A bird and a landscape. Temporal figures to distort the present

Abstract

For much of the philosophical tradition, images have been and continue to be objects of criticism, since they seem to constitute a place of suspicion of deception and falsehood. However, images can ally with criticism, not only when they prove to be a tool or support for thought, but when they expose their potential to criticize for themselves a world of violence. This article offers poetic texts by Wilsawa Szymborska and Mary Oliver as dialectical images, and traces within them certain critical temporal figures that disrupt the present, opening the question of the more normalized temporal frameworks and those that fail in their reproduction. The reflection admits two moments: the first, where the link with nature appears as a landscape as well as the relationship with the creaturely; and the second, where the sovereignty of a subject in cohabitation is put into tension, in the face of experiences that undo it. From a Benjaminian perspective, these poems function as an interruption to certain ways of understanding time, as they contain some figures that distort the full presence of the human, and thus offer a critique of the present as the prevailing framework for understanding time.