Under det senaste decenniet har begreppet ”kulturarv” tagit en allt större plats i den offentliga debatten. Samtidigt är kulturarv ett märkligt begrepp, som antyder att kultur kan ärvas som om det vore ett ting och att det därmed finns en sorts arvs-kultur. 

Den här boken handlar om kulturarv, men den handlar inte om kulturarvets eventuella fördelar inom minnes- och identitetspolitik. Inte heller är boken tänkt som en kritik mot hur kulturarv kommer till användning i praktiken. 

Vad som orienterar föreliggande reflektioner är snarare frågan vad ett arv är, vad en kultur är och vad en arvs-kultur kan tänkas vara samt vilka värden och värderingar ett sådant arv förutsätter?

Boken tar sin utgångspunkt i dessa frågor samt i ett pågående samtal mellan Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, professor i filosofi och Johan Hegardt, som är docent i arkeologi.

Ett särskilt förord har skrivits av Irina Sandomirskaja, professor i Cultural Studies.

Bokens bilder är tagna av Esther Shalev-Gerz och Jochen Gerz och föreställer deras konstverk Monument against fascism.

When utopian desire for the future is lost and uncertainty in the present increases, the political signigicance of the past ands its social value dramatically increase. Alongside, and in between, history and memory -- Modernity's two meganarratives of the past --there evolves still another mode of transmission of the past and its accomodation in the present. In this book, this third mode, restoration, is analyzed as a professional practice and part of museum science as well as, in a wider meaning, as a third discourse critically opposed both to history and memory. Restoration is a domain of practical measures and strategic manipulation with material and value-related constitution of historical artefacts undertaken for their enrichment with symbolic and material value. In a broader sense, restoration is analyzed as a symbolic machine for the appropriation of the past by the present and the use of the past for the present moment's own purposes.  Restoration's imagination, techniques, and institutional practices play an important role in the creation of national and imperial  ideologies of history, mass movements of historical monument preservation, and commercialization of cultural heritage, the patrimonializartion of the past in symbolic commodity exchange. Special attention is given to specific strategies of the desirable past within the framework of the symbolic political economy of socialism,  in Soviet restoration and more generally, in the evolution of the Soviet cult of the historical monument. 

In this article I argue not only for the value of hermeneutics today but also, and especially, how the crucial gesture of hermeneutics is that of changing the subject for the sake of our today. Surveying briefly the main lines of hermeneutical positions along its history and critiques, and connecting these critiques to the discrepancy between theory and practice, between interpretation and the need to change the world, the article proposes that our reality today, reshaped through globalization and the virtual, is performed as a hermeneutics of history. The challenge for today's hermeneutics is to work out categories for understanding the present as on-going in a world that tends to capture and distort more and more the meaning of freedom of thought. In the final section, I propose a hermeneutics of the on-going, of gerundive time, partially under the inspiration of Paul Celan, as a response that develops the meaning of the freedom of thought. A defense of nearness and how to think in narrow nearness to the on-going is discussed. 

The lacuna is an object of restoration and a special problem in the theory of art and historical restoration. This paper analyzes the lacuna more generally, as a figure of destruction and loss, and collective memory as a set of symbolic gestures similar to restoration whose techniques integrate lacunas and neutralize their negative expression. I am reading a 1971 film by Mikhail Bogin and some biographic materials relating to its prototypes, museum workers in Leningrad after the siege, to identify an underlying eschatological dimension in monument preservation, a gesture of restauratio ad integrum.

Лакуна — объект вмешательства реставратораи проблема теории художественно-исторической реставрации — рассматривается как фигурадеструкции и утраты, а коллективная память —как совокупность символических жестов, подобных приемам реставрации по интеграции инейтрализации ее, лакуны, красноречивого зияния. Анализируя фильм Мих. Богина «О любви» и некоторые биографические материалыреальных прототипов — музейных работниковв послеблокадном Ленинграде, — я выделяюэсхатологическое измерение в жесте restauratioad integrum.

What is hermeneutics for today? The discussion departs from a critique of hermeneutics and of its critics to show that the excess of interpretation has emptied the meaning of interpretation. This paper considers the dynamics of the voiding of meaning due to its excess and "whatsoeverying", the moving principle of globalization with its main outcome in the censorship of the freedom of thought. A lacunar method is proposed to think this lack of freedom, namely, the focus of attention on the on-going of "disattention" and oblivion, to elucidate the gerundive of existence, as existing of existence. The method might help elaborate a new path of thought in the humanities.

Что такое герменевтика нашего сегодня? Я начинаю с критики герменевтики и критики критиков герменевтики и далее показываю, какв результате избытка интерпретаций нынеоказался пустым сам смысл интерпретации.В статье рассматривается динамика опустошения смысла в результате его избыточности и«чего-угодности», которая стала движущимпринципом глобализации и соответствующейцензуры свободы мысли. Предлагается «лакунарный метод», который состоит в том, чтобысосредотачивать внимание на рассеянии внимания и забвении как процессах, протекающихво времени, то есть на существовании в герундивном модусе. Возможно, метод позволитнайти новую тропу для мысли.

How can the loss of connection with history be experienced and expressed? The relationship with the past is difficult to capture and describe, although at some historic moments the emotional connection with the past becomes pivotal. This article introduces the debates on loss and cultivating the sense of losing the past in modernizing Russia in the late 19th – early 20th century. It contributes to the history of emotions, analyzing the discourse on the disappearance of Russian cultural history cultivated by intellectual and artistic circles around the journals Mir Iskusstva, Starye Gody and Iskusstvo in the late Russian Empire, and tracing distinct voices that problematized the relation to earlier times in Russia and promoted the preservation of Russian cultural and historical monuments. The article concludes that the discourse of losing the connection with Russia’s own past played an important role in forming the discourse and practices of Russian heritage preservation.

: The article considers the relationship between memory and post-memory through the lens of translating the experience of generations. The author takesZ. Baumann’s term “retrotopia” as the basis of the research. As a new mode of referring to the past retrotopia he treats it as the phenomenon of reaction in socio-psychological and political meanings. The escape of the obsessive retrotopic past is visiblein the ability to have a dialogue (Z. Baumann), and things that link to the experienceof previous generations play here a vital role. The paper analyzes variants of things’behavior in their inter-generation interaction: the mode of tactility in collectingthings serves the setting “total recall” (M. Stepanova “To the memory of memory);interaction with other people’s things (the movie “Khrustalyov, the car”) whena live dialogue of generations is impossible. The refusal of things to converse isa symptom of guilt in losing the past. Retrotopia coordinates with another important concept — post-memory with the cult of accumulating and preserving heritageinterpreted as the result of ideology and upbringing. The cult of legacy testifi esto real anxiety of survival. Post-memory as a cult of heritage strives to reproducehistorical experience in the effects of representation, and discourses of collectivememory and traumas effectively suppress and replace real memory of the historical experience. Thus, it substantiates the transition from retrotopia to utopia, fromheritage to oblivion. Retrotopia is a form of oblivion that forces one to delve intothe past. It is not for the sake of the past, but to forget the impending terrible future.Present-day digital media create a new arrangement of memory based on the valueof the concrete and the individual. History starts to converge with memory coinciding in the limit with infi nitely changing fragments and connections that memoryorganizes not by the principle of cause-and-effect but by associations and similarities. This program has features of principally different ways of managing the heritage: retrotopia (the goal is to save and preserve), and utopia (to put the past to rest).