History and Theory 50 (May 2011), 254-269

Wesleyan University 2011 ISSN: 0018-2656

REVIEW ESSAYS

The Time of the Self and the Time of the Other

The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality. By David Couzens
Hoy. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2009. Pp. xxi, 288.
ABSTRACT

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical
questions by engaging David Hoys recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a history of time-consciousness in twentieth-century
European philosophy. Hoys book traces the turn-of-the-century debate between Husserl
and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake
in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific-objective time of the universe
and the phenomenology of human temporality, the time of our lives. Hoys approach is
to organize his book around the three tenses of timepast/present/futureand to view
objective-scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived
experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoys work, I attempt
to explore how time (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of
consciousness (Hoys thematic), but in terms of the selfs relationship with an Other.
That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time-consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to
situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoys
project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting
on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the selfs own timeconsciousness, I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.
Keywords: temporality, justice, messianic, angel of history, Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas
i. Introduction

What is time? St. Augustine poses this question in Book XI of his Confessions, a
question whose timbre reverberates throughout the history of philosophy in deep
and abiding ways. Yet Augustine was certainly not the first to raise such a question. In the earliest surviving fragment that comes down to us in Western philosophy, Anaximander writes of time as the ontological ordering of beings that
adjudicates change and becoming. Considered as the first to discover the gnomon,
the sundial that indicates the passage of time according to the suns movement,
Anaximander measured time spatially, a convention that would be followed by
Aristotle. This Greek affinity for spatial metaphor would come to determine the
. On the topic of the gnomon, cf. Indra McEwen, Socratess Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural
Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 17-38.

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way philosophers measured time and the way time itself would come to function
as a measure for all beings. In the Physics (219b) Aristotle provides the classical definition: for time (chronos) is the number (arithmos) of motion (kinesis)
with respect to before and after. By determining time as essentially a measurable
movement within space, Aristotle succeeded in providing a model for understanding the regulative time of natural processes that constitutes the order of the cosmos. In this way time was grasped as uniform, applying indifferently across the
various modalities of change, a measured constancy that gives direction and shape
to natures movements. But the ancient Greeks were also aware of a different understanding of time that could not be applied neutrally across all kinds of change.
The ancient poet Pindar, drawing on Greek mythology, would differentiate the
time of chronos (the time of the gods that rules over all mortal happenings, Olympian II: 17 Chronos, the Father of all things (Chronos ho panton pater) from
the human dimension of time, kairos. Kairotic time would prove recalcitrant to
the instruments of the sundial and the calendar for it would resist both calculation
and computation. The kairos would present itself as the right time, the opportune moment, the critical juncture, or the fateful hour. This kind of lived
time could not be measured by duration, for it opened to the human being as a
compressed moment of the full span of a human life. This poetic time whereby
the human being, to borrow Blakes language, is allowed to hold infinity in the
palm of [its] hand and eternity in an hour, comes to us as a gift surpassing our
understanding. When Augustine writes, What, then, is time? I know well enough
what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to
explain, I am baffled, he attempts again to take up the irreconcilable problem of
chronos and kairos.  How to think simultaneously about the time of the calendar
and the time of love? How to weigh the import of a passing moment in the great
sea of incalculable duration? How to balance the opening of an instant with the
majestic span of times epochality? How to measure the flash of the timely against
the weight of times breadth and amplitude?
It is these formidable questions about the nature of time that lead David Hoy
to offer a reflective study on the problem of time in twentieth-century European
philosophy. Hoys book proposes a history of time-consciousness rooted in a
basic dilemma: how to think about time? As the scientific-objective time of the
universe that functions as the indifferent measure of clock time, chronology, the
objective time of physics? As the time of our lives that manifests itself in human
existence as the time of memory, of experience, and of expectation, the time that
passes yet forms a unity with all that recedes from view and with all that both
slowly and suddenly appears? Deeply aware of the Augustinian quandary about
knowing what time is, yet being unable to articulate it, Hoy embraces the paradox
of experiential time and proffers an account of time that is a model of philosophical rigor and clarity. The Time of Our Lives sets out in Hoys words to see how
phenomenological philosophers have tried to locate the source of time, how they
analyze times passing, and finally, . . . how they depict our relation to time once
. Michael Theunissen, Pindar: Menschenlos und Wende der Zeit (Munich: Beck, 2000), 804-840.
. St. Augustine, Confessions (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 264.

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it has been regained (xi). Confronted by the inevitability of the passage of time,
these philosophers hope to recover or regain, not the time we have lost, but the
time that remains: the time of our lives. What makes Hoys work so appealing
is not merely its philosophical perspicacity or its writerly grace (though these are
certainly palpable); rather, it is its underlying conviction that philosophy cannot
properly be engaged without its history. And it is this enduring commitment to
doing the history of philosophy both critically (Frankfurt School/Benjamin) and
genealogically (Nietzsche/Foucault) that mark it as representing a vital contribution to the growing work in continental philosophy in North America. At home in
both the French and German philosophical canon, Hoy engages the work of KantNietzsche-Husserl-Heidegger-Gadamer-Adorno and Benjamin as well as Bergson-Proust-Merleau-Ponty-Derrida-Bourdieu-Deleuze and Foucault. In laconic
fashion, Hoy looks at the problem of time from three central traditionsphenomenology/genealogy/critical theoryand tries to trace the turn-of-the-century
debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across
the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism,
and feminist theory. For him what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish
between the scientific-objective time of the universe and the phenomenology
of human temporality, the time of our lives. On the basis of this distinction he
then raises a series of pressing questions that come to shape his approach and the
structure of his inquiry:
Is the time of our lives the same as the time of nature and history? In particular, if time
runs through our lives, in which direction does it run? Does time come toward us from
the future, as Martin Heidegger maintained, from behind us through the past, as Pierre
Bourdieu asserted, or from the present, cycling perhaps in an eternal recurrence, as Friedrich Nietzsche speculated? (xii)

