François Hartog, Elie Halévy and Félix Fénéon

If time is our common riverit is also an element that can flow, boil or become tempestuous. This is evidenced by “Chronos”, “Kairos” and “Krisis”, the three temporal categories, the three “regimes of historicity”these intensities of historical time requested by François Hartog, specialist in Greco-Roman historiography and thinker of the adventures of historical duration, to evoke in Chronosprecisely, the West grappling with time, from the Gospels to the Anthropocene.

If “Chronos” defines “ordinary time”time which engulfs everything in its gaping maw, that of Goya's Saturn, time as it goes and as it goes, “Kairos” marks the advent of “the opportunity, [du] decisive moment ». There, time gets tense. “Krisis”, the Atropos of the trio, the third fate, the one that cuts, proves to be the apocalyptic, ultimate and conclusive moment: the hour of judgment and definitive mutation. These three investigative tools, real Geiger counters capable of measuring eschatological intensities, François Hartog takes them throughout Western history, showing us the medieval “Chronos” magnetized by “Kairos”, haunted by “Krisis”, taking up an autonomy disputed during the era of humanism, the Enlightenment and the 19th century^e century, then contested again in the contemporary era, that of the bomb. A struggle for influence which sees biblical figures and times clash over a secularized period. A fourth category erupting in the (dis)favor of contemporary crises, that of “presentism”, the fruit of an eviction of the past which is no longer a model but a foil, of an absence of the future and a hysterization of the present , the T moment has become a frenzied idol, a minute-apocalypse.

Among the range of terms able to qualify not the historical effervescence (crisis, decadence) or the frameworks of duration (century, millennium), but the divisions of the material-history, humans have at their disposal a precise lexicon: age, era, epoch , period. Péguy distinguished between the bonace of the “period”, where the wind of history no longer blows, and the “epoch”, the intense moment of heroes and martyrs. On November 28, 1936, the historian of England, socialism and philosopher Elie Halévy delivered before the French Society of Philosophy a communication that remained famous for its lucidity and urgency, declaring Europe had entered into “the era of tyrannies” since 1914.

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