Após uma breve retomada da tese bergsoniana da inadequabilidade da linguagem para exprimir o real, a qual está presente ao longo de toda sua obra, este trabalho procura mostrar de que modo Matéria e Memória contempla uma reflexão mais profunda sobre esta temática ao apresentar a noção de “aparelho motor”, que permite vislumbrar o fundamento corporal dos hábitos da prática e aponta para o problema de transpô-los sem crítica ao âmbito do pensamento especulativo. Em linhas gerais, procuramos entender de que (...) modo a concepção de linguagem de Bergson – com base na definição da palavra como entidade de ordem motora ou mais explicitamente como aparelho motor – anuncia um acesso extralingüístico ao real. (shrink)

The notion of time is traced both in Philosophy and in Physics (Newtonian Mechanics, Relativity, Cosmology, Quantum Theory). Distinct temporalities emerge and time appears as the essential condition for the realization of being, in accordance with ideas and theories developed by Peirce, Whitehead, and Heidegger.

This paper describes a neglected aspect of the critique of academic ‘cultures of speed’ offered by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber in The Slow Professor. I argue internalisation of the values and imperatives of cultures of speed can encourage the erosion of a range of academic virtues while also facilitating the development of a range of academic vices. I focus on the ways that an internalised ‘psychology of speed’ erodes our capacity to exercise the virtues of intellectual beneficence – excellences (...) of character which advance the intellectual needs of others – by radically distorting our experience of time. (shrink)

This contribution intends to explore patients’ lived experience, with a focus on the temporal dimension. On the basis of a qualitative study that led me to interview persons with Parkinson’s disease (PD), caregivers, and medical professionals, I develop an empirical and philosophical investigation of the temporalities surrounding the implementation of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in Greece. I raise the issue of access to DBS medical care, and show how distinct temporalities are implied when the patients face such a (...) matter: that of linear time, linked with the medical discourse, the bureaucratic time linked to administrative and financial hurdles in the implementation and maintenance of DBS, and the technological time of the body/technology fusion. I consider initially the impact of technology and health care settings on the lived experience of patients and the enactment of multiple bodies which are interrelated with the social world. I then expand my analysis in order to show that this experience cannot be a solipsistic one, or specific to one physician/patient relationship. It is fully socially shaped. (shrink)

The moral pedagogy in the fairy tales is simple but powerful. It is concentrated in the lesson –according to the message of Aristotle– about the finalism sense of action: it makes the child understand that the human answer is an action with sense. Everything in the fairy tale leads to this perspective. Moreover, it exemplifies MacIntyre’s opinion which says that current people tend to be proto-aristotelian and to understand their own life and the other’s in narrative terms.

In the decades after World War II, oceans were envisioned as sites of resource abundance that would underpin global development. This essay investigates Antarctic krill and its potential “surplus” as one articulation of this abundance, attending to the cultural and epistemic strategies at play in constituting this ocean abundance. Concentrating on the work of Neil Mackintosh, a world-leading British whale biologist working within governmental scientific bodies, this essay identifies temporal imaginings and sensibilities as being central to his claims around krill (...) abundance and its seeming surplus in the context of whale stocks significantly diminished through overexploitation. Mackintosh’s temporalities of abundance were generated in three overlapping and mutually reinforcing sites: the archive of the colonial scientific survey he worked for, the decades of his career, and the recovery of polar seal populations. The story of the krill surplus and the temporalities underpinning it allows for a more complex reckoning with ideas of scarcity and abundance as well as further demonstrating the need to see the temporalities at work in constituting environments and the scientific labor in them. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine has been studied as a rich and diverse set of epistemic and infrastructural practices that relate imperfect medical knowledges to complex clinical practices. We examine instances of medical decision-making where medical professionals relate recommendations from clinical practice guidelines to individual patient characteristics when deciding to prescribe implantable cardioverter defibrillators to treat heart failure. When connecting evidence-based recommendations to decisions about individual patients, we find that clinical deliberations invoke different times, such as linear, chronological time, and biological aging, as (...) well as different futures, such as individual future risks and the future sustainability of health systems. Such different “temporalities of evidence” are integral parts of clinicians’ considerations concerning economy, suffering, risks, and hopes in making decisions on individual patients. In line with calls to anchor science and technology studies scholarship studying EBM in the concerns that matter most to patients and health care providers, we argue that the social study of EBM needs to attend to such temporalities to understand how evidence is weighed, which outcomes are considered important, and hence which clinical action is proposed. However, since different ways of “doing time” lead to different appreciations of the clinical outcomes, the notion of clinical “anchoring” becomes rather elusive. (shrink)