Parsing out the tenses of temporalized time, Hoy attempts to underscore the different modalities of lived temporality and their effect on how we perceive ourselves as in time and whether we perceive the passing flow of time as sequential
or directional.
Ultimately, however, Hoy goes back to Kants question about whether time is
mind-dependent or mind-independentthat is, he asks: does time come from us
or from the universe? By structuring his problematic in this way, Hoy is able to
focus attention on the phenomenality of time experienced in terms of lived temporality rather than on the physicists question, what is time? Phenomenology begins
with a description of the lived experience of time as it manifests itself in human
existence, not with the time of the sundial, the clock, or the calendar. Yet, in so
doing, it likewise challenges the traditional philosophical distinction between the
objective time of physics and the subjective time of psychology. What matters
for phenomenology is to rethink the subjectiveobjective split back to the lived
temporality of experience rather than to view it as a matter of theoretical debate
between realism and idealism. Hoys starting point for such an inquiry is Kants
project of searching for the source of time. As Kant frames it, time is neither a
concept (Begriff) nor the content of an intuition (Anschauung); it is, rather, the
form of an intuition that serves as the a priori condition for sense experience. Yet

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time itself cannot be perceived. As a form of intuition, time comes from the mind;
as that which involves intuition, it depends upon data from the empirical world.
Kant thus has it both ways: wearing the hat of the empirical realist he sees time
as independent of mind, yet when he dons the hat of the transcendental idealist
he views it as mind-dependent. Ultimately, Kant never resolves this tension in his
work, though the upshot of his transcendental aesthetic is to grasp time as the a
priori condition for all perceptionincluding temporality. Hoy underlines this as
a revolutionary change in the philosophical understanding of time since it constitutes the first step beyond the metaphysics of time and toward a phenomenology
of temporality (7). His book takes up the challenge of this Kantian problematic and does an excellent job of situating it within post-Nietzschean continental
philosophy. Hoys approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of
timepast/present/futureand to view objective-scientific time as derived from
the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. On this reading, time is understood hermeneuticallyas the
way human beings understand/interpret their experienceand phenomenologicallyas the primal impression, the protention, and the retention of such experience. Husserls transcendental approach becomes crucial to such an enterprise.
For Husserl, time-consciousness is the most primordial and foundational of
all the structures of consciousness. Drawing upon Kant, yet differing profoundly
from Kants faculty psychology that focuses on the measuring and ordering of
experience, Husserl points to the problem of duration as expressing in a radical
way the temporality of consciousness. Consciousnesss great ability to transcend
itself toward the absential marks its uncanny character of transcending the present
toward both its past and its future. As it retains its past experiences and extends
itself toward future ones, consciousness never corresponds with the present in reductive fashion. Rather, Husserls radically phenomenological gesture is to show
that any assumption of a present consciousness is fraught with difficulty. If
earlier philosophers could speak of pastpresentfuture as separate boxes
connected by the motion of directional moments, Husserls notions of retention,
protention, and primal impression try to show how time is refracted by memory
and expectation to form what he calls a living present that constitutes the source
of temporality. In Hoys rendition, Husserlian time-consciousness opens up the
whole problem of the duration of time in diachronic terms, an interpretation that
contrasts with Bergsons synchronic understanding of human temporality. What
emerges from such a reading is how the Now of our temporal experience is never
the Now of Aristotelian succession, since this Now is always already gone by
(92). As he moves back and forth between different iterations of time-consciousness from Husserl and Bergson, James and Hegel, Deleuze and Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and iek, we come to a richer understanding of the philosophical
perplexities involved in articulating a coherent language of temporality. Hoy is
less interested here in privileging one philosopher over another in the course of
his inquiry than he is in thinking through the baffling complications involved in
our lived experience of temporality that sabotage any illusions about a universal
order of time.

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No matter whether we agree with Hoys own admittedly tendentious narrative

