What Is the Contemporary? A Critical Essay on the Meaning

This essay works from Giorgio Agamben’s “What Is the Contemporary?” and asks what it means to be contemporary. Being contemporary, in this reading, means holding past, present, and future in a single moment of awareness. The essay traces the word back to its Latin root, con-tempus, “together with time.” It also plays with the double sense of con: to be against, and to deceive. Time itself becomes a kind of con, and the contemporary is the one who sees through it. Greek Kairos and Chronos sit beside Bergson’s intuitive duration, Theravada Buddhist teaching on time and impermanence (anicca), and Carlo Rovelli’s physics of time as an illusion. Together, they show the artist as someone who reads the darkness of the present and pulls from the past what the future needs. Alexandra David-Néel and Alanna Kaivalya serve as examples of contemporary women working outside patriarchal and linear time. The essay’s form follows its argument. Three earlier essays are woven together in three fonts, and the writing moves between tenses on purpose. It ends with contemplative practice, Sanskrit chant, and So Hum, as the way into the present moment, where the contemporary lives.