ABSTRACT
The author suggests that it is time today, the right moment, to think about two broad ways of dealing with this situation. The first, which is massively dominant in the metaphysical tradition attempts to map the apparent untimeliness of the time in its arrival onto a truer timeliness, giving rise to a metaphorics of ripeness and fruition, pregnancy and childbirth. The second, traces of which can be found no doubt throughout that same tradition, but which might be seen more obviously in, say, Stendhal, Kierkegaard or Benjamin, accentuates the irruptive or interruptive temporality of the moment in its intempestive arrival. The absence of a Last Judgement liberates judgement from its traditional status as a provisional anticipation of a Last Judgement to come. The out-of-jointness of the time dislocates it across its responsibility towards the past in the form of the inheritance it cannot simply accept and the concomitant futural task which, however, commits it here and now.
