Rabinow identifies “the contemporary” as a temporal and ontological problem space. In "Marking Time" (2007) he distinguishes two senses of the term contemporary. First, to be contemporary is to exist at the same time as something else. This meaning has temporal but no historical connotations. The second sense, however, carries both temporal and historical connotations, and it is this meaning that figures in Rabinow’s work. Rabinow takes up the contemporary as a “moving ratio.” Just as “the modern” can be thought of as a moving ratio of tradition and modernity, so the contemporary “is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a (non-linear) space.”