ABSTRACT
If time is the measure of movement (Aristotle, Physics 219b 36), and if move-
ment takes a number of mutually irreducible forms, the measure of movement
will fragment and time too will take a number of irreducible forms.1 The
enquiries which follow explore various aspects of the paradoxes generated by
such a hypothesis, not least the disruption of linear history and of a history of
philosophy which divides moderns from ancients. Ever since Heidegger’s early
analyses, before the move to Marburg, there has been available the strong
interpretation of Husserl’s rethinking of time, as a retrieval of Aristotle’s analyses
of time, and as an account of the movements of the soul, whereby concepts of
both soul and movement are transformed.2 Derrida’s writings contribute to
charting the outlines of this transformation, and of the emergence of a definitive
break between ancients and moderns. Heidegger subsequently seeks to move the
point of contact with the Greeks back from Aristotle to Parmenides and Anaxi-
mander, to a Greek philosophy less dominated by a Latin language reception.
For Derrida, however, the connection must go by way of St Augustine, and his
conversion from paganism, and by way of the writings of Sigmund Freud, and
his reconversion to paganism. The recasting of an account of the soul in the
thoroughly secularised terms of Freud’s topographies has a neglected impor-
tance here.3 Derrida’s Husserl is to be found between an Augustine emergent
from paganism and a Freud emergent from 3,000 years of theocracy.
