ABSTRACT
Despite the centrality that has been given to becoming (and with it to repetition) the first move in any response to the question of time —the time of traditionmust begin by noting that neither the Bergsonian concept of durée12 with its emphasis on pure becoming to which ‘intuition’ (l’intuition) provides the only access, nor a present construed as pure intensity-pure as singular-and thus constructed as a site devoid of conflicting values because difference is only ever understood as either variety or diversity rather than being of itself differential, can provide the basis for an adequate answer to this question if they are taken as ends in themselves. Nonetheless they gesture towards such a basis in that neither can account for a f ormulation of repetition which sanctions — beyond the range of paradox-identities within difference. Indeed they are to a certain extent constrained to exclude such a construal of repetition. Accepting repetition will allow for a connection to be established between paradox understood as the active presence of the logic of identity and time (the connection takes the form of an interarticulation). What must be avoided is the either/or in which it would be argued that, because the new cannot be reduced to the temporal moment, it thereby follows that the new can never be present, as the new, at the present.
