100 Atheists

[badger2]

#18 takes the time bait, a postponement that skips the real time problem of presence-in-itself, which makes god impossible due to the becoming space of time and the becoming time of space. This slogan from the hippie years truly scared some believers: "This is the first day of the rest of your life."

 

[badger2]

Sunday Morning: Parent's Basement and the Founding of the World

Haegglund explains the pathology via Derrida:

'All metaphysical theses (e.g., that there must be a simple substance, an uncaused cause, or a necessary being that is the ground of all contingent beings) can be countered by an antithesis that demonstrates that these theses are incompatible with the constitution of time and space. The antinomies are thus structured around the conflict between a thesis that asserts that there must be an indivisible instance and an antithesis that asserts that there cannot be an indivisible instance since everything is divided by time and space.
....
If time must be spatially inscribed, then the experience of time is essentially dependent on which material supports and technologies are available to inscribe time. That is why Derrida maintains that inscriptions do not befall an already constituted space but produce the spatiality of space. Derrida can thus think the experience of space and time as constituted by historical or technological conditions, without reducing spacing to an effect of a certain historical or technological epoch. If spacing were merely an effect of historical conditions, it would supervene on something that precedes it and thus adhere to the metaphysical notion of spacing as a Fall. Spacing is rather an ultratranscendental condition because there has never been and will never be a self-presence that grounds the passage between past and future. That is why any moment (always [italics]) must be recorded in order to be. The ultratranscendental movement of spacing thus accounts for why there is neither a beginning nor an end to historicity and technicity. The inscriptions that trace time are susceptible to all sorts of transformations, manipulations, and erasures, but the general condition of spacing cannot be eliminated.'
(Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Ch. 1 Autoimmunity of Time: Derrida and Kant)