict in a dynamic without a predetermined plot. The Element pays special attention to the more-than-human temporalities of the Anthropocene, the technology-fueled historicities of runaway changes, and the conflicts in the fabric of historical time at the intersections of technological, ecological, and social change.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/historical-understanding-9781350168794/
The first decades of the new century shake old certainties. In a whirlwind of profound changes, do we have more history or less? Does history overwhelm us in all domains of life or is historical understanding in yet another crisis? The answers do not come easily. The recent demise of humanities education, the technological alterations of our social lifeworlds and the human condition, the anthropogenic changes in the Earth system, the growing sense of memory, trauma and historical injustice as alternative approaches to the past, seem to entail contradictions and complexities that do not fit very well with our existing notions of historical understanding. Historical thought as we know it is facing manifold challenges, and we struggle to grasp a larger picture that could encompass them.
Boasting a range of contributions from leading scholars, this volume attempts just that. In an innovative collection of short essays, Historical Understanding explores the current shape of historical understanding today, by surveying a variety of historical relations to the past, present, and future in the face of socio-political, ecological and technological upheavals.
This book is an invaluable research tool for students and researchers alike, presenting a kaleidoscope-like overview of manifold new ways which we navigate “historically” in coping with present-day challenges, both in wider society and in historiography
The authors of the special issue include: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ewa Domanska, Sheila Jasanoff, Bruno Latour, Libby Robin and Hava-Tirosh Samuelson.
This book is a unique attempt to capture the growing societal experience of living in an age unlike anything the world has ever seen. Fueled by the perception of acquiring unprecedented powers through technologies that entangle the human and the natural worlds, human beings have become agents of a new kind of transformative event. The ongoing sixth mass extinction of species, the prospect of a technological singularity, and the potential crossing of planetary boundaries are expected to trigger transformations on a planetary scale that we deem catastrophic and try to avoid. In making sense of these prospects, Simon's book sketches the rise of a new epochal thinking, introduces the epochal event as an emerging category of a renewed historical thought, and makes the case for the necessity of bringing together the work of the human and the natural sciences in developing knowledge of a more-than-human world.
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Reviews
"Zoltán Simon continues his quest to develop an understanding of our predicament of anthropogenic-technological transformations that is both untimely and timely, in the best Nietzschean sense-both radically different from existing theories and exactly what we need in the present moment. In The Epochal Event, he offers us a tool to engage meaningfully and critically with the effects of human planetary-scale agency, and points out a new direction for historical thinking to contribute to the omni-disciplinary endeavor to save the planet and our futures." - Helge Jordheim, Professor in Cultural History and Museology, University of Oslo, Norway
"This book offers much needed conceptual orientation about our current situation, the complexity of which we haven't understood yet. It makes us see how contemporary historiography can approach the affordances of our time in their intricate entanglement. If one wants to get a sense for the epochal significance of the Anthropocene-thesis in its ontological and political bearings, here is a well-argued statement." - Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Professor MSO in Philosophy, Aarhus University, Denmark
[Introductory chapter preview]
Book info:
Our understanding of ourselves and the world as historical has drastically changed since the postwar period, yet this emerging historical sensibility has not been appropriately explained in a coherent theory of history. In this book, Zoltán Simon argues that instead of seeing the past, the present and the future together on a temporal continuum as history, we now expect unprecedented change to happen in the future (in visions of the future of technology, ecology and nuclear warfare) and we look at the past by assuming that such changes have already happened.
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Reviews:
“Among an expanding literature, Zoltan Simon's challenging book will quickly become a landmark. A clear vision of what is at stake, a well informed and precise inquiry starting from a fascinating question: how to think the novelty of an “unprecedented event” or “unprecedented change", such as the anthropogenic one? And an ambitious proposal to rethink the very concept of history.” – François Hartog, Chair of Modern and Antique Historiography, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), France
“The idea that the devastating wars of the twentieth century and the unprecedented growth of technology and environmental concerns of the twenty-first have, taken together, permanently destroyed the appeal of history in the West, has been dominant for a while. Simon mounts a vigorous, provocative, and imaginative challenge to that thesis. A powerful intervention that will rekindle debates about history and its nature in our uncertain times.” – Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, University of Chicago, USA
“In a world that seems both bewildered by and disassociated from history, Zoltan Simon brings a sharp and deep argument in favour of philosophy of history that embraces disruption. His is a deft and thought-provoking account of why novelty, historical ownership and singularity need to be understood on more than narrative terms. This will be an invaluable book for anyone wanting to dig into and to break past the sense that theory cannot speak in a world of so many fractured voices.” – Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Professor of History, Australian National University, Australia
“History understood as knowledge of the past can never be the same after reading Zoltan Boldizsar Simon's book. It offers a future-oriented perspective on historical thinking which is challenged by times of unprecedented change. We are living through an epochal transformation marked by nuclear warfare, anthropogenic climate change, bioengineering and radical enhancement. How can history as a conceptual strategy help us to cope with these novelties? How might the future be pre-figured through a different approach to historical change? And how would this reorient theories of historical writing? In exploring these questions, the author presents a thought-provoking book that belongs to the emerging fields of anthropocene and posthumanist history. It is a must read for anyone interested in critical history as realistic scientific-fiction.” – Ewa Domanska, President of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography, Professor of Human Sciences, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland
“History is in trouble, or even in crisis. At present, this is almost a truism. What sets Zoltan Boldizsar Simon's book apart from other publications making the same claim, in the footsteps of Francois Hartog, Aleida Assmann and others, is that he actually knows why. His theory of unprecedented changes presents a radical - indeed unprecedented - attack on history as developmental process and narrative form, penned by one of the most original new voices in the theory of history.” – Helge Jordheim, Professor of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway
The article is part of the dossier "Inheriting modern times," edited by Patrice Maniglier, in the opening issue of Les Temps qui restent. The new venue has emerged out of the ashes of Les Temps Modernes, the legendary journal founded by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in 1945.
