The politics of temporality: Autonomy, temporal spaces and resoluteness

Abstract

While many theorists and projects raise the notion of creating more ‘free time’, the implication that this will somehow be ‘beneficial’ is inadequate without a deeper understanding of how time is related to the individual and psychological well-being. This article offers some considerations for the raison d’etre of what can be termed a politics of time, taking as its trajectory the phenomenological understanding of time in Heidegger, and the view that restricted experiences of time in contemporary capitalist society fragment the phenomenological unity of individual temporalities. A politics of time is posed here as the necessary intervention to alleviate the subsequent inability to experience an authentic temporal orientation in such conditions. The article offers that any such temporal project must place such an understanding of temporality as its theoretical basis, and apodictically, the creation of ‘temporal autonomous spaces’ (TAS) as its political purpose.