Marcel, the newly elected history teacher in high school, starts his course with "The structure of time" in Alain Tanner's most famous film "Jonas". Starting not from history as substance (which he sees correctly as a manifestation of time), but with its "shape" in the sense of post-Einsteinian physics, he uses blood-sausage from his father's butcher store, forming a long pipe or a corridor which he asks one of his students to cut conforming with the ticking metronome on his desk. So do people "create" their time, by hazard "splitting" it into longer or shorter, but arbitrary pieces. However, taken the blood-sausage as a whole, one sees not only its continuum, but all the folds, creases and pleats: these dis-continua are what we call the "events", the events that need time and shape time at once. The sum of events in time we call history.
Tanner's whole film is a complex example of how all these 68er people, now in a post-revolutionary confusion, try to understand the structure of time and their own position in it. Social critique philosophy is always existentialism, not on the trivial reason that a society consists of individuals, but because Being differs from existence by including the component of time into reflection. Since time cannot be structured by an individual alone, conflicts emerge, and conflicts are usually "solved" with fights and battles - as we know from history. However, a society in which conflicts can be analyzed into theses and anti-theses in order to be neutralized in syntheses, would be a society that is conscious that history starts with a metaphysics of time - as taught in the movie by Marcel. But Marcel loses his job, teaches in an old age home the "Temps Des Cerises", and history still starts with the enumeration of single battles - we have still not learned that the topic of history is not the fragile product of mankind - but the time and its structure.
Tanner's whole film is a complex example of how all these 68er people, now in a post-revolutionary confusion, try to understand the structure of time and their own position in it. Social critique philosophy is always existentialism, not on the trivial reason that a society consists of individuals, but because Being differs from existence by including the component of time into reflection. Since time cannot be structured by an individual alone, conflicts emerge, and conflicts are usually "solved" with fights and battles - as we know from history. However, a society in which conflicts can be analyzed into theses and anti-theses in order to be neutralized in syntheses, would be a society that is conscious that history starts with a metaphysics of time - as taught in the movie by Marcel. But Marcel loses his job, teaches in an old age home the "Temps Des Cerises", and history still starts with the enumeration of single battles - we have still not learned that the topic of history is not the fragile product of mankind - but the time and its structure.