“TIME IS VIOLENCE”

Jacques Derrida argues that the aporetic impossibility of time and of living outside of presence condemns time to violence. Derrida writes, “There is no experience which can be lived other than in the present. The absolute impossibility of living other than in the present, this eternal impossibility, defines the unthinkable as the limit of reason.” This impossibility invariably commingles time with death and violence. The slippery present moves into loss and absence or fades into smothering abstraction and definition. Derrida writes, “The living present is originally marked by death. Presence as violence is the meaning of finitude, the meaning of meaning as history.” This impossibility of presence and time means that for Derrida “then time is violence.”1

The “living present” of death also means that presence and time commit violence against meaning. The instability and fluidity of time challenge the quest for meaning. Arguing that “time is that which erases … time,” Derrida maintains that “[t]ime has already been suppressed at the moment one asks the question of its meaning, when one relates it to appearing, truth, presence, or essence in general.” He says, “Time is a name for this impossible possibility.” As Levinas argues, time and the search for meaning can become entrapped in suffocating sameness.

Levinas, as previously noted, sees presence as “the time of the Same” that encircles meaning and encloses consciousness into a self-affirming “correlation and equality between what is thought and thinking itself.” Levinas strives to go beyond the synchronicity of presence toward a diachronic temporality that overflows and bursts out of the known, the same, and the thought to a realm of transcendence and the infinite responsibility toward the other.

Tommy Lee Jones in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) turns the Western into a drama of the violence and impossibility of time in its engagement with meaning. The landscape becomes a scene of perennial, inexorable temporal contention. Rather than the spatialization of time through endless expansionism on the virgin American frontier, Jones presents a boundlessly open malleable space of borderline Texas and Mexico that undergoes continuous reconfiguration by a distant, fluid horizon that stretches toward the infinite unknown. The film moves steadily through this temporally shifting space. Time functions as a player in the film in combat for survival with other temporal players.