The end of time -the shrinkage of the present

The features of this "end" include the "shrinkage of existential time

and the reduction to a present that hardly qualifies as such any longer,

 given the virtual effacement of that past and future that can alone

define a present in the first place" (708). Jameson

We may believe we have that immediacy of experience but do we ever think of 

the inescapable mediacy of representation.

Time has been ontologically reduced to space, 

Time has

become a nonperson and people stopped
writing about it. The novelists and poets gave it up under the entirely

plausible assumption that it had been largely covered by Proust, Mann,

Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot and offered few further chances of literary advancement.

  

What is time? A secret—insubstantial and omnipotent.

A prerequisite of the external world, a motion intermingled and fused with bodies

existing and moving in space. But would there be no time, if there
were no motion? No motion, if there were no time? What a question!
Is time a function of space? Or vice versa? Or are the two identical?

 

An even bigger question! Time is active, by nature it is much like a verb,
it both “ripens” and “brings forth.” And what does it bring forth?

Change! Now is not then, here is not there—for in both cases motion
lies in between. But since we measure time by a circular motion closed
in on itself, we could just as easily say 

to position language at the centre of things is also to foreground temporality, for whether one comes at it from the sentence or the speech act, from presence or the coeval, from comprehension or the transmission of signs and signals, temporality is not merely presupposed but becomes the ultimate object or ground of analysis" (706)

Derrida’s laconic epitaph on the Aristotelian

philosophy of temporality: “In a sense, it is always too late to talk

 about time.”

Can we do any better with space?