of lived temporality or not, both philosophers and historians will learn a good deal
from both its style of emplotment and its self-conscious attempt to pose questions
clearly and pointedly. What I find most helpful about Hoys The Time of Our Lives
is the way it shows how the fecundity of tradition lends itself to incessant redescription both through and as creative repetition. That is, like Nietzsche, Bergson, and
Deleuze, Hoy understands the suppleness of the past to the interpreters fashioning
grasp. Time is not only stretched out, to use Heideggers phrase, it is also pliant
and tractable, accommodating itself to a supplementation capable of supplanting
anything the tradition puts forward. In this sense the writing of time can be seen as
a reinscription of the incalculability of temporal experience. Under this optic, time
never settles into a present but remains ever open to the inexhaustible, unremitting enactment of temporal happening that opens to a future via a retrieval of the
past. Given such supplementary possibilities, we could understand the history of
temporality in ways different from Hoys. Taking up Hoys own reading of Husserl,
for example, we might pursue the ethical implications of Husserls time-consciousness, a topic that Hoy avoids. Following such a path, we might privilege other texts
such as Levinass Time and the Other (1947) with its emphasis on time not as the
achievement of an isolated and lone subject but as the very relationship of the subject with the Other. From such a perspective, we might, like Levinas, see Husserls
notion of time as too egological, preferring instead to think of past and future not as
fusing into the synchrony of the subject, but as dispersing into the diachrony of the
Other. On this reading, the otherness of the past would appear irrecuperable much
as the otherness of the future would burst forth as beyond what happens to me,
beyond what for an ego, is to-come. I raise these possibilities not as a criticism of
Hoy per se, but to show that in the spirit of Hoys own projectwhich he announces
in his Preface as the writing of a two-volume study of the history of consciousnesswe might proceed otherwise. In what follows I would like to take up some
of these possibilities by reflecting a bit differently on time in Heidegger (early/late),
Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Derrida, four of the thinkers whom Hoy engages. My
aim in doing so is to explore how time (lived, experiential, phenomenological)
can be read not in terms of consciousness (Hoys thematic), but in terms of the
selfs relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental
tradition about time-consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy,
phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms
of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoys project as too bound up with
an egological interpretation of consciousness. My hope is that by reflecting on time
differently, we might begin to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.

. Emanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 39 and
116.
. Ibid., 116.

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II. I am time: Heidegger and the Time of the Self

Hoys impressive achievement in The Time of Our Lives is to trace in clear and
convincing terms the transformation of the metaphysics of Newtonian scientific
time into the lived temporality of experiencethe time of our livesin postKantian continental thought. Based on what he sees as Heideggers deliberate
misreading of Kant, Hoy argues that Heidegger reverses the traditional Kantian view that time is mind-dependent and shows instead that mind is time-dependent. Breaking through the longstanding subject/object thinking of medieval
and Cartesian metaphysics, Heidegger points to temporality itself as the source
of our relation to time. On Heideggers reading, time is not rooted in an inner
time-consciousness, as Husserl would have it. Rather, consciousness itself is
understood as a reified structure imposed on phenomena. What matters is to burrow down below consciousness to the phenomena themselves and to show how,
through our experience, we gather (and are gathered by) that which manifests
itself. The very term phenomenology, derived from the Greek noun phainomenon (that which shows itself) and the Greek verb legein (to gather, collect),
communicates something of this indicatory meaning of beings self-manifesting
way of gathering human beings into the temporality and facticity of the human situation. By starting in the facticity of lifeits moods, concerns, awakenings, and
attunementsHeidegger demonstrates how the traditional Aristotelian concept
of time as a succession of now points shows itself as inauthentic and derivative.
What characterizes human time is its existential structure, the fact that its unity
is arrived at through the lived structures of care and concern. In our dispositional
attunement (Befindlichkeit)) to the world, we find ourselves in situations whose
ultimate meaning cannot be reduced to a single point on a line. On the contrary,
such situations open us up to a future that we project and a past that is not dead
and gone, but that lives on in the present as a way of encountering future possibilities. Hence Heidegger speaks of the three ecstases of timeagain from the Greek
noun ek-stasis, to stand out fromrather than of either a static time or a time
that merely flows. Within temporality time does not flow from the past into the
present toward a future, but rather the present arises out of a future that, following
its German etymology, comes toward us (Zu-kunft) by way of the past.
The implications of this Heideggerian interpretation of temporality are profound
since time is here never understood as a thing or a structure that is somehow
external to human beings. Rather, as time, Dasein temporalizes its being. What
. Heidegger communicates something of this way of understanding phenomena in terms of
gathering in Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50) in Early Greek Thinking (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1975), 76; Vortrge und Aufstze, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1975), 7:231
[hereafter: GA]; and also Heraklit, GA 55:266-270 where he reads Logos as gathering and collecting. For more cf. Liddell-Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (New York: World, 1897), 880.
. Martin Heidegger, The History of the Concept of Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1985), 319; GA 20: 442; Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 179
[hereafter: BT]; and Sein und Zeit (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1949), 192 [hereafter: SZ].

