*

When there is hope, hope has pertinence. In being pertinent, it pertains
at a specific site and therefore at a given time. It is thus that it can be
said to pertain to the present. This formulation is on one level apposite.
None the less it works at the same time to construct hope as involved in a
relation to the present. The contention to be argued here is that rather
than being in a relation that allows for the arbitrary, the arbitrary being
the assumption that any relation initially signals the lack of a necessary
connection, hope is to be taken as forming part of the present's
constitution. As such therefore hope will need to be formulated as that
which eschews the arbitrary and becomes an ineliminable part of the
present. Moreover the present becomes the site of hope. Hope therefore
pertains to the present rather than to the future. What characterises this
formulation is the presence of temporal terms. Time here is not an option
since, as will be maintained, hope and the present are to be understood as
inextricably linked to time.

*

There are two difficulties that arise here. The first is understanding
the temporality in question. The second is more detailed. Working with the
presupposition of the necessary interarticulation of ontology and time,
what the detail means is that what has to be determined, in the second
instance, is the ontological status of hope and the present. However in
suggesting that hope and the present need to be construed temporally what
must be taken up are the varying philosophical arguments that intended to
dispose of the present as that which is, or can, be given for philosophical
thinking. Not only is there the general argument that the present
understood as the now -the nunc stans - is caught in an inevitable
paradox; i.e. the present can never be cited now as it is, namely present.
There are two more specific arguments that work against the present. The
first involves the argument that because temporality is to be thought in
terms of repetition - leaving the term repetition unqualified at this stage
- positing the present is to efface it in the act of presenting it. The
present, thus presented, would appear to be incompatible with any construal
of repetition. The second is that if temporality is to be thought in terms
of duration then, once again, the present resists any adequate formulation.
The two most straightforward examples of such positions would be Bergson
and Heraclitus. What must be taken up eventually is the inadequacy of the
formulation of the present within all these positions. It will then be
possible to go on and argue rather than being that which is able to be
eliminated from all philosophical consideration the present insists in
precisely those attempts to exclude it. The movement of attempted
exclusion and subsequent inclusion will be traced throughout the text. As
an opening however it will be necessary to clarify and sustain the more
general claim concerning the possibility of the present. What this will
involve is the argument that an attempt to think the present does not
necessitate identify the present with the now and therefore its taking
place with the nunc stans. Thinking the present and noting thereby its
insistence will demand another possibility of time. As will emerge in what
follows time is central.

*

What however is this insistence? More emphatically how is it to be
understood? Asking these questions is to address the present. And moreover
it is to address its being present, (its being at the present). And yet the
present is held in a form of questioning that must itself be questioned. In
asking to the question - what is the present? - it is self-evident that a
particular type of questioning is being invoked. What must be considered
therefore is precisely the questioning appropriate to the present. It is
straightforward that what is raised by any evocation of the 'appropriate'
is the existence of a certain type of propriety. Here it concerns that
which is proper to the present itself. The form of question marked out by
the set up - what is ...? - is constrained to raise the Platonic heritage
of question asking. (A heritage taken up and continued by Heidegger.)

*

What marks out this form of questioning is a twofold movement that
encompasses both a commitment to the existence of an essence and, in
addition, the claim that the answer to the question is in some sense
already contained in the question's formulation. It is, as it were, given
within it. Working within these confines it would follow that it is an
answer that is already present. In being present the task at hand is itself
already given. (It will be seen that it is the interarticulation and thus
reciprocity between presence and the determination of a specific task,
marked out here in terms of a doubling of the gift, which will form an
integral part of any understanding of the present.) The already present
answer is to be recovered or if not actually recovered then the
preoccupation with what is involved in its recovery becomes that which
determines the orientation, as well as the content, of the philosophical
task. While it remains the case that the essence in question is problematic
and to that extent its specificity is still to be determined, what is
retained within this approach - retained as determining it - is the
effective presence of the essential. Once again this will be the case even
if it is an essence the precise determinations of which remain to be
thought.

*

Here rather than assuming the effective presence of traditional
questioning - the questioning that only pertains to the essence - it is
precisely that questioning which is to be questioned. What this reversal,
or perhaps redirection of questioning entails is another opportunity to
think through that which is involved either in claiming or establishing
identity. Within the tradition of the essence the answer to the question,
the question that addressed essential identity, had to have a specific
determination; a determination both ontological and temporal. It is these
determinations which will be of central importance, since it is in terms of
the interplay of ontology and time that the determinations of questioning
are to be understood. These determinations not only involve the locus and
thus the re-presentation of that which is given (putatively given, it will
be suggested, in the end) but their duration.

