Updatism : Gumbrecht’s broad present, Hartog’s Presentism and beyond.

Abstract

In this article we discuss two hypotheses related to current forms of temporalization: the Presentism of François Hartog and the Broad Present of Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht. We argue that certain aspects of the present time can be derived from Heidegger`s descriptions of the temporality of “opening” (Erschlossenheit), in particular from the “inauthentic” or “improper” dimension. On the basis of Google Ngram and other databases, we identify the growth of the semantic field around the word “update” since the early nineteen-sixties. The loss of energy of words like “progress” in similar proportion may indicate some competitive relations between the two fields. Futurism in the first decades of the postwar period seems to give way to what we call an updatist time, with its own forms of past, present and future.