Modern Phenomenology III

This chapter argues that after Marx’s analysis of capitalist temporality, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) introduced an even more radical elasticity into transcendental temporality in the form of an “absolute flow of time.” This move set him apart from both Hume and Kant. Hume had to explicitly presuppose the continuous passing of time, but he could not defend this thesis on the basis of our experience of successive moments. Husserl’s remarkable innovation therefore was to multiply and stretch the temporal field itself such that any given temporal field can become a subcirculation or conjunction within an even larger field. This is possible, as we will see, because the flow of time is absolutely elastic.