Kairoticism: The Transcendentals of Revolution

Rowan G. Tepper, M.A.

Department of Comparative Literature, Binghamton University

Dissertation Prospectus

5/21/2011

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Contents

I. The Moment At Stake: An Overview 3

II. Contributions to the Concept of Kairos (Repetition) 52.1. Tillich2.2. Walter Benjamin2.3. Danièlou-Bataille2.4. Concepts of Kairos

III.Kairos: Creating a New Concept (Difference) 203.1. History of the Project3.2. Krisis: Kairos as Critical Moment in History3.3. Secularization: Political Theology at the End of History/Modernity3.4. The End of History/Modernity3.5. La Révolution Posthistorique3.6. Going out of synch(rony): Creating community with the quodlibet-Messiahs: Kairos and Immanence, Messianism and Apocalypse

IV. Programmatic: Revolution. 384.1. Exemplary Acts4.2. Revolution, Rupture: Kairoticism & Kairopolitics

Appendix A: Chapter Summaries 43 Appendix B: Jean Danièlou, “Georges BATAILLE. — L'Expérience intérieure.” 47

Bibliography 48

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I. The Moment At Stake: An Overview

The present dissertation, engages with and builds upon recent conceptualizations of time as kairos,

as qualitative, as opposed to chronological, quantitative time (G. Agamben and G. Marramao).1 My aim is

to construct an understanding of temporality qua kairos, without reference to essence or static being, in

connection to eros/desire - in view of which I coin the term 'kairic' (or, when the erotic dimension is to be

emphasized, 'kairotic') - that is both descriptively and practically efficacious in terms of radical or

revolutionary change on the personal, social, historical and political registers. Under what circumstances

and on what conditions vis-à-vis temporality does such change succeed or fail? How can this understanding

be mobilized? And, how to think this without falling into an eschatological/millenarian (i.e.

Fascist/'totalitarian') discourse? These are the principal questions. Finally, there is the intellectual-historical

question as to the relative dominance of chronology in modernity and the preoccupation with the

experiential dimension of time (i.e. A re-emergence of a dualism or multiplicity in thinking and speaking

of temporality) that characterizes late modernity (Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard, Proust, etc.) and the

epoch (the term 'postmodernity' has endured too much denigration and ridicule to rehabilitate, let alone

use without here) that succeeded it (Bataille, Benjamin, et seq). Key theoretical sources not already

mentioned include Paul Tillich, Jean Danièlou, Reinhart Koselleck, Évanghélos Moutsopoulos, Maurice

Blanchot, Jacob Taubes, Gaston Fessard, Alexandre Kojève, the negative/mystical theological tradition, and

to a lesser extent, Foucault, and the Russians Lev Shestov, Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev. More

simply, the aim is to delineate the conditions of possibility (the transcendentals) of changing oneself and

the world (revolution).

I should like to begin A very short piece published during May of 1968, published in the first and

only issue of Comité by Maurice Blanchot (which, fortuitously, appears in the very recent (2010) English

translation of Écrits Politiques: 1953-1993), entitled [A rupture in time: Revolution] in the form of a reflection

on the fifteenth thesis of Walter Benjamin’s On The Concept of History, In this text, he writes:

As soon as, through the movement of forces tending toward rupture, revolution appears possible,

in a possibility that is not abstract but rather historically and concretely determined, It is in these

moments, at these instants, that revolution takes place. The only mode of presence of revolution is

its real possibility. Then there is a state of arrest and suspension. In this suspension, society undoes

1 Antonio Negri's recent explorations of the concept of kairos are due acknowledgment, however they operate in such a radically different theoretical milieu and semantic field that they do not here offer a significant contribution. Rather, the attempt to incorporate Negri's work on kairos would cost more effort and force more compromises than letting the matter rest with this passing acknowledgement.