*

It may seem that the evocation of duration is at odds with the general
tenor of that which is involved in taking up ontology and time. And yet
duration, by introducing speed - while not being reducible to the simple
presence of speed - allows for an oscillation between the static and the
dynamic. In its most classic formulation, namely Platonic naming, the
possibility of answering the question - what is....? - depends upon the
absence of duration and the imposition of the static and with it of the
ontology of stasis. In the Cratylus the possibility of there being
knowledge and thus of being able to know what it is that is asked for in
the question, what is knowledge ?, depends upon the essence (ousia) of
knowledge being "always the same as itself" (aei estin oion estin). The
temporal term here is the "always" (aei). However its work takes place, and
can only take place, in its necessary interarticulation with the
ontological marker the designates that the essence (ousia) must be the
"same as itself". (The reciprocity here is necessary.) What follows is that
is the specific ontologico-temporal concatenation which signals the
absence of duration. The necessary impossibility of movement, the
non-existence of speed, not even a dawdling or idling at the start, is
both indicated, demanded and sustained by this formulation of the
effective presence of ontology and time.

*

Here, within the frame set by the tradition of the essence, the question
will sanction an answer in which the answer in its being enacted in terms
of preexistent conditions of existence - the ontology and temporality of
stasis - repositions the answer as a gift that closes the question.
Actually or potentially the given answer ends the questioning. The question
in being answered, or in being able to be answered, closes by becoming
reconciled with itself. The absence of duration, the impossibility of
speed, work to close the question off. In being positioned as precluding
the future it comes to occupy an enduring present. What will emerge is that
it is this present, a present that is necessarily linked to reconciliation
that obviates the possibility of hope. The absence of this possibility
works, at this stage to indicate another departure. This other possibility,
which must always be more than the affirmed negation of the position
sketched above will allow for another interconnection of hope and the
present; an interconnection in which they come to be rethought. What this
other thinking will have to involve is a construal of the present that is
marked by an opening - an opening that is given as an integral part of the
ontological determination of the present - and which precludes therefore
the possibility of present reconciliation and thus reconciliation at the
present. Even though the move may appear slight, with it the present is
radically reformulated. the immediate difficulty with simply offering this
reworking and thus repositioning of the present is that the terms -
present, reconciliation - will themselves have to be reworked. Rather than
giving this advance it will emerge within the actual confrontation of
philosophical, literary and architectural positions all of which involve an
explicit confrontation with the present ( a confrontation that is of course
inextricably positioned at the present and thus as part of it).

*

There are many aspects of this closing off of the question that are of
interest and which will need to be taken up. One of the most significant is
that the closing of the question, and with the closure its becoming either
the actual site or the projected site of reconciliation, is that the
questioning and thus the process of questioning is itself then closed of
from its own being questioned. What this means is that the act of
questioning is not implicated in and thus cannot work upon the process of
questioning. It is precisely this set up which works to project philosophy
outside of its own activity. The consequence of this intended projection is
that philosophy in not being implicated in that which it seeks to determine
or uncover - e.g. truth, the essence - there is no need for philosophy to
have to think the consequences of the necessity of its already being
implicated in its own activities. It will be with the necessity of this
thinking that philosophical activity will find its measure.

*

It should not be thought however that the attempt to establish
philosophy's self-relation is an argument for the existence either of a
metaphilosophical position or the projection of metaphysics into an all
encompassing and thus supreme evaluative position. Not only do these
movements give rise to an almost inescapable infinite regress, they fail,
at the same time, to address the way in which implication is to be
understood. Implication does not involve the claim that philosophy can or
indeed should evaluate itself, as though the act of evaluation both
incorporated and encompassed philosophical acts in their exclusivity and
thus in their totality. Implication has another sense in this instance, it
marks out a different logic. It does not refer to a simple inscription but
rather to an ontological position in which philosophy is unable to close
itself off from that on which its activities are directed. A situation
marked by an inevitable and productive reciprocity.

*

Philosophy must be able to think its own position. This will involve a
thinking in which the twofold presence of openness and the impossibility of
closure inscribes philosophy in a position in which it is effective
precisely because of the impossibility of effecting a closure. The
impossible here should not be taken as the simple counter-positing to
possibility, as though impossibility were no more than possibility's
op-posite. It is rather than the negative must be recast such that it is no
longer just the other side of a projected state of affairs, but that it
emerges out of the overcoming of the opposition between the possible and
the impossible. In other words the opposition in setting up a determining
either/or grounds what is to take place; a taking place in either a
negative or a positive sense. In contradistinction to this set up
impossibility becomes an affirmative eventuality because of its relation of
non-relation to the dominant logic set by the either/or. (It will, or
course, be necessary to return to this complex situation.)

*