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Taking Time Temporal Representations and Cultural Politics Richard Terdiman On the one hand, the exhilarating temporality of revolution. On the other, the baleful “burden of the past.” These images identify—at their polar limits—two contrasting projections of time. Of course they are very different. But both are grounded in the materiality of social life. Here I contrast them with a conflicting conception of time that emerges in the projection of Postmodernism. My objective is to suggest what is at stake, theoretically and politically, in contemporary representations of time. The past’s dead hand, and our experience of the inertia with which it weighs us down, clashes with one of the most optimistic fantasies that modernity brings us. Since the Enlightenment we’ve followed a paradigm of temporality that conceives of time as the medium in which human purposiveness and social action are made possible and become effective. At its extreme this figure of productivity and renewal is the time of revolutions. It is the temporality of Robespierre ’s resonant appeal to the making of history in his speech on the Revolutionary constitution of 1793: “The time has come to call upon each to realize his own destiny. The progress of human Reason has laid the basis for this great Revolution, and the particular duty of hastening it has fallen to you.”1 The conflict I’m tracing here takes this form: against hopeful projections of a winged productivity of time stands an antagonistic paradigm , the involuntary reproduction of history, an arrest of the present in surrender to past contents. In this we recognize the nightmare “tradition of all the dead generations” that in The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx evoked to reflect on the constraints on change imposed by the frustrating colonization of “now” by “then.” The arrested temporality defined by this blind persistence of the constituted reappears in Nietzsche’s preoccupation with such disabling historical survivals in “The Use and Abuse of History,” and in Freud’s theory of neurosis. Miller 3 :Whats minta 1 9/3/08 4:49 PM Page 131 It has been one of modernity’s tenacious preoccupations. As its emblem, we might think of Baudelaire’s image in “Spleen” [II]: “I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years”2. Such investment of “now” by the proliferating traces of “then” overwhelms our present and tangles our sense of time. The resonances or reflexes of such representations are pretty clear. Since Flaubert’s Sentimental Education at least, we’ve had to deal with the de-realization of our most intense personal and political dreams and desires. These are the narratives of modernity. Such plots plot time in a characteristically baleful mode. They project a temporality indifferent or positively hostile to human projects—a paradigm of time that elevates to the level of a master representation lurking behind everything Flaubert’s perception that irony is the supreme rhetoric of existence. This projection of a temporality that repels politics then becomes the subterranean story of modernity itself. It only deepens in the familiar claims of Postmodernity to dispense with meta-narratives altogether. Thus the perfusions and distensions of memory converge with representation of modernity’s time. In particular, the occupation of the present by the past through our hypertrophic and seemingly unsuppressible recollection complicates and illuminates the model of time on the basis of which we seek to make sense of modernity’s paradoxes. This blind persistence of the past is the Enlightenment’s bad dream, ceaselessly reproducing the burdensome contents that indenture us “now.” The whole dynamic within Modernism that privileges forms that break with tradition and seek to “make it new” collides with the past’s own colonization of present experience. This collision threatens to collapse the whole ideology of modernity itself. Derrida wrote a book about specters. They model this problem. A specter is spectral because it shows up at the wrong time. But this improper temporality of the specter is only a dramatized case of all human temporality, which is always underlain and rewritten by other times. Every moment arises not as a liberation from the past’s persistence , but as its confirmation, as the form the past takes now. Every time thus exhibits the fundamental characteristic of all human time: never single; constitutively multiple and, like the specter, always “inappropriate.” Time always has the serried and disorderly character that memory does too; time always contains more than itself. Much more than the present is present in the present. This variegated...

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