ABSTRACT
In the presented text, the author follows the trail of K. Marx, F. Nietzsche, and G. Agamben in claiming that only he belongs to his epoch, i.e., is truly contemporary, who does not find himself entirely in it and does not strictly adapt to its requirements. The “contemporary” is the one who is “outdated.” Thanks to this deviation from the “terror of the present,” or anachronism, one can perceive and understand his times. If Marx, Nietzsche, and Agamben are right and the contemporary is the one who lives at another time, it follows that only by shifting phases one gains the necessary distance to think about his times. Thereby, the author returns to the concept of tradition and claims (this time after Adorno) that, on the one hand, no tradition is directly present anymore and cannot be easily recalled, and on the other, that if all traditions have already expired, then humanity’s march towards global oblivion has already begun, i.e., a march towards a kind of non-traditionality. As a result, the author argues that “modernity” can only function today as “backwardness” and “tradition” only as “resistance.”
