A lecture on the phenomenology of historical time by Dr Tetiana Zemliakova (CEU Democracy Institute)
A historian’s encounter with a distinct period usually precedes any argument about it. When immediately perceived, an artefact discloses its relation to a past age before interpretation begins, and this disclosure is taken as given, needing no justification. The talk examines this given, not as a professional skill but as a structure of everyday perception, shared by historians and non-specialists alike.
Following Nietzsche’s claim that a historical epoch is a unity of style, the talk treats epoch recognition as an aesthetic judgment rather than a conceptual one, as an organising perception active prior to reasoning from evidence. In professional practice, this perceived unity is reassigned to the objects themselves and treated as a material bond that the sources merely confirm, thus effacing the act of perception. The talk proposes neither to accept nor dismiss the givenness of historical periods but, following phenomenology’s method of bracketing experience, to suspend it and ask what grounds them.
The anticipated result would not be a dissolution into an undifferentiated past, stripping an appearance of its claim while leaving the object untouched. Rather, the talk traces how what is suspended relocates beyond singular perception, moving the sense of a historical period from things to subjects, and beyond them to the intersubjective experience of time. Thus, through this critique of aestheticised historical experience, the talk regrounds historicity, no longer a label attached after the fact but a temporal structure that historical practice can re-constitute once it moves beyond naive perception.
Tetiana Zemliakova is an intellectual historian of modern disciplinary knowledge and a philosopher working on the problematics of historical time. She is lead researcher of CEU's Democracy in History Work Group and a former Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the EUI.
Her current book project, The Last Men and Their Times: Modernity's Emancipation from History, explores the history of embodied time in modernity, tracing the discoveries of geological, ontogenetic, and mythical time to examine the transformation of fin-de-siècle intersubjective temporality.
She co-organises the Invisible University for Ukraine and directs its Summer and Winter Schools. She co-edited Essays on Democracy at War (Cornell University Press, 2024), co-authored Le Sens des révolutions (Éditions de l’Atelier, 2025), and writes Precision and Soul.
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