Contemporaneity and Its Discontents

P edro E rber

dia critics, V olum e 41, N um ber 1, 2013, pp. 28-48 (Article)

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CONTEMPORANEITY
AND ITS
DISCONTENTS

PEDRO ERBER
Contemporaneity is in fashion. In philosophical debates, in literary criticism, in po- Pedro Erber is an assistant professor in
litical theory, and even more persistently in the realm of art, never before have we the Department of Romance Studies
at Cornell University. He is the author
discussed and published so much on the contemporary. However, this apparent desire for of Breaching the Frame: The Rise of
contemporaneity disguisesand at times revealsa conflicting disposition. A tangible Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan
discontent with contemporaneity and a theoretically grounded attempt to avoid the (forthcoming, University of California
Press), Poltica e Verdade no pensamento
present emerge symptomatically in the current debate on the contemporary. To make de Martin Heidegger (PUCRio/Loyola,
things thornier, such attempts to withdraw and create distance from the present are 2004), and articles on political thought,
often cloaked under the deceptive guise of a search for and affirmation of contempo- art, literature, and aesthetics.

raneity. In this respect, Giorgio Agambens brief and much-quoted essay What Is the
Contemporary? is in many ways an exemplary case. This discontent or disquiet with
the contemporary, this denial of contemporaneityits philosophical and political sig-
nificanceis what I will discuss.
The primary and most enduring problem on the path of any attempt to theorize the
contemporary has to do with the multiplicity and imbrication of its meanings. On the
one hand, we have grown accustomed to defining the contemporary as the historical
period that succeeds the modern period and as the epoch that we happen to inhabit
in the early twenty-first century. On the other hand, contemporaneity refers to a rela-
tionship between two events, persons, phenomena, etc. that are contemporaneous with
each other; that is, they share the same time. In addition, contemporary refers to that
which is contemporary with uswhoever and whenever we areand is in this sense
synonymous with the present. As John Rajchman aptly argues, the contemporary has
two interrelated components:
The first says that the contemporary contrasts with the modern (and so with modernism, mo-
dernity, and, hence, post-modernity or postmodernism), or more precisely, involves a time
(and sense of time) that complicates or undoes the grand divisions between modernity and
tradition in terms of which European thought, and art, was for so long pleased to define itself
and its Enlightenment. The second says that the question what is contemporary? is now
inseparable from anotherwhat is global?on which, at the same time, it offers a peculiar
point of view.1
The situation is further complicated by the fact that these three meanings are not
entirely separate and independent. The attempt to define the specificity of the con-
temporary as a historical period in its difference from the modern, for instance, must
inevitably come to terms with the condition of a growing transnational contemporane-
ity as a decisive phenomenon of the so-called globalized world. The widespread debate
on the contemporary, which permeates intellectual discourse today, both within and
outside academia, cannot avoid this fundamental difficulty. Neither can it escape the
crucial caveat that any theoretical decision regarding the concept of contemporaneity
will consist inevitably of a political position regarding the whole range of its meanings.

DIACRITICS Volume 41.1 (2013) 2849 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
30 DIACRITICS>>2013 >>41.1

>> Denial

What I have called the denial of contemporaneity draws on an expression by the

German anthropologist Johannes Fabian: the denial of coevalness.2 In Time and the
Other, first published in 1983, Fabian offers one of the most significant contributions to
the current debate on contemporaneity. Coevalness is how he terms the characteris-
tic time of ethnographic research, the temporality of anthropological fieldwork. More
distinctly than in other disciplines of the humanities, anthropological knowledge origi-
nates in direct contact and interaction with its object. The temporality of this prolonged
personal contact, this sharing of time between the subject and object of anthropologi-
cal knowledge, constitutes the specific mode of contemporaneity that Fabian terms
coevalness. At work in this definition is neither contemporaneity as the name of a specif-
ic historical period, nor a mere chronological relationship between two events. Coeval-
ness names the temporality of dialogical interaction between human beings: time shared
through action, interaction, and communication.
According to Fabian, although grounded in an experience of sharing the same time
and spaceof contemporaneitywith its object of study, the writing of anthropology
insists on concealing and betraying its origin by framing its object as belonging to a
different time, distinct from the time of the subject of knowledge. A fundamental con-
tradiction determines the position of anthropologists vis--vis their object of study: On
the one hand we dogmatically insist that anthropology rests on ethnographic research
involving personal, prolonged interaction with the Other. But then we pronounce upon
the knowledge gained from such research a discourse which construes the Other in
terms of distance, spatial and temporal.3 This representation of the other as distant not
only in space but also (and mainly) in time,
Allochronism is grounded on a primacy which Fabian describes as the allochro-
nism of anthropological writing, reveals
of seeing and observing, on the an underlying denial of coevalness, a
refusal to acknowledge the dialogical con-
transformation of the other into an object temporaneity of ethnographic fieldwork.
This denial of contemporaneity ex-
of contemplation; in brief, it consists of a presses itself as the construction of dis-
tance: a distance that, Fabian argues, es-
sort of aestheticization of the other. tablishes itself in the transition from oral,
dialogical knowledge to the written medi-
um, a distance that allows the anthropologist to look at, observe, and objectify the Other.
Allochronism is thus grounded on a primacy of seeing and observing, on the transfor-
mation of the other into an object of contemplation; in brief, it consists of a sort of aes-
theticization of the other. In Fabians words: Observation conceived as the essence of
fieldwork implies, on the side of the ethnographer, a contemplative stance. It invokes
the naturalist watching an experiment. It also calls for a native society that would, ide-
ally at least, hold still like a tableau vivant. Both images are ultimately linked up with a
Contemporaneity and Its Discontents>>Pedro Erber 31