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itself entirely. The law collapses. Transgression occurs: for a moment, there is innocence;

interrupted history. 2

Now, were this moment, instant, interruption to be thought in terms of the present, of being

present, it would then be fixed and ossified in the form of an atemporal entity (which is absurd), and it

would be reduced to any moment of chronological time n’importe qui (the present – whether present or not

– as a moment inhering in the attempted atemporal representation of time). In The Writing of the Disaster,

published some twelve years later, we find one fragment in which this thinking of the moment of

revolution is once again formulated, this time on a less explicitly political-historical register, retaining an

implicit reference to Benjamin’s reflections on time and history: “…from what comes to pass, the present

is excluded. Radical change would itself come in the mode of the un-present which it causes to come,

without thereby either consigning itself to the future (foreseeable or not), or withdrawing into the past

(transmitted or not).”3 It is this moment, which is always now, and yet never present, in relation to our

unquenchable desire both for it and that for which it serves as a transcendental, that is at the center of this

work. The word kairos signifies “the opening of a discontinuity in a continuum... a decisive moment that

must be caught in passing,”4 while the kairotic designates the mode of temporal experience to which kairos

corresponds – experience in which time itself is invested with desire.

2 Maurice Blanchot, “[A rupture in time: Revolution],” in Political Writings: 1953-1993, Trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 100.

3 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, Trans. Ann Smock (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 114. 4 Francoise Balibar, Philippe Büttgen, Barbara Cassin, “Moment, instant, occasion,” in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire européen

des philosophies. Dictionnaire des intraduisibles. (Paris: Le Robert/Seuil, 2004) 813-818. 815. Trans. H. Jordheim, 2007.

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II. Contributions to the Concept of kairos (Repetition)

Every moment is at once experienced as singular and heterogeneous: no one has ever said that

time, in their experience, felt “clock-like,” or continuous. We can only experience time become

dhomogeneous and without qualities while staring at the clock in endless expectation. As our time is

apportioned, it becomes all too easy to forget that this moment is unlike any other and will never return –

experience is thereby atomized and put out of reach as even time is commodified by the measure of the

hourly wage. This disjunction between intensive and extensive experiences of time, between qualitative and

qualitative, can be detected long before the well known linguistic doubling of time into chronos and kairos, in

Attic Greek rhetoric, philosophy and myth: that there are indications, correlates, traces or equivalents

found in languages ranging from Vedantic Sanskrit and Avestan, to modern Indo-European languages

(becoming less pronounced; today found in most pronounced form in the German words Moment and

Augenblick) suggests a sort of quasi-universality – limited, however, to historically conscious written

cultures of the Indo-European linguistic family.1 The relationships between these various words and

concepts – most familiarly in the relationship between chronos and kairos – indicate a more complicated

state of affairs than naïve dualisms, for instance “lived time” and “measured” time, must be foregone in

favor of merely indicating that we generally see spatial metaphors, numerical and quantitative measure, and

homogeneity/interchangeability associated with one word/concept (chronos), while we encounter non-

spatial (re-)presentations, intensive, qualitatively distinctions between times, as well as a heterogeneity that

makes each moment or time unique and irreplaceable, associated with the other (kairos).

Time resists conceptualization, and this resistance leads to it being thought solely in the mode of

chronos – that is, on the model of space. In The Genesis of the Copernican World, Hans Blumenberg traces this

process: “In the strict sense, we have no concept of time. We comprehend what we mean when we use the

term "time" by means of spatial metaphors, and we use them not only as clarifying illustrations but as an

intuitive foundation [fundierende Anschauung].”2 Nevertheless, history bears witness to a multitude of

conceptualizations of time, whether implicitly in a given language's representations or explicitly in theories

rooted in concepts of mythological, theological and in philosophical origin. Every history itself depends

upon a specific concept and experience of time appropriate to it.

