The Time of Promise: Response to Antonio Cerella, Devin Singh and Riccardo Baldissone

Abstract

Antonio Cerella has raised an extremely important question, which is deeply connected with the problem of debt. In order to ask, as Antonio rightly does, what the conditions for rethinking and practicing time anew might be, it may be useful to reflect on what experience of time we have had in recent years. Until the beginning of the last global economic crisis, a certain idea of the “end of history” had somehow prevailed in the Western world. People here felt they were living in an eternally present time – the present time of consumption – in the more or less conscious belief that they had achieved an irreplaceable degree of prosperity, which could eventually be “exported” along with democracy. But a new dimension of time has emerged since 2008, when the economic crisis erupted and debt became the key issue in global politics, first in the United States and then in Europe. As Nietzsche shows in his Genealogy of the Morals, debt is at the origin of a peculiar social relationship, which is based on a temporal nexus, a “new temporalization,” as efficiently noted by Riccardo Baldissone: the time of promise, the faculty of operating on the future in advance, thus suspending the force of oblivion and activating the faculty of memory. Debt is an ambiguous dimension – an “apparatus of temporalization,” as described by Riccardo – which can turn into a social bond or coincide with a form of domination. The relationship between debtor and creditor, which, for Nietzsche, is the oldest known human relationship, originates in the activation of the possibility of promising remission of what is owed; a condition that opens the present to a complex dynamic in which both the past and the future are involved – and not simply in temporal succession. What is at stake here is something that intimately concerns the Christian experience, as argued by the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, to whom Antonio rightly refers. In his important and posthumously published work La fine del mondo (The End of the World), devoted to the theme of “cultural apocalypses” as expressions of “crisis” and “transformations of presence,” Christianity represents a very peculiar example of this experience of time. More specifically, for De Martino, the peculiarity of proto-Christianity consists in the elaboration of a community of faith in Christ, which is based on the actualization of his coming (parousia) in the anticipation of the promise of the past event of the resurrection as liberation from guilt and remission of debts. In this regard, I think it is particularly interesting to note that the Greek word