Boram Jeong is an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver, U.S. She received her PhD from Duquesne University and Université Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis in 2017. She works on 19th & 20th century continental philosophy and social & political philosophy, specifically the politics of time — theories of racialized, colonial, and gendered temporalities. She teaches courses on contemporary continental philosophy, philosophy of gender & race, and decolonial thought.
Thank you for doing this interview. In full disclosure, I asked you to do this interview because of the important scholarship you are publishing and teaching, but also because we were trained in the same graduate program at Duquesne University. Thomas Nail has also mentioned your name to me, which was delightful to hear. What was your overall experience in the program and how did you turn towards the interests and specializations you now work within? How did you begin to become more interested in theories of time/temporality?
Thank you for having me! My current work on temporality falls under social and political philosophy, but my interest in time initially began with the questions I had as an artist: what distinguishes aesthetic experience from ordinary sense perception? What happens epistemologically when we are moved by a work of art? I took up these questions in my MA thesis on Deleuze’s aesthetics and time, where I argued aesthetic experience prompts resonance, instead of recognition, drawing on his book Proust and Signs. Resonance and recognition are both a function of memory in the perception. However, if recognition is a recollection of the past similar to/ same as the object of the present perception, in resonance a piece of the past rises up to the surface in the present with a new meaning, just like in the famous madeleine moment. I thought that aesthetic experience moves us by a kind of temporal disorientation, where the depth of time unfolds in the ‘now.’ As I was doing this work, I came to discover my interest in the temporal structure of trauma. It all makes sense now, considering the intergenerational trauma, historical injustice and unresolved grief/anger that my family has been dealing with; my father is a former revolutionary in the democracy movement in Korea under the military regime and a peasant movement activist. He’s a survivor of the May 18 Movement, where the civilians in the city of Gwangju were massacred by government troops with US approval. In fact, I almost went to a medical school in Gwangju in the hopes of working at the city’s Trauma Center — I copped out just before the final interview. (haha) I had collected too many philosophy books by then that I had to do something with them first.
I joined the PhD program at Duquesne shortly after that. I consider myself lucky to have landed in the program with three Deleuze scholars. There I met some of the most supportive and generous people I know, including my advisor and dear friend Fred Evans. They helped me through my struggle as a foreign-born woman of color in a male-dominated field at an overwhelmingly white institution. They helped me turn the institutional shortcomings into an inspiration to work on climate and inclusive justice.
I, too, feel incredibly fortunate to have landed in such a program with many wonderful teachers. We had some of the same mentors as philosophers of race, in phenomenology and in the history of philosophy, including George Yancy and more. I noticed it was important to you to begin your chapter “A People Yet to Come: ‘People of Color’ Reconsidered” with a personal narrative, particularly about your identity in relation to whiteness. This approach lends itself to support for your scholarship. Can you comment on the connections where appropriate? For example, you unpack the phrase “person of color” in philosophical detail and demonstrate how there are ways to define persons of color that go “beyond its opposition to whiteness.” I’m very interested in the scholarship and methods that take us beyond whiteness in a communal way.
The book chapter was my attempt to articulate the workings of racialized time. I looked particularly at Frantz Fanon’s idea of how people of color feel that they arrived ‘too late’ in the world, where their bodies are seen through the historical-racial schema before anything. If whiteness manifests temporally as ‘the now,’ I argue, peoples of color, as far as they are determined in relation to whites, do not belong to the present. I problematized the notion of ‘people of color’ as a negative expression of white people in this regard (‘of color’ being ‘non- white’). Also, I wanted to emphasize how racial identity defined in opposition to whiteness can cause a further division between communities of color. This is shown, for example, in the term ‘honorary whites,’ an assimilationist ideology for Asian Americans whose ‘success’ is supposed to lie in moving away from other peoples of color, who in turn are racialized by their failures to approximate white norms. This is why I began the essay by sharing my frustration as an Asian immigrant, being categorized arbitrarily as an honorary white (not a person of color) sometimes, and a perpetual foreigner (not a white person) other times.
I completely understand, well, as much as I can try to with compassion and rationality, philosophically and pragmatically. As this series for the APA is about time and temporality, do you think time is real, ontologically and metaphysically speaking?
I think so. I’m not sure where I stand between Newtonian absolute time and McTaggart’s unreality of time, but I’m with Bergson in that change is reality and time is substance. I wonder if we can even say that all that is real is in time, more so than in space, in the sense that things that really matter in life don’t always seem to take up space: stories, losses, sufferings or hope. I believe there’s a sense in which thinking in time allows generosity and sympathy toward others.
