Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time.

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The contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him. Darkness is something that - more than any light - turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.
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The entry point to the present necessarily takes the form of an archeology; an archeology that does not, however, regress to a historical past, but returns to that past within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living. What remains unlived therefore is incessantly sucked back toward the origin, without ever being able to reach it. The present is nothing other than this unlived element in everything that is lived. That which impedes access to the present is precisely the mass of what for some reason we have not managed to live. The attention to this “unlived” is the life of the contemporary. And to be contemporary means in this sense to return to a present where we have never been.