Introduction: in medias res …

In our post-modern or post post-modern present, we pay little more than lip service to a flawed sense of a continuously unfolding linear temporality. Within an apparently dynamic frame of moving horizons which, on the surface, recognises that meaning does not settle easily within segregated presentism, we have locked the early modern into a temporal pocket on the lower end of a value-added sequential scale. Our contemporary understanding of linear history, as an accumulation of personal and communal experience, is, of course, more complex and, indeed, less ‘linear’ than the Aristotelian concept of the numerical estimation of movement. But while we may not have sacrificed the phenomenology of how individual human beings participate in three-dimensional time (past/present/future), and have expended considerable energy on unlocking the secrets of the hermeneutic circle, our insistence on the ‘early’ modern betrays an unwillingness to recognise that human nature, at any point or place in time, could be said to exist ‘in medias res’ – that is, that our communal beginning comes only after beginning; and that the corporeal individual exists somewhere between life and death, an intermediate state destabilised by the incommensurable complicity of accessible ‘temporal’ time as we experience it and an awareness of ‘cosmic’ time, absolute, somehow ‘purer’ and experientially absent.