Thinking the moment of the originary : memory and the paradoxes of re-turning

Abstract

Focusing on the paradoxes of thinking the originary, this essay attempts to explore the contingencies and ambivalences shaping the modalities of memory and turning. Examining the role time and presence play in enabling the thinking of turning, the conceptual specificities constituting time in terms of linearity are here opened up in terms of the contingent relationalities (un)tying time, memory, and presence. On this ground this essay turns towards Bergson and Heidegger’s views on time and explores the problematic turns characterising such views. Reflecting on how the thinking of turning in terms of linear, homogenous time enables the signification of originary, and foregrounding the (im)possibility of turning towards the originary, this essay gestures towards acknowledging the continuous negotiations and movements of simultaneity that constitute any attempt at turning. Here are no messianic claims to alterity, or to radically rethink time and the originary, but rather a questioning of the paradoxes of any such attempts, with the cautionary awareness, however, that any such attempt remains operative always as one of many partial, ambivalent, and contingent turns.