Philosophical zap

‘The time is out of joint,’ says Hamlet. And, as Jacques Derrida tells us in Specters of Marx (1993), it is also ‘deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is off its hinges … off course, beside itself, disadjusted.’ If time was deranged thirty years ago amid the AIDS crisis and the Balkan wars, in the wake of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ and the first Gulf War, the times have now mutated, become radically other again and again. There is before Covid-19 and after, before generative artificial intelligence and after. There is time before the return of fascism as a global phenomenon and time after: time now as authoritarians surge to power on promises of a return to pasts not only unreachable (and, for many, undesirable) but which never existed in the ways they are now imagined.