The question I’m more interested in concerns the many ways in which time is real to us — temporalities more than time, if you like. Do we live in the same time or different times, as the feminist historian Rita Felski asks in Doing Time? In which way are we made to feel ‘behind the time,’ ‘stuck in the past,’ or trapped in the circle, regardless of clock time? As the Korean American writer Matthew Salesses notes, grieving — as well as living as an adoptee — is like living in two different times at once. We can also think about the temporality of the settler-colonial narrative that characterizes Indigenous peoples as a ‘people of the past’ or ‘disappearing people’ that the works of Leanne B. Simpson and Mark Rifkin point out. Once we begin to look closely at the many temporalities that structure our lives, the reality of time itself might seem less relevant.
This is thought provoking. Although I understand what you are saying, I would have to slightly disagree, at least logically speaking. There are no easy concepts for time with some of the Early Moderns, thinkers like Spinoza or Leibniz, for example, who seem to be intimately interested in, however disparate, concepts and processes of eternity. I agree that we’re discussing temporalities here more than ‘time.’
Thanks for pointing that out. I, by no means, am trying to deny the value of metaphysical questions concerning time. I do find the relation of eternity and time fascinating, especially featured in Borges’ short stories. What I’m questioning here is the assumption underlying debates on the reality of time itself that time is an empty and homogenous unit, or a linear progression — again, in support of Bergson’s notion of time as duration and qualitative multiplicity.
A good chunk of your research involves a more Deleuzean and, at times, Marxist, materialist reading of time and money. Is that correct? Specifically, you address a capitalist model that includes its means and ends as debt, individual debt and credit, it seems, and being bound to live a certain way because of the factors of morality and past decisions, or as slaves to debt without many options otherwise.
As someone who is deeply in debt due to my educational programs, of which I will be paying for until death, can you elaborate on your deduction in the essay “The Production of Indebted Subjects: Capitalism and Melancholia” published in the Deleuze and Guattari Studies journal as they pertain to time/temporality?
That article was the preliminary idea for my doctoral dissertation, which is the book project I’m currently working on. I’m interested in the ways in which capitalism exerts a temporal control over its subjects, particularly through debt —the idea inspired by my teachers at Paris 8, Éric Alliez & Maurizio Lazzarato. The condition of indebtedness puts one in a certain temporal structure, since the promise to pay back weighs in virtually every decision one makes for the future. I call it a ‘melancholic temporality,’ where one suffers from moral obligations to the past and a failure to proceed into the open future.
In grad school, I had a small medical bill of $200 that I couldn’t pay off immediately. Over the course of time, I received a number of letters from a few different debt collecting companies. They called me every day for over a year — for $200! This is a tiny amount compared to student loans and mortgages that many of us have to carry for decades if not until death, as you said. If indebtedness is a general condition of the subjects in financial capitalism, it’s necessary to consider debt philosophically as a way of subject formation; as a technique of control and subjection, it is extremely efficient because it doesn’t involve any spatial, external confinement of the subject but only their voluntary submission to the temporality of debt. As Deleuze says, in contemporary capitalism “man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.”
Brilliant. Congrats on the current book project too. To be even more specific, can you elaborate further on your assessment of capitalism today when you write, “The ‘power’ of time that generates difference in monetary value, however, has different effects on debtor and creditor…or Deleuze’s ‘circle of capital’?
In the article, I speak about the power of time in the self-generation of capital through the concept of ‘Time Value of Money (TVM),’ a key concept of financial management in economics. The idea of its formula (FV = PV * (1 + i)n) is that the future value of money (FV) equals the present value (PV) multiplied by 1+interest rate (i) to the nth power, with n signifying the number of time periods. Given the interest, there is a so-called ‘inherent monetary value of time.’ That is to say, if you are deprived of self-generating capital (or worse, in debt), time is not on your side.
For instance, in Seoul, there’s a bridge called Mapo Daegyo, known as a ‘bridge of death.’ The city of Seoul has recently put up encouraging messages on the guardrails to prevent suicide attempts, such as “the most shining moment of your life has yet to come.” Korea has the highest suicide rate among the OECD nations. It also holds the highest ratio of household debt to income as well as the most credit cards per capita in the world.
Suicide is the most radical attempt to resign from one’s time to come, due to the complete loss of temporal autonomy – in this case, under the pressure of growing debt and internalized guilt. For many of us who are in debt that multiplies infinitely over time, time promises only to accelerate exponential debt growth.
Do you feel there are any ways a ‘melancholic subject’ can escape such capitalistic temporal controls? Can those deeply in debt have any good reason to imagine a future as free?
Right. First of all, I’m not saying that one’s financial condition determines entirely or exclusively their sense of lived time. They may have other reasons to be hopeful. But debt as a technique of government deserves critical attention because it is often presented in the enticing language of optimism and promises for the future — the idea that debt gives you the opportunity for education, medical care, housing, etc., all of which should be available to all people in the first place. No one should have to trade their temporal autonomy for basic human rights.
