The ways in which we imagine and experience time are changing dramatically. Climate change, unending violent conflict, fraying material infrastructures, permanent debt and widening social inequalities mean that we no longer live with an expectation of a progressive future, a generative past, or a flourishing now that characterized the temporal imaginaries of the post-war period. Time, it appears, is not flowing, but has become stuck, intensely felt, yet radically suspended.
How do we now ‘take care’ of time? How can we understand change as requiring time not passing? And what can quotidian experiences of suspended time - waiting, delaying, staying, remaining, enduring, returning and repeating - tell us about the survival of social bonds? Enduring Time responds to the question of the relationship between time and care through a paradoxical engagement with time’s suspension. Working with an eclectic archive of cultural, political and artistic objects, it aims to reestablish the idea that time might be something we both have and share, as opposed to something we are always running out of.
A strikingly original philosophy of time, this book also provides a detailed survey of contemporary theories of the topic; it is an indispensable read for those attempting to live meaningfully in the current age.
Table of Contents:
preface
acknowledgements
1. Introduction: On the survival of obdurate temporalities in late liberalism
2. Maintaining: On time, attachment and care
3. Waiting: On psychoanalytic time, generation and protest
4. Repeating: On stilled time, maternal time and the non-reproductive
5. Enduring: On chronophobia, incarcerated time and a politics of hopefulness
6. Recalling: Late Memory: on time and older age
7. Staying: On anachronism, out-datedness, and the case of ‘psychic reality’
8. Delaying: On time’s withdrawal and the surpassing disaster
9. Conclusion: Time without project and the time that we have
bibliography
index
About the Author :
Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Studies, in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, UK and the author of Maternal Encounters (2008).
Review :
The remit of Enduring Time is generous and expansive, implicating a seemingly limitless range of temporal tropes: delaying, waiting, repeating, persisting. But Baraitser offers not merely a philosophical rumination on time’s suspension, but also an intervention that seeks to create, however partially, conditions for political action, too.
This original and comprehensive book is an insightful and valuable source for artists, activists, students, and academics working on (maternal) time, temporality, and care.
Enduring Time is an extended meditation on the often-despised forms of time both revealed in and required by the practices of care that ‘take’ time. Baraitser shows us how to think and revalue the forms of time’s suspension experienced in and through maintenance, grief, waiting … to see what endures. A beautiful and profound book that calls us to notice what might otherwise be missed or dismissed, it brings to the fore the multiform labours underpinning the maintenance of existence by theorising the temporal underbelly of ‘our times’. Baraitser shows us what, in our haste, we often can’t see: the ways time doesn’t ‘pass’, and how, in that stuck time, the question of care surfaces.
Baraitser: “brilliant and capacious”
A prodigious and capacious work that offers a complex and surprising reflection on time and, along the way, a new theoretical foundation for psychosocial studies. Drawing on a wide range of cultural and theoretical accounts of time, its multiple forms, Baraitser give us a new way of thinking about a time that does not move, one that remains, fraught with the anachronistic and the “useless” as minor paths toward affirmation. This book releases “maintenance” from the shadows of disavowed social life. The time at issue here is one that conforms neither to project nor to progress, but slowly and insistently returns our attention to the repetitive practices that make life with and for others. The “useless” comes to characterize as well modes of thinking that seek value, even reparation, in the time that remain, in the wake of destruction, but also in the face of closing horizons.
This work is actually a tour de force, even though it prizes work that does not always gain a monumental status in the public eye. It constitutes the most significant rethinking of “women’s time” since Kristeva’s influential article. It produces an alliance between maternal and queer thinking through recourse to the pervasive character of the “unproductive” – the work is as provocative as it is persuasive. In other words, it changes multiple frameworks at once, finding and asserting the value of “not moving on” as it links to both the ethical and aesthetic potentials of our enduring ties with others. Finally, it brings philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, feminism and race theory, art and art criticism, together with trenchant social critique, philosophical meditation, and psychoanalytic inquiry in a brilliant and capacious way. Without any recourse to essentialism, Baraitser shows us for the first time the temporal world of care, of maintenance, their nonproductive and nonteleological potentials in an ethics that illuminates our world as one of time-consuming practices of staying with and for one another in the midst of destruction and repair.
