Coming out in: Continental Philosophy Review ** Please quote only from the published version.** Phenomenology and the Experience of the Historical A Review Essay of David Carr, Experience and History. Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World (Oxford University Press 2014) 1 by Maxime Doyon (maxime.doyon@umontreal.ca) 20 th Century philosophical accounts of history have been dominated by two paradigms: our relation to history either takes the form of a representation of the past, or the historical past is conceived as a sociological phenomenon of collective memory. Whereas the defenders of the representationalist approach are primarily interested in history as a story that can be known and fixed through the elaboration of a narrative discourse (e.g., Hayden White, Arthur Danto, W.B. Gallie, Louis Mink), advocates of the memory-oriented approach (e.g., Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Paul Ricoeur) are more typically interested in discerning and analysing the psychological effects of our collective relation to our past. Beyond their unmistakable differences, these two tendencies have a common dominator, which provides David Carr with the starting point of his reflections on history: “On both of these accounts, then, history is divided by a gap from what it seeks to find or wants to know, and its activity is seen by philosophers as that of bridging this or these gaps. This constitutes the problem to which the philosophy of history addresses itself: How does history bridge the gap, overcome the distance, which separates it from its object, the past?” (4) 2 If Carr thought in 1986 (in Time, Narrative, and History) that his conception of narrativity (which he sees at work in human action and in experience) could help to remedy the situation and close the gap, his 2014 opus, Experience and History, develops an account of history which further emphasises experience (without, however, leaving the terrain of narrativity). In this way, Carr’s investigations remain phenomenological in orientation: “The purpose of this study is to outline a distinctively phenomenological approach to history.” (1) To phenomenologically describe the experiential character of historical events amounts to inquire “into history as a phenomenon, and into the experience of the historical.”(1) In Experience and History, Carr keeps his promise throughout the 8 chapters of this immensely insightful and creative book. Given the scope of the thesis defended, the extraordinary range of people and disciplines discussed is not surprising. Apart from the work of classical phenomenologists (especially Husserl, but also Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), Carr also surveys and critically discusses the important contributions of classical and more contemporary historians (Akersmit, Kellner, Danto, White, et al.), philosophers of history (Hegel, Löwith, Marx, et al.) and hermeneuticians (Dilthey, Ricoeur), among others. Two 1 This is a very slightly modified version of the paper that I gave at SPEP, in Atlanta, on October 10 th , 2015. Thanks to Dermot Moran for organizing the panel and for inviting Steve Crowell and I to engage with David Carr’s work. Thanks also to Hanne Jacobs, who moderated the session. 2 See also the following passage: “Different as they are from each other, one thing these two approaches have in common is that they begin with a gap between us and the past, between the present which we inhabit and the past to which we turn in history.” (3)