Kairos first emerged in the Ancient Greek rhetorical tradition “kairos first appeared in the Iliad,

where it denotes a vital or lethal place in the body... [and] carries a spatial meaning.”3 The word kairos is first

1 These constraints are due on the one hand to limited expertise outside of this domain, and on the other to philosophical objections to universals and universality.

2 Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, Trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 437.3 Philip Sipiora, “Introduction,” in Rhetoric and Kairos, 2.

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found in the theory and the practice of rhetoric, designating the “proper time,” or “opportune moment”

for an action. In this sense kairos played an important ritual function: designating the temporal occasion of

the performance of, for instance, a sacrifice. Kairos would later be carried over in Roman religion as the

occasio or tempus for the performance of a ritual, ritus, which Georges Dumézil notes “is related to the

important Vedantic concept rtá, Iran. Arta “cosmic ritual, order, etc., as the basis of truth” (c.f. Rtú,

“proper time [for a ritual action], allotted or regulated span of time”; Avestan ratu).”4 Now, since to the

Vedantic rtú corresponded the word kāla, "a fixed or right point of time, a space of time, time... destiny,

fate... death,”5 the root of which, *kāl-, meaning to calculate, while kairos derives from the root *krr-,

meaning “union, communion,”6 it appears to follow that we can infer a parallelism with kairos-chronos. A more

extensive philological and historical examination will be written later, however for the moment one might

speculate that the temporal specification of kairos occurred as a result of cultural contact, conquest and/or

assimilation.7 The fact that such linguistic doublings as kairos and chonos can be found in all Indo-European

languages since the time of the Vedas, in conjunction with the associations with ritual and sacrifice,

suggests that they emerge at the inception of written culture and the earliest forms of historical

consciousness. This hypothesis resonates with Georges Bataille's remark that “sacrifice will illuminate the

conclusion of history as it did its dawn. Sacrifice can't be for us what it was at the beginning of “time.”

Our experience is one of impossible appeasement. Lucid holiness recognizes in itself the need to destroy,

the necessity of a tragic outcome.”8

Our study of kairos in Attic suggested that the non-temporal meanings were largely in abeyance by

the end of the fourth century B. C. However as a literary-rhetorical term kairos is still vigorously

championed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the Augustan period... If the tendency to restrict kairos first

to temporal appropriateness and then to a mere synonym for chronos began in the middle of the fifth

century B. C, it still had not run its course more than five centuries later.9 One notable early deviation

points toward an additional meaning: the critical moment, the moment of crisis, as Koselleck and

Agamben, more elliptically, have noted, in Hippocrates. In the philosophical discourses of Ancient Greece,

kairos comes to stand in opposition to chronos – an opposition suggested aptly in the form of a sort of

inverse relation in the Corpus Hippocraticum: “chronos is that in which there is kairos and kairos is that in which

4 Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, Volume One, Trans. Philip Krapp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 80.5 Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate

Indo-European languages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964). 6 Boisacq, 393.7 Perhaps via Persia: Zoroastrianism. Written in Avestan – Founded 6th Century BCE.8 Georges Bataille, Guilty, Trans. Bruce Boone (Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1988), 51. Due to numerous inaccuracies in this

edition, in all quotations from this book I have corrected the translation. 9 John R. Wilson, “Kairos as 'Due Measure,” in Glotta, 58. Bd., 3./4. H. (1980), 177-204. 203-4.

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there is little chronos [chronos esti en ho kairos kai kairos esti en to ou pollos chronos].”10 It is at this early juncture, in

the Corpus and subsequent Greek medical literature, the moment designated by kairos is at the same time a

“crisis [which, as a concept] refers both to the observable condition and to the judgment (judicium) about

the course of the illness. At such a time, it will be determined whether the patient will live or die… With its

adoption into Latin, the concept subsequently underwent a metaphorical expansion into the domain of

social and political language. There it is used as a transitional or temporal concept (Verlaufsbegriff), which, as

in a legal trial, leads towards a decision. It indicates that point in time in which a decision is due but has not

yet been rendered.11

“Kairos is also a significant concept in the Bible, appearing hundreds of times in both the Old and

New Testaments. The first words of Christ call attention to the importance of timing:“The time [kairos] is

fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:14).” And, in the earliest years of Christianity, St.

