![]() ![]() It “is so closely bound up with the present that it composes with it a singular temporal form the future which Heidegger considered as a reality which is given at the present moment.” Footnote 20 “My future” is open to possibility as such without devolving into pure abstraction, and is capable of acknowledging failure as a real risk without viewing it as either inevitable or in need of redemption, precisely because it is grounded in the concreteness of past and present. Footnote 19 Crucially, this future is one that is integrated into the flow of time, characterized by the interwovenness of the axes of time. We must, Beauvoir suggests, embrace agency and the likelihood of failure, indeed recognizing the latter as both consequence and enabling condition of the former-for a being that cannot fail, whose will is instantly and perfectly realized, would be neither truly free nor capable of generating an ethics. On the one hand, there is “my future”-this is “the definite direction of a particular transcendence,” a “movement which, prolonging my existence of today, will fulfill my present projects and surpass them towards new ends.” Footnote 17 This is the future of the individual who acknowledges and inhabits, rather than flees, the ambiguity that, according to Beauvoir, characterizes the human condition: We are conscious, free, projecting, reflective, yet also one fragile body among many, subject to circumstances beyond our control in Nietzsche’s words, both “creature and creator.” Footnote 18 To live towards “my future,” we must grapple with the fundamental precarity of our lives and projects without seeking refuge in fantasies of cosmic certainty (“everything happens for a reason,” “it will all work out in the end”) but also without surrendering to fatalistic escapism (“nothing I do will change the outcome anyway”). Footnote 15 The best example of this can arguably be found in The Ethics of Ambiguity, where we find an extended discussion of “the present and the future.” Footnote 16 Here, Beauvoir draws out two different-and, as we will see, ultimately competing-ways of relating to the future. Much of the scholarship on Beauvoir and temporality focuses on The Second Sex and, naturally, Coming of Age, but I want to turn to earlier texts that already map out the key concerns of her model of time in clear, bold terms. ![]() These resonances, however, should only serve to recast rather than dissolve the tension between their approaches ultimately, we need to acknowledge the distinctiveness of their differing concerns and aims. Footnote 14 Both resist teleological perspectives problematize the endeavor to describe the structures of lived temporality in neutral terms and show that temporality is crucial to the pursuit of a political phenomenology. For both Beauvoir and Fanon, for example, freedom is bound up with futurity, with its lack therefore cashed out in terms of stagnation, repetition, and the entrapment within a hollow moment that prevents authentic projection. However, reading them together also reveals affinities that broaden our understanding of reductive temporalities. While Beauvoir suggests that reductive temporalities work to sever the future from the past and present, Fanon locates this destructive operation in the heightening of their entanglement. Overall, then, it seems that these two models of temporality have radically different emphases. ![]() Both resist teleological perspectives problematize the endeavor to describe the structures of lived temporality in neutral terms and show that temporality is crucial to the pursuit of a political phenomenology. However, I will contend that there are deep affinities between these accounts: For both Beauvoir and Fanon, freedom is bound up with futurity, with its lack therefore cashed out in terms of stagnation, repetition, and the entrapment within a hollow moment that prevents authentic projection. At first glance, it seems that these two models of temporality have radically different emphases. This paper will explore what we might learn about the operation of different types of reductive temporality if we read Beauvoir and Fanon alongside each other, focusing primarily on the early works that arguably lay out the central concerns of their respective temporal frameworks. Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon both argue that oppression fundamentally constrains the subject’s relationship to and embodied experience of time, yet their accounts of temporality are rarely brought together. ![]()
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