The sovereignty of modern times: Different concepts of time and the modernist perspective

Abstract

Given World and Time is a collection of essays that summarizes much of the recent work on the theory of time, including cultural, political, and social conceptualizations of temporality. The grounding narrative of this collection, roughly stated, leads from the German and German-Jewish ideas of a temporality of crisis developed in the 1920s, to the French poststructuralism of the 1960s and 1970s, and concludes with the American syntheses of the 1980s and 1990s. Methodologically, the book weaves together different historical narratives with a new emphasis on their temporal dimension, all seen from the perspective of critical theory and recent cultural critique. However, it is interesting to point out that the majority of the articles do not challenge the classic critical tools of modernism, in spite of the frequent reference to poststructuralist critique. The volume editor has also not acknowledged more recent work that treats similar topics and themes through the application of a radical political critique, most significantly the work associated with biopolitics and the so-called theological turn. © 2010 Wesleyan University.