The time lag in question here may be understood in two ways: as a shift in time itself, and as a corresponding shift in signi\ue000cation. The following consid- erations begin with a general orientation as to the ordering of time; then they cross over to speci\ue000c phenomenal \ue000elds in which time unfolds its eVect.1

The logos of time is to be understood as the way we think time, talk about it, represent it and present it, and all of this with reference to an experience of time that like all phenomena is to be brought \u201cto utter its own meaning.\u201d2

The oldest discourse on time is found inm\u00e8y o w. Chronos is known as a god who devours his own children, a god older than Zeus. Here time is portrayed as a power that in coming to be and passing away, in aging, manifests itself as a deterioration and disintegration of forces. Some of this lives on in poetry: \u201cMake haste Chronos! Out of the rattling trot!\u201d\u2014 in Goethe Chronos is apos- trophized as coachman and entreated in his distant proximity. In Virginia Woolf\u2019s Mrs. Dalloway it is Big Ben\u2019s chime that scans the course of the day within the novel.3 Or \ue000nally Octavio Paz in hisPiedra del Sol: \u201cmientras el tiempo

Theclassical ordering of time that has been determining our thinking for cen- turies develops particular coping strategies that work against time\u2019s power. Three fundamental aspects of this may be distinguished.

(1) In the \ue000rst place there is the attempt at a certain demythologization. Time appears no longer as a who or what presided over by a time-sovereign or an anonymous temporal power; rather time appears as a how, as mode, as schema. Time d\u00e9butsin something orin someone, no longer under its own direction. On the one hand Aristotle composes the great prelude: he derives a physical time from cosmic kinesis. On the other hand there is Augustine, who develops a psy- chic time from the lived time of the soul. This psycho-physical duality reaches up to the present day. Time is cordoned oV as long as the question \u201cWhat is X?\u201d or \u201cWho am I?\u201d does noteo ipso carry a temporal or spatial accent. What emerges in time is not something that temporalizes itself. In modern terms, identity does not mean in the same breathtime identity, in the sense that today one is accustomed to speaking ofplace identity. Identity remains timeless in its very core.

(3) Time itself is thought as a member of an opposition. The most pregnant oppo- sitions are those of time and space (following after one another in succession versus standing out from one another in extension), of time and eternity (\ue001owing vs. standing, temporal \ue001ux vs. nunc stans). In this way the force of time is tamed: one is at the mercy of time as a human being, but not as a think- ing being.

The classical ordering of time gradually gives way to aradical experience of time the consequence of which is that the logos turns into a \u201clogos of the aesthetic world.\u201d5 This leads to a transformation of the classical representation of time. (1) Time is henceforth more than an attribute of things or a way of experienc- ing the soul; it is also more than the form of intuition for a transcendental sub- ject. Time is no longer reduced to a mere modality, since it has a decisive part in the formation, shaping, and realization of something (object), of someone (subject), and of meaning (orderings). These three moments, still divided between three worlds by Karl Popper, have their respective temporal ways of being. Temporality turns out to be a generator of identity. (2) Time no longer falls under binary schemata; it proves to bed iV er ing in the sense of a holding up, shift, or postponement. (3) Time frees itself from the opposition to timeless instances; it becomes entangled in itself in the form of aself-reference that leads to a self- doubling and self-duplication. Thus Husserl remarks at the beginning of his time lectures,6 \u201cthat the perception of a temporal object has itself temporality, that perception of duration presupposes duration of perception\u201d; and Merleau- Ponty speaks in his late writings of a temporal \u201cvortex.\u201d7 Here emerges with

increasing and varying radicality a phenomenology of time in which time folds chiasmatically over what it determines: as consciousness of time and time of consciousness in Husserl; as being and time as well as time and being in Heidegger; as \ue001esh of time and time of the \ue001esh in Merleau-Ponty; as time of the other and alterity of time in Levinas and Derrida; as time of narrative and narrated time in Ric\u0153ur. Equally worth mentioning are human-scienti\ue000c authors such as L. Binswanger, E. Minkowski, E. Straus or V. von Weizs\u00e4cker in whose work the pathology of time takes on particular weight. In a broader sense the attempts of Bergson and Whitehead to think lived time together with a modern biology or cosmology belong within this sphere as well. Finally we should point to the fact that the conception of time in classical physics, which in many ways also has a part to play in the philosophical theories of time, has itself undergone substantial revisions. For instance, the theory of relativity has done away with the representation of a temporal receptacle and an absolute time, and deals with time-spaces, with a dependence upon movement in the measuring of time. We come upon new forms of time, \u201cupon times dependent on the internal state of a system, upon a time that is an operator\u201d and lends the \u201carrow of time\u201d a new signi\ue000cance.8

In what follows I shall restrict myself to looking for a way through the \ue000eld of time experience, orienting the search according to two central problems tightly intertwined with one another. The one problem concerns the self-refer- entiality already mentioned, which is not only restricted to time but returns equally in phenomena such as \ue001esh, language, or self, and prevents a hierarchic ordering of the phenomena. The other problem concerns the indirect mode of access required when something withdraws from precisely those orderings in which it is conceptually grasped. Here Wittgenstein\u2019s distinction should be remembered, his diVerence between saying and showing, which do not coin- cide; or the late Merleau-Ponty, who establishes with regard to philosophy that \u201celle fait voir par des mots\u201d\u2014it shows by words, it shows what does not per- mit of being directly said.9 One can hardly better formulate the task of a phe- nomenology. In the same place Merleau-Ponty places philosophy alongside literature (as well as politics): \u201cno absolutely pure philosophical word\u201d is what this means. Philosophy works in parallel to the arts, which perform (auf f\u00fchren) in colors, sounds, movements and scenes what philosophy demonstrates (aufweist). This does not signify a simple con\ue001ation of categories, but rather a considerable proximity that also \ue000nds expression in the phenomenological analyses of time. It comes across in the following spheres of problems, which one could ascribe to a kind of \u2018minimal art of time\u2019.