Time-fetishes : the secret history of eternal recurrence / Ned Lukacher.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lukacher, Ned, 1950-

Series:

Post-contemporary interventions.

Post-contemporary interventions

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eternal return--History.

Eternal return.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (193 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 1998.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"For over two and a half millennia human beings have attempted to invent strategies to 'discover' the truth of time, to determine whether time is infinite, whether eternity is the infinite duration of a continuous present, or whether it too rises and falls with the cycles of universal creation and destruction. Time-Fetishes recounts the history of a tradition that runs counter to the dominant tradition in Western metaphysics, which has sought to purify eternity of its temporal character. From the pre-Socratics to Ovid and Plotinus, and from Shakespeare to Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, Time-Fetishes traces the secret tradition of the idea of eternal recurrence and situates it as the grounding thought of Western philosophy and literature. The thinkers in this counter-history of the eternal return lingered long enough on the question of time to learn how to resist separating eternity from time, and how to reflect on the possible identity of time and eternity as a way of resisting all prior metaphysical determinations. Drawing out the implications of Nietzsche's reinvention of the doctrine of return, Lukacher ranges across a broad spectrum of ancient and modern thinkers. Shakespeare's role in this history as the 'poet of time' is particularly significant, for not only does Shakespeare reactivate the pre-Christian arguments of eternal return, he regards them, and all arguments and images concerning the essence of time and Being, from an inimitably ironic perspective. As he makes transitions from literature to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Lukacher displays a theoretical imagination and historical vision that bring to the forefront a host of pre- and post-Christian texts in order to decipher in them an encounter with the thought of eternal recurrence that has been too long buried under layers of rigid metaphysical interpretation." -- Book cover.

Contents:

The anachrony of the time-fetish

From Ovid to Titian: eternal return and the cult of Bacchus and Ariadne

"Shakespearances"; or, the war with time

Anamorphic perspectives, human (im)postures, and the rhetoric of the Aevum

Anamorphic ghosts of time: Schopenhauer, Kant, and Hegel

Drive-time: eternal return and the life of the instincts in Schelling, Freud, and the Marquis de Sade

Playing with cinders: from Nietzsche to Derrida

Forgetting the umbrella; or, Heidegger and Derrida on how to say the same thing differently.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages [161]-173) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822322733

0822322730

9780822398837

0822398834

OCLC:

607095749