Paul uses the term kairos12 not merely to denote a time, but as a synonym for what is, in the Judaic tradition

known as “messianic time,” it denote the time, the present time of the messianic event. It is at this juncture

a messianic concept, an experience of the present or of imminence, not yet an apocalyptic-eschatological

anticipation of the krisis of the Last Judgment. Later, during roughly the period spanning the first through

fifth centuries AD, kairos acquires a theological, mystical (Gnostic, Neo-Platonic and Christian) and

philosophical usage, adding nodes and connections to the theoretical nexus around kairos. Here, kairos is at

last linked to eschatology as the krisis which brings to an end the profane world and in which eternity

irrupts into time, much as in the nunc stans of the mystic of the age. Its transposition into the apocalyptic

was made thinkable and indeed, to some extent legitimate: already in Hippocrates the moment of kairos is

also the moment of krisis – and thus the Last Judgment, the absolute eschatological event, the Krisis

(Koselleck, “Crisis” 359-60; Danièlou, LOH 32), would manifest temporally as kairos. Origen uses kairos in

a sense exemplary of this period. For him, “kairos denotes a quality of action in time, when an event of

outstanding significance occurs... a moment of time when a prophecy was pronounced... when a prophecy

is fulfilled”13 By coming to figure as a much awaited, anticipated and desired eschatological event, kairos

comes into relation with Eros. After this period, however, kairos falls into disuse with the efforts of the

Church to damp down dangerous and revolutionary millenarian expectations.

In Futures Past, Koselleck observes: “A ruling principle of the Roman Church was that all

10 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Trans. Patricia Daley (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2005), 68-9.

11 Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” Trans. Michaela Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), 357-400. 360-1.

12 Usually found in Paul's epistles in the formulation ho nyn kairos, the time of the the now13 P. Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History & Eschatology (Boston: Brill, 2007), 130.

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visionaries had to be brought under its control... The Church is itself eschatological. But the moment the

figures of the apocalypse are applied to concrete events or instances, the eschatology has disintigrative

effects.”14 With the Reformation and the rise of the absolute state in the 16th and 17th centuries not the

Church but “the state enforced a monopoly on the control of the future by suppressing apocalyptic and

astrological readings of the future.”15 Subsequently, the “historical time” and corresponding experience of

“lived time”(durée) replace kairos in a relationship of opposition to natural or chronological time. At the same

time, “progress occurred to the extent that the state and its prognostication was never able to satisfy

soteriological demands which persisted within a state whose own existence depended on the elimination of

millenarian expectations.”16 The goal of historical progress took over the structural and dynamic function

of eschaton while the fact that such a goal should be subject to prediction and the belief in its inevitable

realization – with or without revolutionary intervention – first requires that historical time arise out of

chronological time, and then that progress become ideological and forget the experience of time that gave

birth to history. The ideology of progress has henceforth served to make time measurable so as to be able

to quantify time and labor. Time, on the scale of days, is thoroughly homogenized by and on the model of

the clock and natural time, while on the scale of years and ages, as Benjamin notes, there remain traces of a

qualitative experience of time – in holidays – the repetition of which was, in fact, an archaic signification of

the word “revolution.”

2.1. Paul Tillich

It is thus no surprise that aside from a few scattered remarks by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, it was in the

context and service of “religious socialism,” that kairos was first re-conceptualized in the domains of the

philosophy of history and the political by Paul Tillich (in the company of the other socialist Protestant

theologians who formed the Kairos-Kreis) beginning in the early 1920s. In Kairos and Logos (1926) Tillich

writes: “time is all-decisive... qualitatively fulfilled time, the moment that is creation and fate. We call this

fulfilled moment, the moment of time approaching us as fate and decision, Kairos.”17Toward the end of his

life, he wrote in Systematic Theology (1957) that, apropos of the turbulent historical moment out of which it

arose, kairos “was chosen [as a term] to remind philosophy of the necessity of dealing with history, not in

terms of its logical and categorical structures only, but also in terms of its dynamics. And, above all, kairos

14 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 13.

