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Kierkegaard frequently defined his project by virtue of opposition to the work of Martensen and Grundtvig, This chapter identifies the key ‘philosophical tools’ that underlie the Kierkegaardian critique. Drawing chiefly from Philosophical Fragments, Concept of Anxiety and Practice in Christianity, the chapter analyses ‘the moment’ (Øieblikket) and ‘the leap’ that leads to ‘contemporaneity’ (Samtidigheden). Together these notions represent what Kierkegaard meant by authentic existence, and what he understands as true Christianity distinct from the habitual religion of Christendom. As a ‘moment’ or a ‘moment of vision’ Øieblikket refers to both a temporal/historical relation and also to an orientation and way of being. Likewise, Samtidigheden has clear temporal connotations, but is also the means by which humans relate to God in Christ. For Kierkegaard, Øieblikket and Samtidigheden together allow the individual to exist authentically, regardless of the historical or cultural context.

This chapter delves deeper into the understanding of time; since we already have an implicit but nonetheless definite understanding of time, an understanding that can only arise in the situation of being-in-the-world, and since any such time-understanding first makes the question of the essence of time possible, the question is whether and how one can reach “an ‘explanation’ of time that would transcend world-knowledge,” in an overcoming of the mundane level on which problems are posed and resolved. While the overall problem of a phenomenology and philosophy of time can be stated in general terms, dealing with the problem cannot remain on the level of general conceptual statement; it must be done in concrete investigation and in the critical, interpretive reconsideration of both the method and conceptualities at work in that investigation.

This extended chapter, consisting of three interrelated parts, forms the philosophical heart of the book. The first section completes the exposition of the historical state of musical temporality initiated in the first chapter, outlining how music, by the early nineteenth century, came to be heard as the most temporal of the arts. This is followed by a philosophical explication of just why music was considered uniquely capable of uncovering the aporias of temporality, setting up the philosophical basis for the remaining four chapters. A key contention is the idea that music may have been as useful for philosophers as a means to illustrate conceptions of time as much as philosophy may be useful for understanding music. This thesis is developed in the final section, which argues that music may provide, if not a conclusive philosophical solution, at least the most powerful aesthetic reconciliation of intractable problems in the philosophy of time.

This chapter engages in a patient reconstruction of the philosophy of time by turning to a text by the medieval kabbalist Abraham Abulafia that explicitly treats the influence of the divine overflow. In Abulafia's mystical system, based primarily on associating an ontological equality between Hebrew words and phrases that have the identical numerical value, the kabbalist in meditational practice receives an intellectual influx from the Tetragrammaton, which allows the mystic to intuit that opposites are indeed one. Yet despite the rhetoric of union that is omnipresent in Abulafia's work, the chapter shows that this is not a quasi-Hegelian totalizing move in which all opposites are dissolved in the unity of the divine. Instead, the unity of opposites must include the unity of the static and the dynamic; for Abulafia, the divine is always temporalized. History is the divine life: there is no static nature to the divine being, but only historical becoming. The influx that the mystic receives thereby maintains the contingency of history and produces influence in Wyschogrod's sense. In this way, the category of influence allows scholars to uncover the intimacy of the postmodern and the classical.

This chapter turns back to philosophy in order to establish a set of connections between temporality and self-consciousness. It also illustrates the inseparability of a problematic of self-consciousness from the philosophy of time. Heidegger's notion of authenticity adds an interesting dimension to the hermeneutic circle of reading and being. The study of narrative has much to learn from the philosophy of time, but this is one of the places where the direction of teaching is the other way around. There are three types of distance that cooperate throughout the narrative. The first is distance from God, the second is distance from truth and the third is temporal distance. Augustine's relocation of the past, the present and the future is of course based on the argument that neither the past and future, nor the present, can exist, in the sense of being present to consciousness.

