François Hartog

Time and Heritage

As a historian studying what can be considered a form of intellectual history, I have slowly come to adopt Michel de Certeau’s observation made at the end of the 1980s that ‘objectifying the past, for the last three centuries, has undoubtedly left unconsidered time within a discipline that has continued to use it as a taxonomic instrument’. To a certain degree, time has become commonplace for the historian who has preserved or instrumentalized it. It is not considered because it is inconceivable, but because we do not think of it or, more simply, we do not think about it. As a historian attempting to pay attention to the time I’m living in, I have thus, like many others, noticed the swift development of the category of the present until it has become obvious that the present is omnipresent. This is what I refer to here as ‘presentism’.

The Invention of History: The Pre-History of a Concept from Homer to Herodotus†

The following pages, which deal with the pre-history of the concept of history from Homer to Herodotus, first propose to decenter and historicize the Greek experience. After briefly presenting earlier and different experiences, they focus on three figures: the soothsayer, the bard, and the historian. Starting from a series of Mesopotamian oracles (known as “historical oracles” because they make use in the apodosis of the perfect and not the future tense), they question the relations between divination and history, conceived as two, certainly different, sciences of the past, but which share the same intellectual space in the hands of the same specialists. The Greek choices were different. Their historiography presupposes the epic, which played the role of a generative matrix. Herodotus wished to rival Homer; what he ultimately became was Herodotus. Writing dominates; prose replaces verse; the Muse, who sees and knows everything, is no longer around. So I would suggest understanding the emblematic word “historia” as a subsititute, which operates as an analogue of the (previous) omnivision of the Muse. But before that, Herodotean “invention”— the meeting of Odysseus and the bard Demodocus, where for the first time the fall of Troy is told—can be seen as the beginning, poetically speaking at least, of the category of history.

Croire en l'histoire

L’Histoire fut la grande puissance des temps modernes. Veritable theologie, elle organisait le monde et lui donnait sens. On se mit a son service, au point de s’aveugler, voire de commettre le pire en son nom. Affaire des historiens, elle ambitionna d’etre une science, tandis que les romanciers lui livraient volontiers leur plume. Depuis les annees 1980, cette toute-puissance est mise en cause. Notre rapport au passe est desormais affaire de memoire plus que d’histoire ; trop imprevisible ou trop previsible, l’avenir semble avoir disparu de notre horizon, et l’historien est pris dans l’urgence du present. L’histoire peine a remplir son role de trait d’union entre le passe, le present et le futur. Quel sens lui donner aujourd’hui ? Dans le sillage de ses travaux sur le temps, Francois Hartog fait intervenir, au cours de cette vaste enquete sur le monde contemporain, historiens, philosophes et romanciers – de Thucydide a Braudel, d’Aristote a Ricœur, de Balzac a McCarthy – afin de saisir sur le vif les enjeux d’une epoque nouvelle. Date de premiere edition : 2013.

The Double Fate of the Classics

Praelio victus, non bello; “the ‘classical’ has lost many battles, but never the war.”1 It is with these words that Salvatore Settis concludes his recent stimulating book, The Future of the “Classical.” Is this merely wishful thinking, or is he so confident that he feels no need to add a question mark? What is the status of classics as a discipline? To offer a reply requires an immediate shift in the framework of the question, for the classics are precisely more and less than a discipline. Their fate ultimately depends upon understanding this more and this less. The more immediately refers to the place held by the ancients in the public realm. Humanists have chosen them as interlocutors and have generally invested them with an operative role in the making of European culture throughout the centuries and, in particular, in the very formation of the notion of the classical. In short, we cannot ignore the fact that on several occasions the classics have been solicited as meaningful protagonists in both an intellectual and a political history. Hence to launch my interrogation the accent is placed, evident in my essay’s title, on the paradoxical and doubled nature of the condition of the classics. Classical studies, in the widest sense of the term, is not in the same position as, for example, anthropology, Sanskrit, or even history, even if the destiny of the classics today and even more so tomorrow largely depends on what will happen to these disciplines. But the destiny of classics also depends on its past influence—the glory of Athens and the grandeur of Rome—in the public realm, as it is partly on account of, or in memory of, this glory and grandeur that the discipline has defended and still cur-