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unifies such being is not a flow or a pre-given category, but the lived temporality
of care that shows itself in our anxieties, hopes, moods, fears, and expectationsin
short, in our being concerned about our own being as a possibility. As we encounter the cares of life, our Dasein is always already ahead of itself in its being even
as it is anchored in its own fragile sense of a having-been that shapes its present. As
Heidegger puts it: Temporalizing does not mean a succession of the ecstasies.
The future is not later than the having-been and the having-been is not earlier than
the present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future that makes present, in the
process of having-been (Zeitlichkeit zeitigt sich als gewesende-gegenwrtigende
Zukunft). Heidegger would radically underscore the antecedent claims upon us
of a world saturated by historical contingencies. Yet he would always be skeptical of the historicist mentality that viewed the past as a Rankean museum that
housed a permanent and unchanging order. Like Nietzsche, he would reject all
forms of antiquarianism and view history instead in its possibilities for overcoming
the present and for shaping the future. As Nietzsche put it in his second Untimely
Meditation: if you are to venture to interpret the past you can do so only out of
the fullest exertion of the vigor of the present. . . . When the past speaks it always
speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present
will you understand it . . . only he who constructs the future has a right to judge the
past.10 Heidegger would embrace these Nietzschean insights in Being and Time,
and his schema of the three ecstases of time owes a significant debt to Nietzsches
horizonal understanding of temporality in terms of the antiquarian-critical-monumental modes of historical interpretation. What mattered for Nietzsche above all
was times relationship to justice, a theme that shaped the whole structure of both
the second Untimely Meditation as well as Thus Spoke Zarathustra. If in the second Untimely Meditation, justice toward the past is conceived as the rarest of all
virtues, one that enhances ones life-energy and strength, then by the later work
Nietzsche conceives of justice as a constructing, separating, destroying way of
thinking from out of valuations: the highest representative of life itself.11 Later, in
his Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche will distinguish two kinds of justice: a slave
justice rooted in revenge and ressentiment modeled on the debtorcreditor relation
and a noble form of justice rooted in excess strength, power, and a joy in being
alive. Zarathustran justice understands such life-affirmation as being intimately
related to a certain relationship to time that attempts to overcome the human, all
too human ressentiment against the past and times it was. In lieu of such a lifenegating relation, Zarathustra embraces a new kind of temporal justicea justice
toward time itself that overcomes the poisonous adders bite of the past with a
Heraclitean embrace of time as justice.12 Here all modalities of time are reconciled
. Heidegger, BT: 321; SZ: 350.
. On this topic, cf. Elizabeth Gross, The Nick of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004), 119-125.
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 94; Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, eds., 15 vols. (Munich: dtv,
1980) (hereafter: KSA) 1: 293-294. Emphasis in original.
11. Nietzsche, KSA 11: 141.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 111: And this itself is justice, this law of time that it must devour its own children. KSA

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261

in the cosmic play of the aion (Greek, alternately translated as the time of life,
duration, eternity), as Zarathustra reads eternity through the prism of the moment (Augenblick) that balances/harmonizes the temporalities of pastpresentfuture without eliminating their infinite contradiction/opposition.13
Hoy takes up a reading of both Nietzsche and Heidegger in The Time of Our
Lives, but he does not pursue the connection between time and justice in any systematic way. To be fair to Hoy, his project entails a history of time-consciousness
that begins in the post-Kantian experience of temporality. His aim is to contribute to
tectonic transformations in the way we think about time by going back through a
genealogical history of philosophy and offering a critical account of it. Though he
does not pursue the temporal link between Nietzsche and Heidegger, Hoy explores
the crucial influence of Kant in the early work of Heidegger, especially the section
on Schematism in the first Critique. Here he outlines the decisive break in the
phenomenological tradition, particularly Heideggers break with Husserl on timeconstitution. Those of us interested in the development of continental philosophy
and its approach to time will be indebted to Hoy for his clear and insightful account
of the KantHusserlHeidegger connection. Yet there is also room for criticism, and
I would argue that much of it falls on Hoys somewhat narrow reading of Heidegger.
In broad outline I want to underscore two problems I find worthy of mention. First,
Hoy does not seem to pick up on Heideggers critique of Husserlian egology, which
might explain his preoccupation with the term consciousness. That is, he does not
come to terms with the humanist assumptions that undergird his anthropocentric focus on consciousness, a disposition that the later Heidegger would no doubt ascribe
to the metaphysics of subjectivity. Second, he does not follow Heideggers interest
in the problem of time past the early writings of the 1920s and into the period of
the so-called turn and beyond. In Beitrge, for example, Heidegger will no longer privilege the temporality of human experience but, rather, what he terms the
ecstatic free-play of the truth of being (Seyn).14 As part of this turn, Heidegger
will emphasize the inceptual (anfnglich) character of being as an event that holds
sway through its appropriative claim upon human being. In a late text, Time and
Being (1962), Heidegger writes: Time is not something fabricated by the human
being, the human being is not something fabricated by time . . . authentic time appears as the It that we name. In the saying: there is/it gives (es gibt) being . . . time
itself remains the gift of an It gives.15 In the gifting of time as be-ing, Heidegger
will offer a reading of history (Geschichte) as a Geschick (a destinal sending): the
appropriative sending of a destiny whose sendings yield a jointure of justice as the
very basis of time. Thinking about time as dike (Anaximanders term for justice),
Heidegger now ponders it as the ordering of coming-to-be (genesis) as passingaway (phthora). Here dike as justice is understood as the ontological ordering of
beings in their temporal jointure.16 If, for human beings, the time is out of joint,
4: 180.
13. Cf. Gnter Wohlfart, Also Sprach Herakleitos (Freiburg: Alber, 1991), 33.
14. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999), 171; GA 65:242.
15. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 16-17; Zur Sache
des Denkens (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 17-18.
16. Martin Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment, in Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper
& Row, 1975), 13-58; GA 5: 321-373.

