A coagulação dos ponteiros: relógios e outras máquinas do tempo na literatura de António Lobo Antunes

The need for a unique measure of time marked by a tool apparently as bourgeois and modern as the clock is the centre of 20th-century philosophical reflection, at least in Heidegger’s interpretation of man as In-der Welt-sein. Lobo Antunes' works collect the challenge of reconfiguring the large archive of images connected to the time of the clock that, in the historical and spatial context of post-colonial Portugal, is no longer valid. Moreover, clock time works poorly or unnecessarily. As we are told in the novels of António Lobo Antunes, history no longer submits to the tyranny of the linear time of clocks. New temporalities need other time-measuring machine.