This introduction sets out the key questions to be explored in the volume, examining contemporaneous definitions and uses of ‘postérité’, and the complex temporal games that both anticipating and describing posterity entail. It considers the precariousness of relying on an unknown future public, how gaps and flexibility might enhance the likely survival of a text or its author, and how the idea of posterity (in its various configurations) acts as a motivating force, conditioning how an individual acts even as ‘real’ posterity continually recedes into the distance before them.

中文翻译：

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简介：后代是什么，在哪里，谁是后代？

引言列出了本卷中要探讨的关键问题，研究了“后事”的同时定义和用法，以及预期和描述后代​​的复杂时间博弈。它考虑了依靠未知的未来公众的危险，差距和灵活性如何提高文本或其作者的生存能力，后代的思想（在各种配置中）如何起到激励作用，调节个人的方式甚至当“真实的”后代不断退缩到他们之前的距离时。