ABSTRACT

In (re)writing the text of the contemporary city, in the attempt to urbanize and re-urbanize city empty spaces and shaping a new configuration for the city-as-image, the contemporary discourse of "reconstruction" and its grand narrative of political, cultural, aesthetic, architectural as well as ethical discourse is marked by the hegemonic discourse of historicism. Historicism, in its uncritical notion of the past, falsifies history and unproblematically short-circuits the experience of modernity by rehearsing the Enlightenment myths of historical progress and continuity on the one hand, and historical closure on the other. The author discusses one recent instance of "reconstruction", the case of the city of Berlin, but he want to point out here that in the current conception of the reconstruction project, one discerns a positive project of ontologization of the spectres of the memory, a domestication and gentrification of the fundamental experience of the 'shock' of modernity.