Paper short abstract:

History, referential illusion, modernity and colonialism

Paper long abstract:

Thinking about modernity forces us to think through 'man's time'.

Modernity establishes man as the center of the (natural) world he

claims autonomy from, and the world he appropriates through science

and technology.

Modernity, as Heidegger states, is when man establishes his time, its

laws, its truth and its history. In other words, modernity is the time

when the "man" is constituted as a subject, the subject of history. To

realize "man as subject" required new developments in science and

technology. These tools help achieve, and confirm, the greatness of

the subject in its modern management. Therefore it is not surprising

that both History and photography were established in the nineteenth

century as privileged means of narrative. They offer a universal

representation of "subjectivity" that was introduced by the subject.

This article seeks to understand how History mistook formal processes

(meant to be objective) and transformed them into a performative

imaginary within the elaboration of a process that we designate here

as the avatar of modernity—colonialism.