In view of the final truth, that of one's own death, all human beings are victims of time. The mask of the constraint which seems to emanate from time is nothing other than protection from this truth. In this respect, we cannot take it off completely, but it ought to be possible to look behind it a bit more. For the victims merrily carry on acting in the meantime.
Time is made by human beings and has to do with power which they exercise over one another with the aid of strategies of time. Time unites and separates – combatants as well as lovers. As with every form of power, there is a counter-power; every strategy finds its counter-strategy. Time is in everything, as Shinmen Musashi, a famous Japanese warrior, sums up the strategies of his art of war (Go Rin No Sho) in 1645: time is important in dancing and in music, since rhythms exist only when the time is right. But there is also time in all skills, and equally in the void. Time determines the life of the warrior, his rise and decline, his harmonies and discords. In order to be able to think and act strategically, one has to know which time is to be used, and when it is not to be used . . . from the small to the big, from the fast to the slow, from the time of the distance to the time of the background. Without knowing the time of the background, every strategy becomes uncertain in its outcome. It is a book, incidentally, which became almost compulsory reading for American managers in view of the challenge of Japanese economic power.20
The strategic use of time as a central aspect in the emergence of power, and for the purpose of maintaining it, runs throughout the whole of social life, from interpersonal relations to the big institutions and their built-in tendencies to persist. It begins with the child, who always places the state of consciousness he or she has just experienced at the centre of the perception of time, and in whom immediacy follows immediacy. From the periodicity of the body, he or she develops the first ideas of time, but also the first strategies in dealing with time. In the rhythm of breathing, eating and sleeping, the child experiences his or her earliest gratifications and privations. With the control of the sphincter muscles, the child develops a little later the most important instrument for implementing its independent consciousness of time, with the aid of which it becomes possible to make adults, all-powerful up to that time, dependent on its own will in a way. But society and outside determination already intervene here. The pleasure contained in the independent scanning of its bodily functions makes it terribly hard for the child, under the pressure of its surroundings, to give up its original perception of time. Alienness abstracts from all pleasure.21 In a fine essay, Caroline Neubaur has studied the experiences and theoretical insights of the English psychiatrist Donald W. Winnicott. Precisely in the early mother-child relationship, a situation is produced which is characterized by alienation. There are illusions which thwart one another and which consist in the fact that two ‘interior' systems confront one another which have usurped the other's ‘exterior' in each case, but which cannot perceive one another as illusory. So that the alienation can be removed, something has to be added which is perceptible to both sides, which has an element of estrangement for both, and yet is capable of removing estrangement. According to Winnicott, this third element is the transitional object which can be accepted by both sides as something alien. For this it is necessary that an effort has to be made on the part of the child as well as on the part of the mother: namely to accept a bit of alienness in order to be able to overcome alienness.22
The Longing for the Moment
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