Les Temps qui restent was founded in 2024 by the former editorial board of Les Temps Modernes, under the leadership of Patrice Maniglier and Juliette Simont, following its discontinuation by Gallimard, the magazine’s owner. It is based on the conviction that the inaugural project of the magazine founded by Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and their friends, far from being outdated by the present situation, has on the contrary become all the more relevant - provided it is profoundly transformed.

After the Second World War, it was a matter of taking note of the impossibility of isolating ourselves from the global context in any ivory tower whatsoever, and of the need to gain a clearer understanding of our collective and individual ways of being caught up in a totalizing movement that not only surpassed us, but also compromised us. Today, in the context of the upheaval of biogeochemical systems on a planetary scale as a result of human activities, and precisely of «modernizing» activities, this diagnosis and this demand are all the more relevant. Les Temps qui restent proposes to be the place where the Sartrean notion of commitment is redefined in the age of the «Anthropocene», i.e. in the context of the planetarization of our modes of existence, in both continuity and rupture with the history of Les Temps Modernes.

The journal Les Temps qui restent mixes different periodicities: it is made up of quarterly issues, but contributions are put online in a continuous flow, while some are regular series and chronicles with their own periodicity.

The journal publishes contributions in every conceivable medium (texts, images, sounds, videos, even events) that help us to see more clearly the most urgent task of our time, which can be described in the words of Bruno Latour: how to bring Modernity back to Earth?

The title of the magazine can be understood in four senses, which define the problematic space of the magazine.

• Inheriting Les Temps Modernes: Les Temps qui restent is what remains of Les Temps Modernes. It inherit it on two formal aspects in particular: articulating individual lives and experiences to a global or totalizing perspective; doing so without any a priori dogmatic line, but in a synthetic or diagonal spirit.

• Act while there’s still time: Les Temps qui restent is also about the time we have left before it’s too late. Too late for what? To «bring back to Earth» the dominant socio-technical trajectories, i.e. to modify them in such a way that they do not alter the dynamics of the planetary system, with potentially apocalyptic consequences for these socio-technical systems themselves as well as for life on Earth in general.

• Learning to live with the remains of Modernity: We can’t get rid of Modernity in the same way that Modernity thought it could get rid of tradition. Greenhouse gases, radioactive waste and microplastics, but also the material and mental infrastructures that Modernity has put in place, have the temporality of a remnant with which we’ll have to live for a long time to come. Les Temps qui restent will explore how we can live with the remnants of Modernity to better deactivate it.

• Opening up to other times: Les Temps qui restent is finally about the other times that remain in the vaults of the future, those virtual histories that run parallel to our own and that our current trajectory obliterates. Les Temps qui restent aims to liberate these alternative times, these times that are yet to be imagined.

One of the most significant originalities of TQR is its mode of governance: with no editorial board, it is managed by a very broad community divided into three circles (the Committee, the Council and the Collective), concerned to avoid as far as possible the perverse effects of power mechanisms and to encourage the greatest possible involvement of each and every person in the action. A Scientific Committee ensures the quality of the scientific content published in the magazine.

This collective project aims at stimulating reflection on the legacy of Modernity, at attempting a shared and nuanced inventory of demodernization. It welcomes all initiatives likely to contribute to bringing back to Earth the currently dominant historical dynamics. It hopes to contribute to the emergence of a collective and plural subject capable of doing something with the times that remain.

For an in-depth development of the journal’s intentions, please read Patrice Maniglier’s programmatic text «Des Temps Modernes aux Temps qui restent: histoire et avenir d’une revue, histoire et avenir du monde» available on the site in several languages.