What if our complicated present is actually a whodunit with no clear culprits or detectives? So the very popular genre of detective stories can provide suspense as we search for the killer, but these stories can also help us cope with traumatic realities, with our identity issues, or with sharing.

The book Stretching the Present. A Detective Quest for a Shared World takes two main directions. It describes the dynamics of detective narrative, from classic literature (Raymond Chandler) to iconic films (Rear Window, Memento) to serial narratives (The Sopranos Family, Born Again, On the Lake, and Rectify). The second strand of the book is a search for a philosophy of presence that draws primarily on post-structuralism and the affective turn, and moves towards an original conception of identity politics and reality.

The book attempts to inquire in both directions – reading detective fiction through the prism of philosophy and subjecting philosophy to investigative scrutiny. In doing so, it reinterprets detective narrative as part of a search for a temporal orientation that can provide us with something as important as a shared concept of the present. In other words, detectives are not only trying to identify the murderer, but also to discern the turns and breaks in time that characterize our contemporary situation.

Napínat současnost. Detektivní pátrání po sdíleném světě (Stretching the Present. A Detective Quest for the Shared World)