The question I would like to point to the beginning of this [text] is: "Who and what We are contemporaries? And, above all, what it means to be contemporary? "A first indication for temporary and direct our search toward an answer comes to Nietzsche. Just one of their courses at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes sums it this way: "What contemporary is untimely. " In 1874, Friedrich Nietzsche, a young philosopher who had worked so far with Greek texts and two years earlier had achieved unexpected fame with The Birth of Tragedy , publishes Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, the "Untimely Meditations" with the accounts you want to do with your time, take a stand on this. "This consideration is untimely" and read at the beginning of the second "Consideration" as is "understood as an evil, an inconvenience and a defect in some of what the time is proud, that is, its historical culture, because I think we're all devoured by the fever of the story but at least we would have to realize. " Nietzsche puts his claim to "present", "contemporaneity" with respect to this, within a disconnect, a gap. Truly belongs to its time, is truly contemporary who may not coincide with it or adapt to their claims, and that is why, in this sense, not current, but because of this, precisely through this difference and this anachronism, he is more able than others to perceive and understand their time.
This mismatch, this interval does not mean, obviously, is that contemporary living in another time, a nostalgia that is best in the Athens of Pericles or the Paris of Robespierre and the Marquis de Sade that in the city or in time in which he lived. An intelligent man may hate his time, but anyway he knows he belongs irrevocably knows he can not escape in time.
Contemporaneity is this unique relationship with time itself, which adheres to it but at the same time, takes away from it, more specifically, it is that relationship over time that sticks to him through a gap and an anachronism. Those who agree completely with the time matching anywhere with it, are not contemporary therefore because of this, they can not see, can not keep his eyes fixed on her.
In 1923, Osip Mandelstam wrote a poem which he called "The Century" (although vek Russian word also means "time"). It contains not a reflection on the world, but on the relationship between the poet and his times, ie on the contemporary. Not "century", but according to the words that open the first verse, "My Century" (moi vek ):
Century mine, my beast, who can / look into your eyes / and unite with your blood / the vertebrae than two centuries?
The poet, who had to pay his contemporaneity with life, is one that must be stares into the eyes of his century-beast, together with its back torn blood of his time. The two centuries, the two times are not alone, as suggested, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also and above all the time an individual's life (remember that saeculum the Latin word originally meaning time of life) and the collective historical time, we call in this case, the twentieth century, whose back-learn in the last stanza of poetry is shattered. The poet, in contemporary terms, represents the fracture, thus preventing the formation time and, simultaneously, the blood that suturing the rupture. The parallelism between the time-and-creature's vertebrae and the time-and vertebrae-century is one of the key themes of poetry:
living creature to / should take their vertebrae themselves, / joke flows / with the invisible spine. / How tender cartilage child / baby is the century of the earth.
The other big issue, it also, as above, an image of the contemporary "is the shattered vertebrae century and its union, which is the work of the individual (in this case, the poet):
century to free the chains / to start the new world / you need to meet with the flute / gnarled knees of days.
You can try the following stanza, which closes the poem, which is an impossible task-or even paradoxical. Not only the time-beast has shattered vertebrae, but also vek, the century that just born with a gesture impossible for anyone who has a broken back, wants to turn backwards, to contemplate their own fingerprints and, thus, shows his face insane:
But is shattered your spine / my great and poor century. / With a smile insane / Like a beast ever flexible / you turn back, weak and cruel / to contemplate your tracks.
The contemporary poet, should have their eyes fixed on time. But what do you see who looks at his time, the insane grin of his century? At this point I would like to propose a second definition of the contemporary: Contemporary is one who is staring at his time, to receive no light but darkness. All times are for those who experience the contemporary, dark. Contemporary is precisely the one who can see the darkness, and is capable of writing dipping his pen in the darkness of this. But what does "see the darkness", "feel the darkness"?
A first answer suggests to us the neurophysiology of vision. What happens to us when we are in an environment where there is no light, or when we close our eyes? What we see is darkness at the time? Neurophysiologists tell us that the absence of light inhibitions a number of peripheral cells of the retina, called precisely off-cells, which become active and produce this particular kind of vision we call dark. Therefore, darkness is not a unique concept, the mere absence of light, something like a no-sight, but the result of the activity of off-cells , A product of our retina. This means, if we return now to our thesis on the darkness of contemporaneity, to perceive the darkness is not a form of inertia or passivity, but an activity involving a particular skill, which in our case, correspond to neutralize the lights from the time to discover its darkness, its special darkness, which, however, can not be separated from those lights.
can say not only that contemporary left blinded by the lights of the century and which fails to distinguish in them the shadow, its intimate darkness. But with all this, we have not yet answer our question. Why make sense of darkness from the time would be interested? Is it not an anonymous experience the dark and impenetrable by definition, something that is not addressed to us and can not, for that matter, entitled? In contrast, the contemporary is one who sees the darkness of his time as something that corresponds to and continues to challenge them, something more than another direct light is directed specifically to him. Contemporary is the one that receives the beam in the face of darkness that comes from his time.
