Collapse and Repetition: The Crisis of Historial Imagination and Temporal Extractivism

Abstract

In the context of climate crisis and an exhausted modernity, this essay explores the crisis of historical imagination as a phenomenon in which time becomes a circular trap. The logic of temporal extractivism imposes a vision of the past as a sequence of collapses and utilitarian rebirths serving current power structures, reflecting the exhaustion of our ability to conceive alternatives to the hegemonic present. Dominant historical narratives select and simplify only those elements of the past that confirm a linear vision of progress. In response, undocumented pasts and alternative historical models —such as decentralized societies of the Bronze Age, indigenous cultures, and medieval communal structures— are analyzed as openings to a plurality of temporal possibilities that challenge the ideological closure of the future. This approach invites us to reimagine history not as a justificatory tool but as an ethical practice that, by freeing memory from this temporal exploitation, rediscovers a time filled with collective potentialities to rethink the present and its futures.