Chapter 8 examines Persephone’s rebirth and return to the underworld with the goal of understanding what its emancipatory promise and historicity—or relationship to the past, present, and future—tells us about the politics of modernist neoclassicism. Gide introduces the cardboard figure of Triptolemus as a symbol of renewal he associates with the Soviet Union, and with Orpheus’s “backward glance” and the anxious politics of his pédérastie. Rubinstein, Copeau, and Stravinsky, in contrast, think of Persephone’s rebirth in terms of the resurrection of Christ. Stravinsky interprets resurrection from Suvchinsky’s Eurasianist perspective as related to the notion of cyclical history, and to the political idea of Russia resurrecting as a theocracy after the Bolshevik revolution. In his music he realizes the temporal idea of the simultaneity of past, present, and future by composing music that functions as a “vitalist” sculpture, and that can be compared to Aby Warburg’s notion of the Pathosformel. The chapter ends with reflections on how Perséphone failed on the night of its premiere, and the heterogeneity of interpretations it elicited.

This chapter addresses the question of inner and outer time, and turns attention on the Augustinian foundations of modern philosophies of time, and an analysis of the narrative aspects of Augustine's Confessions. A consideration of the relationship between time, consciousness and self-consciousness is also presented. The representation of memory does nothing to question the forward movement of time. Ursula Heise considers a huge range of factors that affect the ‘experience of time’, and encompasses a range of ideas about time and history, but the philosophy of time is simply missing. Jacques Derrida's impossible object – the internal pocket that is larger than the whole – offers a model for the relationship between subjective time and objective time in general, and a framework for the relationship between the fictional theme of time and the temporal logic of storytelling.

This chapter examines the work of entrepreneurs and industrialists from the mid-1770s through the 1790s who competed for supremacy in developing chemical techniques by which to replicate chemically unstable academic paintings. Highlighting the involvements of many chemical replicators with radical politics, the chapter places lithography (the best known of the period’s chemical-imaging innovations), encaustic, and enamel painting in relation to the chemical scandal of the “Venetian Secret” as made public in 1797. Therein, Benjamin West and other leading Academicians had pursued a fraudulent compilation of painting techniques purportedly used by Titian and other Venetian masters. The chapter expands to consider a host of lesser known chemical technics including “pollaplasiasmos,” James Watt’s copying machine and the interventions into the philosophy of time advanced by Thomas Wedgwood, purported “first inventor” of photography. The chapter argues against the familiar identification of Thomas Wedgwood’s chemical research with photography.

This chapter explores the expression of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's untimely within a Deleuzian philosophy of history. Gilles Deleuze's use of the untimely appeared to be not only a departure but a productive misappropriation of Nietzsche, and as such a creation that might itself suggest a new time to come. It then investigates how Nietzsche diagnosed European degradation in the advent of ‘modern historical cultivation’ and ‘history as an objective science’. Nietzsche reports three types of history that form relations either in the service or disservice of life: monumental history, antiquarian history and critical history. Deleuze's interaction with Nietzsche's analysis of history and the untimely is explained. A philosophy of history should emerge in Deleuze that is not only more than a critique of facile historicism, but also a crucial part of his general philosophy of time.

This book concerns the philosophy of time. One might well wonder how a philosophical approach to time different from a scientific, psychological, sociological, literary, or other approach to the subject. Answering this question requires that we briefly examine what philosophy is.

The Introduction begins the theoretical discussion of time travel and narrative theory with interpretations of three representative texts from the late 1960s: Robert Silverberg's Up the Line, Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man, and Larry Niven's “All the Myriad Ways.” In each case, time travel narrative exhibits essential problems of narrative theory, historiography, and the philosophy of time, all in the guise of literal plot events and mechanical devices. The Introduction concludes with a discussion of the contemporary context of time travel studies in literary criticism, media and film studies, philosophy, and physics. Finally, the structure of the book as a whole is briefly described, laying out what Wittenberg identifies as three historical phases of time travel fiction: the “evolutionary utopian travel” or “macrologue” phase (approximately 1880s to 1905), the “paradox” phase (approximately early 1920s to 1940s), and the “multiverse/filmic” phase (approximately mid-twentieth century to the present). Overall, Wittenberg argues that time travel fictions are simultaneously a minor or idiosyncratic subgenre of popular literature, and a paradigmatic instance of narrative structure and literary form—in short, a “narratological laboratory” for studying and testing fundamental principles of storytelling.

