Mode Of Temporality Research Articles

LGBTQ: An Alphabet of Interested Writing

LGBTQ: An Alphabet of Interested Writing Sue-Ellen Case (bio) Cruising Utopia: The then and there of Queer Futurity. By Jose Esteban Muñoz. New York: New York University Press, 2009; pp. 234. Theatre & Sexuality. By Jill Dolan. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; pp. 96. Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance. By Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; pp. 314. Sitting down to write this review of recent queer scholarship and performance, I was reminded of a scene from Split Britches’s Lost Lounge (2011), in which Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw bring on a fragment of a lounge act, accompanied by the sound and image of collapsing buildings, remarking on the new structures that replace the old. Then they lie motionless on the floor while a digital clock marks the passing time. Contemporary queer scholarship resonates with the collapsing of the structures of twentieth-century modes of temporality, identification, political activism, and performance, at times nostalgic for their prior efficacy and enthusiasm for goals, at other times dismissive of those same qualities. The newer critical structures significantly alter the sense of temporality (the “ticking” of the digital clock); ethnic and nationally bounded modes of identification give way to new transnational and migratory forms, and any direct tie to political activism resembles lying prone on the floor—an activist stasis—while the authors wrestle their ways out of ideological strongholds. The term “performance,” once tethered to something like acting and a performance space, now encompasses a spectacularly broad spectrum of things, from poetry and paintings to clubs and pissing contests. Moreover, the critical strategies of both performance and its interpretation are nourished by metatheories that help to set the critical terms of queer identification and social encounter. Critical theory, once cast in theatre circles as an intrusion, a dalliance, or an elitist [End Page 607] transcendence, is firmly rooted in many contemporary queer writings and performances as a way to account for how meaning is produced and distributed through social codes. In the twenty-first century, the notion and experience of “queer” construct a critical space or a lens through which to engage fully with ideologies that seek to dominate civic and global exchange. For example, conservative and fundamentalist ideologies that claim the threat of terrorism as their origin have been confronted in books like Jasbir Puar’s brilliant Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). These critiques organize a critical methodology through which they may regard, or disregard, dominating forms of authority and their attendant violence, offering alternative formations of juridical and civic sociality. Major philosophical systems that organize the very notions of space and perspective have been queered to reveal the gender and sexual bias in their structures by such works as Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), while traditional values of temporality have been refuted through queering the terms of the future by books like Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011). For the queer movement, defined, in part, by structures of desire and love, the critical treatment of emotions has been central to the development of the field. First inscribed in personalized narratives like coming-out stories, descriptions of sexual awakenings, and the stories of shaming in homophobic encounters, descriptions of the operations of desire and love then became the subject of queer and LGBT writings and performances, particularly in terms of psychoanalytic discourses in the former and seductive acts in the latter. But the arrival of the postmodernist “cool” style froze out the discursive treatment of those emotions. As Fredric Jameson diagnosed in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the “waning of affect” is one of the key symptoms of postmodernism. Accordingly, queer theorists turned to analyses of juridical structures (Butler, George Chauncey, and David Eng) and the queering of global economies (Martin Manalansan IV, Eng-Beng Lim, and Eng).1 When queer scholars returned to a full consideration of feelings, emotions appeared as inscriptions...

FORMS OF ATTENTION: TIME AND NARRATIVE IN ECPHRASIS

This paper investigates differing forms of attention entailed by the ecphrastic gaze in epic and epigram as a way of considering issues of time and narrative as crucial elements of ecphrasis. Its first section focuses particularly on Paulinus of Nola, who has been almost wholly ignored in recent discussions of ecphrasis, but who not only provides the first example of an ecphrasis of an ecphrasis – the description of an ecphrastic inscription attached to a work of art – but also provides a set of poems which construct the viewer's experience of visiting a church. This is taken as exemplary of a new development of a Christian gaze, a new form of attention. The second section looks specifically at temporality in ecphrasis (through Pliny, Virgil, and epigram), to see how different ideas of time and the experience of looking are inscribed in different genres – which in turn expect and create different forms of knowing. The third section looks particularly at later Greek epigrams, Callistratus and Achilles Tatius, to see how different authors play with ideas of temporality and narrative explored in the first two sections of the paper. Together, these interrelated arguments demonstrate how investigating forms of attention and modes of temporality allows us to develop a more nuanced comprehension of ecphrasis as a historical and aesthetic expression.

