Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context

376 Pages·1.446 MB·English

by  Miller T. (Ed.)

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Given World and Time
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Given World and Time
TEMPORALITIES IN CONTEXT
Edited by
Tyrus Miller
Central European University Press
Budapest New York
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© 2008by Tyrus Miller
Published in 2008by
Central European University Press
An imprint of the
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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of the Publisher.
ISBN 978-963-9776-27-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Given world and time : temporalities in context / edited by Tyrus Miller.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-9639776272 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Time. I. Miller, Tyrus, 1963-
BD638.G25 2008
115--dc22
2008030064
Printed in Hungary
by
Akadémia Nyomda, Martonvásár
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Contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Introduction, Tyrus Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Temporality in the Long Run
1. Stefan M. Maul, Walking Backwards into the Future:
The Conception of Time in the Ancient Near East . . . . . . . . . 15
2. Karen Bassi, Epic Remains: Seeing and Time
in the Odyssey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3. Jonathan Beecher, Fourier and the Saint-Simonians
on the Shape of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
4. Wai Chee Dimock, World History According to Katrina . . . . 59
Historical Figures: Mediations, Citations, Narrations
5. Ruth HaCohen, Intricate Temporalities: The Transfiguration
of Proper and “Improper” Sounds from Christian to Jewish
Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
6. Britta Duelke, Quoting from the Past, or Dealing
with Temporality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
7. Richard Terdiman, Taking Time: Temporal Representations
and Cultural Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
8. Catherine M. Soussloff, Image-Times, Image-Histories,
Image-Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
9. Bill Nichols, Documentary Re-enactments: A Paradoxical
Temporality That Is Not One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Shapes of Modernity
10. László Kontler, Time and Progress—Time as Progress:
An Enlightened Sermon by William Robertson . . . . . . . . . . 195
11. Andrew Wegley, Religious Revivals: The Binds of Religion
and Modernity in Friedrich Nietzsche’s TheAnti-Christand
Richard Wright’s The Outsider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
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vi Contents
12. Lisa Rofel, Hetero-Temporalities of Post-Socialism . . . . . . . 243
13. David Couzens Hoy, The Politics of Temporality:
Heidegger, Bourdieu, Benjamin, Derrida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
“To the Planetarium”: From Cosmos to History and Back
14. Tyrus Miller, Eternity No More: Walter Benjamin
on the Eternal Return . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
15. Karl Clausberg, A Microscope for Time:
What Benjamin and Klages, Einstein and the Movies Owe
to Distant Stars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
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Acknowledgments
The various encounters, projects, and exchanges that ultimately gener-
ated this volume have extended over a number of years and have been
the result of intensive individual, group, and institutional cooperation.
This process has included the following main events: Given World and
Time: Temporalities in Context, a conference co-sponsored by the Uni-
versity of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and Central European Uni-
versity’s (CEU) Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies, held in Buda -
pest at CEU on November 28–29, 2003; Cosmologies of History: The
Symbolic Organization of Time, a summer course for advanced gradu-
ates and postdocs, part of CEU’s Summer University, held in Buda -
pest, July 3–17, 2004; Materiality/History: The Materialization of
Historical Time, a conference co-sponsored by UCSC and CEU, held
at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin on November 26–27, 2004; Sav-
ing Time: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Memory and Memorializa-
tion, a conference sponsored by the University of California Presiden-
tial Chair’s Group on the Philosophy of Time, with Cowell College,
held at UCSC on November 18–19, 2005.
I would like to acknowledge the exceptionally generous support,
over several years, of David Hoy, whose University of California
Presidential Chair provided funding for the original core of faculty in
the research group of the Philosophy and History of Time at the Uni-
versity of California at Santa Cruz, as well as substantive funding for
the conferences in Budapest, Berlin, and Santa Cruz and for the publi-
cation of this volume. Wlad Godzich, Dean of Humanities during the
period of these activities, helped to provide funding for graduate par-
ticipants in the CEU Summer University course, on topics related to
this volume. In addition I would like to thank Jocelyn Hoy and Dean-
na Shemek for their active participation in and support of the activities
