Of Times: Arrested, Resigned, Imagined

Temporality in Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida

LEIDEN UNIVERSITY

Event Date: 27th-28th June 2019

We can take time – time as now, as movement, as presence and event, past and future, as history and historicity, as teleology and dissemination, as becoming and decay – as the central axis from which the relation between Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida can be interrogated. What is the present, the ‘now’, and how can it be understood in relation to the past and future? What is the significance of the privileging of the present in the history of thought? What does the dissolution of the present in the historicity of history mean for our present, for our times? How should philosophy relate itself to the past – to its past – which constitutes its heritage but which also bears down on it as an inescapable weight? And how can this interrogation open up to a new imagination of time, and thereby to the future of philosophical thought itself? The thematic approaches sketched below are meant to be indicative rather than exhaustive. We welcome original contributions on the three key thinkers through which this project attempts to think temporality, with an emphasis on their interrelation, both in terms of their reappraising continuities and their polemic ruptures.

Time Arrested

In thinking about time, Hegel writes, the ‘now’ has a monstrous privilege. Beings appear as maintaining themselves in presence, enduring in an extended ‘now’ which carves itself out of the flow of time. The arrest – halt, delay, deferral – of the movement of time allows beings to persist, for a while, in the midst of becoming.If metaphysics has always allied itself with the image of the circle – perfect, eternal, continuous, uninterrupted, without halt – arrest can be considered to interrupt metaphysics, to open up a space for difference, a break in the necessity of an immanent development, the ‘unhalting progression’ of history. Yet the arrest is also a metaphysical gesture, holding on to what is there, what is present, securing it in eternity, maintaining the now, maintaining order. Subject and object, Derrida writes, are but ‘arrested effects’ of a movement that has many names – gift, différance, Ereignis. But philosophy, too, in all of its moments and all of its names – Hegel, Heidegger, even Derrida, and all the others – arrests thought, seeks to fix and secure it in an ordered system of concepts: Heidegger arresting Aristotle, Hegel arresting everyone, Derrida arresting Hegel… In this play of arrest and release, interruption and letting go, what should be the role of philosophy today? 

Time Resigned

And what if time, each time, were a sign? A cipher, a Shibboleth, a semantic node, always a unique signification, even, perhaps, a history. Taking the sign as the point of articulation around which temporality and historicity unfold their trajectories, the tenuous relation of the two in Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida opens up to new possibilities of exploration. Certainly the sign of the times redoubles each time. To write about time and history means to sign – con-sign, counter-sign, re-sign – the signs of a history of philosophy already at work. Accordingly, time re-signed is a time re-signified, rather than a time forgone, relinquished, abandoned. Heidegger re-signs Hegelian time, Derrida re-signs the Heideggerian re-signation. This transformation of meaning would 2 remain inaccessible unless each new re-signation first under-signed the previous. Dialektik, Destruktion and déconstruction are here aligned. Should the sign (sêma) that constitutes the body (sôma) of time, as the latter fleshes itself into history, be consigned to a mere tomb (sêma)? The difference between resignation and re-signation is the difference between the acceptance of a history without future and a history in which meaning remains a possibility, between the eclipse and the promise of truth. At our historical juncture, this difference appears momentous. 

Time Imagined

‘It is too late for the future’ – this is the outcome of all philosophy according to Hegel. Is it possible to say, perhaps, that for Hegel the future is always already known? Can we expect the future to hold any radical surprises? Heidegger, critical of what he names Hegel’s onto-theology, abandons this immanent temporalisation of the system in favour of a thinking of radical finitude, thereby concluding that we are neither inside nor outside metaphysics. Yet Heidegger himself notes that ‘time itself is both the passing itself and what passes; it has always passed away.’ In relation to Heidegger, too, this raises the question: does philosophy have anything to say about the future? And, if it does, how can we imagine or conceptualise the future of thought with, and after Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida? Can deconstruction, questioning time from a source that is other than the truth of what is, transform the essence and task of thinking as the deployment of truth to a question of justice? Perhaps, in doing so, it can open up the present by privileging the a-venir of a future which cannot even be imagined. The conference has been made possible through the generous support of Leiden University Institute for Philosophy and the Leiden University Fund.

The Organisers:

Rozemund Uljée

Bart Zantvoort

Georgios Tsagdis

DAY 1 • Time Between Being and Thought

DAY 2 • On Time: Response and Responsibility