1 Pedagogy of Time and a Decolonial “Present” Nassim Noroozi McGill University While reflecting on the concept of “trace” 1 during an interview, Jacque Derrida elaborated on a pedagogical tradition in philosophy classes in which philosophers start a course with a question, e.g. “What is…?” After alluding to the problems of opening a course with questions in general, Derrida recalled how queries like “What is?” are concerned with Being and therefore put the present and the now in positions of advantage: “Haven’t we in our interpretation of Being privileged a modality of time that is the present?” 2 He then explained that he has sought to interrogate, “displace” and “re-inscribe” this desire for the present in different terrains or corpuses, and has attempted to ponder on a past or a future “that is not just a modified present”, but a “different experience with regard to the past or the future.” 3 In this paper I will elaborate on how a pedagogy that is committed to provoking thinking about modified presences and different experiences of pasts and futures can be a decolonial engagement. I argue that this endeavor -what I will hereafter call pedagogy of time- aims to disrupt what regulates students and readers’ economies of knowledge 4 , without appointing conclusive endpoints for this disruption. Moreover, pedagogy of time does not aim for oversimplified and hurried theoretical reflections. As such, it is committed to confront politics of speed in thinking. I maintain that this confrontation with politics of speed is an important 1 Jacque Derrida, “What comes before the question?” YouTube Video, 1:45, September 9 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2bPTs8fspk. 2 Ibid., 3:19. 3 Ibid., 6:05. 4 I use the phrase “regulating the economy of knowledge” from Derrida. In Given Time he discusses how the notion of gift as being a free product as we commonly assume is impossible. He does to reflect on the potentialities of this impossibility. “The gift itself […] should never be confused with the presence of its phenomenon. Perhaps there is nomination, language, thought, desire, or intention only there where there is this movement still for thinking, desiring, naming that which gives itself neither to be known, experienced, nor lived, in the sense in which presence, existence and determination regulate the economy of knowing, experiencing, and living. In this sense one can think, desire, and say only the impossible according to the measureless measure […] of the impossible”. What I mean by what regulates the economy of knowledge in this chapter is not what Derrida develops, however. I use the phrase to reflect on the factors and experiences that are decisive and central in shaping our knowledge structures: elements like theories, stories, school curricula, epistemologies, novels, cultural traditions, etc. See Jacque Derrida, Given Time I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 29.