15 Koselleck, Futures Past, 16.16 Koselleck, Futures Past, 21.17 Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History, Part One Translated by N.A. Rasetzki, Parts Two, Three and Four Translated by Elsa

L.Talmey (New York and London: Charles Scribers Sons, 1936), 129.

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should express the feeling of many people... that a moment of history had appeared which was pregnant

with a new understanding of the meaning of history and life.”18

We find a thoroughly philosophical, that is stripped of its theological accoutrements, definition of

kairos in explicit distinction from chronos in “Kairos III:”

Chronos hat es mit der meßbaren Seite des zeitliche Prozesses zu tun, mit der Uhrzeit, die durch

die regelmäßig Bewegung der Sterne bestimmt wird, im besonderen durch die Bewegung der Erde

um die Sonne. Kairos dagegen bezeichnet einzigartig Momente im zeitlichen Prozeß, Momente, in

denen sich etwas Einzigartiges ereignen oder vollenden kann... Chronos bringt das quantitative,

berechenbare, wiederholdbare Element des zeitlichen Prozesses zum Ausdruck, während Kairos

das qualitative erfahrungsgemäße, einzigartige Element betont.19

Kairos is thus the qualitative, experiential and particular element or face of any given moment of time. The

very title of Kairos and Logos makes clear that kairos is to be seen in conceptual relationships other than this

on; firstly, if “a moment of time, an event, deserves the name of Kairos, fullness of time in the precise

sense, if it can be regarded in its relation to the Unconditioned, if it speaks of the Unconditioned, and if to

speak of it is at the same time to speak of the Unconditioned,” this means that the fullness of time in

kairos is the momentary point of contact between the temporal and conditional and the eternal and uncon-

ditional. Secondly, if “to look at a time thus, means to look at it in its truth,”20 this means that the relation-

ship of kairos to logos is not exactly a simple matter of contrast, but of the eternal logos becoming temporal

in a unique moment of time, kairos. John E. Smith provides the following gloss: “...we cite this information

only when it is needed or relevant... [logos] represents truth that is regarded as universal in import and [kairos]

the special occasion in the course of events when such truth must be brought to bear by an individual

somewhere and somewhen.”21

This becoming-temporal and becoming-contingent of the eternal, unconditional logos within kairos

is not merely the truth of time or a historical category, but it is the moment in which time becomes history.

In Meaning in History (1949):

Natural space-time and the distinction of an indifferent "now"-point from its "before" and "after"

do not explain the experience of a qualitative historical time. A historical now is not an indifferent

instant but a kairos, which opens the horizon for past as well as for future. The significant now of

18 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Volume Three, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 369.19 Paul Tillich, “Kairos III,” in Der Widerstreit von Raum und Zeit: Schrifien zur Geschichtsphilosophie,Gesammelte Werke.(Berlin: Walter

de Gruyter, 1963), 137.20 Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History, 173.21 John E. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” Rhetoric and Kairos, 53.

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the kairos qualifies the retrospect on the past and the prospect upon the future, uniting the past as

preparation with the future as consummation. Historically, it was the appearance of Jesus Christ at

the appointed time which opened for the Christian faith this perspective onto the past and onto the

future as temporal phases in the history of salvation... Prefiguring and unfolding this outstanding

time when the time was fulfilled are other kairoi in the past and the future which together delineate

the historical oikonomia of the divine dispensation. A mere before and after of a neutral now could

never have constituted historical past and historical future.22

If it is true that the 'now' of kairos transforms the indifferent, homogeneous continuum of (natural) time

into history “uniting the past as preparation with the future as consummation,” it would follow that all

doctrines of a historical progress toward fulfillment in a fervently anticipated, long awaited goal (whatever

it may be) represent a secularization of eschatology.

