Abstract

Of the three “uses of history” handed down to us by Nietzsche – not as inheritance, for nothing is more foreign to his untimely meditations, “for the sake of life and action,” than to indebt the future to a past – which use should be our model to fashion our relation to the future (Nietzsche 1983)? The heroic example of a “monumental history” that inspires weaker times by holding up before them the promise of the possibility of greatness once again? It is doubtful that our exhausted “desert time” could resuscitate the faith, mobilize the will to turn to some real or imaginary past as inspiration in order to fashion for itself, even if only as a copy, another future. Besides, it is precisely the will to fashion/fiction history that is censured by the negative object lesson of recent history – the histories of fascism, communism, of revolutions, nationalisms, dictatorships, totalitarian and totalizing projects of every kind. Their miserable failures prohibit our political imaginary all the more to dream of Nietzsche's other, “critical” path of actively forgetting the past and endowing ourselves with another history – in order to invent a future, not yet seen in history.