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Tracing the complex history of the term 'reenactment', back to R.G. Collingwood's philosophy of history, on the one hand, and popular practices of war reenactments and living history museums, on the other, a survey of its current contribution in art and museum practices highlights the importance of historicity - a category the postmodern was supposed to have vacated - in a wide range of examples, from Rod Dickinson and Jeremey Deller to Alexandra Pirici, Manuel Pelmuş, and Milo Rau. Performance reenactments, in particular, are premised on performance art having become historical, but also threaten to digest history in favour of a mere productivist mobilization for the needs of current attention economies. An alternative could be the attempt to counter historical with dramatic time in order to unlock unrealized possibilities and futures, as the term preenactment promises.
Throughout his career, Stanley Cavell's subject has been the ordinary: what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call 'the near, the low, the common'. Cavell provides compelling insights into Emerson's efforts to locate philosophy within the flow of everyday life. He examines how Emerson renews common thinking, citations, and fragments from the works of others by means of his 'aversive thinking': his technique of turning writing back upon itself. While taking Cavell's Emerson readings as its point of departure, this essay switches Cavell's philosophical angle for a philological one. I suggest that Emerson's engagement with contemporary debates concerning the historical reading of sacred and secular literature (the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare) formed his own practice of reworking literatures of various origins and recasting aesthetics in major ways.
This article develops a novel reading of the threefold division of modes of historicization in Nietzsche's "Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life". It argues that Nietzsche's stance is closely matched, and indirectly responds, to specific features of the argument for progress in human history that Kant presents in "Conflict of the Faculties". Kant had hit upon interest, boredom, publicity, and forgetting as systematic problems for the philosophy of history, and Nietzsche's thought on history takes up these concerns. I argue that Nietzsche's reaction to these Kantian problems prompted him to subtly dissociate historicization and historicity. This manoeuver allowed him to counter the conceptual challenges Kant had established and to align his notions on history with those on ethical normativity in lived life, embracing what he elsewhere rejected as a “"moral ontology."