Narrating the unappropriable: Time and différance between hermeneutics and literature

Abstract

Introduction: Philosophical reflection on time has been hampered by a fundamental difficulty: thinking about that which is experienced immediately but which eludes any definitive conceptual definition. From Augustine's paradox to Heidegger's ontological reformulations, temporality appears as a phenomenon resistant to objectification, insofar as it cannot be reduced to substance, an available entity, or a fully appropriable magnitude. This article critically examines the reification of time through a dialogue between philosophy, hermeneutics, and literature, aiming to demonstrate that temporality cannot be understood from a substantialist logic nor reduced to a category susceptible to conceptual appropriation, but rather must be conceived as event, trace, and narrative configuration. Materials and methods: This study articulates the thought of Saint Augustine, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida with the narrative theory of Paul Ricoeur, whose notion of temporal refiguration allows us to understand narrative not as a representation of time, but as the operation through which experience acquires intelligibility without closing off its aporetic character. The scope of the study includes the literary analysis of "Funes, the Memorious" by Jorge Luis Borges and "Manuscript Found in a Pocket" by Julio Cortázar, read as narrative explorations of temporal distension and the failure of any conclusive synthesis. Results: The hermeneutic reading of the narratives reveals that in "Funes, the Memorious," the impossibility of forgetting shows that absolute memory cancels the minimum conditions of narrativity, since where there is neither distance nor selection, meaning cannot emerge, leaving temporal experience trapped in a saturation of presents that prevents the configuration of an intelligible story. In Manuscript Found in a Pocket, time appears as a contingent opening, as a permanent deferral that thwarts any attempt at mastery and predictability, showing that human temporality can only be inhabited in tension. Discussion: The articulation between time, gift, and trace allows us to understand that temporality cannot be reduced to an object of knowledge in the strict sense, but must be approached as a phenomenon that occurs in experience, always incompletely and with deferral. The configuration of the Derridean perspective has allowed us to radicalize this impossibility of closure by thinking about time from the logic of the trace and différance, where time never appears as an immediate presence but is always displaced, deferred, traversed by remnants that refer to an inaccessible otherness. Conclusions: The study demonstrates that every attempt to narrate time is simultaneously a way of making it intelligible and evidence of its irreducible excess. The critique of the reification of time possesses a historical and cultural dimension, in response to which philosophy and literature open the possibility of conceiving alternative temporalities, forms of experience not exclusively subordinated to calculation or productivity.