ABSTRACT
One of the major concerns of philosophical and cultural analysis in recent years has been the need to reflect upon the reduction of time and space brought about by contemporary processes of technicization, particularly digitalisation. Such a reduction radically reorganises classical and modern understandings of time and space, having effects in previously divergent, but now ever converging domains of experience. The recent return, for example, of religious faith and organisation is to be situated within these processes of technicization, the search for ‘identity’ and the desire for the ‘pure’ being predicated upon an uprooting movement of de-localisation and de-temporalization that is inextricably linked to present technico-economic invention. If this movement also accounts for the present upsurge in nationalist and ethnic-based politics, it calls at the same time for a re-elaboration of national and international law and political symbolisation (particularly the concept of citizenship) that would progressively articulate nternationalisation beyond present predominantly neo-liberal affirmations of ‘globalization’. How can philosophy help us in these re-inventions? Without grounding a particular political programme, how can philosophical reflection assist future orientation in and, ultimately, beyond this world?
