The Time of Our Lives ─ A Critical History of Temporality

The project of all philosophy may be to gain reconciliation with time, even if notevery philosopher has dealt with time expressly. A confrontation with the passing of time and withhuman finitude runs through the history of philosophy as an ultimate concern. In this genealogy ofthe concept of temporality, David Hoy examines the emergence in a post-Kantian continentalphilosophy of a focus on the lived experience of the "time of our lives" rather than onthe time of the universe. The purpose is to see how phenomenological and poststructuralistphilosophers have tried to locate the source of temporality, how they have analyzed time's passing,and how they have depicted our relation to time once it has been--in a Proustian sense--regained.Hoy engages with competing theoretical tactics for reconciling us to our fleeting temporality,drawing on work by Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Sartre,Bourdieu, Foucault, Bergson, Deleuze, ?i?ek, and Derrida. Hoy considers four existentialstrategies for coping with the apparent flow of temporality, including Proust's passive and WalterBenjamin's active reconciliation through memory, ?i?ek's critique of poststructuralistpolitics, Foucault's confrontation with the temporality of power, and Deleuze's account of Aion andChronos. He concludes by exploring whether a dual temporalization could be what constitutes thesingular "time of our lives."

David Couzens Hoy is Distinguished Professor of Philosphy Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of C ritical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (MIT Press, 2004).