The theory of “spacious temporality” figures significantly in the fulfillment of the radical existentialism of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Spacious temporality or “this space-time of freedom” develops Nancy's argument for emerging existential presence or the coming and birth to presence. Existential presence occurs as a happening and experience in time, including the intervention of a nonchronological temporal regime that can transform the way of being in the world with the suddenness of a revelation or epiphany. The temporality of emerging presence ineluctably gravitates toward spacious temporality or space-time. Indeed, for Nancy the happening of the birth to existential presence requires spacious temporality. An original thinker and writer, Nancy's existentialism of existence as its own essence must happen in relation to otherness. Nancy writes, “The otherness of existence happens only as ‘togetherness.’” Thus, the otherness of existence for Nancy compels spacious temporality as a dimension of thought and being in a space-time for togetherness.

For Nancy, spacious temporality and space-time mean “the opening of time.” The spacing of time engenders a fresh fluidity and malleability of time. Spacious temporality, as Nancy sees it, opens free space-time for existential freedom to reexamine time itself in the face of groundless being. Nancy writes that free space-time “is opened onto a new spatiality, onto a free space at the heart of which freedom can exist, at the heart of which freedom can be freed or renounced” (EF: 18, 19, 184; emphasis in the original).

Such opening of “free space of time” fosters the singularity of existential presence in its engagement with otherness and the ethical imperative. The freedom of spacious temporality relates the singular to the plural. Spacious temporality invokes “the generosity” of “the plural singularity of ‘us’” (EF: 147). Nancy asserts “freedom is that which spaces and singularizes” (EF: 68).

Spacious temporality can render fresh meaning to Laura Mulvey's paradigm of the dynamic of “delayed cinema” and “stillness and the moving image.” The tension between stillness and the moving image, as described by Mulvey, creates a scenario for dramatizing the existential coming of being and presence. Nancy's spacious temporality insinuates a correlation with the fluidities of shifting time in delayed cinema for the enactment of emerging existential presence.