be presented in the form of simultaneity. For example, one could take the terminus a quo
of the birth of contemporaneity to be the diffusion of the daily press, or, better still, the
invention of media such as radio or television that are able to let us know what happens
around the world ‘in real time’, as one might say. The ‘reality’ of real time, then, is given
by the fact that there are technical means by which we can, so to speak, ‘simultaneitize’
events that take place all over the world. This ‘simultaneitization’ of history, of reality, is
significant insofar as for apparently different reasons—that may actually be the same—it
occurs in a situation in which historicity as diachrony tends to waste away to nothing.
The ‘mediatization’ and ‘simultaneitization’ of our historicity take place in a world
that is living through a crisis in the very notions of history and historicity. When we
speak of History with a capital ‘h’, we assume that there is a single course along which
we can place events that occur in America, in Africa or here in Italy. But this is no longer
true. The historians were the first to lose faith in this schema: above all in recent decades,
but actually ever since the expansion of schools like the French school of Annales,
founded at the end of the 1920s, the debates of historians have revolved around the
problem of knowing whether there is a dominant history, a history that would be the basis
for other different histories. For example, one speaks of the history of art, of micro-
histories such as the history of kitchen utensils, the history of economy, as specialized
histories that branch off from a principal history. Yet there always emerges an awareness
that this principal history is not objective and external, but rather presupposes a subject
with reasons for universalizing certain schemata. One of the most common realizations in
contemporary historiography, then, is that history presupposes literary rhetorical
schemata, different ways of telling stories. History, therefore, is not history, but histories,
in the sense of stories that have been narrated and whose meaning depends on the
perspective, the coordinates or the point of view adopted for their narration. We are
witnessing a dissolution of historicity—in communal life, conditioned by technology, no
less than in methodology, historical consciousness and philosophical reflection. Now, in
the tradition of Western metaphysics, history is real to the extent that it is a realization
and an articulation of a Grund, a foundation. This may be seen in the idea of ‘revolution’,
a familiar concept in the Western tradition. But could revolution not also be called
‘innovation’? A revolution is an innovation that leads that which happens—history back
to its originary foundation: the Renaissance was a rebirth of Greece, in the same way as
the French Revolution, based on the thought of the Aufklarung, of the Enlightenment,
was itself set on returning to an original state, on regaining an authentic human condition,
etc. History, then, is affirmed as positively real to the degree that it realizes a foundation
already present in an implicit form. But this conciliation between being and becoming
presupposes the possibility of speaking of history as if it were a single course, in order
that a rational schema may be identified within it. When it is no longer possible to speak
of a single history, however, neither can there be any recourse to the rational schema.
What is at stake in historicism is not merely establishing whether Hegel was right or
wrong, but the fact that if one can no longer speak in terms of a single history, the only
possibility of speaking of being as foundation is lost—as we see clearly in Nietzsche and
Heidegger.
If these authors are read, that is, if Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger are read, one can no
longer simply return to an earlier conception of the relation between the founded and the
foundation. In our recent history, the development of the relation between founded and
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