Chronopolitics

Johannes Fabian argues in his Time and the Other that “geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.” Bauman summarizes the argument: “The modern perspective ‘denied coevality’ to any form of life different from its own; it construed the Other of itself as ‘living in another time.’ The allochronic distancing device (Fabian’s felicitous term) seems to be a variant of a more general expedient: construing the Other (defining the Other) in a way that a priori decides its inferior and, indeed, transcient and (until disappearance) illegitimate status. In an age of the forward march of reason-guided progress, describing the Other as outdated, backward, obsolete, primitive, and altogether ‘pre-,’ was equivalent to such a decision.”