of the research group.
I would also like to acknowledge the generous support, institution-
al and financial, ofCEU’s Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies and
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viii Acknowledgments
its director, Sorin Antohi, as well as CEU’s Summer University. My sin-
cere thanks go to the leadership and staff of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin, who contributed to the success of our second conference.
I wish to give heartfelt thanks to Darren Waterston, whose beauti-
ful painting adorns our cover.
Editorial assistance was provided by Harold Strecker and Linda
Kunos, and by the CEU Press copy editors. Their patience and efforts
are greatly appreciated.
The Editor
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Introduction
Tyrus Miller
In his 1991 novel Time’s Arrow, the British writer Martin Amis, play-
ing a postmodern “narrative game with time” (as Paul Ricoeur would
say) explored the implications of a very simple narrative twist for
our historical and moral perception.How would some key twentieth-
century historical event, an event as ineluctable as the Nazi seizure
of power and the unfolding of Nazi genocide, appear from a radical-
ly different temporal perspective? And what might this perspective
shift tell us about the way our historical and moral judgments carry
along with them, enfolded into their conclusions, assumptions about
the relation of time and its nature to the meaning of history?To what
extent are we obligated, ontologically and morally, to yield to the
necessities of time and to what extent is it legitimate to give time
over to a play of fictions and interpretations? It is on this dangerous,
but consequential borderline between freedom and necessity, between
guilt and evasion, between responsibility and play that Amis’s novel
plays out its thought-experiment.
The novel raises a seemingly absurd question, but one fraught
with psychological and cultural symbolism, conjuring the various eva-
sions and denials, collective and individual, that this critical moment
in contemporary history has provoked. It asks: how would the life
of the concentration camp doctor Odilo Unverdorben, who has fled
atonement and punishment, changing his identity and emigrating
under this cover to the United States, look if it were narrated back-
wards, with the arrow of time reversed? Regressing backwards in
time, the “normal” surgical labors of the post-war American physi-
cian appears to Amis’s “third-person” narrator like horrifying violence
and torture: wounds are opened in patients, sutures are removed and
blood flows out of bandages and sponges, recovery becomes disease.
Whereas in contrast, those “exceptional” perversions of medicine in
the concentrations camps now appear as miraculous acts of mercy
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2 Tyrus Miller
towards the favored recipients of the Nazi “charity,” the Jews: the
dead are reanimated, the beaten and starved are returned to health,
prisoners are released with the happy prospect of repatriation and
restoration of property.Amis ends his book with the pathos of Odilo’s
approaching infancy, with birth paradoxically marking the moment
of his death and disappearance from time’s regressing line.
At the same time, however, Amis’s narrator anxiously hints that
this fiction is unsustainable, that the very premise of his character’s
life, this whole effort to reverse time and cancel history, contains at
its innermost core the traumatic force of collective denial that once
allowed the obscene, violent, scatological, necrophilic crimes of the
concentrations camps to take place under the cover of night and fog
and perhaps will allow them to recur in new forms. With this name-
less force of denial, the narrator is himself complicitous: the third
person narrator and the unspoken first person of his character appear
to have the same aim, to regress, to erase, to undo.When the arrow of
time threatens to turn around the right way, the narrator “corrects” it,
insisting on his favorite character’s childlike innocence, his “Unver -
dorben-heit” (unspoiledness) by history, to the very end. Everything
that took place—earlier in the book—was, we are given to under-
stand, all just a perverse insistence of time running forward, leaving
the storyteller stranded in untimeliness and forcing him to tell his
story imperfectly, at least this time around:
Only a moment.There are no larger units of his time.He has to
act while childhood is still here, while everything is his play-
mate—including his ca-ca. He has to act while childhood is
still here before somebody comes and takes it away.And they
will come. I hope the doctor will be wearing something nice,
something appropriate, and not the white coat and the black
boots, which surely. … Myself. Mistake. Mistake. … When
Odilo closes his eyes I see an arrow fly—but wrongly. Point-
first.Oh no, but then. … We’re away once more, over the field.
Odilo Unverdorben and his eager heart. And I within, who
came at the wrong time—either too soon, or after it was all too
late.1
Amis, clearly, is playing a Samuel Beckett-like narrative game with
time to suggest the limits of our capacities to reshape time—or at
least, the moral desirability that these limits be observed. Yet this
question of limits is not merely a question of individual responsibili-