A Year with KOMPOSITA: Punctum…

After a year of essayistic forays through Reinhart Koselleck’s intellectual cosmos, it is time for the KOMPOSITA blog edition to come to a point. Or rather two points: A “punctum” in the sense of a closing punctuation mark that marks the provisional conclusion of the anniversary project, but also, in reference to Roland Barthes’s theory of photography, in the sense of what spontaneously catches the eye in our snapshot of current perspectives on Koselleck’s work.¹

KOMPOSITA combines these current perspectives into a glossary that broadly traverses the concepts—but also metaphors (Kaleidoskop), images, and objects—and the historical thinking of Reinhart Koselleck. Without any claim to completeness, it classifies them historically, interprets them critically, and short-circuits them with new directions in historical research. Where does Koselleck prove inspiring today, and what are the limits to his thought, especially with regard to the urgent need to overcome epistemic and theoretical Eurocentrism? What cross-connections and tensions emerge in and between glossary entries? These questions invite far more detailed readings than we can provide in our conclusion, and we also hope that the contributions will continue to attract many readers who will think about possible answers and completely new questions.

We received thirty-eight entries in the year of Koselleck’s centennial. Some of these lemmas reinterpret Koselleck’s classic concepts (Horizont, Futures Past, Progress, Revolution, Zeitschichten), while some use more profound concepts to reorganize Koselleck’s intellectual cosmos (Absurdität, Lava, Seriality, Tecnologia, Welt/Umwelt, Wahrnehmungsgeschichte), and still others challenge the individual and historical contours of his thought with conceptual probes from other theoretical traditions (Differenz, Ghosts, Habitus, Jinns). Fortunately, a number of authors contradicted the editors’ requests for certain entries and presented their own proposals, which open up surprising and inspiring spaces for thought. What do they reveal when we ask what concerns us today when we engage with Koselleck? “Is it Koselleck who speaks to us, or are we speaking through Koselleck?”

Several contributions are explicitly or connotatively linked by a concept that can be understood as a perception of the present: that of “Crisis.” Here there is a contemporary resonance with Koselleck, who describes the paradoxical effects of technological regulatory instruments and the belief in them: their accelerated tipping over into new problem situations and a politics that, forced to anticipate ever more quickly, at best prevents the worst. Numerous contributions, for example on the concepts of the Beschleunigungsaxiom (acceleration thesis), Catastrophe, Tecnologia, Crisis-time, and Defeat, shed light on this aporia from different perspectives. The experience leading to the limits of resilience and the sobering realization of this condition connects us with Koselleck as well as with Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Between illusionless realism and totalitarian “delusion,” developing new, non-destructive and inclusive perspectives on the formability of the world and society depends on our imagination—an ability that gains much from the “other” that history always makes tangible. Understood in this way, the topos “historia magistra vitae” retains an important function, especially in the “horizon of turbulent modern history.”²

We would like to express our sincere thanks to all the authors for not only providing us with new perspectives on Koselleck’s work over the course of a year with their perceptive and enjoyable contributions, but also for illustrating the analytical power of historical thought. We would also like to thank Marcus Wystub and Sebastian Hombitzer for their technical assistance and the editors of the blog Geschichtstheorie am Werk for their generous hospitality in hosting our issue KOMPOSITA in inspiring surroundings. We remember Kai Kruse, who passed away this past year, as we read his contribution to the lemma Qualmwolken (smoke clouds).

As an anniversary project, the KOMPOSITA glossary has come to an end, but it remains open to further contributions and can be updated. We are happy to receive ideas for new lemmas that are sparked by reconsiderations of Koselleck’s thinking, and are therefore setting not one, but three points…

1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated from French by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. [↩]
2. Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae. Über die Auflösung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte,” in Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989, 38–66. For the English, see “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated from the German by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 26–42. [↩]