Semiotic technologies, temporal reckoning, and the portability of meaning. Or: Modern modes of temporality – just how abstract are they?

This essay is about meaning and measurement, with particular emphasis on the relation between semiotic technologies and temporal reckoning. It begins by theorizing four ways of framing time. Temporality as metricality focuses on the repetition of tokens of common types. Temporality as performativity focuses on the roots and fruits of a given event. Temporality as reckoning focuses on how one determines when an event occurred or how long an event lasted. And temporality as worldview focuses on the ways a given community (genre, public, discipline, philosophy, register, etc.) frames the nature of time. Temporality as reckoning is then used to question some entrenched claims about temporality as worldview. In particular, the claim that modern modes of temporality are ‘abstract’ (in comparison to so-called premodern, traditional, or everyday modes of temporality) is called into question. In place of pre-theoretical notions like abstraction (and similarly inadequate concepts, such as ‘commensuration’, ‘quantification’, and ‘objectification’) a set of fine-grained analytic distinctions is introduced. These may be used to theorize the conditions for and consequences of a technology being relatively portable: its meaningfulness being widely applicable and/or contextually independent. Reflexively, while this essay draws its examples and methods from the domain of time, its general claims are meant to be portable to other domains – from velocity and price to temperature and information.

Rosamond Jacob and the Hidden Histories of Irish Writing

Rosamond Jacob and the Hidden Histories of Irish Writing Gerardine Meaney The case of Rosamond Jacob’s The Troubled House raises fundamental questions about the process by which novels become, or fail to become, part of national and academic canons. The extraordinary diaries of the novel’s author also offer an unusually detailed insight into the alchemical processes that transform historical events, personal stories, political activism, social milieu, friendship, love, and desire into fiction. Read today, it is hard to understand how such a well-written novel—one that concerns a defining moment in Irish history, the Anglo-Irish War; that maps tragic structure onto historical circumstance; and that challenges so many preconceptions—has remained obscure and out of print for so long. Reading the diaries, we can see that Jacob’s particular view of the conflict in which she participated generated ambivalent reactions from the dominant cultural institutions that emerged in the new Irish state. As late as May 10, 1936, an editor at Duffy’s publishing house told Jacob that “A House Divided” (the earlier title for A Troubled House) was too sad, and he would not publish it at that time—but might later when he felt he could risk more.1 Later in the same year, however, extracts from the novel were published in the Irish Press, the official organ of the Fianna Fáil party. The relative obscurity of the novel even in scholarly circles has been extended by the fact that, oddly, it was not reprinted in the 1970s and 1980s by any of the feminist publishing houses, such as Arlen House in Dublin, or Virago and Pandora in London. Such presses helped to restore Kate O’Brien to the center of accounts of the twentieth-century Irish novel, and assisted the slow reappraisal of such earlier writers as Katherine Cecil Thurston and Frances Sheridan. Jacob’s obscurity may have been perpetuated by her combination of apparently antithetical ideological commitments to feminism and republicanism, which both connected her to the center of Irish politics and alienated her from it. Her literary style, neither high modernism nor depressed realism, likewise made her hard to classify for literary historians. These oppositions are, of course, a retrospective construction. The Troubled House, seen in the milieu of the dissident political, social, and artistic circles that it represents and which produced it, challenges the simplistic view that the energies that produced massive upheavals in early twentieth-century Ireland simply died of exhaustion in the aftermath of [End Page 70] the civil war. More important, the novel challenges the persistent myth that Irish feminism vanished with the suffrage movement, only to be reinvented ex nihilo in the 1970s. Casting a backward glance at this Irish novel is particularly timely now, when such feminist critics as Freeman, Rohy, and Traub are proposing new modes of understanding literary history and temporality across a broad range of historical periods.2 Jacob’s quest to find a publisher for The Troubled House was a long one; that of finishing it, even longer. Jacob’s friendships with other political and literary women both helped and hindered her progress. On May 31 1924, she went to visit her old friend and former cellmate, Dorothy Macardle. As she notes in her diary, Macardle’s feedback was at turns fierce and perceptive: Afterwards when they were gone I read the Cullen story aloud to her and she abused Mrs C as utterly unlike a real mother—unmaternal—aggressive, tactless, hard, weak—always “butting in.” I felt I must be making a great exposé of myself, but also felt she had a rather conventional sentimental idea of a proper mother. But she was right about one scene with Roddy.3 The “Cullen story” was to go on to have a further working title of “A House Divided” before it was eventually published in 1938 as The Troubled House. The mixture of literary activity and political activism, friendship and disagreement on that evening in 1924 was typical of Jacob and Macardle’s relationship. Both were middle class women whose cultural activism and political interests were transformed by the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War. Both were already established writers...

