The Cracks of the Contemporary: (Les esquerdes d’allò contemporani)

Abstract

In this paper, I want to think about art and philosophy in relation to time. I want to think about what art and philosophy have in common in that respect, which I consider to be something of the greatest importance (their common purpose). I do this by reading three books in which this aesthetics and this philosophy of time ‘happens’, namely Michel Tournier’s Friday and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore. It is my belief that the three books in question are able to realise many different interventions in the economic, social and political entanglements that make up the present. And that they, consequently, are able to offer us a wholly different earth to which we had been blind. An earth that we, for some reason, were unable to think before.