Foreword

Abstract

A confounding antinomy has characterized the ill-fated twenty-first century. On the one hand, a frenzy of “historical” and “unprecedented” moments, as the world is incessantly afflicted by momentous change and cataclysmic and unique events, we are told. “How historical is this?” the news anchor asks the reporter in the field or the expert in the studio, and infallibly, it’s always off the charts. On the other, a debilitating sense of inertia, of being struck by paralysis and unable to imagine alternatives to the present. The more historical moments, it seems, the less times are prone to change, and the weaker the historical agency of our species. These two phenomena coalesce in the violent resurgence of historical imaginaries of a distinctly mythical, messianic, and Manichean zeal. Thus far, the post-millennia era is bookended by the declarations of a Christian crusade to purge the world from terror, and the resurrection of the “spiritual unity” 1of Russia and the reunification of a “people bound by blood.” 2While the former was waged in the name of “the Homeland” and “American soil,” and refracted through the cultural memory of Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima, the latter stakes its claim in the baptism of the Viking prince Valdemar, the conquests of Peter the Great, and the Great Patriotic War. In the interim, we have witnessed the campaigns to reestablish the Caliphate, draped in the archaisms of mounted knights, black banners, iconoclastic rituals, and dark punishments; to “make America great again” (that is to say, to undo the alleged post-racial era); and to “take back control” (the ironic slogan of Brexit).