visual root metaphor of knowledge.4 At stake here is first an epistemological matter. The
representation of knowledge in terms of vision, of aesthetic contemplation rather than
linguistic communication, implies a specific mode of temporality. The denial of contem-
poraneity rests on the negation of the temporal materiality of communication through
language. For the temporality of speaking . . . implies cotemporality of producer and
product, speaker and listener.5 For Fabian, this co-presence of speaker and listener, this
sharing of time, is what gets denied in anthropological writing. At work in this transition
is a temporal displacement of the original scene of ethnographic knowledgeoral and
dialogicto the time of a certain scientific writing, which secures the distance between
self and other, between subject and object of knowledge.
Commenting on Fabians theory of coevalness, anthropologist Marc Aug argues that
this distancing between the anthropologist and her/his object takes place even before
the transition from dialogue to writing; neither the anthropologists dislocation from
field to office nor the specificities of writing as a medium for scientific discourse are
to blame. On the contrary, Aug argues, there is something almost schizoid about the
very situation of fieldwork.6 Time in the field is divided between information gathering
and the activities of daily life. This partition indelibly defines the time shared between
anthropologist and object. The investigation circumstances themselves, Aug claims,
create a temporal-type hiatus between observer and observed.7 In this sense, perfect
coevalness is impossible from the outset under conditions of anthropological research.
In any case, whether it happens in the transition to writing or earlier in the field,
this split, schizoid relationship with the otherat once dialogue partner and object of
studyseems to be inscribed and prescribed by the very method of anthropological re-
search. While relating to the other in so-called real time, the anthropologist must simul-
taneously isolate the other in a different temporal dimension. It remains a task for the
individual anthropologist to resolve, or else to carry the burden of, this split subjectivity:
a task and challenge that are not restricted to the field of anthropology, but are at work
in the practice of fieldwork in general, that is, whenever interviewing is involved as a
methodological step in humanistic research. Indeed, the contemporaneity implied in the
very concept of interview is implicitly challenged by the inevitable hierarchy between
the roles of interviewer and interviewee and by the objectification of the other implied
in the process of interviewing and reporting.

>> Literature

Borrowing an example from literature, it is, among other things, the failure to carry out
the task of such a prescriptionand its tragic outcome in the self-destruction of the
anthropologists own bodythat is the central plot of one of the most accomplished
novels to come out of Brazil in recent years, Bernardo Carvalhos Nine Nights (Nove
Noites). Carvalhos narrativeitself split between a voice ambiguously identified with
the writer himself and another expressed in the form of letters from a supposed friend
of the deceased protagonisttells the story of the brutal suicide of the young American
32 DIACRITICS>>2013 >>41.1

anthropologist Buell Quain (191239), while with an indigenous tribe in Northern Brazil.
Troubled by an unknown disease, Quain gives an account of his condition that mingles
his personal correspondence with anxiety about his continual displacement between in-
digenous tribes and the civilized world:
In his loneliness, his ghosts always accompanied him. He saw himself as another, as some-
one he was trying to get rid of. He was dragging someone in his wake. He carried a burden:
Cmtwon. Every death is a murder, he had written to Ruth Benedict about the Trumai.
Imaginary attacks are common. The men press together, terrified, in the middle of the vil-
lagethe most exposed place of alland wait to be shot at by arrows coming out of the dark
forest. If we accept the explanation that he was ill, which is to say accept an exterior, more
objective explanation, his burden becomes his own leprosied or syphilitic body.8
Carefully blurring the boundaries between fiction and history, Carvalhos account
reveals above all the trauma of a prescribed schizophrenia, which Quain, the wunder-
kind of cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict, attempted to follow to the letter. Indeed,
in its ability to expose the subjects schizoid split, to dwell on its symptoms rather than
conceal them, lies perhaps one of the privileges of literature as a discursive mode vis--
vis the scientific discourse of anthropology. As Aug suggests, the denial of contempo-
raneity in anthropological writing might be less a result of the transition from speech to
writing than an inherent characteristic of anthropological discourse itself, whose very
credibility as science depends upon the integrity of the subject of knowledge.
Not long after Quains suicide, Benedict herself had to confront this paradox of
anthropological knowledge in a quite particular manner. Her classic account of Japanese
culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, had been commissioned by the US govern-
ment in 1944 and was first published in 1946. Due to ongoing military conflict between
the United States and Japan, fieldwork in Japan was not a possibility, and Benedict
resorted to native informants among the inmates of concentration camps for Japanese
citizens and their descendants on the West Coast. The shared time of fieldworkthe
encounter between anthropologist and object of studytook place in the anthropolo-
gists own cultural space and time, rather than in that of the studied culture. Under such
circumstances, the task of cultural translation involved in anthropologic fieldwork was,
at least in part, delegated to the native informants themselves, who were to some extent
familiar with the anthropologists cultural background. It would not be too far-fetched
to argue that, in such cases, the denial of contemporaneity has already been manifested
in the discourse of the native informants, who need to distance themselves from their
own purportedly native culture in order to make it understandable to the anthropologist,
while at the same time portraying themselves as authentic elements of the culture they
attempt to translate.
A different mode of this complex game of denial and construction of contemporaneity
is the one bequeathed by another illustrious student of Columbia Universitys Depart-
ment of Anthropology, the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre. A child of the Brazilian
northeastern rural aristocracy and a cosmopolitan intellectual, Freyre helped perhaps
Contemporaneity and Its Discontents>>Pedro Erber 33

