On Anachronism

*On Anachronism* joins together Shakespeare and Proust as the great writers of love to show that love is always anachronistic, and never more so when it is homosexual. Drawing on Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and Levinas and Deleuze, difficult but essential theorists of the subject of ‘being and time’ and ‘time and the other’ the book examines why speculation on time has become so crucial within modernity. Through the related term ‘anachorism’, it considers how discussion of time always turns into discussion of space, and how this, too, can never be quite defined. It speculates on chance and thinks of ways in which a quality of difference within time – heterogeneity, anachronicity – is essential to think of what is meant by ‘the other’. The book examines how contemporary theory considers the future and its relation to the past as that which is inescapable in the form of trauma. It considers what is meant by ‘the event’, that which is the theme of all post-Nietzschean theory and which breaks in two conceptions of time as chronological. Using sharp and incisive readings of Proust, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Borges, Marquez, films such as My Own Private Idaho and 2046, and speculating on anachronism in the music of Mahler, the book brings together criticism and cultural theory and critical theory, in a way which shows how the subject has been a dominant one in thinking within modernity, modernism, and in the postmodern.

Jeremy Tambling is Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester.