Re-membering the Present certain experience of writing. There is more yet to this edge, this riddle of part problem, part solution, a more that renders our burden, this de-ranged but self-asserting reason, not quite a convenient and/or 'adolescent' posturing, but itself formative of the questions we intend to discuss. Presently, and soon, here and else-106 where. II. PROBLEM? We can begin by considering the frame, what is also, in a sense, the work of these notes, namely, 'the present'. From this our discourse—all discourse—issue, and to this they return. And between the two, between issue and return, there is an absence, a fundamental presence in reality. 'History'. The 'Real'. Who we are. Or, so we can say. We don't propose to be disclosing this absence-presence here, the things as they are. Modernity and Modernism—at least, not in the sense in which the other contributors to this volume would.1 What we are offering, really, a hindsight, is a contribution preliminary to such a task. But as preliminary, it may yet animate a whole context. For the one key it plays, or rather, underscores, time and temporality, as they bear within the element of discourse, is not for us to postpone any longer. Where then, 'the present? Where does any thought, all discourse in, and of, the present, the 'presenf of the present, always, already, find itself? In the very place it founds, namely, 'the present', (and) what also concerns the problematical status of this present: an order of 'presentness', coeval with, a derivation of, a reduction in, and of, the present. It is important that this scripting—what concerns 'the present' and the problematical status of this present—be read. For any, or all, 'present are driven to reproducing the limit' that constitutes them in the first place. We should perhaps be taking a more direct textual line, attentive to a set of material, tracing their positions, arguing their mediations, illustrating, generally, their historical and/or cultural underpinnings. Maybe, but the line we are taking here, if it can be considered 'textual' at all, fixes on a 'movement', a trace perhaps, and nothing more, from which 'the present springs, to which it returns, compre-ssive of 'history' as a whole and making for, dare I say it, the density of the historic. That is to say, we will query the frame, as also the work of the frame, that is being brought to the present, rendering 'the present as 'present.2 All this may not seem perspicuous enough. Maybe. But, what is going on? What are we drawing your attention to? We are, we have been, wending our way through, and into, the anachronism that is 'the present. Not only that 'the present is being posited, but also, what is more, being posited as such (that is, being given a quality, a time).3 The ambiva-lence, any ambivalence, either discerned or spoken of as specific to this pose, is but an illusion, a facade, even a strategy of power. For, where 'the present is concerned, the basic form of its thought is the judgement. A judgement both 'making sense' of and 'making present the present. That to say, a movement of tempo-ralization producing 'the present, and, in being so produced, being retained and Journal of Arts & Ideas