Introduction Preface and Acknowledgments Sorin Antohi, Tyrus Miller Foreword I. Temporal Figures: Citatations, Images, Narratives 1. Stefan M. Maul Walking Backwards into the Future: The Conception of Time in the Ancient Near East 2. Karen Bassi Epic Remains: Seeing and Time in the Odyssey 3. Ruth HaCohen Intricate Temporalities: The Transfiguration of Proper and ‘Improper’ Sounds from Christian to Jewish Environments 4. Lászlo Kontler Time and Progress – Time as Progress. Enlightenment Perceptions II. History and Cosmos 5. Aziz Al-Azmeh God’s Chronography and Dissipative Time: Vaticinium ex eventu in Classical and Medieval Muslim Apocalyptic Traditions 6. Moshe Idel Kabbalistic Interpretations of the Concept of Jubilee 7. Jonathan Beecher Fourier and the Saint-Simonians on the Shape of History 8. Wai-Chee Dimock Off-Center Periodization: Emerson in Islamic Time 9. Sorin Antohi Cosmos vs. History: Time in Ethnic Ontologies 10. Tyrus Miller Eternity No More: Benjamin and the Eternal Return 11. Karl Clausberg A Microscope for Time: What Benjamin and Klages, Einstein and the Movies Owe to Distant Stars III. Time, Culture and Politics 12. Richard Terdiman Taking Time: Temporal Representations and Cultural Politics 13. Friedrich Jaeger The Concept of Modern Times 14. Maria Todorova The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism 15. Costica Bradatan A Time of Crisis, A Crisis of (the Sense of) Time: The Political production of Time in Communism and its relevance for the Postcommunist Debate 16. Lisa Rofel Hetero-Temporalities of Post-Socialism IV. Life/Times 17. Harald Welzer The Social Genesis of Time in Early Ontogeny 18. Britta Duelke Quoting from the Past or Dealing with Temporality 19. Catalin Partenie Searching for Answers You Are Never Going to Get: Platonic Immortality Revisited 20. David Hoy The Time of Our Lives V. Afterword 21. Jörn Rusen Making Sense of Time. Towards a Universal Typology of Conceptual Foundations of Historical Consciousness