This chapter provides an analytical framework for the concept of prolepsis designed to take the term forward from Genette's influential account in such a way that it is capable of accounting for effects formerly considered as metafictional. Prolepsis, for Genette, is a moment in a narrative in which the chronological order of story events is disturbed and the narrator narrates future events out of turn. The complications in the definition of prolepsis are reported. Performative prolepsis produces the future in the act of envisaging it, so that the possible transforms itself into the actual. The relationship of Prolepsis 1 and Prolepsis 3 is the axis between time and self-consciousness, since storytelling is not just self-distance but temporal self-distance; and, on this subject, narratology has much to learn from the philosophy of time.

This chapter surveys research into artificial phosphorus conducted in the 1670s by leading figures in the early Royal Society of London. Mastered by itinerant chymists from German-speaking lands, artificial phosphorus could be synthesized from human waste, then rubbed onto visual art to make it glow in the dark. But, it also spoke to broader interests: studies of light and combustion, production of organic vitality, and other problems of central interest to Restoration experimentalists. Tracking phosphorus research through those networks, the chapter centers on a spectacular lecture read twice before the Royal Society in summer 1682 by Robert Hooke. The final installment of his lectures on light, Hooke’s text used competing preparations of artificial phosphorus to model the ontology of time and to explain key features of human temporality. Examining how Hooke’s controversial claims about time would be reconfigured by contemporaries such as Nehemiah Grew, the chapter concludes by examining the ways in which the phosphorus research theorized by Hooke would later be claimed in larger chemical genealogies of photographic image-making.

The Conclusion summarizes the main ideas of the book, focusing on Donne's engagement with the Augustinian theology of charity. In Donne’s, as in Augustine's writing, charity is a Christian virtue, but it is also a potent polemical weapon and a complex habit of thought, which encompasses doctrinal, epistemological, and moral dimensions. The Conclusion also outlines the chronological and thematic development of Donne's Augustinian reading in the sermons preached between 1615 and 1631, stressing the importance of the period 1624/5, when Donne's recovery from a near-fatal illness encouraged him to rethink his relationship with Augustine's texts. The Conclusion re-situates Donne's Augustinianism in the wider context of Renaissance scholarship and re-emphasizes the role of Augustine's thought in Donne's philosophy of time. Her study highlights, for the first time, the depth of Donne's reflections on human and providential history: Augustine's texts help him negotiate the linearity of fallen time and enable glimpses of God's eternal love in the resurrection.

The hard questions regarding identity, explicitly or implicitly, involve questions of time, therefore inheriting the complexities involved in the discussion of the concept of time. This book begins the discussion of the philosophy of time by posing the question of whether time exists or not. In ancient times, the reality of time was presupposed even if the concept did not have a clear-cut definition. Ironically, it was during the time when physicists seemed to gain a better scientific understanding of time that philosophers began questioning the reality of time. The discussion of identity begins with Locke’s notion that the identity of a person consists in nothing but memories and conscious experience, which are independent of the body.

Chapter 4 identifies the epistemological limits of Hegel’s idealism, showing that the concept of the whole is incompatible with Hegel’s methodological alternation between reason and experience. Since this method relies upon the movement of becoming, it is incompatible with the “annulment of time” at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. I argue that Quentin Meillassoux’s development of a “speculative materialist” philosophy responds directly to this methodological contradiction in Hegel’s work and, in particular, to its consequences for the theory of time. Mediating between my reading of Hegel and my reading of Meillassoux is Heidegger’s theory of the ontological difference. I argue that Meillassoux’s effort to sustain the philosophical consequences of the ontological difference is the key to understanding and appreciating the stakes of his theory of absolute contingency.