more than anyone to shape the discourse on racial relations in Brazil and to consolidate
the idea of Brazilian racial democracy. Freyres account of Brazils amicable, cordial
slavery, laid out in The Masters and the Slaves, overcomes the dilemma of a split identity
between the ethnologist in dialogue with the other and the distant, objective writing
of the scientist by skillfully bringing together both roles in the body, voice, and pen of
the son of the slave-holding aristocracy. Of course, in talking about the past, fieldwork
can only play a limited role, and Freyres book is based largely on archival research. Yet
despite the temporal lag, and in contrast to the air of scientific objectivity that marks
Benedicts account of Japan, Freyres narrative of Brazilian master and slave relations is
colored by the intimate tone of personal involvement. This constructed contemporane-
ity with the Brazilian national past, on the one hand, and Benedicts denied contempo-
raneity with Japanese culture, on the other, follow specific methodological demands.
While Benedict writes from the authority and distance of anthropological objectivity,
the Brazilian researchers credibility is partly derived precisely from his native status,
from his supposed capacity to speak as an insider of Brazilian society, to be contempora-
neous with iteven when talking about the distant past.
More openly conflicted is the relationship of the narrator of Nine Nightsand to some
extent that of Carvalho himselfwith the emergence of the other, the native, in the
time and space of civilization. The main narrator of the book, who travels to an indig-
enous tribe in search of information about the American anthropologist, thus inverting
the very object of field research, had spent part of his childhood in contact with the
Indians on his fathers estate in Xingu in western Brazil. This narrator confesses his total
inability both to deal with the periodic visits of the Indians to the city and to cope with
their incessant requests for shelter, money, and even a tape recorder. This inability and
hopelessness finally lead him to cut all ties with his indigenous hosts:
The Indians adopt you when you come to their village. And they expect you to do the same
when they come to the city. It is an apparently reciprocal relationship, but it is deeply strange
and often disagreeable. Its not a relationship of equals, but of mutual adoption, which makes
all the difference. In the village, you are their child; in the city, they are your children.... They
are the orphans of civilization. They are abandoned. They need allies in the white world, a
world they make an effort, usually vain, to understand.... There are those who dont have a
problem with it. Not me. I am not an anthropologist and I dont have a great soul. I got fed
up. After a while, I decided not to respond to the messages they left me, asking me to call
urgently the following night. I was also irritated by my own guilt over this decision, but less so
than I feared that at any minute they might knock on my door.9
The emblematic event of this eruption of the indigenous in the city, this sudden inter-
ruption of the time of civilization by the time of the tribe, so characteristic of the ambigu-
ous situation of the Brazilian intellectual in the novel as a mediator between the West
and the jungle, bears a strong analogy to the challenges of anthropology today.
A poignant critique of Orientalist imagination is a recurrent motif in Carvalhos
novels, which are populated with amateur anthropologists, wannabe Westerners, and
34 DIACRITICS>>2013 >>41.1

conflicted Orientalists. His characters are constantly exposed to the embarrassing dis-
crepancy between their preconceived, Eurocentric conceptions of the other and the
surrounding reality, which they refuse to let in. In Monglia (2003), a Brazilian diplo-
mat stationed in China and somewhat ironically referred to as the Westerner (scare
quotes by Carvalho) embodies this complete refusal to share the same time with his sur-
roundings. The reader is ensnared by a series of speculations on writing and culture, the
poverty of modern Chinese literature, and the spiritual differences between Shanghai
and Beijing, quoted from the Westerners travel diary, only to be blindsided by the nar-
rators harsh remarks: His arguments could even be interesting, as hypothesis, for a
foreigner who had never put his feet in China, but their arrogance, ethnocentrism, and
ignorance made them embarrassing even to a guy like me, who might not know much
but didnt dare such blind flights.10 As in Nine Nights, the main narrator in Monglia
speaks from a position of critical consciousness vis--vis the traps of ethnographic dis-
course, a position of awareness of the farcical, secondhand ethnocentrism personified
by the Brazilian Westerner. Long before the emergence of anthropology as a science,
European literary fiction, as Edward Said forcefully demonstrated, has been a principal
medium for the construction of a discourse that objectifies the Oriental other, isolating
her/him in a different historical time. Carvalhos writing brings these supposedly separate
temporal spheres into jarring proximity with one another, thus revealing their funda-
mental contemporaneity.

>> Theory

For Aug, the task of an anthropology for contemporaneous worlds consists in com-
ing to terms with this new condition of radical contemporaneity between peoples and
cultures:
It is only now, in the rather blinding light of a generalized situation of cultural circulation, that
we can become aware of what the eruption of the outside world into their societies has meant
for certain peoples. Likewise, it is only today that the conditions of a contemporaneous an-
thropology are emerging, in the sense that the dialogue between observer and observed is
inscribed in a universe where both recognize each other, even though they continue to oc-
cupy different and unequal positions. Contemporaneity cannot be decreed; the transforma-
tion of the world imposes it.11
The object of contemporary anthropology is no longer simply the other of primitive
societies. It is no longer possible to identify its otherness with a supposed non-Western
culture, with contours as imprecise as the very limits of the putative unity of the West.
Aug calls attention to this displacement of the focus of anthropological research, which
now turns itself to phenomena that are undeniably contemporaneous with the subject of
knowledge, as in the study of subcultures or corporations, for instance. It is thus most of
all a transformation of the world by the blinding light of generalized cultural circulation
that imposes the task of a theoretical revision of the understanding of time that grounds
Contemporaneity and Its Discontents>>Pedro Erber 35

anthropological research. On the one hand, the speed of cultural, economic, migratory
circulation inaugurates a generalized sharing of time: The worlds inhabitants have at
last become truly contemporaneous, and yet the worlds diversity is recomposed every
moment; this is the paradox of our day.12 On the other hand, by providing so-called
Western cultures with an experience of the eruption of the outside world into their so-
cietieswhich the process of colonization (and anthropological practice by extension)
has imposed upon primitive societies for centuriesthe current time seems to bring
about an unexpected empathy between the anthropologist and her/his object.
This consciousness of an eruption from the outside comes to light in a particularly
startling fashion in a 1985 interview with Claude Lvi-Strauss, who compared the
exterior threat posed to French culture by an Islamic explosion to the annihilation of
certain indigenous cultures due to European aggression:
I have started to reflect in a moment when our culture committed aggression against other
cultures, of which I made myself a defender and witness. Now, I have the impression that
the movement has been reversed and that our culture is on the defensive vis--vis exterior
threats, among which the Islamic explosion is probably included. Immediately, I feel myself
staunchly and ethnologically a defender of my culture.13
With all of the absurdity contained in this comparison, the analogy has the merit of
revealing the daunting perception of an eruption of the outside world into the spiritual
boundaries of Europe, a perception that casts its shadow upon a large share of contem-
porary European thought.
In his 1964 lecture, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking, Martin Hei-
degger described the current epoch as the beginning of a world civilization that is
based on Western, European thinking.14 The end of philosophy, Heidegger clarified,
does not amount to its dissolution, but rather to the perfection of Western metaphysi-
cal, technical thinking and its actualization as modern technology. To put it bluntly, our
globalized present would be thus entirely the result of a historical development that
took place within the thinking of European men: what Heidegger terms the history
of metaphysics. Yet not even Heidegger was entirely immune to doubt concerning this
hegemonic role of Europe as the brain of
global civilization. His unconditional af- The speed of cultural, economic,
firmation of European cultural hegemony
attempts to respond to (and simultane- migratory circulation inaugurates a
ously conceal) a deeply ingrained anxiety
regarding Europes increasing proxim- generalized sharing of time.
ity to its others. Just a few years earli-
er, it was Heidegger himself who commented on Paul Valrys famous 1919 The Cri-
sis of the Spirit and who reiterated the French poets question: This Europe, will it
become what it is in reality (en ralit), that is, a small cape of the Asiatic continent? Or
will this Europe, rather, remain as what it appears to be (ce quelle parat), that is, the
precious part of the whole earth, the pearl of the globe, the brain of a spacious body?15
36 DIACRITICS>>2013 >>41.1

