The point isn't that time is broken into little bits; it's that no instant is ever really present. All presence is an effect of a trace structure.
This is great news for God. Time doesn't exist at all, since there are no present moments that really succeed one another. Or it exists so flimsily that entities can pretty much do without it. This is about as effective against God as a wet wash cloth! In fact—all of us are outside time as a naive succession of instants. It's also disastrous for Hägglund's ethics of “survival.” Nothing survives without present instants. We're all screwed/eternal!
At least Kotsko's reading gave atheism a fighting chance.
Hägglund's view, if this is correct, sounds more like Buddhism/apophatic OOO all the time...
2 comments:
The commenter does not disagree with me, or at least I don't disagree with him. When I talked about the moment as being internally divided, referring to both a past and a future moment -- that just is the trace structure. I was summarizing, and the commenter is using the technical Derridean term.
I don't understand how my reading leads to any of the conclusions you draw from it, for atheism or anything else -- but of course, I don't understand what you thought my reading even was if you think this comment differs from what I was saying.
I think that's great for your reading Adam, which I prefer. Yes, I think the "trace structure" is just as you say, and not some strange abolition of time. So we have time as succession, which implies a "present" of some kind. This is better for the atheist argument, though it suffers from the limit of not incorporating temporality fully into ontology. Time is a one way tube through which things travel.
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