Koselleck’s Dichotomies Revisited

GABRIEL ENTIN

ABSTRACT
One of the characteristics of conceptual history as developed by Reinhart
Koselleck is its relation with social history. This connection refers to a con-
stitutive dichotomy of conceptual history between reality and language. In
this article, I argue that in Koselleck’s works, the meanings of conceptual
history/social history and reality/language dichotomies are not evident,
and I propose to explore them through an analysis of his methodological
texts on historical writing from the 1980s. Furthermore, I suggest that
these dichotomies function as a limit for thinking about the problem of the
symbolic, which I seek to account for by drawing on Claude Lefort’s notion
of the political and an examination of the concept of Jewish people.

KEYWORDS
conceptual history, Koselleck, Lefort, nonconceptuality, People, social
history, symbolic

Tout mouvement nous découvre

—Montaigne, Essais, Book I, 50

“Babylon, London and New York have overwhelmed with their ferocious
splendor the imaginations of men; no one, in their populous towers or their
urgent avenues, has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable
as that which day and night converged upon the hapless Ireneo, in his poor
South American suburb.”1 Jorge Luis Borges thus described Ireneo Funes,
the Uruguayan protagonist of his short story “Funes the Memorious,” who in
the late nineteenth century had the ability—or the limitation—to remember
everything. Funes had access to a “reality” forbidden to others: “He knew by
heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882.”2
In his project for an infinite vocabulary to replace the series of numbers, he
changed the sign of the words, and he would say “in place of seven thousand
This work is part of the project Fondecyt Iniciación nº11191108. I thank Martin Burke,
Luis Fernández Torres, Eduardo García Ramírez, Nicolás Kwiatkowski, Francisco
Ortega, Elías Palti, Pablo Sánchez León, and Lucila Svampa for their comments.
1. Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious” [from Ficciones, 1944], trans. James E.
Irby, in Labyrinths Selected Stories & Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964),
148–154, here 153.
2. Ibid., 152.

Contributions to the History of Concepts Volume 18, Issue 2, Summer 2023: 1–17
doi:10.3167/choc.2023.180201 © Berghahn Books