Maria Ines Mudrovcic

This paper attempts to show that in western late modern societies, in the absence of absolute foundations and the lack of a frame of meaning that opens new horizons of expectations, a political self-understanding of the present in terms of past, begins to emerge. This is possible because the major “catastrophes” of the twentieth century have not established a rupture between past and present on the political plane. What I am trying to show here is that the kind of break between past and present made possible by events such as the French Revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, took place because these events provoked political ruptures. Because the catastrophes of the 20th century did not break the political order which gave them birth, they have created an order of time which, without leaving the future aside, feeds itself from the past which is read in the register of a memory code.

This paper deals with two different meanings of the concepts of representation related to historiography. Both of them have different consequences when they attempt to give account of recent pasts in conflict. The first of them is representation as it is understood in cultural or social history –a sort of belief that people have about the world, especially with recent pasts that affect them. The other one is historical language or historiography understood -after the linguistic turn- as a representation of the past. The main objective of this paper is to show how these two meanings of representation collapse in a “history of the present” or in a“history of the recent past”.