In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

NOTES TO PAGES 420-424 483
Museum (Essen) specifically for its display on the social and cultural history of
industrialization in Germany. There, museumgoers could use sports equipment
(such as dumbbells) from the early twentieth century, and, while sitting in a
1920s pub, could listen to a recording of one of the first soccer broadcasts ever
aired in Europe.
18. See Reinhart Koselleck, "'Erfahrungsraum' und 'Erwartungshorizont':
Zwei historische Kategorien," in Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, pp. 349-375.
19. This way of experiencing the present informs Baudelaire's famous definition,
in Peintre de la vie moderne, of modernity as "Ie transitoire, Ie fugitif, Ie
contingent. "
20. Some of the central concepts in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of
time (such as Bewusstseinsstrom, Protention, and Retention) try to describe this
experience. See Husserl, "Zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins
(1893-1917)," Husserliana, vol. 10 (The Hague, 1966).
21. One can illustrate this change by pointing to the fact that a definition of
"the present" which is frequently taken for granted by academics of my generation
(i.e., the time-span between the "students' revolution" of the late 1960s and
the current 1990s) has meanwhile come to include more years than the period
between the end of World War I and the end of World War II.
22. The metaphor of the "receding line" is a leitmotif in the introductory
chapter of Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967). For an application
of this idea to the "present" epistemological situation, see Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht, "Ende des Theorie-Jenseits?" in Rudolf Maresch, ed., Zukunft oder
Ende: Standpunkte, Analysen, Entwurfe (Munich, 1993), pp. 40-46.
23. See Niklas Luhmann, "Gleichzeitigkeit und Synchronisation," in Luhmann,
Soziologische Aufklarung, vol. 5: Konstruktivistische Perspektiven
(Opladen, 1990), pp. 95-130.
24. "Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen" is another central concept of Reinhart
Koselleck's thought. See, in particular, '''Neuzeit': Zur Semantik moderner
Bewegungsbegriffe," in Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, pp. 300-348.
25. A (not so) randomly chosen example is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and
K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds., Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbruche: Situationen
offener Epistemologie (Frankfurt, 1991).
26. The history of this topology (i.e., the topology of the "hermeneutic field")
is retraced in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Non-Hermeneutic (Stanford, 1998).
27. David Wellbery, "The Exteriority of Writing," Stanford Literature Review
(1991-1992): 11-24.
28. For this (re)construction of a systemic notion of "understanding," see
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, '''Interpretation' vs. 'Understanding Systems,'" Cardozo
Law Review, special issue (1992): 283-300.
29. Significantly, I would not have perceived this "irony" in my own project