Although acknowledging that perhaps Europe has already become what it is: a mere
cape,16 Heideggers answer, his unwavering position, was to affirm at all costs Europes
appearance as the brain of the entire terrestrial body;17 that is, the uncontested cen-
ter of world civilization.
Yet the contemporary situation cannot be understood simply in terms of the expan-
sion of Western thought and technique throughout the totality of the planet. On the
contrary, what the blinding light of the present reveals is rather the impossibility of
identifying a certain mode of thinking and a certain set of valuesreason, democracy,
universalism, etc.with the history of European man. The contemporary epochglobal-
ization, not just as an economic phenomenon, but also as the generalized sharing of time,
as the growing contemporanization of diversitybrings with it the germ of a thorough
questioning of the very cultural and historical identity of the West. The decentering of
international political power, the emergence of formerly peripheral countries such as
China, India, and Brazil as major economic and cultural players, the European econom-
ic cul-de-sac, and the recrudescence of conservative ideology in the United States and
beyond are just a few of the most obvious symptoms of this political, economic, and
cultural reorganization of the contemporary world.
In the case of anthropology, this challenge of contemporaneity is intensified to the
extent that the demarcation of its own field of knowledge is grounded upon a tempor-
alized split between two modern concepts of humanity. As the science or study of an-
thropos, anthropology seems to indicate broadly the study of human beings. However,
modern anthropology was constituted from the start as knowledge about the other,
about non-Western societies in their specificity and diversity. Meanwhile, the study of
the civilized and universal (European) human being, as the incarnation of humanitas,
developed into the domain of what came to be designated as the humanities. As Osamu
Nishitani observes, the humanities, as the knowledge of the knowing subject,18 that
is, as reflexive knowledge about man as human and universal, develop in implicit coun-
terpoint to anthropology as the study of man in his cultural diversity. In this process,
Nishitani argues, modern anthropology recurrently construes the difference between
the European and his others in terms of a temporal difference. The establishment of this
allochronic consciousness marks the beginning of modernity itself: What is referred to
as modernity, which began with this discovery of difference, is not merely a historical
time period but also a form of consciousness. It is a consciousness that positions itself as
new while at the same time historicizing the Other. It possesses the ability to translate
spatial difference into temporal difference.19 For anthropology, the challenge of contem-
poraneity is thus posed at the level of its very identity as science, as the risk of dissolution
of its own field of knowledge.
Nonetheless, it is from anthropology that some of the most significant contribu-
tions to the current debate on the contemporary stem. For instance, in the introduc-
tion to the volume Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contem-
poraneity, the historian and art critic Terry Smith goes so far as to affirm that the most
developed theorization of contemporaneity to date is that of Marc Aug: Responding
Contemporaneity and Its Discontents>>Pedro Erber 37

to the crisis in anthropology brought about by decolonization, he boldly draws out the
consequences of the fact that the core object of that colonial discipline ceased to be the
remote otherrather, it became the proximate other and then, precipitously, otherness
within ourselves.20 Meanwhile, the opposite of this courage vis--vis the contemporary
can also be spotted amid the current debate. And, not by chance, it is in the realm of the
humanities as knowledge of the human subject in its universality, and more precisely
in the domain of philosophy and critical
theory, that this denial of contemporane- There is no reason why theory as a
ity emerges most conspicuously. While
theory, as Naoki Sakai sharply formulates fundamental human activity should remain
it, is presumably the essence of Western
humanity,21 once the conditions for this connected to one specific human group at
exclusive identification between the West
and theory are no longer in place, there is the expense of others.
no reason why theory as a fundamental
human activity should remain connected to one specific human group at the expense of
others. Nonetheless, as Sakai observes, precisely because the conditions for the separa-
bility of the West from the Rest are in the process of being undermined, I am afraid its
distinction might well be emphasized all the more obsessively.22 Precisely because the
current situation of generalized cultural exchange deeply undermines the conditions of
the Western monopoly of theory, it is not surprising that this situation should generate
distinctive anxiety and disquiet within the discourse of European theory.

