Russell West-Pavlov

Conceptual studies became very popular in the 1960s. In the social sciences in particular, they boomed, often with a Marxist undertone (especially in the German tradition, less so in the Anglo-Saxon area). Philosophy also quickly felt the need to define concepts and notions more precisely. In almost all cases, attempts were made to streamline the debate: agreement on what a certain word or concept means is a clear basis for discussion, otherwise you will be talking next to each other. Of course, it is not a simple job, because the spectrum that a concept covers can be quite broad, and it always appears that the angle you look at the concept is crucial for the interpretation. That immediately means that you are also talking at a fairly abstract level.
This book, published in the series The New Critical Idiom by Routledge, tops the category of abstract concepts. Because, is there something more elusive than ‘time’ or ‘temporality’? The classic reference is always to Augustine (5th century) who wrote: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know”. The author of this study, Russel West-Pavlov, hasn’t been put of by this dilemma. He is a professor of literature studies in various places in Germany, but also in South Africa and Australia, and belongs to the Critical School, of Marxist origin, specialized in what is called ‘Subaltern Studies’: the post-colonial and post-imperialist view from the South to the Western world.
It is therefore not surprising that West-Pavlov in this book on temporality is very critical of the concept of absolute, universal and homogeneous time forced upon the world by Western modernity. He contrasts this Western concept with the many other forms of temporality that still exist or that have been repressed by that universal temporality. His analysis is erudite and enormously synthetic, but at the same time - how could it be otherwise - very abstract. What particularly appealed to me is that he approaches the concept of temporality in particular from systemic thinking. At the same time, his analysis also contains somewhat simplistic assumptions, and his final conclusion remains very vague. For a full review, see my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3139941316.… (més)