Despite feminism's uneven movements, it has been predominantly understood through metaphors of generations or waves. Feminism's Queer Temporalities builds on critiques of the limitations of this linear model to explore alternative ways of imagining feminism's timing. It finds in feminism's literary and cultural archive narratives of temporality that might now be diagnosed as queer, where queer designates modes of being historical that exceed the linear and the generational. Few theorists have looked to popular feminist figures, literature, and culture to (...) theorize feminism's timing. Through methodologically creative readings, McBean explores non-generational, anti-linear, and asynchronous time in the figure of Antigone, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, the film Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains, Valerie Solanas and SCUM Manifesto, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. The first to substantially bring together the ways in which time has come to matter in both feminist and queer disciplines, this book will appeal to students and scholars of feminist, queer and gender studies, cultural studies and literary studies. (shrink)

The plural, impure or discordant nature of time has become an important theme in recent critical social and political theory. Against Althusser’s dismissal of Sartre’s presumedly Hegelian understanding of time and history, this article establishes Jean-Paul Sartre as a key figure in this debate on the plurality of temporalities. Especially in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre understands history and the social in terms of a multiplicity of uneven and non-synchronous temporalisations, rejecting an notion of time as a universal (...) container within which events take place. The originality of Sartre’s approach is that it establishes a link between the notion of the plurality of temporalities and the problem of freedom and domination. His mature social and political theory allows us to understand temporalisation as a strategy for domination, and objective social temporality as key to a form of anonymous or structural domination. A reconstruction of this highly complex and sophisticated approach to thinking domination through time can also shed an original light on the temporal dimension of democracy and totalitarianism. (shrink)

In “Melancholia, temporal disruption, and the torment of being both unable to live and unable to die”, I discuss the way in which the temporal desynchronization of melancholia can disrupt the melancholic’s relation to their own death and, on a Heideggerian interpretation, the meaning and significance of their life. In their thoughtful commentaries, Kevin Aho and Gareth Owen draw out some important points for further elaboration and clarification, the most pressing of which invoke Heidegger’s interpretation of time and the radical (...) temporalities of fundamental attunements. As Aho anticipates, this is the conception of time that underpins my interpretation of melancholia and, because this is important... (shrink)

Massimiliano Tomba’s book, Marx’s Temporalities, stresses the centrality of the body for the critique of exploitation and suggests that a new phenotype is produced by consumerism and by the dynamic of capitalist accumulation, with its plural temporalities. However, both the body of the worker and the new phenotype do not appear to have a sex or a gender in Tomba’s book. In this intervention, I read some of Tomba’s insights about the body, the new phenotype, and primary accumulation (...) in the light of a critical gender and feminist perspective. (shrink)

Rachel Loewen Walker's original study of Deleuze's theory of temporality critically expands our understanding of non-linear time through engagement with queer theory and new feminist materialisms. Walker draws on the notion of non-linear time in Deleuze's work to advance a conception of 'the living present' as a critical juncture through which new meanings and activism in the fields of feminism, environment, and queerness may be realised. Using literary texts by Jeanette Winterson, and philosophical texts by Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, (...) Walker reflects on monomythic stories about gender, sexuality, and identity in the context of rapid climate change, and posthumanist politics to tread new ground for Deleuzian studies of time. Speaking to and from feminist, queer, environmental, trans, and crip political movements, Walker uses Deleuze to argue for a 'lived present' which is both mutable and embodied. Such characteristics are presented as essential components in the construction of meaning that is not bound by a static present, past or future. Queer and Deleuzian Temporalities pinpoints the importance of feminist and queer theory to a critical re-evaluation of time. Through a wide-ranging analysis we are able to see how everyone is embedded within rather than outside of time, opening up the possibility for imagining and realising alternate futures both for ourselves and the environment. (shrink)

