How can the temporality of supersession be untimely? At first glance, it might seem to be anything but. After all, supersession appears to guarantee a punctual progression from before to after, from early to late, from past to present. “That was then, this is now”: the phrase, a neat summation of supersessionary time, presumes an absolute temporal rupture between two self-identical monads, one canceled, the other current. “Now” replaces “then,” seemingly permitting no polychronic remainder, no untimely trace or survival of the not-now.

Yet one of the most influential theories of supersession constitutively depends on the trace of the then...

In a recent New Yorker magazine competition, readers were invited to supply a caption for a cartoon by Victoria Roberts (fig. 4 ). The cartoon depicts a recognizably bland scene of modern American life: a nondescript middle-aged couple, seated with their dog in a nondescript sitting room, read the news. Yet Roberts injects into this homely scene something unheimlich. The man and woman browse not newspapers but two engraved tablets that seem anachronistically to have materialized from biblical-era Mount Sinai. The winning caption pithily underscores the scene’s temporal disjunction: “Wait,” the man remarks to his wife, “this is yesterday’s.”¹

The...

At the beginning of 2 Henry 4, Rumour represents himself as a global communications system that spans “orient” and “drooping west.” As in Herbert’s “Church Militant,” these compass points demarcate a space conceived not just geographically—from Asia to Europe—but also temporally: Rumour operates from sunrise to sunset and, by implication, from past to future. In this speech, “orient” and “west” also circumscribe the space and time of the theatrical, providing the imaginative limits within which Rumour can “unfold / The acts commenced on this ball of earth”—if not the aptly named Globe (built in 1599), then the...

Those who subscribe to the temporality of supersession respond to polychronicity by reworking the traces of the past-in-the-present as dead or obsolete matter, subordinated to the agency of a progressive present and future. Yet as we have seen with Herbert’s “Church Militant” and Shakespeare’s Henriad, practitioners of supersessionary time often revivify that which they wish to pronounce dead, thereby granting the supposedly superseded past a new lease of life in the present. Those who practice what I am calling the temporality of explosion seize on this possibility and amplify it. In explosive time, the traces of the past acquire a...

With his thumbnail sketch of the antiquarian, Nietzsche shows how readily civic history can be made to repose in the mundane material relics of urban space. The antiquarian, argues Nietzsche, finds historical riches in “trivial, circumscribed, decaying, and obsolete” things, such as “city . . . walls” and “the towered gate.” The heightened attention the antiquarian accords such things anticipates the recent critical fascination with Renaissance material culture, which has itself been dubbed a “new antiquarianism.”¹ Yet Nietzsche’s sketch admits another element largely missing from work in the field. Despite the scorn he directs at the desire to conserve every...

Did the Shakespearean stage stink?

The Jonsonian theater certainly did. In the prologue to Bartholomew Fair, the Scrivener complains that the Hope Theatre—where Jonson’s play was first performed in 1614—is “as dirty as Smithfield, and as stinking every whit.”¹ Such a description may confirm the worst suspicions of modern readers, who all too easily imagine the early modern playhouse—in an age before deodorant, daily baths, and air conditioning—to have been a malodorous cesspit of the great unwashed, populated by reeking groundlings against whom the only available protection was the plague-palliating nosegay or pomander. But while Jonson...

How might we characterize the relation between the temporality of conjunction and those of supersession and explosion? They are in one crucial respect similar: all are materialized by palimpsest-like entities that conjoin multiple times. What distinguishes the temporality of conjunction, however, is its distribution of agency within the palimpsested object. Whereas the practitioners of supersession treat only the present as active and the past as dead or obsolete matter, and whereas the proponents of explosion grant agency primarily to the live traces of the past that dispute and shatter the present, those who practice the temporality of conjunction recognize the...

Two women, from different times, from different worlds, touch in one body—albeit a body that is not one but multiple, palimpsested, polychronic. The scene? It, too, is multiple. Paris, 1975: the Algerian-French feminist Hélène Cixous brushes up against the Egyptian queen Cleopatra in the heterogeneous, intertextual body of Cixous’s écriture féminine. Antwerp, 1655: the exiled English writer Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, rubs shoulders with Cleopatra in Cavendish’s labyrinthine gallery of the mind where, in her words, “so many creatures be, / Like many Commonwealths.”¹ Washington, D.C., 2008: Cixous joins with Cavendish in extolling the “infinite variety” of Cleopatra,...

Othello has long been regarded as afflicted by a temporal anomaly in need of correction. Cracking the infamous “double time” conundrum—do the events of the play take place over a day and a half or over a much longer duration?—was a favorite parlor game of Shakespeareans for more than a century, and the temptation to straighten out the play’s story into an orderly, linear succession of events remains irresistible to many readers.¹ In this chapter, by contrast, I consider how the play refuses linear temporality. Rather than a singular progression that can be geometrically plotted, time in Othello...

Untimely matter in the time of Shakespeare challenges the fantasy of the self-identical moment or period, of the sovereign moment-state divided from its temporal neighbors. It materializes instead a temporality that is not one. Yet in all the instances I have examined in this book, untimely matter remains potentially in thrall to what we might call Eastern Standard Time: the presumption that the orient, where the sun rises, is the location of the past. The physical traces in the western present of orientalized pasts—engraved Mosaic tablets, the bodily techniques of Asian stage despots, a Hebrew gravestone, a Catholic odor...