Book, Regimes of historicity: presentism and experiences of time[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. “The construction of the neologism 'presentism' initially occurred in relation to the category of futurism (the future commanded). For me, risking the name presenteeism was primarily a hypothesis. Didn't our way of articulating past, present and future have something specific, now, today, that would make our present different from other presents in the past? And my answer was yes, it seems to me that there is something specific. Far from being uniform and univocal, this presentist present is experienced very differently depending on the place occupied in society. On the one hand, a time of flows, acceleration and valued and valuing mobility; on the other, what Robert Castel called precariat, that is, the permanence of the transitory, a present in full deceleration, without a past – except in a complicated way (even more so for immigrants, exiles, displaced people), and without a future neither is it real (the project time is not open to them). Presentism can thus be an open or closed horizon: open to ever more acceleration and mobility, closed to daily survival and a stagnant present. To this, we must also add another dimension of our present: that of the future perceived, no longer as a promise, but as a threat; in the form of catastrophes, of a time of catastrophes that we ourselves provoke.”François Hartog