This paper theorizes and historicizes the ideas of modern language and translation and challenges the imperialist and nationalistic mode of worlding with the notion of ‘untranslatability’ that is embedded in the linguistic and cultural practices of colonial Taiwan and Korea. I redefine the notion of translation as a bordering system – the knowledge-production of boundaries, discrimination, and classification – that simultaneously creates the translatable and the untranslatable (i.e. the equivalence and incommensurability) in asymmetrical power relations. With this, I discuss how (...) this ambivalence is embodied in the experiences of colonial writers Wu Yung-fu and Pak T’aewŏn and their novellas ‘Head and Body’ (1933) and ‘A Day in the life of Kubo the Novelist’ (1934). I illustrate two characteristics of the ambivalent untranslatability embedded in their novellas: the linguistic untranslatability and the experience of ‘unhomeness’. The linguistic untranslatability and unhomeness, I argue, result in the colonized’s dislocation in homogeneous time-space relationships, resulting to the incompletion of the modernization project through colonialism. At the same time untranslatability offers a site to explore the transnational space that crosses linguistic boundaries, and to caution against the legacy of colonialism. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 1014-1034, September 2022. The plural, impure or discordant nature of time has become an important theme in recent critical social and political theory. Against Althusser’s dismissal of Sartre’s presumedly Hegelian understanding of time and history, this article establishes Jean-Paul Sartre as a key figure in this debate on the plurality of temporalities. Especially in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre understands history and the social in terms of a multiplicity of (...) uneven and non-synchronous temporalisations, rejecting an notion of time as a universal container within which events take place. The originality of Sartre’s approach is that it establishes a link between the notion of the plurality of temporalities and the problem of freedom and domination. His mature social and political theory allows us to understand temporalisation as a strategy for domination, and objective social temporality as key to a form of anonymous or structural domination. A reconstruction of this highly complex and sophisticated approach to thinking domination through time can also shed an original light on the temporal dimension of democracy and totalitarianism. (shrink)

Industry 4.0 The present work enables us to take the first steps in the world of the 4th Industrial Revolution, a world where robots, artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing technologies will change forever the way we design, produce and buy products and services. The first characteristics of this revolution is globalization: for the first time in history, an industrial transformation is taking place simultaneously on a global scale. The second key-factor is the word ecosystem: unlike the first three industrial revolutions (...) (steam engine, electricity and computers) over the past few years, no technologies nor machines were invented anew, but we understood how to keep together different technological platforms by using the same language (bit). If the revolution in place will complete the transformations announced, in twenty years we will look at today’s society the same way we nowadays look at the 19th Century society. (shrink)

The beginnings of epidemics are often told as if they are simple to locate in time. They take the form of a crisis, and as such, function as great synchronisers of different temporalities, bringing social temporalities “in line” with biological ones. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, political processes that are usually slow were accelerated in order to “catch up with” the fast pace of the virus's reproduction, as policymakers saw a need to contain the (...) virus. The end of an epidemic, on the other hand, is more difficult to pinpoint. This can be attributed to the fact that the myriad actors involved in and affected by an epidemic operate on diverging time scales. Although seemingly synchronised from its outset, these lifetimes become un-synchronised as the epidemic unfolds. Some effects of an epidemic outbreak are easily observed, such as infection rates and the number of deceased. Others-psychological or medical after-effects, or the lasting memory in a population-may be harder to spot. Declaring that an epidemic has “ended” usually relies on the ceasing of the former, not the latter. However, as this article argues, the ending(s) of an epidemic should be regarded in the plural, each operating within its own rhythm and scale. This article explores the multiplicity of lifetimes involved in epidemics-human, microbial, institutional-and tries to give an explanation as to how epidemics end (or linger on) using an approach of multiple temporalities. (shrink)

This article recapitulates and develops the attempts in the Nietzschean traditions to address and overcome the proliferation of nihilism that Nietzsche predicted to unfold in the next 200 years (WP 2). Nietzsche approached nihilism not merely as a psychology but as a labyrinthic and pervasive historical process whereby the highest values of culture and founding assumptions of philosophical thought prevented the further flourishing of life. Therefore, he thought nihilism had to be encountered and experienced on many, often opposing, fronts to (...) be fully consumed and left behind. Thus, just as Nietzsche captured the subtle reinventions of nihilism in new forms in his time, in the new doers assumed behind new deeds (WP 488), this article focuses on the contemporary tectonic shifts brought by digital technology and challenges subjectivation and narrativization of algorithmic will to power in human-like interfaces such as ChatGPT. Having identified philosophers and himself as the most advanced nihilists in their overvaluation of truth, in the 4th part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche grappled with the difficult, perhaps impossible, temporality of post-nihilistic historicity that oscillates between highest creativity and highest truths, especially in the sections entitled The Shadow and At Noon whereby he explored new temporal techniques to evade the relapses into temporal nihilisms of the notions of linear progress or eternity (TSZ, 4). By drawing on this juncture, this article offers ways to address transfigurations of nihilism behind new technological performances of subjectivity. The article points toward creative temporalities beyond narrativity and subjectivity insofar as the statistical operations and probabilistic estimations of language-models exceed grammatical construction of meaning. This multifaceted application of his thought on the contemporary ontic reality is necessary to perceive our comet's incalculable movement as a veritable ray of sunshine. (shrink)

