EPOCHAL THOUGHT

From ‘the postmodern era’ to ‘the post-industrial epoch’ and ‘the digital age’, people have not ceased to offer labels for the present. To find the concept capable of defining the nature of it, and thus to speak truthfully regarding the characteristic feature of our age, is in effect one of the major theoretical concerns of numerous contemporary thinkers. But less attention is paid to the historical logic on which such a preoccupation depends. By historical order or logic, I mean the practical mode of intelligibility of history that provides us with temporal schemes, methodologies and patent positivities. In the case of the search for the concept most capable of grasping the core of our era, it goes without saying, for instance, that the present is a singular phenomenon, that it is identifiable and delimitable, that it warrants being interrogated in and for itself, that it has a proper nature, and that a single and unique concept would be capable of defining it. Such an investigation thus falls within a historical order dominated by what we can call epochal thought. This can be generally understood as the reduction of history to a periodical chronology, and more specifically as the attempt to grasp – perhaps even with a single epochal concept – the nature of an era, or of an important subset of it.

It can turn out that the investigation into the nature of the present proves itself to be more revealing of our historical conjuncture than the responses it provides. At least this is what Michel Foucault suggests in several texts written at the end of the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s. He initiates a reflection on what he proposes to call ‘the ontology of contemporary reality [l'ontologie de l'actualité]’ by raising a fundamental question: where, historically speaking, does this interrogation into the very being of the present – so characteristic of our conjuncture – come from? In posing such a question, he attempts to historically resituate a certain form of historical questioning. In other words, he recognises that our relationship to the present, far from being invariable, is a thoroughly historical phenomenon.