Teratochronies: Temporal Multiplicity and the End of History in François Hartog

Abstract

This article examines the historicity of the concepts of “presentism” and “regime of historicity” as formulated by François Hartog, situating them within debates on the status of history that emerged in France from the late 1970s onward. The first part shows how the elaboration of these concepts is connected to discourses on the end of history and of politics—not in a Hegelian sense, but in terms of a temporality without telos, a form of rationality devoid of finality. In this context, presentism and the regime of historicity appear as attempts to inscribe the “end of history” within a theoretical and historiographical framework. The second part analyzes how this framework is shaped by metahistorical categories derived from Reinhart Koselleck, particularly his account of the formation of the modern concept of history. The appropriation of these categories marks a transcendental turn in Hartog’s trajectory, especially in light of his earlier definition of the regime of historicity. Whereas the modern experience of time is structured by distance and by the tension between experience and expectation, the contemporary configuration, according to François Hartog, emerges from their radical dissociation, culminating in presentism. If history once articulated past, present, and future, these dimensions now appear separated by an abyss, resulting in a crisis of history and a loss of temporal orientation characteristic of the presentist condition. History, as a concept, thus loses both its self-evidence and its operative force. Presentism, therefore, does not disclose a new temporal order but rather a disorder of time—a teratochrony. From this perspective, the issue is not the end of the modern regime of historicity, but the dissolution of the very concept of history. Deprived of a unifying historical horizon, the presentist individual is left with chronos, ordinary time. The final part considers how Hartog associates presentism with temporal pluralization and the disintegration of the unity of time. In Western Europe, he suggests, people no longer believe in history. Within the French sociological tradition, belief constitutes the basis of social cohesion; its erosion leaves only individualized temporalities, shaped by the immediacy of digital communication and its effects of social disconnection. Hence the negative valuation of heterochronies as forms of fragmentation and disjunction. In conclusion, the article argues that Hartog’s concept of regime of historicity seeks to re-axialize temporalities, functioning as a device for reconnecting them within a shared temporal framework: the historian must be the bond between times and, as such, treat the pathological and monstrous condition of presentist time.