Words Murder Time

“Words murder time.” This phrase is attributed to Hegel (Jaques, 1982), and it is the aim of this essay to try to make sense of it.

It is a confusing, paradoxical statement, with unexpected implications for what is known as the talking cure - the intricate process which claims to replace, through the use of words and not much else, the timelessness of the Unconscious, according to Freud, by the time-bound reality principle under which the ego operates.

Time has been the subject of inquiry for a variety of disciplines over the years. From philosophers to scientists and from psychologists to literary theoreticians, the preoccupation with the concept of time has been prolific whilst the views and definitions employed have not always coincided. If there is some consensus, it is around the division of the concept of time in its two basic aspects: Time as sequence or perspective, as a series of digital events (chronos) and Time as duration, that is, as an analogic function (kairos) (Hartocollis, 1976).

Time as sequence entails the notion of the before and the after, of flux and of difference. It entails the external physical world of inevitabilities. It is the time of chronology and measurement and succession. It corresponds to the objective and hence the shared.

Time as duration, on the other hand, is the world of narration, a sphere of episodes with a beginning, a middle, and an end: the human and living time of intentions and goals. It is the “time that gives value,” according to Aristotle. Units of time are thus thought of as holistic entities of affects that are experienced in a process and are made up of “series of patterns of shifting intensity of feelings over time, as occasioned by internal and external events” (Stern, 2000). The literary critic Frank Kermode (1966) describes this aspect of time as the “period filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end. Kairos signifies the past present and future - it establishe