>> Anxiety

Nothing is more symptomatic of this anxiety and disquiet with contemporaneity than
Agambens What Is the Contemporary? (2008). Augs words quoted above bear re-
peating: It is only now, in the rather blinding light of a generalized situation of cul-
tural circulation, that we can become aware of what the eruption of the outside world
into their societies has meant for certain peoples.23 It is in this blinding light that con-
temporaneity erupts. However, when turning his eyes to the present, Agamben would
rather contemplate its darkness. Like a twenty-first-century Joseph de Maistre, he states
peremptorily: Contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to
perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience con-
temporaneity, are obscure.24 But different from Maistres bleak verdict about post-
revolutionary France,25 Agambens darkness does not imply, at least primarily, a moral
judgment on our time; it is rather the outlook of any era insofar as it is experienced
from the perspective of contemporaneity. This darkness, Agamben assures us, is not the
simple absence of light; it is not a passive and nostalgic darkness. On the contrary, the
perception of darknessand here Agamben turns to modern neurophysiologyis the
result of the activity of the off-cells, a product of our own retina.26 Darkness is thus
not in the present itself, but in the eye of the beholder. It consists of a specific ability to
38 DIACRITICS>>2013 >>41.1

achieve a neutralization of the lights that come from the epoch in order to discover its
obscurity,27 a kind of selective vision. Truly contemporary are those who do not allow
themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of
the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity.28 Seeing in the dark requires
a particular faculty, some sort of dark lenses with which to filter the excess of light, to
protect ones sight from the blinding light of the present.
At the root of this opposition between light and darknessan opposition that, like
many other passages in the essay, points to a deeply religious, Christian undertone of
Agambens argumentis the primacy of vision as a mode of relating to the present.
Agamben understands contemporaneity entirely on the basis of this primacy of seeing
and gazingby no means unrelated to the primacy of observation and vision criticized
by Aug as the basis of allochronic discourse. Seeing, in turn, requires necessarily a cer-
tain degree of detachment, since there is no vision without distance. Therefore, as Agam-
ben argues: Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to
it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see
it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it.29 Contemporary are not the ones who
participate entirely in their own time, but rather those who comprehend it by means
of a distanced and objective gaze, who distance themselves from the present in order
to contemplate it. Contemporaneity is thus that relationship with time that adheres to
it through a disjunction and an anachronism.30 In brief, to be contemporary is to (in a
subtle, particular manner) refuse contemporaneity.
Not by chance does Agamben propose from the outsetsupported by the authority
of Friedrich Nietzsche and Roland Barthesto equate the contemporary with the un-
timely. It is unnecessary to point out the sequence of argumentative strides that lead
from Barthes to Saint Paul along the catwalks of fashion. More important is the direction
in which Agamben carefully conducts the discussion of contemporaneity from the be-
ginning. In the very first paragraph, which introduces the text as the opening session of a
philosophy seminar, the question of contemporaneity is posed in terms of a hermeneutic
and methodological problem. At stake in this first instance is our ability to understand
texts from different epochs, to ourselves be contemporaries of texts whose authors are
many centuries removed from us, as well as others that are more recent, or even very
recent.31 Contemporaneity is thus not simply a chronological matter. Indeed, chronol-
ogy matters little, as long as we can connect with and participate in different times and
different epochs. Contemporaneity here consists in what Sakai defines as participating
in the same discourse,32 not by virtue of stating the same thing, but of sharing the same
discursive register. In this sense of contemporaneity, two utterances could be treated as
contemporaneous even if they were produced decades apart from each other.33 It is this
meaning of contemporaneity that is primarily at stake, as a crucial methodological ques-
tion, in a seminar dealing with texts from different time periods. As Agamben phrases
it, the question becomes, Of whom and of what are we contemporaries?34 Or perhaps
more precisely: Of whom and of what can we be contemporaries?
But rather than responding to this question, the text swiftly moves away from this
first meaning of contemporaneity toward a consideration of our relationship to the his-
Contemporaneity and Its Discontents>>Pedro Erber 39

torical present. From the second paragraph on, contemporaneity is discussed mostly in
the sense of a mode of being and relating to ones own present; the methodological ques-
tion of our relationship to texts from the past returns only at the end of the essay. How-
ever, even if these two meanings of contemporaneity are not independent of each other,
their imbrication cannot be treated as a univocality. Our contemporaneity in the sense of
our mode of inhabiting and relating to our present is intrinsically connected to the ways
in which we can participate in the past, as well as to what we expect from the future. But
our relationship to each of these different modes of temporality is not the same, even if
the same wordcontemporaneitycan cover each of those different meanings.

>> Untimeliness

What Is the Contemporary? adheres to a peculiar argumentative structure, succes-

sively proposing and expounding on, in a sort of poetic exegesis, a postulate concern-
ing contemporaneity obtained from the canon of Western thought. Nietzsches second
Untimely Meditation is the first and principal reference.35 With the help of Barthes,
Agamben extracts from this 1874 text by Nietzsche a first postulate on contemporaneity:
the contemporary is the untimely.36 Agamben argues, quoting Nietzsche:
In 1874, Friedrich Nietzsche ... published the Unzeitgemsse Betrachtungen, the Untimely
Meditations, a work in which he tries to come to terms with his time and take a position with
regards to the present. This meditation is itself untimely, we read at the beginning of the
second meditation, because it seeks to understand as an illness, a disability, and a defect
something which this epoch is quite rightly proud of, that is to say, its historical culture, be-
cause I believe that we are all consumed by the fever of history and we should at least realize
it. In other words, Nietzsche situates his own claim for relevance (attualit), his contempo-
rariness with respect to the present, in a disconnection and out-of-jointness. Those who are
truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide
with it nor adjust themselves to its demands.37
Agamben reads the Untimely Meditations as Nietzsches attempt to come to terms
with his time, and, as such, as a claim to actuality and relevance. Insofar as this coming
to terms and taking position with regard to the present announces itself under the guise
of the untimely, Nietzsche would seem paradoxically to equate the actual and contem-
porary to the untimely and the out-of-joint. Hence, the contemporary is the untime-
ly, that is to say, the inactual, the anachronistic. To be truly contemporary, Agamben
claims, to belong to ones time, is not to belong entirely to it, but to be somewhat irrel-
evant and inadequate to ones own present. In brief, the contemporary is the not-entirely
contemporary. Apart from its seemingly paradoxical nature, this definition describes the
task of contemporaneity as an extremely easy one. After all, who coincides perfectly with
ones own time? Who can adjust entirely to its demands?
Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether we should rely so staunchly on
Nietzsches authority to determine our understanding of contemporaneity, it is worth
returning briefly to Nietzsches text and examining the extent to which it really allows
40 DIACRITICS>>2013 >>41.1

