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• Collingwood – Re-enactment: Hívők és kritikusok

  8–15.

  Gábor Gyáni

  Views:

  10

  Robin G. Collingwood, a British archeologist and philosopher, elaborated on the so-called notion of re-enactment. In his main theoretical work, the Idea of History, published posthumously, the editor placed an argument in the “Epilogue” in which Collingwood detailed this concept. `The truly historicist epistemological idea of re-enactment was closely connected to another one of his arguments concerning the epistemological importance of the question and answer. According to the latter, when a historian tries to find out the precise meaning of a textual testimony coming from the past, he/she must also know the question to which the historical actor addressed his/her response, and what it meant, as they are correlative. Collingwood’s historical epistemology, an extreme version of historicism, generated contrasting reactions: several theoreticians (e.g. W. H. Dray) and historians (e.g. Q. Skinner) adopt it unreservedly; there are, however, thinkers, like H. G. Gadamer in particular, who in the name of philosophical hermeneutics, reject it altogether.

• A magyar „emlékezet helyei” és a traumatikus múlt

  41–50.

  Gábor Gyáni

  Views:

  267

  Memory is gaining ever greater significance in the formation of national consciousness. With academic historiography losing ground, this phenomenon is mainly caused by the coming into the forefront of collective memory. One of the crucial features of the nation is that it is also a memorial community; that is, the members of the nation remember in the same way and forget collectively as well. From the point of view of Hungarian national consciousness as a memorial community the Trianon-syndrome is the dominant point of reference, actually implying various meanings even today. This mainly stems from political faction. The cult of Trianon has revived lately, and it is fed by public history, offering the political utilization of the past. As opposed to this, the other evident example of the traumatic Hungarian past, the Holocaust is still unable to become a real national lieu de mémoire. Thus, two „cold” cultures of collective memory stand fatally opposed to each other, while both claim the position of the sole victim.

• Kulturális trauma: adott vagy teremtett?

  5–19.

  Gábor Gyáni

  Views:

  249

  Trauma, the key experience of twentieth-century Europe, has recently gained global importance. That is the reason behind the growing number of trauma theories. An important notion of Freudian trauma theory (Cathy Caruth) is that the traumatic event does not inevitably coincides with the emergence of traumatic state of mind (or consciousness). The concept of sociological trauma, coined by Jeffrey C. Alexander, suggests that it is the community that eventually decides which past event can be considered a traumatic experience. This is how traumatic experience is becoming today a decisive political doctrine that designates directly our moral and political attitude towards the events in the world.