Eigenzeit and Neurodivergence: Why Autistic and ADHD Biographies Collapse Under Administrative Time

This paper develops the concept of Eigenzeit as an analytical instrument for investigating neurodivergent life realities. Eigenzeit is neither a concept generated by nor specific to neurodivergence, but arises from prior boundary work on the ontology of decision, responsibility, and world-binding. Eigenzeit denotes the non-delegable instantiation of world-time in action: that form of time in which world is bound at all, carried, and irreversibly co-enacted. Time is not understood here as an ordering category or a logic of deadlines, but as the temporal dimension of enacted world-binding—as the structural context of world-capability.On the basis of this general conception, the paper shows why autistic and ADHD biographies in particular are systematically pushed into overload, breakdown, and dependency within modern institutions. Central societal systems—administration, labour markets, education, social law—operate in time- and structure-administrative regimes that presuppose world-binding while simultaneously undermining it: through standardisation, fragmentation, the simulation of responsibility, and the replacement of real binding by procedures. Deadlines, pacing, and file-based formality are not the core problem here, but symptoms of a deeper deficit of world-capability.Neurodivergence is thus not treated as a deficit, but as a different cost and binding structure of world-relation, in which this structural inoperability becomes visible early and with particular sharpness. Autistic integrity is often characterised by high binding strictness and low capacity for simulation vis-à-vis externally imposed world-regimes; ADHD frequently exhibits a dynamic in which fragmented, externally steered contexts do not allow for stable world-binding. Many phenomena commonly read as “symptoms”—exhaustion, breakdown, avoidance, dysfunctional adaptation—can therefore be reconstructed as Eigenzeit collapse: as the temporal-structural consequence of a prior withdrawal of world-binding.In continuity with They Cannot Understand, Eigenzeit is understood as a specification of the concepts of incommensurability, inoperability, and non-translatability. The paper shifts the focus away from temporal adaptation and therapeutic normalisation toward the question of under what conditions world remains bindable at all—and why the systematic withdrawal of this capacity destabilises not only neurodivergent existences, but the ontological viability of social reality itself.