History and Theory 60, no. 3 (September 2021), 444-448 © Wesleyan University 2021 ISSN: 0018-2656 DOI: 10.1111/hith.12220 A RESPONSE TO FRANÇOIS HARTOG, “CHRONOS, KAIROS, KRISIS: THE GENESIS OF WESTERN TIME” 2. DANA SAJDI Who stole nature from us but ordered us to conserve the environment? — Faraj Suleiman, “Hymn to Gentrification” 1 What does François Hartog’s purportedly unique temporal order, which he calls “Western time,” make of moments in history when concerns, hopes, and anticipa- tions were shared by others beyond the temporal order he conceptualizes? What did the instances in which non-Westerners had similar apprehensions and expec- tations of time do to the Christian regime of historicity? For example, what is the position of Western time regarding common millenarian anxieties in the early modern period when monotheists—Christians, Muslims, and Jews—of the Old World from “India to Iberia” spoke of the apocalypse? 2 Hartog remains silent about such questions, probably because his main preoc- cupation, at least in “Chronos, Kairos, Krisis: The Genesis of Western Time,” seems to be the establishment of a homology between the situation of early Christians and our situation today. The apocalypse anticipated by an a priori sinful Christian community is echoed by a secularized doomsday of extinction in the Anthropocene, as expected by the equally sinful species of Homo sapiens. For Hartog, the uncanniness of the resemblance between our situation and that of early Christians is further enhanced by another trait in the homology: the idea of “the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.” Whereas the early Christians had to accommodate their quotidian time to a new temporality that was bracketed by the moment of incarnation and the Messiah’s return, we, today, need to think of our historical time in relation to that of the Anthropocene. As we consider the incommensurability of our temporalities, the incapacity of historical time to apprehend the geological counterpart, Hartog invites us to reorient ourselves by taking lessons from early Christianity. Early Christians learned how to tread a time of anticipation and possibility, on the one hand, and simultaneously lead a life in quotidian time, on the other. The Augustinian formula of the two cities delineated a new Christian regime of historicity that, according to Hartog, went on to shape Western time. Hartog proposes an Anthropocene regime of histo- ricity. And though we may not be able to find an Augustine to harmonize our contradictory or mutually incompatible temporalities, we must at least attempt 1. Faraj Suleiman, “Hymn to Gentrification,” track 4 on Better than Berlin, 2020 (my translation). 2. This is taken from an announcement for a symposium titled “Speaking the End Times: Prophecy and Messianism in Early Modern Eurasia” (University of Michigan, 16 April 2015), https://events. umich.edu/event/21503.