“Why is our past so uncertain? In a different way than the future, the past also appears, in a certain sense, unpredictable and elusive, constantly shifting and reconfiguring itself in accordance with the needs of the present. How does the past differ from history, history from historiography, and historiography from heritage? Unsteadily positioned along these conceptual fault lines, and largely unaware of their seriousness, we repeatedly fall into them as into traps, whether in the form of historical revisionism or in the processes of musealization, mummification, and commodification of cultural heritage. The discussions of this year’s Philosophers’ Square will be centered on temporality – the fundamental condition and structure of human existence, and on the ways in which we can conceptualize both our individual and collective historicity.

We will discuss the past as a dynamic and unstable condition of both present and future – specifically, the “expansion of memory” and the risks that proliferating selective and unreflective reinterpretations of the past may pose to the communities shaped by them. This raises the question of the relationship between history and memory – are they segments of a unified process, or distinct, even opposing, structures? Nearly a decade of violent warfare in the territories once known as Yugoslavia was made possible by turning the past into a weapon and transforming its reinterpretations into ammunition. Have the instrumentalization and political use of collective memory effectively kidnapped the future? And does an over-saturation of the past ultimately prevent its responsible and authentic reflection? Even today, more than three decades later, the political monetization of the past shows no signs of weakening in its power, hypnotic persuasiveness, or capacity to mobilize hatred and violence. Is a sustainable future possible without a basic consensus on the status, meaning, and significance of the past? In what ways do irreconcilable visions of the past perpetuate present conflicts and become factories of resentment that fuel the machinery of violence?”
Paula Petričević