“End of history” theories came in many shapes in the last decades of the previous century. Just as many shapes as do the various claims about the revival of history in midst of the political turmoils and human-induced environmental crises of the new century. This article argues that neither “end of history” theories nor their counterparts are able to adequately capture the contemporary shapes of historical thought due to the fact that they both consider the idea of “history” in solitary confinement. Based on the contention that ideas can properly be understood only in relation to other ideas, the article will outline a transformation of historical thought by sketching a change in the relation between the ideas of “the end of history” and the “end of the world.” After highlighting the modern constellation in which claims about the end of history were typically accompanied by the view that the world continues to exist, it will explore the rather curious contemporary constellation in which history is expected to continue even after the world is expected to come to an end.
Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is, in three respects, far more than a synthesis of over a decade of pioneering conceptual work aimed at making sense of the Anthropocene/planetary predicament and its implications for historical understanding. First, the book makes visible an intellectual trajectory in which Chakrabarty's conceptual struggles with the Anthropocene gradually move from the centrality of the notion of the Anthropocene toward the centrality of the notion of the planet. Second, it highlights the relational complexities with which one needs to grapple when trying to make sense of the current predicament. Third, and finally, the book showcases a series of often overlapping conceptual distinctions that Chakrabarty has developed while navigating these complexities. Through a discussion of the above key aspects, this review essay highlights the achievements of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and critically engages with its central themes. In dialogue with the book, it pays special attention to exploring the respective benefits and drawbacks of the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet, and to the character and role of human agency in the Anthropocene/planetary predicament. Finally, the essay concludes with a few thoughts concerning the question of what kind of a reinvention of historical understanding might be triggered, respectively, by the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet.
Against the backdrop of the growing footprint of the future in contemporary lifeworlds (caught in the midst of rapid ecological and technological transformations), the chapter asks the question of whether the past still matters. It contends that the past matters inasmuch as contemporary societies do, in fact, make the past matter by relating pasts to presents and anticipated futures in societal practices and discourses ranging from the persistence of colonial practices to the burden of nuclear waste. In exploring the ways in which the past is made to matter, the chapter conceptualizes a variety of pasts, such as the unfolding past, the recurring past, the present past, the associated past, the inherited past, the ahistorical past, and the cultivated past.
With our futures gaining a planetary character, our historical understanding cannot escape to be planetary too. Anthropocene and technological futures, however, pose a challenge to disciplinary history on three levels: that of epistemology, methodology, and worldview. The paper sketches the emerging planetary history as a response to the threefold challenge.
Available at: https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/9-2021-1/anthropocene-knowledge-regime/
Available at: https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/9-2021-1/anthropocene-knowledge-regime/
Forthcoming in Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives, ed. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (London, Bloomsbury, 2020).
This is the Portuguese translation of my chapter "The Transformation of Historical Time: Processual and Evental Temporalities," in Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier (eds.), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 71-84, available here: https://www.academia.edu/36646585/The_Transformation_of_Historical_Time_Processual_and_Evental_Temporalities
This is the Hungarian translation of my article "The Limits of Anthropocene Narratives," European Journal of Social Theory 23:2 (2020), 184-199. available at the journal's website: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1368431018799256 or here: https://www.academia.edu/37441428/The_Limits_of_Anthropocene_Narratives
This is the Chinese translation of my article "Two Cultures of the Posthuman Future," History and Theory 58:2 (2019), 171-184, avaliable at the journal's website: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12108 or here: https://www.academia.edu/38858829/Two_Cultures_of_the_Posthuman_Future
The essay is available at the Somatosphere website: http://somatosphere.net/2020/events-of-disruptive-transformation.html/
My review of Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
My review of Aleida Assmann's Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime. Translated by Sarah Clift (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2020).
A review of Kay Junge - Kirill Postoutenko (eds.), Asymmetrical Concepts after Reinhart Koselleck: Historical Semantics and Beyond (transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2011)
Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012)
-PROLOG: CLIO GEWIDMET, MUSE DER GESCHICHTE
-VON DEN GRENZEN DER HISTORISCHEN DISZIPLIN
-VON DER ZURÜCKHALTUNGGEGENÜBER THEORIE
-VON THEORIE UND KRITISCHER GESCHICHTE
-CODA: DER KERN DES TRAUMS
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