M. Foucault vs R. Kozellek: Two Strategies for the Articulation of Historical Consciousness and Politics

Abstract

The article attempts to analyze the articulation of historical and political planes in social space. A hypothesis is put forward and substantiated, according to which the emergence of historical consciousness in the Age of Modernity led to a significant modification of not only political opinions, but also political practices. Two approaches to solving this problem are analyzed – the structuralist concept of Michel Foucault and the historical hermeneutics of Reinhard Kozelleck. It is shown that, with the unity of the common critical attitude of both authors regarding the historical consciousness of the Enlightenment, the opposing assumptions, from which the authors proceed, result in their different understanding of the history / politics connection. The conclusion is drawn that such an approach to the analysis of modern socio-­political processes allows us to interpret, in a new way, such controversial social phenomena as the crisis of socio-­political designing, the presentism and, at the same time, the genuine interest in the past and the abundance of memorial practices, the strengthening of identification processes and of “memory wars”. Modern society preserves the history / politics connection, but it also forms a new regime of historicity in which this connection takes on a form different than that in the Age of Modernity. The historical consciousness crisis in the Age of Modernity leads to the emergence of a post-teleological standby mode in which the acceleration of all socio-­political processes is perceived as devoid of any purpose, either expected or causing concern, and treated by contemporary people as a mere fact, not as a specific problem of political art. This acceleration, reinforced by information technology and global economic structures, leads to serious changes in political culture and the strengthening of its cognitive moments, both rational and pseudo-­rational.