The decline of the belief that salvation will come in history is characterized by a disenchantment of

heaven and of time, which calls forth an incursion of Nothingness... The element of salvational

promise in these theories [Marx & Hegel] is clearly recognizable... transcendent redemption has

given way to the self-reconciliation of the human spirit, the humanization of man who has become

alienated from his own nature. But as scientific critique progresses, these constructions also lose

their cogency. Causal and relativizing thought, brought to the fore by the empirical sciences of

nature and history, gains the upper hand, with the result that theory and practice are no longer

subordinated to a common directive. Thought and action are related no longer continuously but

only from instance to instance in the sense of a mandate and its execution, though the belief in

progress—that last pale memory of an eschatological concept of time—may tend to obscure this fact.23

This is the situation in late Modernity, a time when the obscurantism of the ideology of progress rendered

incomprehensible the true nature of the rise of Hitler and the NSDAP – particularly, according to Walter

Benjamin' s critique, the SPD. Today, the thought that this tragic episode in history could have possibly

been a self-correcting aberration is laughable, if not incomprehensible. And yet, while not a self-correcting

historical aberration, Fascism did bear within itself as it were an internal limit, which Bataille aptly observed

in the epilogue to Sur Nitezsche:

If the essence of Fascism is national transcendence, it can't become “universal.” It draws its

particular force from “particularity.” In each country, a certain number wanted control over the

22 Karl Löwith , Meaning In History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 185-6.23 Helmuth Plessner, “On the Relation of Time to Death,” Man and Time: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, Joseph Cambell, Ed.

(London: Routledge, 1958), 233-263. 243-4. Both Tillich and Danièlou participated in the Eranos conferences, the former as early as 1936.

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masses, taking personal transcendence as their goal. They were frustrated seeking it... not being able

to offer the masses the option of following them in this movement – and so thereby transcending

the rest of the world.24

2.2. Walter Benjamin

In Fire Alarm, a study of Walter Benjamin's last work, “On the Concept of History,” Michael Löwy

notes that the association of the concept of time developed therein with the concept of kairos is virtually

as old as the text itself. No one other than “Adorno compared the conception of time of Thesis XIV with

Paul Tillich's 'kairos' – 'full' historical time, in which each moment contains a unique opportunity, a singular

constellation between relative and absolute,25 although he in fact only mentions in passing, in a letter to

Horkheimer dated 12.6.1941, that “es ist kein Zufall wohl dass danach die XIV These dem χαιρός unseres

Tillich nicht ganz unähnlich sieht.”26 This begs the question: why was it not coincidental or surprising in

the eyes of Adorno? Ralf Konersmann writes most convincingly of the kairic structure and dynamics of

Benjamin's epistemology, etc:

In der Funktion einer elementaren Orientierungsfigur stellt der Kairos das Rationalitätsmuster

bereit, in das die Begriffe Walter Benjamins allesamt eingelassen sind: die Allegorie und ebenso das

dialektische Bild; der Name ebenso wie die Idee, die Monade ebenso wie der Ursprung, die Erken-

ntnis ebenso wie die Erfahrung.27

The claim made by Konersmann is that all of the major philosophical concepts in Benjamin's operate

according to a logical structure and historical dynamic that absolutely conforms to that of kairos. Future

and past times and events are cited in a 'now' in which they have become recognizable and meaningful,

which is not merely an epistemological, historical or even political matter. This is, for Benjamin, a matter of

the basic structure of experience as Erfahrung; the Erlebnis, lived experience, of phenomenology lacks

precisely this kairos-structure. Experience as Erlebnis has always already missed its kairos, its present, in

becoming memory. Hence, the task of the Angel, that is of searching “for a just representation of a new

time: present-instant, interruption, arrest of the continuum, Jetzt-Zeit. Every Jetzt can represent it... In the