we observe in the sky at night, stars glow surrounded by thick darkness. Since the universe is an infinite number of galaxies and luminous bodies, the darkness we see in the sky is something that, experts say, needs an explanation. It is precisely the explanation given contemporary astrophysics of this darkness of what I want to talk at this time. In the expanding universe, the more remote galaxies are receding from us at a speed so strong that its light can not reach. What we perceive as the dark sky, is this light traveling at high speed towards us and yet they can not reach that galaxies are moving away from a speed exceeding that of light.
perceive in today's darkness is the light that reach us and can not do this, it means to be contemporary. Contemporaries are therefore rare. And so, being contemporary is primarily a question of value: it means being able not only to stare into the darkness of the time, but also perceived in the darkness a light, directed at us, walks away infinitely. That is, one more thing: be punctual for an appointment that can only be missed.
is why this is perceived by contemporary vertebrae broken. Indeed, our time, this is not just the farthest: it can not reach us in any way. His back is shattered and we are staying exactly the point of fracture. Yet, so are contemporary to him. Well understood that the quote in question is not contemporary takes place only in chronological time, is in chronological time, which is necessary and transforms it. And this urgency is the inconvenience, the anachronism that allows us to understand our time in the form of a "too soon" which is also a "too late," a "and" that is even a "no yet. " And at the same time, recognize the darkness in this light that can never be achieved, this perennially on his way to us.
Contemporaneity fits the present and the brand, primarily as archaic, and only those who perceived the most modern and recent signs and markings can be archaic contemporary. Archaic meaning: close to arke , ie the origin. But the source is not located only in a chronological past, it is contemporary to the historical development and continues to act on it, just so that the embryo continues to act in the tissues of the mature organism and the child in the psychic life of adults. The division and at the same time, the closeness, that define the contemporary are based on the proximity to the source, at no point beating as strongly as in the present. Anyone who has seen for the first time, arriving at dawn at sea, the skyscrapers of New York, quickly perceived the archaic facies present, this proximity to the ruins whose timeless images of September 11 made clear to all.
Historians of literature and art know that the archaic and the modern is a secret rendezvous, and not just because, precisely, the most archaic forms seem to play on this particular fascination, but rather because the key to what is hidden in the modern and the prehistoric immemorial. Thus the ancient world, to come to an end, becomes, to be reunited with its beginnings, the art, which was lost in time, pursues the primitive and archaic. In this sense we can say that the route of entry to this is necessarily the way of an archeology. That, however, does not retreat to a remote past, but what we presently do not live in any way, and remain without life, is constantly absorbed toward the origin, without being able to ever reach. Given that this is nothing more than the non-lived of all living and preventing access to this is just the mass of what, for some reason (its traumatic nature, its too close), we can not live in it. The care given to non-living this life is contemporary. And being modern means, in this sense, returning to a present where we have never been.
Those who have tried to reflect on the contemporary world, what could be done only with the condition divided into several times, to introduce in time a des-essential homogeneity. Who can say "my time" divide the time he enrolls in a caesura and a discontinuity, and yet, precisely through this break, this interpolation of inert uniformity present in linear time, the contemporary puts into play a special relationship between the times. If, as we saw, is the contemporary who cut the vertebrae of your time (or, rather, perceived failure, or the breaking point.) He makes this fracture the location of an appointment and a meeting between the times and generations. Nothing is more exemplary in this regard, that the hand of Paul, at the time in which carried out and announces to his brothers contemporary par excellence: the Messianic time: being a contemporary of the Messiah, and rightly called the "time" now "(ho nyn kairos ). Not only this is chronologically indefinite time (the Parousia , the return of Christ, which marks the end is real and is close, but it is priceless) but he has the unique ability to relate to himself every moment of the past , to make every moment or episode of the biblical prophecy or foreshadowing ( typos is the term that Paul prefers) of this (and Adam, through which mankind received death and sin, "type" or Messiah figure who brings men to redemption and the life).
This means that the contemporary is not only one who, sensing the darkness of the present, includes the uncertain light, is also one who, dividing and interleaving the time, is able to transform it and put it in compared with other times, an unprecedented reading of history, "citing it" as a need not come from any way to his discretion but a requirement to which he can not answer. It is as if the invisible light is the darkness of this cast a shadow on the past and this, touched by this beam shadow, acquiring the ability to respond to the darkness of this. Something more or less similar should have recalled Michael Foucault when he wrote that his historical research on the past are only the shadow of this theoretical question. AND W. Benjamin, when he wrote that the historical index content in images of the past shows that they reach their legibility only at a certain point in its history. It is our ability to listen to that effect and that shadow, to be contemporary not only of our century and the "present" but also of his figures in the texts and documents of the past, which will depend the success or failure of our seminar.