for such conclusions. First of all, as is clear from the quote aboveand from the very title
of the second Untimely Meditation (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for
Life)Nietzsches fierce rant against his own time concerns mainly the problem of his-
tory and historicism, and what he perceived as an excess of historical culture among his
contemporaries. He does not reject the contemporary as such, but rather criticizes a spe-
cific trait of the intellectual culture of his time. The meditation proposes a diagnosis of
the disease of historicism and tries to prescribe a remedy. What Agamben leaves aside is
no minor detail. We suffer from a consuming historical fever, Nietzsche writes.38 The
human being resists the great and ever greater weight of the past: this oppresses him
and bends him sideways, it encumbers his gait like an invisible and sinister burden.39
This burden of the past is heavy to the point of being detrimental to life. The untimeli-
ness of this meditation consists precisely
Nietzsche does not reject the in going against the dominant and fashion-
able adoration of history, in criticizing and
contemporary as such, but rather criticizes recognizing as an illness what his contem-
poraries were so proud of. Hence the well-
a specific trait of the intellectual culture known figure of the herd, which Nietzsche
introduces up front. The herd lives entire-
of his time. The meditation proposes a ly in the present: These animals do not
know what yesterday or today are but leap
diagnosis of the disease of historicism about, eat, rest, digest and leap again.40
The herds happy inability to remember
and tries to prescribe a remedy. is a counterpoint to the gravity of histori-
cism. Nietzsches untimeliness, his inad-
equacy to his own time, is intrinsically connected to his attempt at being timelier; that
is, closer to the present and less burdened by the past and by historical consciousness.
Surely, it is not a matter of simply animalizing the human, but rather of searching for the
right balance between forgetfulness and remembrance, between the unhistorical and
the historical.41 Yet because of his immediate concern with the excess of history in his
own present, it is precisely a need for willful forgetfulness that Nietzsche emphasizes.
Agambens reading, on the other hand, turns Nietzsche upside down, making him into an
advocate and guarantor of an insistent denial of contemporaneity.
More nuanced than this outright distancing from the present is Agambens treatment
of time and history in The Man without Contenta book deeply anchored in its own time,
marked by the radical experiments of the 1960s artistic avant-gardes and the challenges
they posed to modern European aesthetics. In this early work (in fact, Agambens first
book),42 the problem of our relationship to the present emerges within a discussion about
art and aesthetic judgment. Drawing upon Walter Benjamins discussion of the loss of
tradition as loss of the transmissibility of culture, Agamben links this loss of transmissi-
bility to modern aesthetics: by destroying the transmissibility of the past, aesthetics re-
cuperates it negatively and makes intransmissibility a value in itself in the image of aes-
thetic beauty.43 What is at stake, for Agamben, is the possibility of surpassing aesthetics
Contemporaneity and Its Discontents>>Pedro Erber 41

and recuperating the means of transmission of culture. It is the transmissibility of cul-

ture, he writes, that, by endowing culture with an immediately perceptible meaning
and value, allows man to move freely toward the future without being hindered by the
burden of the past.44 In other words, it is the transmissibility of culture that allows us
to be contemporaneous with the past, with tradition, without losing our toehold in the
present. When, on the contrary, the means of transmission of culture are lost, the past
lingers on like a burden: a past that incessantly accumulates behind him and oppresses
him with the multiplicity of its now-indecipherable contents.45 The diagnosis parallels
closely Nietzsches untimeliness. However, Agamben takes issue not with historicism,
but with the modern aesthetic framing of artistic experience. Here too, Agamben follows
Nietzsche, whose critique of Kants definition of the beautiful in the Genealogy of Mor-
als opens the first chapter of The Man without Content.46 Yet, if the diagnosis is clear, the
remedythe path toward the surpassing of aesthetics and a recuperation of traditionis
obviously less so. What is certain is that, in this whole plot of transmissibility and its
loss, Agambenlike Benjamin himself, as well as Hegel, Heidegger, and even Nietzsche,
to some extentdeals with tradition in the singular, with the past, present, and future of
Western humanity. It is a framework that does not (and cannot) account for the current
situation of generalized circulation of culture, that is, for contemporaneity as the coexis-
tence and interspersing of a multiplicity of traditions in the same here and now.
Agamben was not the first to enlist Nietzsches untimeliness in an effort to con-
ceptualize our relationship to the present. On more than one occasion, Gilles Deleuze
suggested a fundamental connection between Nietzsches untimely and what Michel
Foucault referred to as the actuala connection that Agamben implicitly recuperates
at the end of What Is the Contemporary?47 Here, too, a paradox arises in the attempt
to connect the actual to the untimely and inactual: But how could the concept now
be called the actual when Nietzsche called it the inactual?, Deleuze and Flix Guattari
ponder in What Is Philosophy? Because, for Foucault, what matters is the difference
between the present and the actual. The actual is not what we are but, rather, what we
become, what we are in the process of becomingthat is to say, the Other, our becoming-
other.48 Like Agamben, Deleuze and Guattari appropriate and explain the unlikely af-
finity between the actual and inactual in terms of their own conceptual framework.
For the authors of What Is Philosophy?, what both Foucault and Nietzsche have in mind
with their seemingly opposing concepts is ultimately the temporality of becoming. The
Foucauldian actual, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the now of our becoming;49
like Nietzsches untimely, they argue, it is not a utopian future, but a present that still
does not show itself as such. Agambens claim that the contemporary is the untimely
repeats to some extent this gesture of bringing together the actual and inactual. Yet a
fundamental difference sets them apart, insofar as the untimely, for Agamben, is not the
now of becoming, but a messianic future.
Despite the initial reference to Nietzsche, Agambens understanding of the contempo-
rary stems from a very different thinker: in fact, it comes from someone whom Nietzsche
did not hold in very high esteem. Whereas Deleuze attempts to bring together Nietzsche
42 DIACRITICS>>2013 >>41.1

and Foucault, Agamben posits the much more unlikely combination of Nietzsche and
Saint Paul. Even if the explicit reference to the apostle appears only toward the end of
the essay, it is the Pauline kairos that grounds Agambens argument on the contemporary.
To perceive the darkness of the present, Agamben writes, is like being on time for an
appointment that one cannot but miss.50 Even the temporality of fashion is explained in
the text in terms of its kairological aspect, as an ungraspable threshold between a not
yet and a no more.51 It is worth noting that Agamben himself emphasizes elsewhere,
in relation to Pauls Letter to the Romans, the Pauline conception of redemption as an
already and a not yet.52 The same temporal paradox defines fashion and messianic re-
demption. It is therefore hardly surprising that Agamben ends up by reducing (or up-
grading) fashion to a theological signature of clothing.53 Indeed, the whole argument is
theological all along.

