Global Humanities Senior Research and Teaching Stay at Freie Universitaet Berlin

October - November 2014

From Experience to History?

There have been many contributions these last years to the concept of experience. Reinhart Koselleck opened up the debate. What is, indeed, a “historical experience,” from what is it woven, if not first of all from an experience of time? And if we change our relations to time, the concept of experience also changes. If the gap between experience and expectation widens to a virtual rupture, if the future closes itself off, if the past falls into obscurity, and the present comes to occupy all this space, the very experience will find itself then marked with the stamp of what I term presentism.

Historian, François Hartog is Professor of Historiography Ancient and Modern at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is the author of many books, including Le Miroir d’Hérodote: Essai sur la représentation de l’autre; Le XIXe siècle et l'histoire: le cas Fustel de Coulanges; Anciens, modernes, sauvages; Régimes d'historicité: Présentisme et Expériences du temps and in 2013 Croire en l'histoire.