Beyond a Boundary: Thinking Koselleck outside Europe

Beyond a Boundary: thinking Koselleck outside Europe

Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of historical temporality has been put to varied, often contradictory, usages. This paper explores the limits and possibilities of key concepts derived from Koselleck’s oeuvre to critically rethink debates about contemporaneity and comparability, two intrinsically linked notions seldom thought or placed together. The first part of the essay charts the ways in which post-colonial and heterodox Marxists have sought to deploy Koselleck’s theory of historical time. On this basis, the second half of the essay explores how a critical reevaluation of Koselleck’s notion of the temporalization of concepts and such cognate terms as the “horizon of expectations” and “space of experience” might clarify and deepen efforts to grasp the temporal if not existential comparability between distinct societies in the twentieth century.