As for overcoming ‘financial melancholia,’ I think the Debt Collective organizations like ‘Rolling Jubilee’ is worth mentioning. Normally, your debt from banks gets sold to the debt buying industry for pennies on the dollar, and the debt buyers make profit by collecting the full amount from original debtors. The Debt Collective intervenes the circulation of debt by buying debts for a fragment of the original amount and abolish it, instead of collecting it. I find debt strikes interesting since it is a form of resistance that utilizes the speculative nature of the debt market itself.
Agreed, fully, and hope is so important. Your concept of temporal autonomy is rationally striking. There are many scholars who have written about human rights and the use of time, especially when the topic involves work, working, putting in hours on the clock. What other aspects of time, temporality, and/or human consciousness would you like to see more research on?
I would definitely like to see more comparative work on Western and non-Western notions of temporality, and to learn about various philosophical accounts of non-linear time. I’ve once attempted to look at the concept of return (復; fù) in I-Ching (The Book of Changes) in relation to Deleuze’s notion of repetition, a project I hope to return to someday. More generally, I’d be excited to hear more counter-narratives to the normative temporality (or ‘chrononormativity,’ to use Elizabeth Freeman’s term): queer temporality, immigrant temporality, prison temporality, Indigenous temporality, etc. What I’m working on now in this regard is the notion of ‘colonial temporality,’ which sheds light on the colonial logic of time that describes colonized peoples as ‘anachronistic’ and ‘behind the time.’ For example, I read the ‘newness’ that the New Women thinkers in the 1920s and 30s colonial Korea emphasized as a temporal resistance against the colonial logic.
I am reminded of the philosophy of Lisa Guenther and Thomas Nail, one of our interviewees in this series. Guenther works on using philosophy to help eradicate solitary confinement in the U.S. prison industrial complex. I had the opportunity of learning from her briefly when she visited John Carroll University for a few days where I was teaching.
Absolutely. Guenther’s work on dead time: the temporality of supermax confinement and Nail’s kinopolitics have been instrumental in the development of political theories of time.
Finally, do you ever waste time? What about other ways to produce new assemblages of energies and new ways of going about existence that are worth pursuing?
I love this question! Actually, I’ve been thinking about writing an essay called ‘In defense of wasting time.’ I wanted to first raise a question about our habitual way of understanding time in terms of productivity and efficiency, that is, in economic terms. How do we save instead of waste time? How much time do I need to invest? More fundamentally, I wanted to examine philosophically the idea itself of wasting time. Is the time that I spend watching Netflix to procrastinate a waste of time? Is my failed attempt to make vegan cupcakes a waste of time? Maybe. But as we all know, we sometimes come to a true understanding of our own (in)action much later in time. In fact, Deleuze writes in Proust and Signs, when we think we waste time, certain truths of this lost time are often revealed to us at the end. It’s like being in an apprenticeship of signs, the meaning of which is to be deciphered over time. Sure, wasting time is inefficient but necessary for learning. (Did I defend why I waste so much time?) In this regard, there’s a moment that I keep coming back to. It was one of my first days at Université Paris 8, the first faculty meeting of the semester, open to all members of the philosophy department including students. Faculty members started the meeting by discussing how to respond to the upper administration’s request to post publication records on the faculty webpage. The debate went on for nearly an hour! To a person coming from an American institution, it seemed like a ridiculous waste of time at first. But soon I was struck by everyone’s dedication to question the neoliberal principle behind this demand that implicates a quantitative assessment of faculty research performance. I know in retrospect that this moment was only a precursor of the detrimental neoliberal restructuring of the public university system (the entire society, in fact) in France, which has led to the recent nation-wide protests and strikes — the truth of the wasted hour revealing itself in the years to come.
Chris Rawls
Chris Rawls teaches philosophy full time at Roger Williams University. Chris received her Ph.D. in philosophy in 2015 from Duquesne University writing on Spinoza’s dynamic epistemology. Chris recently co-edited an interdisciplinary anthology Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides with Routledge Press’s series Research on Aesthetics (an experiment for the ages!) with Diana Nieva and Steven Gouveia. Chris also studies/teaches within the Critical Philosophy of Race and Whiteness Studies since 2006 and helped co-found the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) archive at the Pembroke Center for Feminist Theory, Brown University.
Boram Jeong
Boram Jeong is an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver, U.S. She received her PhD from Duquesne University and Université Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis in 2017. She works on 19th & 20th century continental philosophy and social & political philosophy, specifically the politics of time — theories of racialized, colonial, and gendered temporalities. She teaches courses on contemporary continental philosophy, philosophy of gender & race, and decolonial thought. https://ucdenver.academia.edu/BoramJeong
