The past is evil/evil is past: on retrospective politics, 'philosophy of history, and temporal manichaeism

One of the most remarkable phenomena in current international politics is the increasing attention paid to historical injustice. Opinions on this phenomenon strongly differ. For some it stands for a new and noble type of politics based on raised moral standards and helping the cause of peace and democracy. Others are more critical and claim that retrospective politics comes at the cost of present- or future-oriented politics and tends to be anti-utopian. The warnings about the perils of a retrospective politics outweighing politics directed at contemporary injustices, or strivings for a more just future, should be taken seriously. Yet the alternative of a politics disregarding all historical injustice is not desirable either. We should refuse to choose between restitution for historical injustices and struggle for justice in the present or the future. Rather, we should look for types of retrospective politics that do not oppose but complement or reinforce the emancipatory and utopian elements in present- and future-directed politics. I argue that retrospective politics can indeed have negative effects. Most notably it can lead to a temporal Manichaeism that not only posits that the past is evil, but also tends to treat evil as anachronistic or as belonging to the past. Yet I claim that ethical Manichaeism and anti-utopianism and are not inherent features of all retrospective politics but rather result from an underlying philosophy of history that treats the relation between past, present, and future in antinomic terms and prevents us from understanding transtemporal injustices and responsibilities. In order to pinpoint the problem of certain types of retrospective politics and point toward some alternatives, I start out from a criticism formulated by the German philosopher Odo Marquard and originally directed primarily at progressivist philosophies of history

History from the Grave? Politics of time in Spanish mass grave exhumations

During the last decade, Spanish memory movements have exhumed a great number of mass graves from the Civil War and Francoist repression. This exhumation campaign is often interpreted in psychopathological terms as a natural reaction to a traumatic past and as proving that this past should be healed by a therapeutic memory that fosters closure -- a vision that we call 'trauma-therapy-closure (TTC) time'. Although this vision is in line with widespread 'transitional justice' discourse it should be critically analyzed. We argue that the Spanish situation does not prove the naturalness and universal applicability of TTC time. Although we do identify an influential exhumation group that shares aspects of this TTC vision, its approach is contested by local actors and competing exhumation organizations that engage in alternative politics of time. Therefore we demonstrate how the case of Spain rather reveals how TTC time is actively disseminated and promoted on a local level

Time, presence, and historical injustice

The relationship between history and justice traditionally has been dominated by the idea of the past as distant or absent (and with that, irreversible). This ambiguous ontological status makes it very difficult to situate the often-felt "duty to remember" or obligation to "do justice to the past" in that past itself, and this has led philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Keith Jenkins to plead against an "obsession" with history in favor of an ethics aimed at the present. History's ability to contribute to the quest for justice, as a result, often seems very restricted or even nonexistent. The introduction of the "presence"-paradigm in historiography can potentially alter this relation between history and justice. However, to do so it should be conceived in such a way that it offers a fundamental critique of the metaphysical dichotomy between the present and the absent and the underlying concept of time (chronosophy) that supports this dichotomy. The "presence"-paradigm can be emancipatory and productive only if presence and absence are not perceived as absolute dichotomies. In the first part of this article I elaborate on the influence that the present/absent dichotomy has on the notion of justice by introducing a conceptual contrast between what I will call the "time of jurisdiction" and the "time of history." The second part of the article focuses on the way certain aspects of the dominant Western chronosophy reinforce the present/absent dichotomy and thereby prevent us from thoroughly exploring the ambiguous but often very problematic presence of the past. Throughout the article I refer to the relatively recent phenomenon of truth commissions and the context of transitional justice to discuss some challenges for the "presence"-paradigm

A Great Divide? Metahistorische reflectie in België tegen de achtergrond van het Nederlandse succesverhaal, 1900-heden

This article focuses on the history of meta-historical reflection in Belgium and makes a comparison with the Netherlands. Meta-historical reflection is defined broadly as including the traditions of so-called substantive philosophy of history and critical philosophy of history as well as more general reflections on the social relevance of history. The article starts with a bibliometric analysis which is used as a first indicator for the changing success of meta historical reflection in the Low Countries. A more qualitatively-oriented analysis of the theme follows. It is stressed that a relatively large interest in meta-history existed in Belgium starting from the early 1960s until the second half of the 1970s. This interest was shared by historians as well as philosophers (of science). The third part of the article raises and (partly) answers the question of why this interest in meta-historical reflection declined again during the 1980s. It also asks why meta-historical reflection, in contrast to the situation in the Netherlands, has until today hardly been professionalized and institutionalized in Belgium