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for being in its temporal happenings/sending all beings are ad-justed to a jointure
that appropriates such finitude into its reciprocal fit. Instead of imagining this order
as something necessary or compelling (based on the traditional translations of
Anaximanders to chreon), Heidegger thinks of it as letting something belong to its
own being or handing something over to its own essence (Wesen).17 The upshot of
this whole approach is to think about time from out of the event of being (Ereignis),
not merely from out of the consciousness of the human being. Hoy does not follow
Heidegger on this Anaximandran path of thinking that grasps time as the appropriative event of adjusting beings to the just ordering of being. Nor does he attempt to do
justice to the justice of time.18 The closest he comes is in his discussion of a politics
of the future (221) in the writings of two twentieth-century Jewish philosophers:
Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida.
iii. The Time of the Other: Levinas and the Ethics of Responsibility

In chapter 5 of The Time of Our Lives, Hoy explores what he terms various strategies for reconciling lived temporality with objective time (183). There he tries
to look at how different philosophers try to deal with the different senses for reconciling the sting of time and the enjoyment of timethat fundamental tension
between the sense that we always have some time remaining and the sense that
time is running out (220). As part of his analysis he discusses Benjamins strategy of remembering against the grain and Derridas strategy of the politics of
the future. In his effort to offer strategies for dealing with time, Hoy reinforces
his fundamental tendency to understand time as the time of the subject or the time
of consciousness. We can hear echoes of such a reading in the etymology of the
term strategy, which derives from the Greek strategos (general), stratos (army),
and agein (to lead). Strategies are directives for gaining mastery and control over
the past on the part of the subject. Yet what animates both Benjamins and Derridas temporal reflections is less an emphasis on egological time-consciousness
than it is a shared commitment to a time of justice that exceeds the subject.
Both philosophers share an understanding of what Levinas will call the time of
the otheran understanding that the condition of time lies in the relationship
between humans, or in history.19 In his Theses on the Philosophy of History
(1940), Benjamin will point to a temporality of redemption that fans the spark
of hope for just such a time of the other.20 As Levinas will put it, such a time
exceeds the notion of strategizing with all its attendant martial motifs of mastery
and direction. Rather, the time of the other is irreducible to, and incommensurable
with, the time of consciousness; it offers a non-representable infinity in contrast to
consciousnesss yearning for totality. Not only is the past, like the future, other
than the present, but the diachrony of time disrupts the subjects possession of
17. Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment, 53; GA5: 367.
18. When Hoy does write of justice as on page 221 he thinks of it in terms of humanocentric
justice.
19. Levinas, Time and the Other, 79.
20. Walter Benjamin, Selected Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 2003), IV, 391
(hereafter: SW); Illuminationen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 253.

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time and opens up its radical alterity. The past, on Levinass reading, summons us
to a responsibility that is anterior to my existence. In Entre Nous Levinas speaks
of the ethical anteriority of responsibility . . . something that never was my presence and never came to me through memory. . . . In the depths of the concreteness
of the time that is the time of my responsibility for the other, there is the diachrony
of the past that cannot be gathered into re-presentation.21
This ethical interpretation of time finds its resonance in several passages from
Deuteronomy (3:23-28; 32:48-52) that chronicle Jahwehs injunction against Moses that prevents him from entering the land of Israel. As he reflects on the plight
of Moses, Levinas finds a model for an ethical relation to time that becomes aware
of a time beyond consciousness, of a time radically other than the time of egological temporality. Ethics, in this sense, signifies for Levinas an orientation to act
without entering the Promised Land. It entails a patience to renounce the time of
the self so as to envisage a time without me where ones actions would be to
aim at a time beyond the horizon of my time, in an eschatology without hope for
oneself, or in a liberation from my time. To be for a time that would be without
me, for a time after my time, over and beyond the celebrated being for death,
is not an ordinary thought which is extrapolating from my own duration; it is the
passage to the time of the other.22
In contrast to Heidegger, whose anticipatory resolution and running-ahead toward ones death constitutes an understanding of temporality bounded by finitude, death, and nothingness, Levinass understanding of temporality opens up
infinitely toward the other of time, of an alterity that is to-come (Zu-kunft) and
an alterity that is anterior to my own having-been (Gewesenheit). The future no
longer appears as a potentiality that emerges out of my authentic resolution; it
remains resistant to my temporality and remains fathomless and radically other.
As an anarchic trace of what can never be pre-possessed, the future holds the
quality of ineradicable surpriseof what both over (sur) takes (prendre) us and
takes us beyond (sur) ourselves. Levinasian temporalizing breaks with the phenomenological, inner time-consciousness of Husserl and the existential temporality of Heideggerthat is, it breaks with the models of retention/protention and
retrieval/projectionin its attempts to think time starting from the face of the
Other.23 By thinking about the ethical character of time as a passage to the time
of the other, Levinas presses on with his critique of the time of consciousness that
joins time up again in re-presenting it, but betrays it. This betrayal of time that
happens through both the reminiscence of the past and the utopian-eschatological
hope of the future suppresses the time of the other as a time of the immemorable
past (a past that cannot be remembered by a constituting ego cogito) and the time
of the unrepresentable future. In the teeth of the violence of the twentieth century, after the horrors of its genocides and its Holocaust, Levinas understands the
diachrony of time as an ethical openness to the temporal disruptions of past horrors for those dead whom we do not remember and of future revelations for those
21. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 170-171.
22. Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
2000), 92.
23. Levinas, Entre Nous, 177, 176, 175.