Realism, Form, Politics: Reading Connections in Caribbean Migration Narratives

This essay argues that the Caribbean migration narratives of Jean Rhys and George Lamming employ formal tactics associated with modernism to question values subtending literary realism and provide alternative models for thinking about relations between the novel form and community. The systematic orchestration of two key devices in Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and Lamming's The Emigrants challenges modes of perception, temporality, and history shaping the realist discourses each novel directly or indirectly invokes. Voyage in the Dark responds to Zola's naturalist novel Nana through the use of parataxis; The Emigrants responds to the generic conventions of postwar British neo-realism through parataxis as well as paralipses. These experimental strategies interrupt the plotting of migration as Bildung. The resistance to character development and narrative closure enacted in Voyage in the Dark and The Emigrants through parataxis and paralipses leaves the colonial migrants in the grip of an unresolved past. Yet these same devices also operate on a wider textual register to shift readers' focalization from realism's gaze, which disjoins observing subject from observed object, suturing readers and colonial migrants into what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a communité desouvré, a precarious collectivity that is never completely enclosed or stabilized, always safeguarding a discrepancy among members. By doing so, these novels work to transform what Lamming calls “ways of seeing.”

Fearful asymmetry: Kierkegaard’s search for the direction of time

The ancient problem of whether our asymmetrical attitudes towards time are justified (or normatively required) remains a live one in contemporary philosophy. Drawing on themes in the work of McTaggart, Parfit, and Heidegger, I argue that this problem is also a key concern of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843). Part I of Either/Or presents the “aesthete” as living a temporally volatilized form of life, devoid of temporal location, sequence and direction. Like Parfit’s character “Timeless,” these aesthetes are indifferent to the direction of time and seemingly do not experience McTaggart’s “A-Series” mode of temporality. The “ethical” conception of time that Judge William offers in Part II contains an attempt to normativize the direction of time, by re-orienting the aesthete towards an awareness of time’s finitude. However, the form of life Judge William articulates gives time sequentiality but not necessarily the robust directionality necessary to justify (and make normative) our asymmetrical attitudes to time. Hence while Either/Or raises this problem it remains unanswered until The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Only with the eschatological understanding of time developed in The Concept of Anxiety does Kierkegaard answer the question of why directional and asymmetrical conative and affective attitudes towards time are normative.

Art and Impowerment: Levinas, Nietzsche, and the Ethics of Literary Discourse

This article draws on the profound affinities between the thought of Levinas and Nietzsche to argue that aesthetics plays a major role in Levinas's ethical philosophy. As in the case of Nietzsche, who called himself “the first tragic philosopher,” aesthetics gives reference to the tragic, yet affirmative content of Levinas's ethics. For both, what Levinas calls the “alterity,” or otherness, of art and literature is located not in an ontological or conceptual “beyond”—in a “spiritual” dimension “which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute”—but in the “interstices” of language, in the “between times” (entretemps) of its modes of temporality: which can only be accessed by way of “the tragic” in art. Alterity signifies not a privileged, interpersonal dimension freed from the problematics of modernity, but points to the complicity between the West's concept of rationality and its history of barbarism exemplified by the Holocaust. The artwork for Levinas is at once temporally diachronic and spatially diasporic, a region of impowerment that is precisely lacking in the expressive or imaginative empowerment normally attributed to the artwork, but which demonstrates a utopian, emancipatory potential in revealing the fissures and hidden pathways that run through the hegemonic structures and totalizing frameworks of modernity.

