1. Times of the Event: An Introduction

Abstract

This introduction sets the stage for the following contributions by outlining the current state of research on the two fundamental categories that this forum brings together: the event and time. In a brief survey, we discuss the ways in which the temporality of events has been theorized across disciplines. We also present our core argument for understanding the event as a temporal focal point. In dialogue with existing approaches, we seek to develop a theoretically enriched and empirically fruitful conceptualization of the event, thus offering new perspectives to the academic historiography of events as well as to historical culture at large.

The Political Force of Memory: The Making and Unmaking of Brexit as an Event

“…First, Brexit became manifest as a political event for twenty-first-century contemporaries through comparisons with the past. The case therefore illustrates what the literature on the temporal structure of historical events (White 1981; Sewell 2009; Dosse 2010; Jung and Karla 2021) can gain if it integrates how memories of previous events premediate the making of new events (Erll 2009). Second, Brexit seems to qualify as a critical juncture from the vantage point of immediate hindsight (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007; Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010; Slater and Simmons 2010).…”

“…This temporalization determines the making of and the duration of an event, as participants in political and public discourse articulate a periodization of the times they are living through. An event is distinct from the everyday unfolding of politics, a “figure of epistemic difference” (Jung and Karla 2021: 82). And there is a broad consensus among scholars since Reinhart Koselleck and William Sewell that an event emerges as a distinct entity in this daily flow through the temporal order that is established through comparisons, differentiation, and notions of repetition.…”