The Shivery skin of time. Why have we severed the bonds between the past, present, and future?

ENIn the field of 20th-century social sciences and humanities, three innovative opportunities for researching time had emerged, which were proposed by sociology, anthropology, and sociocultural time history. In the 21st century, the theory of history, the anthropology of time, and the study of memory explore many important issues related to historical time: how do we experience and interpret time? In what ways can we think about, reconstruct, and describe the experience of time? What regime of historicity do we live in today? Why does the individual of the 21st century feel as if the order of time has been broken down? This paper examines three fundamental books by François Hartog, Aleida Assmann, and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, written at the crossroads of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which have provided insights into the radical and dramatic change in the way today’s human beings relate to the past, present, and future. This change has had an impact on significant shifts in the self-understanding of Western societies, led to an increased focus on memory and the emergence of new memory wars, influenced the transformation of global historical culture, and provoked historiographical revolutions. The paper will reflect and comment on the statements formulated in the abovementioned books about the regimes of historicity and their change in the 21st century, asking the following questions: how do these changes affect our approach to what the past is? Why is the past not content with remaining a museum exhibit? What are 21st-century human beings and societies looking for in history? Why does the present wish to clean up and change the past? Why has the future become synonymous with a threat? And how do we as historians cope with such a crisis of experiencing time?.Upon discussing these questions, this paper will seek to solve another problem – how can the representatives of small humanities communities and national academic schools contribute to the deliberation of global issues, such as the crisis of the experience of time? Which ideas that François Hartog, Aleida Assmann, and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon have voiced about the crisis of experiencing time and its possible solutions can be creatively applied in developing Lithuania’s culture of history in the 21st century? Keywords: historical time; theory of history; historic sensitivity; crisis of the experience of time; modern time regime; presentism; regimes of historicity; past; present; future.