"This Time Round": David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism

David Mitchell's experimental novel, Cloud Atlas , confronts the potentially apocalyptic effects of both linear and cyclical modes of temporality. Using as a framework Micea Eliade's well-known philosophical treatise, The Myth of the Eternal Return , the essay demonstrates that Mitchell's preoccupation with cyclical temporality can be understood as a reaction against what Eliade calls "the terror of history." Cloud Atlas 's characters, events, and motifs register the destructive effects of both historicist and cyclical understandings of time, culminating in its complex treatment of human clones as an embodiment of eternal return. The novel interrogates historicism through its formal experimentation.

Aesthetics As First Ethics: Levinas and the Alterity of Literary Discourse

Aesthetics As First EthicsLevinas and the Alterity of Literary Discourse Henry McDonald (bio) 1 Notwithstanding the considerable amount of scholarly attention paid since the 1980s to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy of “the other,” critics and theorists have generally approached the relation between ethics and aesthetics in his work warily. Although readings of poetry and fiction inspired by Levinas’s philosophy continue to grow at a rapid rate, arguments applying that philosophy to literary and aesthetic theory have been few and tentatively advanced. Some critics have contended that Levinas was something of a Platonic moralist who “disparaged” and “denounced” art and literature as failing to conform to his idea of what was “ethical.”1 If there is a critical consensus on the issue, it would seem to be that Levinas believed that art and ethics are incompatible.2 Based on the aesthetic writings that Levinas produced over a four-decade period, as well as on the role literature played in the genesis and development of his ethical philosophy, such assessments seem puzzling. A Lithuanian Jew who studied with Husserl and Heidegger in 1929–30, Levinas (1906–95) came to philosophy initially through literature, especially Russian literature and Shakespeare: “the whole of philosophy,” he said, “is only a meditation of Shakespeare.”3 In the first work of his philosophical maturity, Existence and Existents (1947), discussions of aesthetics and literature introduce and develop the notion of being as il y a (there is), an account which, in giving emphasis [End Page 15] to being’s “horror” (horreur), simultaneously critiques ontology and places ethics on a tragic basis.4 The il y a, along with its temporal counterpart, the entretemps (between times), introduced just one year later in “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948), are of particular importance to his writings on aesthetics, produced during a period from the 1940s through the 70s.5 The latter provide abundant evidence of the potential for ethical meaning, indeed transcendence, he attributed to the artwork, as in “The Poet’s Vision” (1956), in which he asserts: “Literature is the unique adventure of a transcendence beyond all the horizons of the world . . . the authenticity of art must herald an order of justice” [“The Poet’s Vision” 134, 137]. Although Levinas never completed anything approximating a “system of aesthetics,” it is nonetheless true that in pieces ranging from developed essays on literary theory and aesthetics to brief commentaries on dozens of literary figures and works, he gave substantive indications of the ways in which his radically nonconceptual, nonontological account of ethics might alter our understanding of the status of “the literary artwork.” Most crucial among those indications is the close connection he posited between the alterity, or otherness, of the artwork and its tragic nature, which he defined in terms of his antiontological accounts of “being” and especially “time” (entretemps, “between times”). As early as “Reality and Its Shadow,” Levinas proposed the thesis, extended in his later essays, that the alterity of art and literature was located not in any ontological or conceptual “beyond”—in a spiritual dimension “which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute” [1]—but in the “interstices” of language [3], in the “between times” (entretemps) of its modes of temporality: which can be accessed only by way of “the tragic” in art. Time in Levinas’s aesthetics is signified diachronically, from within a region of diaspora. What Levinas terms “alterity,” or otherness, points not toward a privileged, interpersonal dimension freed from the problematics of modernity, but strives to expose the complicity between the West’s concept of rationality and its history of barbarism exemplified by the Holocaust, its history, as Levinas put it, of “National Socialism, Stalinism, the camps, the gas chambers, nuclear weapons, terrorism and unemployment.”6 Art and literature demonstrate a utopian, emancipatory potential in revealing the fissures and hidden pathways that run through the hegemonic structures and totalizing frameworks of modernity. A central aspect of such an aesthetics is its privileging of music and musicality, which Levinas shares with a more recent thinker and critic, Paul Gilroy.7 Like Gilroy, Levinas deploys “musicality,” which he characterizes as “writing in its significance without signifiers” [157] not just to “refute,” as Gilroy...

