"Insurgence is not a top-down imposition of an already scripted future. It bubbles up from the past in places where present circumstances seem propitious for an irruption. In this view, the present is like a bog: leaky, full of holes, gaps, contradictions, and misunderstandings. These exist just beneath all the taken-for-granted assumptions that give the present its apparent consistency. I study this ethnographic present historically not to give a historian’s complete account. Rather, I use historical investigation to show how the past always leaks through the present, breaking it up into heterogeneous elements, and permitting it to be recomposed and transformed. I use history to make an argument about the present."
- James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil, Princeton University Press, 2009, p.34.
늪으로서 현재.
한번 읽은 것이지만, 다시 봐도 새삼 눈을 사로잡는 탁월한 비유다.
겉보기엔 평온하고 매끈한 현재의 표면,
그러나 그 아래서 부글거리다가 빈 틈이 보이면 기포로 솟아올라 현재를 찢어버리는 과거,
그리고 그로 말미암아 새롭게 열리는 미래.
벤야민의 '성좌로서 역사'에 비할 정도로 인상적이다.
Posted by 아포리아
