Are we bewildered in the face of an almost permanent feeling of crisis? The eminent French writer and historian François Hartog offers this talk on history and time, as presented in his new book, Chronos (2022). What he calls regimes of historicity are ways in which societies order time, articulating the present, past and future. Hartog has explored this concept in a number of his books, analysing how the modern idea of “history”, imposed by 19th-century European thought, proposes the notion of an open future and constant progress; meanwhile, since the 1980s, a new paradigm has arisen of “future crisis”. In Chronos, Hartog looks at what he considers to be the regime introduced by Christianity, an “apocalyptic presentism”. In conversation with Guillaume Boccara.

Simultaneous translation from French to Spanish available