Nations on screen: live broadcasting of Bastille Day and Reunification Day

By conceiving of mass media as an active part of the celebration of the National Day, this article invites a discussion of the cultural approach to political history regarding symbolic politics and its relationship to mass media. The French and German National Days selected here illustrate two extreme types of national celebration in European comparison: Bastille Day, the French National Day since 1880, is generally accepted to be the archetype of national celebration; conversely Reunification Day, the German National Day only since 1990, represents a very different type of celebration, standing as it does at the end of a long period of fundamental change within the political order. Although differing drastically in their tradition, symbolism and organisation, a comparison of their respective television coverage facilitates a systematic analysis of the impact of television on both the French and German annually repeated rituals. Comparing how the respective coverage underpins the different modes of temporality which generally characterise the National Day not only allows for a discussion of the interdependence of media and politics in contemporary societies. It also highlights differing conceptions of the French and German national celebration, but also reveals important similarities.

“Senses that you don't know”: Vibrating Modernists

ABSTRACTThe evidence that can be found in support of Michael Tratner's account of literary modernism as an aesthetic formal consequence of the heights of political collectivism reached in the 1910s is substantial, but much of this evidence is also amenable to a reading of modernism as originating instead with the impact of the arrival of cinema as a popular institution at exactly the same time. This article looks at the trope of “vibratory seeing” in a number of modernist fictional and critical statements to compare cinema and collectivist aesthetics as causes of this peculiarly modernist permutation of visual sensation. It asks whether this trope indicates a compulsion to attend to a collectivist mass mind which the author is unable to influence or even speak for but which s/he nonetheless must engage with, as it is perceived as the only force capable of spontaneous social change, or whether it represents the new philosophical provocations enacted by cinema's unique linguisticity, its mute enunciations, its mode of temporality and its world of object relations.

Time, change, and sociocultural communication: A chronemic perspective

The temporal orientations of any sociocultural grouping are major factors comprising its central identity. The manner in which the past (memories), the present (perception), and the future (anticipation/expectation) are commonly articulated also concern cultural identity. The identity of a cultural group is altered by developmental changes in time keeping and related objective, scientific temporalities. Three modes of temporality, objective, narrative, and transcendental, congruent with different kinds of brain processes, are common throughout our planet. Objective temporality tends to alter and replace traditional narrative and transcendental (spiritual) time, timing, and tempos. Objective temporality is concerned with what is transitory, modern and “progressive”. Objective time is not a traditional form of cultural time; it is a derived Westernized scientific imposition, rather than any cultural formation. This essay develops a new conception of how semiosis occurs. All information is essentially rhythmic, transduced through sensory systems as signals in a space-time domain, but deposited for use into a spectral thermodynamic domain in the human cortex. A “chronemic” perspective, (temporality as it is based in semiotic processes related to human communication) is assumed throughout. Such a perspective appears to be somewhat novel in both communication and semiotic studies.