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yet unborn. It is this inextinguishable concern for justice that shatters the time
of consciousness, opening it to the time of the other.
iv. Messianic Time: the Angel of History

But what would the time of the other look like? How would the character of the
past and the promise of the future be reconfigured in a temporality of justice
whose source would not be the I think, but the unthinkable other? Hoy does
not pursue this line of reflection; nonetheless he offers some insightful observations about the emancipatory possibilities of critical resistance. What is refreshing about Hoys book is its openness to philosophical engagement. Hoy does not
pose himself as an authority, nor does he presume to synthesize various theories
of time into a metatheory that would resolve all the difficulties/contradictions
that emerge in confronting the various continental thinkers whom he discusses.
Instead, he offers a sympathetic, vindicatory reading of the philosophers in his
work that looks critically at their different projects with an eye toward exploring
their transformative potential, which, he hopes, can lead to experimentation
and self-transformation (241-242). And here, I think, we can find much to learn
from his approach to Benjamin and Derrida.
In his reading of Benjamins parable concerning the angel of history from On
the Concept of History, Hoy raises questions about the meaning of temporality
against the background of the storm of progress that blows the angel backward
leaving a pile of wreckage that appears as one single catastrophe. For Benjamin, historicisms teleological narrative of progressespecially Hegels notion
of world history as a triumphal pageant leading to progress in the consciousness
of freedomshatters against the discontinuous, fragmented shards of human
wreckage that litter the historical landscape.24 Yet it is precisely this catastrophic
image of history that occasions Benjamins understanding of the past in terms of
its messianic possibilities. Like Levinas, Benjamin thinks of the past as other,
as not falling automatically into the temporal continuum of progress laid out by
Hegelian historicism. If we can burst asunder the sequential line of continuity
by attending to the spark of hope in the past that comes to us to through the
recognition of the injustices and abuses suffered by historys victims, then we can
attune ourselves to the weak messianic power to which the past has a claim.25
Only a redeemed humanity is granted the fullness of its past, Benjamin insists;
yet such a task calls out to us for repair and redemption. In taking up the theological metaphors of a messianism that offers redemption, Benjamin echoes his friend
Gershom Scholems commentaries on the Jewish Kabbalah, especially the Lurianic notion of tikkun or repair. As Scholem explains it, tikkun is the restoration
or reintegration of all things to their original condition as intended in the divine
plan of Creation, a plan that was never realized because it was hindered by the

24. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (Hamburg: Meiner,
1955), 63.
25. Benjamin, SW, IV: 390; Illuminationen: 252.

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265

Breaking of the Vessels on the ontological level and by Adams fall on the human
plane. The completion of the process of tikkun is redemption.26
Over the course of Jewish theological crises, this Lurianic notion of tikkun was
reinterpreted by Sabbatianism and Hasidism in such a way as to weaken and dull
the more universal and messianistic aspects of tikkun. Out of this Kabbalistic
doctrine, Scholem relates that only when the holy sparks that are imprisoned in
the world are raised up to their original oneness can the process of redemption
begin. Benjamin does not share this vision of an originary unity lost, but his interpretation of history has been decisively shaped by his reading of Scholem. The
spark of hope that lingers in the wreckage of history offers Benjamin a way to
repair the broken hopes of those who have suffered. Against this background, it
is helpful to remember that Benjamins angel of history cannot change the past; it
can only look on in horror at the destruction lying before it. It is left to us to make
restitution, not for our sakes, but for the victimsnot for the present, but for a
past that calls to us to redeem it. As Benjamin would so poignantly put it, It is
only for those without hope that hope is given.27
Hoy raises pertinent questions about the temporality of hope in Benjamins
parable of the Angelus Novus and wonders whether we can detect a weak utopian hope there or whether its message is dystopian hopelessness. In the end,
Hoy claims that despite the parables dystopian features, it implies that there
is at least some teleology in history, and therefore some grounds for hope. In a
sense, hope works backward rather than forward insofar as what we hope for is
not so much our own redemption from time as the redemption of past injustices
to others through memorialization (163). As I read him, Benjamin does hold out
hopebut only in a qualified and limited sense. The past can be redeemed, but not
by the angel. Only human beings who practice a genuine form of remembrance
(Eingedenken) can hope to save that which has failed and come to wreckage.28
This form of remembrance does not take the form of a nostalgic recollection or
antiquarian preservation; it consists, rather, in a messianic relation to the past that
sees the task of the historian as an awakening from the rosary-bead sequentiality
of events to a new perception of time as a kairotic time of the now. This Jetztzeit
denotes a radical rupture or break in historicist time-reckoning that holds forth a
hope that the messianic possibility of redemption might come at any moment,
blasting asunder the causal chain of historical continuity. It was in terms of this
kairos experience of the now where every second was the small gateway through
which the Messiah might enter that Benjamin would detect the presence of a
messianic force in history.29 Within this Benjaminian temporality, the future does
not stand ahead of us, but behind us. Only through awakening to the remembrance
of the lost sparks of the past can the future be redeemed. With this Proustian commitment to remembrance, wedded to Jewish messianic thinking, Benjamin points
26. Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead (New York: Schocken, 1991), 242243; Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 238-239.
27. Benjamin, SW, I: 356; Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1964), 106.
28. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagenwerk (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 611.
29. Benjamin, SW, IV: 397, 402; Illuminationen: 261. On Jetztzeit, cf. two books by Giorgio
Agamben, The Time That Remains (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 142-145, and Infancy
and History (London: Verso, 1993), 112-113.

