Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Is it Time?
- 2 The Aporia of the Instant in Derrida's Reading of Husserl
- 3 Existential Moments
- 4 Augen-Blicke
- 5 On Alain Badiou
- 6 Instants of Diminishing Representation: The Problem of Temporal Modalities
- 7 Poetry and the Returns of Time: Goethe's ‘Wachstum’ and ‘Immer und Überall’
- 8 ‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
1 - Is it Time?
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Is it Time?
- 2 The Aporia of the Instant in Derrida's Reading of Husserl
- 3 Existential Moments
- 4 Augen-Blicke
- 5 On Alain Badiou
- 6 Instants of Diminishing Representation: The Problem of Temporal Modalities
- 7 Poetry and the Returns of Time: Goethe's ‘Wachstum’ and ‘Immer und Überall’
- 8 ‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
‘The time has come’, the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax –
Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.’
Lewis CarrollNo différance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here and now.
Jacques DerridaBlessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.
RevelationIs it time? It's about time. Just a moment. Any moment now. But the moment or the time in the sense I shall be discussing it has a curious and difficult relation to time in general. In English, at least, it is difficult to separate questions about time in general in all its complexity (cosmological time, psychological time, the phenomenology of internal time consciousness and so on) from questions about the time, the time that might have come, the right time, the moment as appropriate moment, not the moment as just now or as present, but as the right moment, le bon moment, the moment as kairos rather than as nun. This thought of the moment as the right moment, the moment whose moment has come, for which the time is ripe, the time whose time it is, the time that must accordingly be grasped or seized before it has gone, the time as opportunity not to be missed, is, or so it would appear, itself a thought whose time has come. The time has come to talk of many things, but among those many things the thing whose time has most come is, apparently (blame the millennium) the thought of the time's having come. And the proof of that is given among many other signs (including a flurry of recent French philosophical interest in St Paul, messianism and eschatology) by the fact of the conference for which this paper was written, which could not but invite the reflection that it had been organised at the right moment, that this indeed was the moment to talk about the moment. And it seems that any attempt to think about the moment as right or appropriate moment has to accept this reflexive paradox from the start.
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- The MomentTime and Rupture in Modern Thought, pp. 17 - 32Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001