Stasis & Verve: Henry James and the Fictions of Patience

What are the implications of patience's prominence in the final paragraphs of both Roderick Hudson and Portrait of a Lady? How do these patiences differ from each other, and from patience as more ordinarily considered? Such questions provide the frame for a more sustained engagement with patience, as deployed in The Golden Bowl. Patience, in the hands of Maggie Verver and the Prince, becomes luridly preferable to what it otherwise seems to defer; James's treatment of patience, I argue, posits this mode of temporality as inextricable from understandings of knowledge, authority, and (most plangent in The Golden Bowl) from love.

Implicit and Explicit Temporality

Keywords implicit/explicit temporality, embodiment, intersubjectivity, desynchronization, melancholia, schizophrenia Since Minkowski (1970), Strauss (1966), v. Gebsattel (1954), and Tellenbach (1980), temporality has been a main subject of phenomenological psychiatry. Drawing on philosophical concepts of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, these authors have analyzed psychopathologic deviations of time experience, mainly from an individual point of view, for example, as a slowing down or inhibition of lived time in depression or obsessive–compulsive disorder. Their analyses are still most valuable today, but may be carried further by introducing concepts such as embodied and intersubjective temporality into psychopathology. Martin Wyllie (2005), by opening up a wide scope of temporal phenomena and related concepts, makes a laudable effort to contribute to such a progress. In my commentary, I would like to propose a distinction that is suggested by much of Wyllie's analysis and may shed further light on psychopathology, namely between implicit and explicit temporality. If we look at a child while obliviously playing with his toys, lost to the world, we may assume that there is no sense of the time passing. Lived time runs with the movement of life, implicit in the child's experience of being engaged in his play and directed toward his goals. It "unfolds through the processes of bodily activity" (Wyllie 2005). Future and past do not stand out against the pure presence of "becoming." This implicit mode of temporality is retrieved every time that we are absorbed in what we are doing, and may even reach the climax of "flow experiences" (Csikszentmihalyi 1988) where the sense of time is lost in unimpeded, fluent performance. However, this changes when a gap arises between need and satisfaction, desire and fulfillment, or plan and execution. Now the future appears as a "not yet" or "yet to come," experienced as the temporality of awaiting, striving, or longing for. Time is felt as passing by and refusing the desired fulfillment; it becomes conscious or explicit. A similar gap arises between the present and something irretrievably lost, bringing the past to consciousness as a "no more." Again time is experienced explicitly, but now as moving on relentlessly and separating us from the lost object. The gap to the past may not be bridged any more: this is the temporality of missing or mourning. In both cases, explicit time arises as a negation of implicit or lived time (here my use of the term is a bit divergent from Wyllie's); it is experienced as a "not yet" or "no more," often with a component of displeasure or suffering (Fuchs 2001a, 2003). "Implicit" versus "explicit time" thus come near to another distinction well known in phenomenology, namely between the "lived" and [End Page 195] the "corporal body" (Leib versus Koerper). The first term refers to the body functioning in the tacit mode, as the medium of everyday performance. The second term points to the body as turning into the object of attention, for example, when it puts up resistance to our purposes, or is used as an instrument deliberately (Fuchs 2001b). In fact, implicit temporality and tacit performance of the body are nearly synonymous: Lived time may be regarded as a function of the lived body, opened up by its potentiality and capability. The more we are engaged in our tasks, the more we forget time as well as the body; we are, as it were, "inside time." On the other hand, in explicit temporality the body often appears in the corporal or explicit mode as well. For example, when falling ill, we experience our body no more as a tacit medium but rather as an object or obstacle, while we notice the slowing down of time and may even feel excluded from the movement of life. Thus, embodiment and temporality have a parallel background–foreground structure. I now try to carry these considerations further by including the intersubjective dimension of time. In an earlier paper, I describe the attunement of the living being to its environment as a continuous synchronization on the biological as...

