Matters of time

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Matters of Time offers a unique exploration of materialist thought and representation within twentieth-century French intellectual culture, positioning time as a revolutionary concept. It examines pivotal historical moments, from Jean Jaurès’ influence on socialists to the generational conflicts and everyday politicization during May ’68. The collection juxtaposes essays on dialectics and teleological progress with reflections on the existential turn in Marxist thought. Contributions discussing Heidegger and Sartre introduce themes of human mortality and a new politics of finitude. The interplay between aesthetic and political thought in the French avant-gardes is highlighted, with chapters on Sade, Artaud, and Jarry connecting Marx’s theories of production and commodity fetishism to bodily abjection. The manipulation of time in cinema and matter in painting illustrates the experimental tension between form and signification in the twentieth century. Generational futurity is examined through Genet’s spatial representations of filiation and Verlaine’s proto-ecological sensitivity to nature. Overall, the volume constructs a fragmented timeline of the breaks, tensions, and antagonisms in twentieth-century French thought, culture, and politics, focusing on late capitalism and the complexities of political, intellectual, and aesthetic progress and regress.