Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, John Dewey, Niklas Luhmann, and German painter Gerhard Richter, this book offers a set of conceptual tools for scholars examining practices in the life sciences, security, new media and art practices, and other emergent phenomena. It shows how anthropology remains relevant to contemporary debates.

Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction On the Anthropology of the Contemporary 1 Inquiry 6 Elements 7 The Legitimacy of the Contemporary 2000: Drosophila Lessons 14 The Future of Human Nature 20 Bio-ethics: The Question Concerning Humanism 22 Nature 25 Security, Danger, Risk 26 Contemporary Formations 28 Conclusion 29 Adjacency Timing 35 Situating: Tolerance and Benevolence 36 Telos: A Zone of Discomfort 44 Untimely Work 48 Observation Bildung 54 Observing the Future 57 Responsibility to Ignorance 60 Observing Observers Observing 62 Observing First-order Observers 64 Chronicling Observation 66 Original History 67 Writing Things: Deictic Not Epideictic 69 Vehement Contemporaries Rugged Terrain 78 Elements of a Contemporary Moral Landscape 80 Genomics as Ethical Terrain 81 Agon in the Genomic Terrain 84 Thumos: Appropriate Anger 90 Vehement Contemporaries 98 Marking Time: Gerhard Richter Contemporary Modern 101 Biotechnical Forms 103 Richter: Double Negations 106 Art Critics and Others 106 Our Contemporary 108 Nature 109 Photography 112 Marking Time 116 Abstract Images 119 Remediation 122 Objects 124 Remedation 127 Notes 129 Bibliography 141 Index 147

"This essay is an intellectual pause in an active scholarly career... Rabinow contemplates the automation of science and art, where art becomes nature and nature art."--C.S. Peebles, Choice "[T]his book deserves a readership beyond anthropologists and scholars in science and technology studies. Read more generously, Rabinow's conversations with historians and philosophers (both ancient and modern), critics of art and literature, and artists and scientists could shed light on the problems of designing inquiry into the ethos and logos of any time."--Natasha Myers, Isis

"Paul Rabinow has proved again that he is one of our most incisive commentators on the vital question of our time-what it means to be human today. The reflections gathered in this book engage with the question from a remarkable array of starting points-from speculative philosophical histories through the artisanship of painting to the creative labor that sequenced the genome of the fruit fly. In the process, he delineates a methodology for the anthropology of the contemporary that is productive and provocative in equal measure."—Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics and Political Science"Marking Time is a gem of insight and a journey of learning. These essays offer an intellectual adventure to be enjoyed by a broad range of readers."—George Marcus, University of California, Irvine"Paul Rabinow offers us a sustained piece of thought on the meaning of the contemporary for anthropology, with the goal of discovering 'new problems and new truths that open up points of view and new sciences.' Boldly eschewing use of the 'ethnographic record' to address major philosophical questions, Rabinow instead detours through ancient Greece, Rome in late antiquity, his own research with various genome mapping projects, and a dialogue with many German philosophers, to arrive at concepts that help us write in a mediated mode, where one's insights come from finding modes of observing in close proximity that are appropriate to the objects and events to be explained."—John Borneman, Princeton University

Paul Rabinow has proved again that he is one of our most incisive commentators on the vital question of our time-what it means to be human today. The reflections gathered in this book engage with the question from a remarkable array of starting points-from speculative philosophical histories through the artisanship of painting to the creative labor that sequenced the genome of the fruit fly. In the process, he delineates a methodology for the anthropology of the contemporary that is productive and provocative in equal measure. -- Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics and Political Science Marking Time is a gem of insight and a journey of learning. These essays offer an intellectual adventure to be enjoyed by a broad range of readers. -- George Marcus, University of California, Irvine Paul Rabinow offers us a sustained piece of thought on the meaning of the contemporary for anthropology, with the goal of discovering 'new problems and new truths that open up points of view and new sciences.' Boldly eschewing use of the 'ethnographic record' to address major philosophical questions, Rabinow instead detours through ancient Greece, Rome in late antiquity, his own research with various genome mapping projects, and a dialogue with many German philosophers, to arrive at concepts that help us write in a mediated mode, where one's insights come from finding modes of observing in close proximity that are appropriate to the objects and events to be explained. -- John Borneman, Princeton University