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to a time other than the time of the self, to a time of the other that will come to
fuller expression in the writings of Levinas and Derrida.
v. The Time of Justice: Derrida and the A-Venir

Derrida remains attuned to the messianic dimension of time, seeing in it the promise of democratic hope. Nonetheless, he writes that Benjamins messianism is still
too Heideggerian, too messianico-Marxist or archeo-eschatological for me (163).
That is, it appears as still too tied to a Marxist form of historical materialism that
thinks about the future teleologically as culminating in the fulfillment of a historical program of liberation. As Hoy explains it, Derrida wants to think about the
future in two senses: on the one hand, the predictable, foreseeable future, le futur
and, on the other, the unpredictable, unexpected future, lavenir that can break
into the present unexpectedly at any moment (142). Messianicity is an integral aspect of human temporality; it expresses the fundamental sense of expectation that
opens the future to eschatological promise. Yet when such messianicity gets tied
to a form of awaiting that projects the present ahead on the temporal continuum
as a future present, something both foreseeable and foregraspable, then it loses
its futural character and falls back into a predictable form of messianism. Both
Hoy and Derrida remain deeply critical of this metaphysics of time and point to a
temporality that remains open to a future that is to come in all its unpredictability.
Yet Hoys reading of this lived temporality as the time of our lives differs from
Derridas in that it still remains too grounded in the Husserlian notion of a timeconsciousness whereby temporality is a condition for the possibility of subjectivity (vii). Against such a view, Derrida maintains in Marx & Sons that messianic
temporality remains tied to the time of the other and to a responsibility that exceeds
the self and its presence; it remains inseparable from an affirmation of otherness
and justice.30 This responsibility to the other that is at the core of Derridean ethics
forms the basis of a messianic understanding of temporality.
Derrida thinks about time in terms of the alternate temporalities of mourning
and hope. For him, Jewish messianic thought offers a structure for thinking about
the future as radically other than the ordinary time of continuity and progress. The
Messiah is to-come; this comingthe a-venircannot, however, be extrapolated
from the present as forming a continuum of temporal order. The coming can never
correspond to an actual historical event within ordinary time. That is why Derrida refrains from any attempt to determine the Messiah as suchwhether in its
past form as religious doctrine (Judeo-Christian theology) or in its future form
as eschatological revelation (Marxist laws of history). In Derridas words, the
Messiah is not some future present, or some safe and secure projection of our
quotidian order on the grid of the future; rather, the messianic happens now.31
But, Derrida insists, this now is not a present.32 It is not part of the sequence
of historical time, but belongs to an incalculable messianic time. Precisely in this
30. Jacques Derrida, Marx & Sons, in Ghostly Demarcations, ed. M. Sprinker (London: Verso,
2008), 249.
31. Deconstruction in a Nutshell, ed. John Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 24.
32. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001), 21.

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sense the messianic time of justice belongs to the time of the promise [since ] it
will always remain, in each of its future times, to come: . . . it never exists, it is
never present, it remains the theme of a non-presentable concept.33 Yet the messianic time of justice is not simply future-directed; it is also deeply tied to the past
and the experience of mourning.
As in Benjamins parable about the angel of history, Derrida looks at the past
redemptively. Gazing out on the wreckage of history, Derrida notices ghosts, the
revenants of the dead, those phantoms whose spectral forms haunt us with their
unspeakable suffering. These ghosts (revenants) come back again (revenir) to
claim both our memory and our mourning. In mourning we leave behind the lost
possibilities of the past even as we claim the traces of the ghosts who live on in us.
But mourning itself is aporetic. On the one hand, it leaves behind what cannot be
retrieved in the present, in the future, or in the futural present; on the other hand,
it carries out the work of just such a retrieval by making us responsible to the dead
in a way that exceeds the present or any future that could be made present. It is
this sense of responsibility that is before us and beyond us that characterizes the
work of mourning, opening us up both to those who are no longer and to those
who are not yet. Hence, Derrida can write of a responsibility before memory,
a responsibility whose temporality is not modeled on the time-consciousness of
the self, but opens to the alternate temporalities of what is other. The temporality
of mourning those victims both dead and unborn holds time open to the spectrality of others, the ghosts who have gone and are to come. Specters of Marx reads
this temporality as the disjointure of time itself, of the non-contemporaneity of
present time with itself (this radical untimeliness or this anachrony on the basis of
which we are trying here to think the ghost).34 The time of spectersand of their
mourningis a time that is out of joint, disjointed. To be responsible for such a
time means to live not merely in the presence of the present, but to live beyond
present life, to live in the time of justice, not the time of the self. Hoys The Time
of Our Lives presents a forceful reading of this kind of temporality that shapes our
lives, a temporality where the future erupts in the present unexpectedly. Yet Hoy
seems skeptical about the time of the other since he appears to balk at Derridas
deconstruction of the future as a teleological projection from out of the present.
For him, abandoning teleology altogether threatens to make the messianic interruption into a moment of absurdity (181). In the face of Derridas emphasis on
the openness of the future and its unforegraspable-unforeseeable character, Hoy
wants to question the practical merit in Derridean undecidability. As he sees it,
it is a legitimate question to ask whether there would have to be some more definite reasons from which to act, and collective goals toward which to aspire.
vi. The Future Anterior As the Time of Justice

In Specters of Marx Derrida offers a rejoinder to the kinds of questions Hoy poses
by turning his attention to the metaphysics of time and the ontology that supports
it. For Derrida, the phenomena of hope and mourning point to a time that is not
33. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), 306.
34. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994), 25.

