ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I want to make an argument concerning the importance of nature, the body and time in Western societies. It is not, I think, the usual kind of argument, based upon genealogical accounts of the rise and fall of discourses like romanticism or modernism (which is not to say that elements of these accounts do not adhere). Rather, it is an attempt to strike out towards a new understanding of how nature is apprehended, based upon giving much greater credence to that small but vitally significant period of time in which the body makes the world intelligible by setting up a background of expectation which, I will go on to argue, is much of what we feel as ‘nature’.
