Untimeliness and Classical Knowing

Cultural histories are always metaphorical. Without analogies there is no way of articulating the vast complexity of a cultural field, with all of its transformations over time and space. To speak of a ‘field’, for example, is to mobilise the root meaning of ‘culture’ as the tilling of arable space. It follows, however, that any such metaphors constrain apprehension even as they enable it. As Franco Moretti (2005) in particular has observed, models for literary history have tended to be rooted in German idealism.

This paper discusses the role that questions of temporality have played in the modern reevaluation of tragedy. It has often been argued that the universalizing assumptions and abstraction of philosophical readings have been blind to the historical specificity of Greek tragedy. By inaugurating the concept of “the tragic” German Idealism stands accused of making tragedy untimely.

Reinhart Koselleck has influentially analyzed how the French Revolution marks a crucial juncture in what he calls the Verzeitlichung – the “temporalization” – of history, a process which he sees as finding full form in the historical self-consciousness of the nineteenth century. For Koselleck, the nineteenth century ushers in a new sense of what it is to live “in an era” – to be aware of one’s placement in time conceived as a particular linear development.

Untimeliness, especially as a gloss on Nietzsche's plea for the scholarly voice that dares to be unzeitgemäss, has in recent decades been read as a proud call to arms for a self-aware, critical and radical discipline. Through emphasizing the subversive potential of the untimely, though it is still grounded in traditional practices, it is easy to champion an image of the untimely scholar as a role model. This paper suggests that such a stance of untimeliness exists itself in time, interacting with its given historical contexts, and is hence itself changeable.