Contingency as a key element of contemporary historicity.

• Applicant: Professor Andrey Oleynikov, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy ; Modern and Contemporary History ; Political Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 525884836

Over the past twenty years, contingency has become one of the key concepts in the humanities and social sciences. It is especially actively used in sociology and political sciences. Today, with its help, those phenomena of contemporary life are studied that cannot be explained in terms of essential functions, stable structures, or regular processes. It refers not only to accidents or unpredictable events but also indicates the possibility of a different order of things than what we take for granted. With the general demand for the concept of contingency, it is striking that in the contemporary theory of history it is not used very often. The purpose of this project is to use the concept of contingency to highlight important aspects of contemporary historicity, which the concept of presentism does not allow us to see. Here, following François Hartog, we understand presentism as that order of relations between the past, present, and future, in which the interests of the present prevail. Presentism, according to Hartog, replaced the ‘modern regime of historicity,’ in which the future dominated and the past was separated from the present. The modern regime contributed to the development of scientific history, which taught us to see the difference between the past and the present. However, having overthrown the ‘tyranny of the future,’ presentism ceased to need the services of professional historical knowledge. The victory of presentism - the victory of fleeting interests over long-term value orientations – leads to the blurring of the boundaries between the past and the present, the instrumentalization of history, justifies its mythologization and its most cynical use in the hands of those who claim to be the masters of the present. And yet, contrary to what theorists of presentism say, today, we are dealing with an extremely fragile, inconsistent, and vulnerable present than ever before. The present has lost its self-sufficiency and its superiority over the past. Today it is so asynchronous and not identical to itself that it can be stratified into a multitude of temporal orders that are out of sync with each other. Such a present prompts us to think over some new ‘regime of historicity,’ where the principal place belongs not to chronos, but to kairos, not to a process but to an event. What intellectual resources can we have for thinking through such historicity, and what practical consequences can such thinking have for historical writing and understanding its place in public space – these are the most critical questions of my research.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position