Temporalidades miméticas

This essay reconstructs João Cezar de Castro Rocha’s reflections on temporal categories as they intersect with mimetic theory, focusing on presentism, “futures past,” belatedness, and the heterotopic logic of the museum. It first examines Castro Rocha’s account of contemporary presentism, understood through François Hartog’s notion of an all-encompassing present that devours past and future, and reinterpreted via René Girard’s insights into mimetic desire in the digital age. Social media’s viral dynamics, instantaneity, and symbolic violence reveal an unprecedented collapse of the temporal lag once required for interpretation, culminating in a hermeneutical crisis exemplified since 9/11. Shakespeare’s Othello—especially Iago’s manipulation of “nowness”—serves as a literary paradigm of this accelerated, agonic temporality. The essay then turns to Reinhart Koselleck’s category of futures past, showing how Castro Rocha interrogates its applicability to the future of literary studies. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of observation, he argues that overlapping temporalities undermine the linear structure presupposed by the concept of Sattelzeit, complicating the tension between experience and expectation. A third section explores Helmuth Plessner’s concept of Verspätung (belatedness) and its reinterpretation by Castro Rocha as a critical resource for grasping Latin America’s relation to modernity. Through Machado de Assis, belatedness becomes an opportunity to embrace the simultaneity of heterogeneous historical times, to unsettle conventional authorship, and to affirm emulation over originality. The discussion of the nineteenth-century museum highlights its paradoxical attempt to accumulate all times in one space, anticipating a heterotopic structure that destabilizes linear historical narratives. Finally, the essay relates Castro Rocha’s temporal analyses to the notion of “dissonant times,” understood as the coexistence of divergent, stratified, and conflicting temporal layers. This framework expands the reach of Castro Rocha’s insights, underscoring how mimetic processes shape contemporary experiences of temporal disjunction and offering a conceptual tool to articulate the heterogeneity of late-modern temporality.