Since the 1980s, and especially into the 1990s, the phrase “always already” came to be used well beyond its specialised context in Continental Philosophy, becoming ubiquitous in a range of academic disciplines within the general orbit of poststructuralism, and loosely in connection with the legacy of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In this paper, I want to do three things: (i) trace the conceptual background of the “always already” (immer schon) formulation in Kantian and post-Kantian thought, especially via the phenomenology of Hegel through to Husserl and Heidegger, as well as touching on the phrase’s implicit theological overtones; (ii) consider the terms ‘always’ and ‘already’ very literally as they are used in ordinary language in English in order to then think more about what it means for them to be put together (and how this in turn helps us consider the phrase’s distinct usage in the Phenomenological tradition); and (iii) to argue for the implications of thinking about the ‘always already’ formulation in such a way for engaging both with Indigenous conceptions of temporality and place, and with thephenomenology of Deep Time.
