engleski

Framing Contingency: History and Heterology

Though it has been shaped in order to frame contingency by laying down its "hidden law", history appears nowadays to be framed i. e. outwitted by the same contingency. If contingency was expected to be turned into the subject matter of human history, it suddenly turns out to be the subject i.e. the agency that secretly shapes this history. What was intended to be carefully worked through by an unrelentless conscious activity of a historian appears to be compulsively acted out through his or her vulnerable body. Does not, after all, the inscription of an infinitely differentiated net of memory traces into our senses necessarily exceed any attempt at their logically coherent narrative recollection? Is the past therefore not speaking through us before we become able to speak about it ; is not its interpellation the enabling condition of our speech act? Being an empowered subject of "my" past, do I not incarnate a set of inherited constraints which give it a historical shape exactly by being constitutively placed out of my control? Finally, what would be the possible consequences of the outlined "an-archic" intervention into the heart of our domesticating historical activity for the position of the constitutive parts (i.e. events, figures, focalizer, narrator etc.) of its narrative? These are some of the questions our conference is supposed to focus upon.

frame; contingency; history; heterology

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