I have already suggested that the thinking of totality itself – the urgent feeling of the presence all around us of some overarching that we can at least name – has the palpable benefit of forcing us to conceive of at least the possibility of other alternate systems, something we can now identify as our old friend Utopian thinking. Of the antinomies, perhaps we can conclude a bit more, namely that their ceaseless alternation between Identity and Difference is to be attributed to a blocked mechanism, whereby in our episteme these categories fail to develop, fail to transform themselves by way of their own interaction, as they have seemed able to do in other moments of the past (and not only in the Hegelian dialectic). If so, that blockage can only have something to do with the absence of any sense of an immediate future and of imaginable change: for us time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without overlapping or transitional stages.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 70-71