Translations in Time^∗

This text is a modified excerpt from YEAR 1, a project in the reconfiguration of knowledge (as well as a book forthcoming from MIT Press in 2021). The focus is on the first century that starts the numerical countdown to the present. All of the schemata of modernity—time, space, concepts, and categories [as in Kant's First Critique]—are put to the test of comprehending this alleged beginning, and none survives unscathed. Walter Benjamin's understanding of the task of the translator, when applied to historical rather than linguistic translation, provides the methodological armature for the analysis. The excerpt printed here is the methodological introduction to Chapter 2: “Translations in Time.”