Working the Contemporary:

Abstract

What might it mean to “work” the concept of the contemporary, under current conditions, in the sense of Georges Canguilhem’s famous account of “working a concept”? The contemporary, it is argued, has been “worked” by history itself into a global form. Two aspects in particular will be stressed: its immanent relationship to the temporality of crisis, and a renewed sense of history itself as a “project of crisis” (Tafuri), a putting into crisis, or a production of the present as crisis. History as project, it is suggested, is the negativity of the unity of global crisis. How might this sound?