Books and readings: evanescent time

This book is not a philosophy of time in the West, nor a history of time from antiquity to the present day, nor an inventory of increasingly precise techniques for its measurement; such a task, assuming one ran the risk of undertaking it, would probably be endless. Also, I think, it wouldn’t necessarily be enlightening: we would know more, but would we understand better? Here we are dealing with a journey through Chronos, an essay that starts from a question and organizes a common thread. As in my previous books, which can be read like so many other stops on the crises of time, the question, I repeat, is that of an always open question about the present time. Things? Where are we in relation to time? Our present, which few would spontaneously define as “beautiful today”, what is it made of? The leitmotif of this conceptual history essay is the operator of the historicity regime, whose goal has always been to shed light on the crises of time, those moments in which the points of reference waver and disorientation overcomes, when the ways to articulate past, present and future are blurred.

As always, it is the journey that interests me: the crises of time, or those “gaps”, as Hannah Arendt called them. Those moments in which what was still there yesterday, in evidence, darkens and disintegrates, while, in that same movement, the new, the unprecedented, tries to be said, even without (yet) having the words to be able to formulate it . . For a long time this phrase by Michel de-Certeau accompanied me: “it seems that an entire society says what it is building with representations of what it is losing”. Here we touch on the inevitable gap or delay between what we know and what we see. How to see what we have never seen before and how to say what has never been said? How can we give the words of the tribe not a “purer” meaning, as Stéphane Mallarmé sought, but a meaning capable of signifying the original? Like him, Valéry raised the same question. But has the gap between what our societies are “about to lose” and what is happening today has become so deep that societies no longer even know what to “build” before they even know how to build it? Or, even more serious, it would no longer be possible to build, if it were not something completely different. Valéry’s “non-deductible” would have become even worse. This topical issue will not cease to accompany us throughout our investigation, opened with the Christian crisis of the time and its resolution, continuing with the crises of modern times, and ending with the crisis of contemporary time, that of the Anthropocene.

Therefore, the following pages are not only about time or the whole of time, but an essay on the order of time and the epochs of time in what has become the Western world. Like Buffon recognizing the “Epochs” of Nature, we can distinguish epochs of time. Pay attention to the passage from one to the other, our journey will mark their succession. We will thus pass from the Greek ways of understanding Chronos, to the Anthropocene (a time that, on this occasion or for now, eludes us), dwelling for a long time in the time of Christians, a new order of time conceived and implemented by the nascent Church. Because with Christianity a new epoch of time is certainly opening which, for believers (even without their really knowing it), is still ongoing. This Christian time can be recognized as a regime of specific historicity, an unprecedented way of articulating past, present and future. To say it from the beginning, by the Christian regime of historicity I mean a presentism: the present is the dominant category, but, in this case, it is an apocalyptic present.

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