At the very moment when it became possible for it to denounce as fantasies the ideal geneses described in the eighteenth century, modern thought was establishing a problematics of the origin at once extremely complex and extremely tangled; this problematics has served as the foundation for our experience of time, and, since the nineteenth century, as the starting point of all our attempts to re apprehend what beginning and re beginning, the recession and the presence of the beginning, the return and the end, could be in the human sphere.