Abstract

Prolepsis—or the narrative manoeuver consisting of evoking a future event in advance—is a concept borrowed from literary theory that has been applied to collective memory in order to examine how imagined futures are brought into the present by means of particular ways of reconstructing the past. This chapter sets out to further explore the notion of prolepsis. Drawing on Hartog’s notion of regimes of historicity and Mannheim’s work on the utopian mentality, the focus will be placed on the new horizon of expectations generated by modernity in the West, as well as on how the recent crisis of modernity—and the resulting contraction of such horizon—has impacted the way we reconstruct the past and orient our actions in the present.