ABSTRACT
This is a book about time. More specifically, its aim is to introduce questions of sexual difference into debates about the temporal aspects of the contemporary Western world and its culture/s – debates that have hinged on accepted accounts of the defining differences between modern and postmodern temporalities. The book takes up these debates and constructs its argument through discussions of the temporalities of three modes of culture and discourse: confession, nostalgia and memory. Two factors have contributed to the decision to focus on these three terms. First, confession, nostalgia and memory have emerged as key terms within accounts of modernity and postmodernity. Foucault’s account of the dawning of the age of confession in the seventeenth century aligned this discursive mode with the emergence of modernity (Foucault 1981),1 while nostalgia and memory have been associated routinely with postmodern culture. Second, though the temporal aspects of confession have been discussed less frequently than have those of nostalgia and memory, it is my contention that temporality features as centrally in discourses of confession as it does in discourses of nostalgia and memory. A focus on confession, nostalgia and memory enables me to intervene, then, in debates concerning modern and postmodern temporality and times. Impelled throughout by a suspicion that mappings of postmodernism and of postmodern time have been caught within a binary and linear framework that pitted the ‘then’ of the modern against the ‘now’ of the postmodern, this book has aimed to open up those mappings to a consideration of sexual difference and time.