>> Authority

The problem with Agambens theological explanation of fashion is that it covers up one
crucial aspect of the mechanism of fashion, of the fashion industry, and of contemporary
capitalism in general; that is, the question of signature and branding and its significant
political implications as a manifestation of authority. The now of fashion, Agamben
writes, is not identifiable via any kind of chronometer. Is this now perhaps the mo-
ment in which the fashion designer conceives of the general concept, the nuance that
will define the new style of the clothes? Or is it the moment when the fashion designer
conveys the concept to his assistants, and then to the tailor who will sew the prototype?
Or rather, is it the moment of the fashion show?54 Fashion, however, is not merely a
matter of timing, of a when. It is also a matter of who: who makes, who wears, who
signs, etc. A fashion designer is not just someone with a great sense of timing, able to
predict exactly what will be fashionable in the next season, but also one with authority
to dictate, as is often said, the next fashion. Toward the end of his extensive analysis of
the fashion system, Barthes touches upon this authoritative and arbitrary dimension
of fashion. It is an aspect that must necessarily be hidden from sight so that fashion can
work as a system: what is decided on, imposed, finally appears as necessary, neutral in
the manner of a pure and simple fact: for this to take place, it is enough to keep the Fash-
ion decision secret; who will make it obligatory that this summers dresses be made of
raw silk?55 The who of fashion, the position of authority, must be hidden under a cloak
of natural or divine necessity. This wisdom of Fashion, Barthes elaborates further, im-
plies an audacious confusion between the past and the future, between what has been
decided upon and what is going to happen: a Fashion is recorded at the very moment it is
announced, at the very moment it is prescribed.56 It is in part because this prescriptive,
authoritative aspect of fashion is so deeply entangled with the temporal one that fashion
brands acquire the status of quasi-religious cult objects. Agambens discussion of fash-
ion as an entirely temporal question leaves aside the crucial role of the signature, of the
brand or logo, whichno matter whenis already fashionable in itself.
Contemporaneity and Its Discontents>>Pedro Erber 43

This function of the signature as authority, which informs the worlds of fashion and
commerce, also plays a crucial role in the structure of Agambens text. Each step of the
argument builds upon the authority of a specific event in the history of Western knowl-
edge. The breadth of fields and time periods is vast; it ranges from the Bible to Barthes,
from Russian poetry to contemporary astrophysics. At times, the accuracy of Agambens
information does not even seem to matter much: for example, the reference to the dark-
ness we see in the sky at night as the result of the distancing of remote galaxies, which,
according to Agamben, move away from us at a speed faster than that of light.57 What
counts is the signature of authority conferred by a place in the canon of Western intel-
lectual history. Perhaps this is another Pauline aspect of Agambens text. After all, is not
Paul himselfthe apostle of love, the an-
nouncer of the Second Coming of Christ But here and now, what is the point of going
also the great preacher of obedience to au-
thority in the Christian tradition? Every back, time and again, to Nietzsche, Barthes,
person should be in submission to the gov-
erning authorities for there is no authority Benjamin, or Paul as figures of authority?
except from God, and those which exist
are established by God, writes Paul to the Should we really continue to refer to the
Romans, thus attributing divine, theologi-
cal endorsement to earthly authorities.58 It putative tradition of Western thought in a
is hard not to perceive a resonance of this
attitude in Agambens own turn to the au- sort of religious exegetic mode?
thority of tradition.
But here and now, what is the point of going back, time and again, to Nietzsche,
Barthes, Benjamin, or Paul as figures of authority? Should we really continue to refer to
the putative tradition of Western thought in a sort of religious exegetic mode? Isnt this
precisely a way of refusing to be contemporary with those texts? In holding them at a
distance, as objects of pious reverence and contemplation, is it not the very possibility of
sharing their time that we renounce? Nietzsches suggestion in The Twilight of the Idols
to philosophize with a hammer is, in some way, a response to this mode of distant and
obedient relationship with the authority of tradition.59
At the same time, it is hard not to perceive in this insistent affirmation of the Western
tradition the symptoms of a profound disquiet with the contemporary momentwith
the fact that the West and the Rest have become increasingly contemporaneous and
therefore indistinguishable from each other. For European thinkers in the early twen-
tieth century, such as Valry, Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl, it may have still been
possible to assert the European identity of philosophy under the guise of universalism
and to equate the crisis of European cultural hegemony with a crisis of spirit. We have
now reached a point where theoryin order to maintain its identity as theorymust
renounce its identity as Western. The contemporary as the time we now inhabit, as our
own historical time, has become inextricable from the increasing contemporization of
differenceto the extent that, in denying the latter, it is the present itself that one refuses
44 DIACRITICS>>2013 >>41.1

to recognize. Agamben is certainly not alone here, but the brief essay What Is the Con-
temporary? condenses this risk in exemplary fashion.