"A Narrative of Prepare for Saints": Lyric, Narrative, and the Problem of Nationalism in Four Saints in Three Acts

This article analyzes the relationship between language and music in the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with libretto by Gertrude Stein and music by Virgil Thomson. Interweaving musicological and textual analysis, Frankfurt School and post-structuralist aesthetics, I situate the opera in relation to post-Wagnerian compositional practice and explore the ways in which Four Saints both invokes and resists Wagnerian nationalistic and aesthetic principles. I argue that the opera's most abiding tensions arise out of its concern with competing modes of temporality in lyric and narrative. Parodying ritual and the resulting cultic quality that historically characterized opera, Four Saints in Three Acts presents itself not as a unifying gesture of materials upon which a nation might be founded, but as the celebration of the impossibility of such claims of origin.

The Death of an Icon: Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

Amid the furore surrounding Amélie ’s digitally enhanced Paris, what has been overlooked is the fact that the film self-consciously thematises evolving technologies of vision and the modes of temporality they deploy, using the death of Princess Diana as the pretext for a meditation on the nature of iconicity. Amélie may be of the digital age, but it continually points nostalgically to the indexical, privileging the immediacy of human contact over mediatised, iconic identification. The film emphasises contingency as a form of resistance against hyper-rationalised, linear temporality, reflected in the tension between singularity and systematisation, or chance and fate ( le destin).

Temporalities of Community: Ancestral Language, Pilgrimage, and Diasporic Belonging in Mauritius

Temporal indexicality is deeply involved in the production of imagined communities. This article shows how the cultivation of Hindi as an “ancestral language” among Hindus in Mauritius mediates between two different modes of temporality while shaping diasporic identities. Diasporic ideologies of ancestral language are further shown to articulate with the creation of sacred geographies in the context of an annual Hindu pilgrimage.

Telling Time in Feminist Theory

This essay maps out four basic modes of feminist temporality that shape and circumscribe feminist thought: time as redemption, as regression, as repetition, and as rupture. The essay argues that to envision the shape of time is to be caught up in the expansive reaches of a moral and aesthetic vision. Time knits together the subjective and the social, the personal and the public; we forge links between our own lifetime and the larger historical patterns that transcend us. Feminist thinkers do not uniformly place time at the center of their theories, nor do they produce a unique version of time, but in comparison with many other types of thinking, they are more creative in their metaphors, more diverse in their stories, more promiscuous in their allegiances. While confusing, this multiplicity is one of the goods of feminism: what we need is a pragmatics, not a metaphysics, of time. The many times of feminism make it clear that no one time can do justice to the complexities of feminism or the world.

Knowing and being: a postmodern reversal

Everyone knows that implies pluralism, anti-foundationalism, and, generally,a postnormative view of the self and reality. While many embrace it, few bother to tell us what is wrong with modernity. What are the problems that brought about its crisis and ultimate demise as a philosophical and cultural movement? What are the lessons for the postmodern movement that can he drawn from them? James Mensch here explains why modernism failed as a viable philosophical enterprise and how postmodernism must be understood if it is to serve as a defensible intellectual project in its stead. The heart of Mensch's argument is a reversal of the modernist view of the unitary subject as a ground of epistemological and ethical normativity. He substitutes for modernism a view, beholden to Aristotle but adapted to for our present age, that sees subjectivity as temporality in a world where subject and object are interactive. The result is a pluralism of forms of subjectivity corresponding to the different modes of temporality brought about by the world. In a series of analyses on the nature knowing, Mensch shows how we can embrace both the perspectivism of postmodernism while avoiding the skepticism and relativism that have constantly threatened to undermine its insights.

Les temps vécus et leurs entrecroisements dans le cours de la vie quotidienne

«The Actual Times and their Interlacing in the Course of Everyday Life». Thomas Luckmann [17-38]. From the question of the meaning of the historical time, the author propose a comprehensive theoretical reflexion on the different modes of temporality, which interlace in the everyday life structuration. The typology of temporalities that he presents (inner rhythm, intersubjective time, biographical time, time objectived in categories, historical time) draws the frame of a phenomenological sociology of time. This construction offers new outlooks on the exploration of the common sense of history, for the historical time, as inserted in the more generai scope of the struturation of identities, find there an original and rigourous reformulation.