Daniel Sibony, a university professor, with a Ph.D. in mathematics and philosophy, is a psychoanalyst and writer. He has written around forty books.
This book examines time in its simple or complex, common and poetic forms, the time of an instant and of duration. It stays as close to experienced time as to time seen and reviewed by physics – quantum, relativist, or a mix of the two. It introduces the notion of object-time: object – concrete or abstract – bearer of time that dares us to take it, extract it; that lost or available time that offers and reveals itself; that time of memory, which haunted Proust; that time of duration and of the moment, of the event and of trauma, of the encounter and the discovery, of the individual and of the cosmos.
It discusses the place that time assumes in our lives: the way in which we take time, or in which we are taken by time. It reveals a connection between time and the unconscious. They say that the latter is unaware of time. What if it was one of its most fertile sources? The text is filled with the author’s many resources: as a mathematician, physicist, theologian, psychoanalyst who discusses very informative clinical cases. With a consummate and masterly art of the written word, he exploits with ease the unique way language has to stimulate or to clarify reflection.
This book represents an original undertaking, with penetrating insights on the familiar time of experiences, when it is a question of memory or of nostalgia – illuminated with acuity and accuracy – and the complex and rationalized time of physics or metaphysics, approached with a light touch, but while fully acknowledging the mystery.