It is easy to see that even the culturally innovative uchronic time-strategies, which in their fine structure may be coordinated with the latest findings on the biological rhythms of human beings, their social preferences and their desires for social justice or sociability, cannot escape the danger of manipulation, indeed of perversion. Thus the third knife is also sticking deep in the back of this society. Is time pressing to remove the knives? Who are the victims, and whose victims are they?
However different the three current uchronias, the economic, the political and the cultural one, may be in their initial position, however differently they may judge the causes and describe the solutions to be adopted, however collective or individual the prescribed strategies of action may look – they have one thing in common: time is mainly experienced as an externalized constraint, influencing people from outside, which it is necessary to counteract. The constraint can be impersonal or personalized, can appear in the form of employers, of society or as an -ism, but it confronts people as something given, something made by others. Time here appears in the mask, the most neutral image of which is the clock. It is a mask which threatens, denies wishes, suppresses and expropriates them. It is the mask of time which causes suffering and which has inevitable death in store in the end. For even in the boldest uchronias, one liberation is not conceivable: the liberation from the temporal limitations of the existence of every individual human life.
Sartre related the following about his friend Paul Nizan and his disappointed expectations on a trip to the Soviet Union: 'he went to Russia because he wanted to find out whether people were now no longer afraid of death after the revolution, whether death had become something of secondary importance for them.'Then Nizan had gone there and had seen that the Russians thought of death in the same way as we do, and as a result had come back disappointed. He had said at the time – in an unmistakable tone of resignation – to Sartre: 'On this point, no, there's nothing to be done, they haven't changed.'19
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The Longing for the Moment