Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, translated and edited by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman. Stanford University Press. 2019. xxxi + 301 pages. ISBN 9781503605978

This recent translation offers Reinhart Koselleck’s work in its most essayistic and speculative, but perhaps, also the most inspiring forms. Extrapolations, parallels, and analogies suggest themselves on nearly every page of this intriguing volume. In terms of implications and side steps, the content ranges from climate change and melting ice caps to railways and the experienced acceleration of time, and all the way to war memorials and the layered tranquility of cemeteries and mass graves. Primarily, however, the book offers a heavy dose of Koselleck’s Historik, or the theory of possible history. Or perhaps, to exploit Jacob Taubes’s characterization of Koselleck as a “partisan for histories in the plural,” cited by Niklas Olsen and others, we should characterize Koselleck as a partisan for possible histories. While this perspective arguably underlies in rudimentary forms, a large part of his work in general, here Koselleck expressly tackles some of the most fundamental questions in historical theory, including the following: How is history possible in the first place? How, exactly, are historical experiences conditioned by anthropology? How do individuals’ historical experiences turn into supra-human history or history as such? How can we combine the observations of history as both movement and repetition into a single coherent image? How should we understand the causal and temporal relations between historical events and their linguistic (re-)descriptions? How is historical time related to geographical or geopolitical space? And so forth. The volume thus further elaborates several elements that support Koselleck’s analyses in conceptual history and his political thinking, and it can be expected to be of interest to a wide audience in history, philosophy, political studies, cultural studies, and the social and human sciences more broadly. Sediments of Time is a representative selection – representative in the sense that it consists of texts from the 1980s and 1990s, published in Koselleck’s three late collections in German. With seven essays from Zeitschichten ,‘Temporal Layers,’ (2000), two from Begriffsgeschichten, ‘Histories of Concepts,’ (2006), and six from Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte, ‘On the Pankakoski, Timo. 2019. “Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, translated and edited by Sean Franzel and StefanLudwig Hoffman. Stanford University Press. 2019. xxxi + 301 pages. ISBN 9781503605978.” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 22(1): 83–87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.308 REDESCRIPTIONS