Abstract
Throughout all history, leading philosophers have sought in different ways to lay the foundations of a phenomenology of time. One example is Heidegger’s early efforts to base our experience of time upon an originary, existential temporality. Another is Bernard Stiegler, who, by contrast, argued that time is ultimately based on technology. For Derrida, no such ultimate foundation exists. In this chapter, I describe how time, as Derrida sees it, consists of a series of events that suddenly intervene and interrupt the homogeneous flow of chronological time. More than ever, he argues, such events are being produced artificially. They are artifacts. In fact, time is being continually created by a gigantic media apparatus comprised of both traditional and social media as well as of digital archival systems and a global infrastructure in the form of industries, experts, and labour practices. Such pseudo-events are actively produced, sorted, interpreted, hierarchized, and chosen by a technological apparatus in the service of forces about which we know very little. Deconstruction cannot content itself with these virtual events but must also engage with the originary events and how they took place in reality. This virtual structure of the event is what Derrida characterizes as teletechnological différance.
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Notes
- 1.
Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, p. 337.
- 2.
Derrida, “Ousia et Grammè”, p. 41.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 37.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 69.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, pp. 124 and 133.
- 7.
Derrida, “Ousia et Grammè”, pp. 44–51. Derrida further argues that Kant can be situated “in the direct line which … leads from Aristotle to Hegel” (p. 44).
- 8.
Wood, The Deconstruction of Time, pp. 259, 263
- 9.
Derrida, Donner le temps 1. La fausse monnaie, pp. 33–4. The word Ereignis (event) appears as early as Heidegger’s first lectures in 1919 (see Gesamtausgabe vol. 56/57). It recedes in Being and Time, only to re-emerge as the central theme of Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), written in 1936–1938 (see Gesamtausgabe vol. 65). Heidegger’s philosophy thereafter becomes a thinking through of Ereignis, and the words has a prominent place in several of postwar works, particularly the late essay “Time and Being”.
- 10.
Derrida, Aporias, p. 14
- 11.
Ibid., pp. 14–15
- 12.
Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, p. 27.
- 13.
Derrida, “Différance”, pp. 13–14.
- 14.
Derrida, Ousia et Grammè, p. 63.
- 15.
Hägglund, Radical Atheism, p. 27.
- 16.
Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 125–6.
- 17.
Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, p. 19.
- 18.
According to Derrida, the future can “always reproduce the present. Justice remains, is yet, to come, à-venir, it has an, it is à-venir, the very dimension of events irreducibly to come. It will always have it, this à-venir, and always has”. (Force of Law, p. 27).
- 19.
Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, p. 19.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 20.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 21.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Derrida, Donner le temps, p. 18.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 21.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 25.
- 29.
Ibid., pp. 25–6.
- 30.
Derrida was a frequent guest in television studios around the world, but he seems also to have been an inveterate television viewer: “Aside from the news I watch all kinds of things, the best and the worst. Sometimes I watch bad soap operas, French or American, or programs that give me a greater cultural awareness … political debates, spectacular political encounters in general … or else good movies. I could spend 20 h a day watching good political archives … And so I watch a little of everything…. I watch very regularly Sunday morning … the Muslim and Jewish religious programs, which I find very interesting….Then comes the Christian hour: Orthodox, Protestant, then Catholic.” (Échographies de la télévision, p. 155).
- 31.
Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, p. 11.
- 32.
Today, this “teletechnological apparatus” would also include social media such as Facebook, You Tube, Twitter, etc.
- 33.
Its plural form actualités means simply “news”. In Sweden, there is even a current affairs programme called Aktuellt.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 35.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 212.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 238, n. 12.
- 37.
Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, p. 11.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Ibid., pp. 12–14.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 49.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 107.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 89.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 45. Derrida is here referring to the right and the duty of society, the state, or the nation of storing and preserving essentially everything that is produced and broadcast via the national media.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 44.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 82.
- 47.
The democratization process must be seen as a very long-term, not to mention never-ending, process. It took almost two hundred years for democracy to develop in the West—from the ideas of the Enlightenment to the adoption of universal suffrage in the years after the First World War. Applied to international politics, this perspective implies that it will take centuries before a comparable democratic system is realized at a global level. Like many other commentators at around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Derrida here seems a little too optimistic about technology’s potential to accelerate the democratization process. (My notes.)
- 48.
Ibid., p. 47.
- 49.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 1. A few pages on, Derrida adds that “time is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down [traqué et détraqué], deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is off its hinges, time is off course, beside itself, disadjusted” (p. 20).
- 50.
The German sociologist Hartmus Rosa even considers speed and acceleration to be the very kernel of modernity, the central concepts of our time. (See his Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, 2013). A similar argument has been made by the French architect, urbanist, and philosopher Paul Virilio.
- 51.
Derrida and Marx were not the only ones to have spectres. Even Freud and even Heidegger had theirs, it seems: “The most cultivated, the most reasonable, the most nonbelieving people easily reconcile a certain spiritualism with reason … Freud had his ghosts … and he obeyed them … as do I myself (Derrida, Mal d’archive, p. 138–40). On Heidegger’s “spectres”, see Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, p. 147.
- 52.
Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, p. 131.
- 53.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 94.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 121.
- 56.
Ibid., pp. 157–158.
- 57.
Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, op. cit., p. 129.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 48.
- 59.
Derrida and Stiegler are naturally also in agreement about the problematical nature of Heidegger’s statement that “the essence of technology is nothing technological”.
- 60.
Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, p.17.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 27.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 83.
- 63.
Stiegler, “Återerinring och minnesstöd. Platon som den förste att tänka proletariatet [Remembrance and memory support. Platon as the first to think the proletariat]”, pp. 234 and 236 (my trans.).
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Sjöstrand, B. (2021). Technology and Time as Event. In: Derrida and Technology: Life, Politics, and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83407-4_4
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