Abstract

PEREZ MORALES, Enrique. Past, Presence and Historicity. The Aporia of Contemporary Historiography. Hist. graf [online]. 2022, n.59, pp.59-98.  Epub July 27, 2022. ISSN 1405-0927.  https://doi.org/10.48102/hyg.vi59.390.

In the modern practice of historiography, that is, scientific history, an ambiguous relationship with the past is established. This ambiguity takes the form of an aporia: at the same time that modern historiography reveals a more sophisticated historical consciousness, it also reveals the historical condition of all knowledge, including its own. Thus, while scientific historiography opens the subject of historicity, its epistemological aspirations, paradoxically, lead it to conceive the past as a pure field of external objectivity that has itself a stable and immutable identity outside of any socio-historical determination. In other words, the desire of scientific historiography to seek a foundation that allows the unequivocal apprehension and knowledge of what it avidly calls “historical reality”, can only be possible at the cost of excluding the notion of its own historicity.

Keywords : Past; presence; historicity; language; representation; subject; object; contingency.