If Aristotle sought to understand time through change, might we not reverse the procedure and seek to understand change through time? Once we do this, argues Peter Osborne, it soon becomes clear that ideas such as avant-garde, modern, postmodern and tradition-which are usually only treated as markets for empirically discrete periods, movements or styles-are best understood as categories of historical totalization. More specifically, Osborne claims, such ideas involve distinct "temporalizations" of history, giving rise to conflicting politics of time.
His book begins with a consideration of the main aspects of modernity and develops though a series of critical engagements with the major twentieth-century positions in the philosophy of history. He concludes with a fascinating history of the avant-garde intervention into the temporality of everyday life in surrealism, the situationists and the work of Henri Lefebvre.

Elaborates a dialectics of modernity, eternity and tradition

About the Author
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London. He is a long-serving member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time, Anywhere or Not At All, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, Conceptual Art and Marx.


Book Information
ISBN 9781844676736
Author Peter Osborne
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Verso Books
Publisher Verso Books
Weight(grams) 326g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 132mm * 23mm