A battle over the politics (and philosophy) of time is a major part of what is at stake in the differences between three competing currents of contemporary philosophy: analytic philosophy, post-structuralist philosophy, and phenomenological philosophy. Avowed or tacit philosophies of time define representatives of each of these groups and also guard against their potential interlocutors. However, by bringing the temporal differences between these philosophical trajectories to the fore, and showing both their methodological presuppositions and their ethico-political implications, this book begins a long overdue dialogue on their respective strengths and weaknesses. It argues that there are systemic temporal problems (chronopathologies) that afflict each, but especially the post-structuralist tradition (focusing on Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida and their prophetic future politics) and the analytic tradition (focusing on John Rawls and philosophical methodology in general, particularly the tendency to oscillate between forms of atemporality and intuition-oriented “presentism”). What is required is a “middle-way” that does not treat the living-present and the pragmatic temporality associated with bodily coping as an epiphenomenon to be explained away as either a transcendental illusion (and as a reactive force that is ethically problematic), or as a subjective/psychological experience that is not ultimately real.
Introduction: Chronopathologies: The Politics of Time
Part I. Analytic Philosophy, Atemporality, and Presentism: Some Encounters Across the Chunnel
Chapter 1: Analytic and Continental Philosophy: A Contretemps?
Chapter 2: Common Sense and Philosophical Methodology: Some Metaphilosophical Reflections on Analytic Philosophy via Deleuze
Chapter 3: Negotiating the Non-negotiable: Rawls, Derrida, and the Intertwining of Political Calculation and Ultra-politics
Part II. Poststructuralism, Time Out of Joint, and Future Politics
Chapter 4: The Politics of Futurity in Derrida and Deleuze
Chapter 5: Wounds and Scars: Deleuze on the Time and the Ethic of the Event
Chapter 6: Deleuze's Perverse-structure: Beyond the Other-structure and the Struggle for Recognition
Chapter 7: Derrida, Friendship, and the Transcendental Priority of the "Untimely"
Part III. Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Pragmatic Temporality: An Anachronistic Dialogue
Chapter 8: Time Out of Joint: Between Phenomenology and Post-structuralism
Chapter 9: Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze on l'Habitude, Coping, and Trauma in Morality and Skill Acquisition
Chapter 10: Touched by Time: Some Critical Reflections on Derrida's Reading of Merleau-Ponty in Le Toucher.
Chapter 11: Heidegger and Derrida on Being-towards-death and Philosophy's Untimely Future
Conclusion: Beyond Chronopathologies
Jack Reynolds is senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at LaTrobe University.Read more
