Abstract

This essay is a meditation on the relevance of the concept of Zeitgeist for thinking about the ills of our contemporary globalized world. Exploring the heritage of the term from Roman times through to Herder, Hegel, and others, Malpas argues that Zeitgeist (literally: spirit of the time) nevertheless includes a notion of place such that time always unfolds in and through place. It is Heidegger who, for Malpas, most illuminatingly thinks this belonging-together of place and time. Malpas explores the disorientation and anxiety created by the spatialization of the modern world, which imagines that horizons of time and place can be dissolved into unbounded, undifferentiated space.