This article attempts to foreground the importance of everyday life and habit to the reproduction of national identities. Taking issue with dominant linear depictions of the time of the nation, which have over-emphasized ‘official’ histories, tradition and heroic narratives, this article foregrounds the everyday rhythms through which a sense of national belonging is sustained. The article focuses upon institutionalized schedules, habitual routines, collective synchronicities and serialized time-spaces to develop an argument that quotidian, cyclical time is integral to national identity. In (...) conclusion, accounts that discuss the increasing dominance of a postmodern global time are argued to be hyperbolic, since the nation remains a powerful, if more flexible constituent of identity. (shrink)

The moral pedagogy in the fairy tales is simple but powerful. It is concentrated in the lesson -according to the message of Aristotle- about the finalism sense of action: it makes the child understand that the human answer is an action with sense. Everything in the fairy tale leads to this perspective. Moreover, it exemplifies MacIntyre's opinion which says that current people tend to be proto-aristotelian and to understand their own life and the other's in narrative terms.

The visual arts offer refreshing and novel resources through which to understand the representation, power, ideology and critique of law. This vibrantly interdisciplinary book brings the burgeoning field to a new maturity through extended close readings of major works by artists from Pieter Bruegel and Gustav Klimt to Gordon Bennett and Rafael Cauduro. At each point, the author puts these works of art into a complex dance with legal and social history, and with recent developments in legal and art theory. (...) Manderson uses the idea of time and temporality as a focal point through which to explore how the work of art engages with and constitutes law and human lives. In the symmetries and asymmetries caused by the vibrating harmonic resonances of these triple forces - time, law, art - lies a way of not only understanding the world, but also transforming it. (shrink)

The volume's essays, divided into four main topical groups question critically the key problem of context, connecting it to the problem of time.

Rhythm is generally taken to refer to a temporal pattern of events. Yet in recent years, across diverse fields in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, it has come to serve as the conceptual marker for a wide range of new approaches to understanding relations and relationality, following most explicitly from the late work of Henri Lefebvre. This article explores the temporal aspect of such relational thinking, in particular asking how time is implicated in relations, and how it can be (...) meaningful in those relations. The sense of time is surveyed from the perspectives of both cognition and metaphysics as well as with reference to music scholarship and social theory, and key threads are drawn, from the writings of Gaston Bachelard and Charles Sanders Peirce in particular, in order to suggest that time can be a sign, and that the signifying properties of rhythm have critical social consequences. (shrink)

Living in Anthropocene times entails living in relation to two seemingly separate temporalities – the microtime of digital operations and the deep time of geological upheaval. Though divergent, these temporalities are united by their unavailability to perception; microtime proceeds too fast to perceive directly, while deep time is too vast to apprehend. Taking these temporalities as a point of departure, this paper develops three arguments. First, it asserts that the temporalities of deep time and microtime increasingly (...) impact contemporary existence, complicating familiar categorizations of temporal experience. Second, it argues that these ostensibly separate temporalities are ontologically connected through the operations of the tech industry, which is constructing a microtemporal system that extracts the planet’s deep time resources to delimit the future both materially and cognitively. Third, it suggests that Silicon Valley legitimizes these processes by funding the philosophy of longtermism, which appeals to distant timescales to marginalize injustices in the present. (shrink)

This essay argues that we need practices for tending to what has been discarded as "historical debris" in order to generate queer socialities and meanings that refuse the dominant heteronormative, capitalist, and white supremacist privileging of futurity, novelty, and productivity. Artist and city planner Theaster Gates's transformative work takes root in Chicago's South Side, where he has renovated abandoned buildings into dynamic community spaces for celebrating and generating Black history, art, and culture. The essay reads Gates's artistic-activist practice through Elizabeth (...) Freeman's queer feminist framework, in particular her notion of "temporal drag," to challenge conventional assumptions that whatever is "newest" offers the most radical or queer potential. Freeman's and Gates's work demonstrates the latent possibilities within history's "throwaway" objects and spaces, which can act as sites for imagining and living otherwise, generating queer utopias in our present. (shrink)

“Every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time” Giorgio Agamben, History and Infancy: the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron, Verso, 1993, p. 91 Desmond Manderson’s book, Danse Macabre, is an essential read which reminds us that “the visual and spectacular are indispensable elements of how we come to know and are known by politics, law, and regulation”. It presents remarkable research on visual representations of the law, achieving the difficult task of...

