Conclusion

This concluding chapter poses the question of whether or not we have too much past and too little future. After all, the notion of the past has dramatically increased in its range of meanings, as has the future. The relation between the past, the present, and the future is a three-fold relationship in which one dimension cannot exist for long without the others. Ordering this three-fold temporal structure anew and bringing the three dimensions into a balanced relation, however, continues to be an open adventure. To be sure, it is also the greatest challenge posed by the demise of the modern time regime.

Is Time out of Joint?

This chapter argues that we are not at the terminal end of the modern time regime but merely at the beginning of its renewal. Before sketching out the main features of this renewal, the chapter first considers the disorientation and uncertainty that accompanies this temporal reorientation. Like William Shakespeare's Hamlet at the beginning of the Renaissance four hundred years ago, we are today being confronted with a change of temporal ontology. Here, Hamlet's cry, “The time is out of joint!” is an alarming diagnosis that has been steadily intensifying since the beginning of the twenty-first century. And as this chapter shows, it has only become more and more deafening.

Concepts of Time in Late Modernity

This chapter demonstrates how the problems of “polar inertia” and its implications have been the subject of intensified philosophical reflection and debate since the 1980s. Polar inertia is the condition in which we have arrived at a temporal limit. However, we have also arrived at the absolute dead end of the modern time regime, in terms of both its compatibility with the rhythms of human life and the logic internal to the dynamics it has unleashed. The positions taken all grapple with the aporias, or inner contradictions, of the modern temporal regime and its possible alternatives or compensations. However, they do not lose sight of the epistemic presuppositions of this temporal ontology in the process.