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present, but rather marked by absenceof what is no longer and of what is yet
to come. Whereas traditional ontology thinks of being as self-identical presence,
Derrida thinks of it as a spectral ghost that haunts the temporalities of the future
and the past that are not mine, but the temporal specters of the other. Human
temporality is marked by the infinite asymmetry between the having-been of the
past, the presence of the present, and the anticipation of the future. Within such
a temporality, time does not belong to me, is not mine, but is always already
otherthe time of the other. Here the past is not a museum that I enter to mine
its archive for lessons to apply to the coming future; rather, the past remains incapable of being represented as it actually was. The past remains open to the hope
for a democracy to come that eludes the present as it opens to the future anterior. Within this Derridean temporality what matters above all is the time to come:
the time of messianic justice when the dead victims of history will have been
redeemed, when the past of the other will have been made just. Even if such justice is never achieved, never attained as the teleological goal of a meaning-filled
historical process, yet still the time of justice continues to haunt the present in
its coming. Practically speaking, that means that despite the historical shipwreck
of Marxismfor Benjamin in 1940 the HitlerStalin pact, for Derrida in 1989
the collapse of the Berlin WallMarxs promise of a justice to come remains as
vital as ever. Marx and Marxism remain as the ghosts that (despite Fukuyamas
triumphalist pronouncement of the end of history and the defeat of communism) continue to haunt us. The specters of Marx, those ghostly apparitions that
constitute the spirit of the dead and their destroyed hopes of a democratic future,
have not come to presence. They remain absent, unfulfilled, spectral. Yet despite
this absence, they continue to return to us in the form of the revenant, the ghostly
other. In this they share the same relation to temporality as the spectral forms of
those yet unborn. Both the ghosts (revenants) of the past who revisit (revenir) the
living present and those ghosts whose arrivals (arrivants) are still to come haunt
the present with their absence. Hence, Derrida can speak of hauntology as a form
of mourning that teaches us about a responsibility to a time other than the present. Time, in this sense, would be thought of not as the temporality of the subject,
but as the temporalities of what, in a French pun, Derrida terms le plus dun (the
more than one/no more one). This time of the other as the haunting of the other
is what Marxs legacy ultimately means for Derrida. It is the promise of justice
and the reconfiguration of time as justice that underlies the late Derridas various
discourses on mourning, messianicity, hospitality, spectrality, and gift. Times gift
to us is the gift of possibility, of offering other ways of being than the present. To
cling to presence is to close off the possibility of what will be and what will have
been. By embracing an unconditional hospitality to both those who have died and
those unborn, we open the possibility of justice, even as we mourn its delay.
In His Exordium to Specters of Marx, Derrida weaves together these various
strands of justice, time, mourning, spectrality, and the ethics of/with the other:
If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, not presently living,
either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. Justice where it is not yet, not
yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where

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it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights. It is necessary to speak
of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics,
whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize
in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those who are not yet
there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. No justice . . . seems
possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present,
within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born
or who are already dead. . . . Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for
justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet
present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question where? where tomorrow? whither?35

In this reading of time as the Levinasian time of my responsibility to the

other, Derrida gives voice to a continental tradition (Nietzsche-BergsonLevinas-Deleuze) that thinks about temporality in relation to ethics.36 As valuable as Hoys work is for thinking together about a wide range of philosophical
interpretations of temporality, ultimately his organizing principle and the focus
of his project is the time of our lives, the time-consciousness of the subject. But
Derridas call to mourn the absent ghosts of an uncanny, haunting temporality of
the other challenges this focus on the self. In lieu of the Cartesian starting point of
the I am, Derrida substitutes the I am haunted in such a way that wherever
there is Ego, es spukt, it spooks/it ghosts.37 This haunting of the ego by the
other and the others temporal absence dislodges and unhinges the self from its
fixity in the present, opening it to the ghosts of justice past and to come. In this
opening where Ego=ghost, the essential mode of self-presence of the cogito
would be the haunting obsession of this es spukt. Everywhere this ego cogito
goes it is regarded by ghosts whose spectral visage calls out to be regarded. This
ghostly ethic disrupts time, the time of the self, and holds forth the promise of
the time of justice:
When the abhorrent ghosts return, we recall the ghosts of their victims to preserve their
memory, but also, inescapably, for the sake of the current struggle, and in the first place
for the promise that mobilizes this struggle, for the future without which it would have no
meaningto the future, that is, beyond any present life, beyond every living being who
can say, Now, me. The question of the ghost is also the question of the future as a question of justice.38

The ghosts of history and the future shatter the time of the self, tearing it from
its hinges, leaving behind and pointing toward splinters of messianic time that
reconfirm Hamlets lament that the time is out of joint. To hear this lament, to
truly give heed to its claim, would mean to think about the disjointure of time
itself, particularly the time of the self. If justices time is to come, it will come, it
will have come, only in the time of the other.
Charles Bambach
University of Texas at Dallas
35. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix.
36. Levinas, Time and the Other, 112.
37. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 133.
38. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 107.