Embodiment, empathy, rituals

My reflections trying to reach the unchartedterritory beyond the established borders of History and the Humanities will begin by invoking the contrast between the historical world view and the other “chronotope” [i.e. the other “social construction of temporality”] that I assume almost globally dominates our contemporary everyday. The question of how our thinking might engage with the past under the conditions of the new chronotope will lead to the concept of “embodiment” in the sense of a hitherto academically neglected modality of mediating between past and present. On this basis, I will try to show how “empathy” constitutes a levelof embodiment that has already begun to permeate our relationships withthe past, mostly outside academia. “Rituals,” finally, will come into sight asa possible focus helping us to imagine ways in which, counter to primary expectations, embodied approaches to the past might address at least some pressing shortcomings and problems of our present.