This paper aims to demonstrate how museum collection sustainability is grounded in a range of concrete care practices that are social and material. It explores the unstable nature of heritage materials, drawing on the ecological approach of infrastructure and maintenance studies in the field of art and museums. To do this, I analyse the role of mundane operations in the daily functioning of an exhibition area, presenting data from fieldwork I conducted from 2015–2016 at the Musée du quai Branly in (...) Paris, which preserves collections of art and ethnology from outside Europe. I observed the museum's preventive conservation practices, which work to minimise the risks of material deterioration of heritage objects, focusing attention on stabilising the relationship between objects and their environments. These practices contribute to the construction of the temporalities of museum objects. In exploring the means and devices of preserving these heritage objects, the very assumption of perpetuation is destabilised. Environments continually unfold with the silent material metamorphosis of objects. The exhibition becomes a place of flows, where a multitude of entities circulate and cohabit at different scales, such as insects, dust, and powdery fragments. The daily human work of vacuuming, cleaning, trapping, and measuring provide a set of actions united with other entities engaged in the material life of the exhibited object. As we zoom in on the exhibition space, different timelines emerge that are inextricably linked to the different lives of the museum. (shrink)

In this essay I intend to flesh out and discuss what I consider to be the groundbreaking contribution by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck to postwar historiography: his theory of historical times. I begin by discussing the view, so prominent in the Anglophone context, that Koselleck's idea of the plurality of historical times can be grasped only in terms of a plurality of historical periods in chronological succession, and hence, that Koselleck's theory of historical times is (...) in reality a theory of periodization. Against this interpretation, to be found in works by Kathleen Davis, Peter Osborne, and Lynn Hunt, among others, I will argue that not only is Koselleck's theory of historical times, or, with a more phenomenlogical turn of phrase, his theory of multiple temporalities, not a theory of periodization, it is, furthermore, a theory developed to defy periodization. Hence, at the core of Koselleck's work is the attempt to replace the idea of linear, homogeneous time with a more complex, heterogeneous, and multilayered notion of temporality. In this essay I will demonstrate how this shift is achieved by means of three dichotomies: between natural and historical, extralinguistic and intralinguistic, and diachronic and synchronic time. (shrink)

Stakeholder engagement and dialogue have a central role in defining the relations between organisations and their internal and external interlocutors. Drawing upon the analysis of dialogic motifs, power–conflict dynamics and sociopolitical perspectives, and based on a set of interviews with the stakeholders of a consumer-owned cooperative, the research explores the dialogic potential of stakeholder engagement. The analysis revealed a fragmented picture where the co-design and co-implementation aspects were mainly related to the non-business areas of cooperative life, while business logic dominated (...) the most central aspects. Stakeholder engagement was mainly related to consensus building, while dialogic engagement based on a pluralistic understanding was only partially considered and then neglected. The social capital in the local area, the growing size of the organisation and the related power structure embrace stakeholder engagement, influencing the orientation of the dialogic dynamic. The analysis indicates that a dialogic exchange is a relative concept which depends on the interests involved and the topics discussed. It also reveals that the key factors in the democratisation of stakeholder engagement are a mutual understanding and long-term opportunities. Common sociopolitical aspects are also important, but they do not necessarily guarantee the creation of dialogism paths. The research contributes to the critical dialogic literature in revealing whether and how stakeholder engagement has been implemented in a specific setting. It also shows the limitations of voluntarist stakeholder engagement initiatives. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon both argue that oppression fundamentally constrains the subject’s relationship to and embodied experience of time, yet their accounts of temporality are rarely brought together. This paper will explore what we might learn about the operation of different types of reductive temporality if we read Beauvoir and Fanon alongside each other, focusing primarily on the early works that arguably lay out the central concerns of their respective temporal frameworks. At first glance, it seems that these (...) two models of temporality have radically different emphases. While Beauvoir suggests that reductive temporalities work to sever the future from the past and present, Fanon locates this destructive operation in the heightening of their entanglement. However, I will contend that there are deep affinities between these accounts: For both Beauvoir and Fanon, freedom is bound up with futurity, with its lack therefore cashed out in terms of stagnation, repetition, and the entrapment within a hollow moment that prevents authentic projection. Both resist teleological perspectives; problematize the endeavor to describe the structures of lived temporality in neutral terms; and show that temporality is crucial to the pursuit of a political phenomenology. These resonances, however, should only serve to recast rather than dissolve the tension between their approaches; ultimately, we need to acknowledge the distinctiveness of their differing concerns and aims. (shrink)