The Closure of Historicism; or, History in Deconstruction

Part II develops the concept of transcendental historicism that lies at the center of Catastrophic Historicism. It does so obliquely at first, namely, by retelling a series of encounters with the thinking of Walter Benjamin, Werner Hamacher, and Frank Ankersmit, thanks to which the author comes to the realization that the realist concept of historicism needs to be discarded. Part II then presents the notion of dangerous historicity, understood as the modality of a non-historicist experience of the past, by developing the modal intuitions implicit in Benjamin’s motif of historical danger with the help of Jacques Derrida’s conception of ipseity.