ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to consider the notions of time, history, and identity and their relationality. For this purpose, it reflects on time to arrive at the formation of the idea of history. In other words, what this essay argues is that the Kantian notion of space and time is “not things perceived, but modes of perception” or “organs of perception”. History is not time past but an indicator of difference from time present. This “presentness” is felt by virtue of the events or structures that already pre-exist but are not past. Thus, if time is perceived as the metaphysics of being, history would be the ontology of that being. This onto-theology of time can be validated only by a certain form of Derridean difference, a disruption and, thereafter, a formulation. It is time that brings about these ruptures, eventualities, and displacements in history that has perhaps no control over them. This politics of temporalization of history lies in the altered relationships of power between the dominant and the dominated “other”. On the other side of power is powerlessness, of domination is suppression, of the self is “alterity”. The situationalities are different, the locations different, the economies different, and, yet, the political structure so invincibly the same. A possible retrieval of individual freedom lies in a humanistic appraisal of historical time, and therein solely lies trust, empathy, and certitude in man and his innumerous struggles within the cobwebs of his phenomenological existence.
