The jargon of finitude

Or, materialism today

Bruno Bosteels

To ask about materialism today means to ask about the time of materialism. This can be taken in at least two different senses. First, we can take the expression to imply a rephrasing of the larger question ‘What is materialism?’ as ‘When is materialism?’ and ask: When was the time of materialism – whether ancient (Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius) or modern (perhaps Hobbes, certainly d’Holbach, Marx)? When will be the time of materialism (again)? And, in between that noble past and unknowable future, is today, perhaps, a good time for returning to the question ‘What is materialism?’ Indeed, is now the time of materialism, not just in the sense of our here and now, but ‘the now’ as such? Does the time of materialism, whenever it happens, which may be rare, always mark the time of now, against the timeless, ahistorical or eternal lucubrations of idealism? This last formulation hints at the second main way in which the question may be understood, namely: What is time when seen from a materialist point of view, as opposed – presumably – to an idealist one?

These two takes on ‘the time of materialism’, while setting different agendas, are also obviously related. Any serious study of the time and history of materialism is bound, sooner or later, to have to come to terms with materialist conceptions of history and time.

However, the conjunction of materialism with the thinking of time was not always self-evident. Seeing titles such as ‘The Time of Materiality’ or ‘Materialism Today’, I myself have felt an urge to regard the conjunction with a great deal of – what I presume to be materialist – suspicion. This suspicion is due not to some hidden impossibility of the conjunction, but rather to the impression of an all-too-easy, underthematized or unproblematized possibility. Time appears to have become the object of a consensus today, or, at the very least, of a diffuse but for this reason no less peremptory sensus communis, which seems sufficiently self-assured to take for granted its materialist orientation.

Time and untimeliness; temporality and overlapping or alternative temporalities; other times and the time of the other; time both originary and derivative, messianic and fallen, plastic and irreversible; time as history, historicality and historicity…. No matter which way you turn, it would seem, now is the time of time. Time is ‘in’, we might say, because despite of, or perhaps due to, the ubiquitous affirmations that ‘the time is out of joint’, there seems to be no way not to be ‘in’ time – on the condition that we do not mistake this being ‘in’ time for the image of a ‘container’, ‘channel’ or ‘dimension’ out there, through which we pass like other entities of nature, unperturbed by the fundamental temporality of being.

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