Time in Exile

In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lispector

By Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

Subjects: Philosophy Of Literature, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Comparative Literature
Series: SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory
Paperback : 9781438478180, 182 pages, January 2021
Hardcover : 9781438478173, 182 pages, March 2020

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Exile as Postexistential Condition
Times of Excess, Times of Exile
Exile and the Afterness of Existence
The Exile of Memory

2. The Ecstasy of Time (In Conversation with Heidegger)
The Ecstasy of Time in Being and Time
The Ecstasy of Overcoming after Being and Time
From a Thought of the Ecstasy of Being to a Listening to the Whiling of Being

3. Time Absent/Time Present (In Discussion with Blanchot)
The Flight of Philosophy into Literature
The Literature of the Step [Not] Beyond
Neither Absence nor Presence—or the Neutral Time of the Between

4. Time Being (Reading Gerundive Time with Clarice Lispector)
Reading Time and the Time of Reading
The Risk of Writing in Gerundive Time
It Is-Being: Or the Neuter Crafting of Life

5. Without Conclusion: A Home in Gerundive

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Proposes a theoretically rich treatment of temporality within exile as "gerundive" time.

Description

This book is a philosophical reflection on the experience of time from within exile. Its focus on temporality is unique, as most literature on exile focuses on the experience of space, as exile involves dislocation, and moods of nostalgia and utopia. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback proposes that in exile, time is experienced neither as longing back to the lost past nor as wanting a future to come but rather as a present without anchors or supports. She articulates this present as a "gerundive" mode, in which the one who is in exile discovers herself simply being, exposed to the uncanny experience of having lost the past and not having a future. To explore this, she establishes a conversation among three authors whose work has exemplified this sense of gerundive time: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot, and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The book does not aim to discuss how these authors understand the relation between time and exile, but presents a conversation with them in relation to this question that reflects new aspects in their work. Attempting to think and express this difficult sense of time from within exile, Time in Exile engages with the relation between thought and language, and between philosophy and literature. Departing from concrete existential questions, Sá Cavalcante Schuback reveals new philosophical and theoretical modes to understand what it means to be present in times of exile.

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University in Sweden. She is the author, editor, and coeditor of many books, including (with Tora Lane) Dis-orientations: Philosophy, Literature and Lost Grounds of Modernity.

Reviews

"It is very rare that one can find in philosophy a book that has been written neither as a commentary, nor as an exegesis of the authors in question, but rather as an original and thought-provoking reflection in which the author is the main philosophical voice in the book. " — María del Rosario Acosta López, coeditor of Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Fredrich Schiller and Philosophy