events which – whether desirable or not – restore to life that dimension (of occurrence) that would then allow us to perceive and accept its discontinuities, its wrinkles, curves and cracks, and to be prepared for and to celebrate its beginning and its end. 'Vicissitudes' are to be a cipher for a life released from the coordinate system of 'work' and free time', a life good for something other than keeping the great machine functioning and one's own self fit for it. For what? ... The question arises as to whether an appropriation of a more elementary kind would not have to occur before (or on, during) the politicization of a piece of 'new' time wrested from work and its correlate, free time: a conversion of work, free time, or rather freed time into living time, an opening up of the horizon of time to the unforeseen, which would be subjectively assimilable, manageable, and also: welcome.12
The third uchronia has a lot in store for women, since they bring the better prerequisites for it with them. Men are 'blind to the temporal quality of change'and hence all the more at risk ‘as far as the secret predominance of vicissitudes which have been pushed aside is concerned ... as long as they (men) are functioning, they do not notice that there is something the matter with them... until... a... vicissitude notices them'. But in case women and the women's movement should not summon up enough strength to switch off for men the conveyor belt on which they are processing their lives, perhaps the (even though only just germinating) longing for an alternative' experience of time, for a day ‘from which one cannot already tell its evening in the morning, will suffice for this'.13'All days are not equal', runs an inscription which Michael Young saw in Ghana. Did Africans realize the rediscovered Western uchronia long ago?
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The Longing for the Moment