Abstract
What is the past ? T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land answers this question by showing the bitter mixture of memory and desire created by any appearance of the past in dead soil. Complete oblivion, associated with winter, is more comfortable than the awakening imposed by spring. Reverie is linked to a sense of loss : it's when we (re)discover a work of art that a retrospective elegiac feeling takes hold, bringing to the surface a sense of deprivation of which we were previously unaware. Part of the landscape around us is made up of old elements, but these are never as numerous as the " nouveautés ". The past that is present around us is not the past : it is only one past among other possible pasts, other pasts that could have existed in our consciousness. And the awareness of these virtualities of the past, the awareness that we could retain a completely different memory of it, is vertiginous enough in itself.
When does something belong to the past ? A newspaper, a building or a work of music do not have the same " regime of historicity " (Hartog). Barthes has shown that the " système de la mode " is designed to create an artificially accelerated past. In literature, paradigms last longer, and a film by Murnau is far more disorientating than a novel by Virginia Woolf ; yet both are contemporary. Added to this is the question of posterity : Hamlet, though ancient, continues to be alive, while other works are stillborn. But the past that remains is itself preceded by a past : Homer has made us forget older poets. " Le vieux Paris n'est plus " wrote Baudelaire : the tempo of reality changes even faster than the human heart, and thus gives rise to melancholic suffering. This asynchrony characterizes part of modernity.
