On Temporality & Life Critique
A comment on a footnote in one of Fernando Coronil very last articles, "The Future in Question: History and Utopia in Latin America (1989-2010)".
Coronil observes in a footnote to R. Koselleck's work that "Scholars have shown that conceptions of history and cultural cosmologies are intimately connected to each other and are historically specific" (288). In the piece Coronil found it necessary to discuss to a certain extent the question of the future, or rather, to be more precise, the issue of a "present-day future imaginary" (232). His discussion looks in particular at how the the "turn to the Left" in Latin America has been linked to new contemporary imaginaries for a future envisioned from the state.
The point Coronil is making is simple. He means to say that the cultural category of the future that Latin Americans work with, serving as a basic understanding of temporality, would have some kind of historically specific cosmological and thus non-universal ("non-Cartesian") or transcendental grounding. Now, I am sure that that is the case... that history, temporality, culture and cosmology/religion are enmeshed; that these generate non-universal and thus situated or fixed, both historically and spatially ways of thinking and acting.
But what should I do with this thought, with this understanding? I ask the question, and what comes to mind is a programme for critique. That is to say, a never-ending project to denaturalise and present genealogies of whatever categories I take for granted (Nietzsche and Foucault again!), in order to privilege, but only momentarily of course -- how else could it be?--, yet still forcefully, other categories, which I would then appropriate for a line, a page, a book, and thus go on and on... and in this manner, I imagine one lives out other possible lives.
I like this. But then I keep on asking myself, what would be the purpose of any of this? I can't seem to displace or overcome this last question.
Coronil observes in a footnote to R. Koselleck's work that "Scholars have shown that conceptions of history and cultural cosmologies are intimately connected to each other and are historically specific" (288). In the piece Coronil found it necessary to discuss to a certain extent the question of the future, or rather, to be more precise, the issue of a "present-day future imaginary" (232). His discussion looks in particular at how the the "turn to the Left" in Latin America has been linked to new contemporary imaginaries for a future envisioned from the state.
The point Coronil is making is simple. He means to say that the cultural category of the future that Latin Americans work with, serving as a basic understanding of temporality, would have some kind of historically specific cosmological and thus non-universal ("non-Cartesian") or transcendental grounding. Now, I am sure that that is the case... that history, temporality, culture and cosmology/religion are enmeshed; that these generate non-universal and thus situated or fixed, both historically and spatially ways of thinking and acting.
But what should I do with this thought, with this understanding? I ask the question, and what comes to mind is a programme for critique. That is to say, a never-ending project to denaturalise and present genealogies of whatever categories I take for granted (Nietzsche and Foucault again!), in order to privilege, but only momentarily of course -- how else could it be?--, yet still forcefully, other categories, which I would then appropriate for a line, a page, a book, and thus go on and on... and in this manner, I imagine one lives out other possible lives.
I like this. But then I keep on asking myself, what would be the purpose of any of this? I can't seem to displace or overcome this last question.
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