'Temporariness' is a scandal in our culture of monumentalism and its persistent search for permanence and eternal life. Temporariness-the time of the ephemeral and the performative, the time of speech, the time of nature and its constant changes-has little cultural purchase in the machine of the 'contemporary'. In this volume, two practitioners and theoreticians of time, space and the written/spoken word, embrace the notion of temporariness-seeing in it a site for a renewal of ways of thinking about ourselves, our language, our society and our environment. This collage of fragmentary genres approaches the notion of mitigated presence, mobilizing contingency to build an atlas of intersections seeking to pay attention to our own temporariness as the site of conceptual and ethical responsibility.