>>

The contemporary in What Is the Contemporary? is ultimately the time of the com-
ing Messiah. Despite the references to Nietzsche, Foucault, and astrophysics, it is under
the sign of Christian messianism that Agamben positions himself in the current debate
regarding contemporaneity. There is nothing more exemplary, he argues toward the
end of the text, than Pauls gesture at the point in which he experiences and announces
to his brothers the contemporariness par excellence that is messianic time, the being-
contemporary with the Messiah, which he calls precisely the time of the now (ho nyn
kairos).60 To be contemporary would thus mean to distance oneself from the darkness
of the everyday and to perceive in each now the possibility of the advent of the Messiah.
Surely, in referring to the darkness of the present Agamben is not reacting directly
to the state of generalized cultural circulation. Neither does he refer, like Lvi-Strauss,
to the risk of disintegration of European culture due to an Islamic explosion. Should
we read this emphasis on darkness and shadow through the prism of The Man with-
out Content, in which non-art, as the shadow of aesthetically framed art, appears as the
privileged site of our most original aesthetic emotions?61 Or perhaps, in connection
with Agambens reflection on our contemporary political space, darkened by the shadow
of the concentration camp and the reduction of humanity to bare life?62 In any case,
Agambens response to the question What is the contemporary?, which takes the form
of a messianism without God, forecloses any possibility of approaching the contempo-
rary in its most novel, problematic, and thought-provoking aspect: in short, the fact that
the same word names today the historical period in which we supposedly live and the
very impossibility of historical periodization, insofar as the unity of its putative subject
unravels itself in singularities irreducible to generalization.
The theoretical and political task that ensues depends on our ability and willingness
to think through the allochronic discourse of historicism and the accompanying mod-
ern dichotomies between humanitas and anthropos, between the West and its others.
As Fabian writes, the radical contemporaneity of mankind is a project.63 And it is not
through some sort of defensive messianism that theory, philosophy, or whatever name
we would like to give this mode of thinking, will be able to face the task of contempora-
neity. It is not a god that can save us.
Contemporaneity and Its Discontents>>Pedro Erber
Notes
The argument of this article was first presented in the
workshop Cenrios Contemporneos da Escrita at
PUCRio de Janeiro, in July 2012. I thank Karl Erik
Schllhammer for the invitation that prompted me to
write this article, and Taran Kang for crucial insights
during the elaboration of the text. I thank also Franz
Hofer, Natalie Melas, Karen Benezra, Diane Brown,
and my anonymous reviewers for the very helpful
comments and suggestions.
1 Rajchman, The Contemporary: A New Idea?,
126.
2 In Kindai to sekai no ks (Conception of not too much. When I was in Brazil, more than fifty
modernity and conception of the world), Naoki Sakai
powerfully demonstrates the significance of Fabians
notion of coevalness for a discussion of contempora-
neity beyond the realm of anthropology.
3 Fabian, Time and the Other, xli.
4 Ibid., 67.
5 Ibid., 164.
6 Aug, An Anthropology for Contemporaneous
Worlds, 47.
7 Ibid.
8 Carvalho, Nine Nights, 138.
9 Ibid., 13132.
10 Carvalho, Monglia, 25; my translation.
11 Aug, An Anthropology for Contemporaneous
Worlds, 50.
12 Ibid., 89.
13 Lvi-Strauss and Grisoni, Lvi-Strauss en
33 mots, 26; my translation. The contents of this
interview and the polemic it generated resurface in
the narrative of Nine Nights. The main narrator relates
his own interview with Lvi-Strauss in a way that ap-
parently fictionalizes the above-mentioned interview:
45
I twice interviewed Lvi-Strauss in Paris, long before
I knew that I would one day become interested in
the life and death of an American anthropologist he
had met during his brief stay in Cuiab in 1938. Long
before I had ever heard of Buell Quain. In one of the
interviews, he referred to a controversy about French
racism and xenophobia. His position had been mis-
interpreted, so he restated his argument: The more
cultures communicate with each other, the more they
tend to become uniform, the less they have to com-
municate. The problem for humanity is to make sure
there is enough communication between cultures, but
years ago, I was profoundly moved, of course, by the
plight of those little cultures, threatened with extinc-
tion. Fifty years later, I am surprised to note that my
own culture is threatened too (Carvalho, Nine Nights,
60).
14 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the
Task of Thinking, 435; translation modified.
15 Valry, La crise de lesprit, 995; The Crisis of
the Spirit, qtd. in Heidegger, Hlderlins Earth and
Heaven, 201.
16 Heidegger, Hlderlins Earth and Heaven, 201.
17 Ibid.
18 Nishitani, Anthropos and Humanitas, 265.
19 Ibid., 262.
20 Smith, Introduction: The Contemporaneity
Question, 10.
21 Sakai, Theory and Asian Humanity, 454.
22 Ibid., 456.
23 Aug, An Anthropology for Contemporaneous
Worlds, 50.
24 Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, 44;
translation modified. The translator adds the article
46 DIACRITICS>>2013 >>41.1

the before contemporary (contemporaneo), thus 47 Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, 53.
nominalizing a term that, in my view, is used here by
48 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 112.
Agamben as an adjective.
See also Deleuze, Foucault, historien du prsent.
25 See Maistre, Considerations on France.
49 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 112.
26 Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, 44.
50 Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, 46.
27 Ibid., 45.
51 Ibid., 48.
28 Ibid.
52 Agamben, The Time That Is Left, 6.
29 Ibid., 41.
53 Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, 49.
30 Ibid.; italics in the original.
54 Ibid., 48.
31 Ibid., 39.
55 Barthes, The Fashion System, 270.
32 Sakai, Voices of the Past, 118.
56 Ibid., 27172.
33 Ibid.
57 Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, 46.
34 Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, 39.
58 Rom. 13:1.
35 The second of the Untimely Meditations is often
59 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 31.
published separately: On the Advantage and Disad-
vantage of History for Life. 60 Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, 52.
36 Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, 40. 61 Agamben, The Man without Content, 49.
37 Ibid. 62 See, for instance, Agamben, Homo Sacer; Rem-
nants of Auschwitz; and What Is a Camp?
38 Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage
of History for Life, 8. 63 Fabian, Time and the Other, xli.
39 Ibid., 9.

40 Ibid., 8.

41 Ibid., 10.

42 Luomo senza contenuto, first published in 1970

(Rizzoli), reprinted by Quodlibet in 1994.

43 Agamben, The Man without Content, 110.

44 Ibid., 108.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., 1.
Contemporaneity and Its Discontents>>Pedro Erber
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IMAGE: Sarah Slavick

(RE)TRANSCRIBE, 2010
Oil on wood (hundreds of wood panels of varying
depths, widths, and heights), 72 x 72 in.
Photo: Jake Belcher