24 Bataille, On Nietzsche, Trans. Bruce Boone (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1992), 158-9.25 Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's “On The Concept of History,” Trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2005),

87.26 Theodor W. Adorno – Max Horkheimer Briefwechsel 1927-1969, Band 4, Teil 2 (Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp, ), 125. This

letter pre-dates the first publication of the Theses in 1943. 27 Ralf Konersmann, “Walter Benjamins philosophichen Kairologie,” in Walter Benjamin, Kairos: Schriften zur Philosophie

(Frankfurt Am Main: Surhkamp, 2007), 327-348. pg. 331-2.

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Jetzt of the Jetzt-zeit the time of every 'now' is idea of this memory.28

Here we may set forth the operative conceptual oppositions, that is, between memory as Er-

innierung and as Ein-gedenken, to which the opposition of Er-lebnis and Er-fahrung corresponds. In essence,

the task of remembrance with regard to experience could be called die Erlösung des [erfahrung in dem]

Vergangenheits. The experience of time at stake is in fact not at all rare, only rarely recognized and even more

rarely grasped before passing into the sterility of memory. We must restore that which has been reserved

for the ever-deferred messianic event to its place in experience, any ‘now’ can serve as the gateway, the

kairos through which a different time can enter – for experience is “shot through with chips of messianic

time.” These kairoi are “filled with the [virtual] presence of Jetztzeit,” and inhere in every moment that we

desire or from which we recoil, every moment for which we hope or that we dread, every moment in

which we love or hate.

In “Walter Benjamin and the Demonic,” Agamben writes that in Benjamin “the concept of

happiness is inextricably linked to the concept of redemption, which has the past as its object,” and that

furthermore, from the standpoint of Redemption, history becomes citable and that “Benjamin writes that

in citation, origin and destruction merge.”29 This duality of origin and destruction finally results in the

paradoxical formulation that “What cannot be save it what was, the past as such. But what is saved is what

never was: something new.”30 Thus, in Agamben’s view of Benjamin’s Messianic time and Redemption,

which is primarily oriented toward the past, “remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what

happened incomplete and completing what never was.”31 Thus, Messianic time exerts a retrodictive power

upon the past, bringing about a qualitative alteration. This is precisely the desire of the Angel of History of

Thesis IX.

In the European iconographic tradition, there is only one figure that brings together purely angelic

characteristics and the demonic trait of claws. This figure, however, is not Satan but Eros, Love.

According to a descriptive model that we find for the first time in Plutarch (who attributes 'fangs

and claws' to Eros), but that is well documented in certain infrequent but exemplary iconographic

appearances, Love is represented as a winged (and often feminine) angelic figure with claws. Love

appears as such both in Giotto's allegory of chastity and in the fresco in the castle of Sabbionara, as

well as in the two figures of angels with claws flanking the mysterious winged feminine figure in the

Lovers as Idolaters at the Louvre, attributed to the Maestro of San Martino… The claws of Angelus

28 Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, Trans. Miguel E. Vatter (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 51.29 Giorgio Agamben, “Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption,” Potentialities, Translated by

Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 151-2.30 Agamben, “Walter Benjamin and the Demonic,” Potentialities, 138-159. 158.31 Giorgio Agamben “Bartleby, or On Contigency,” Potentialities, 267.

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Novus (in Klee's painting, the angel's feet certainly bring to mind a bird of prey) do not, therefore,

have a Satanic meaning; instead, they characterize the destructive – and simultaneously liberating –

power of the angel.32

The Angel seeks the moment of kairos and the final krisis, and the simultaneously destructive and liberating

moments of erotic fulfillment. While Benjamin never explicitly makes use of the word kairos, writing of

Jetztzeit, das Jetztzt der Erkenntbarkeit and of Messianic time, Adorno – as quoted previously – took note of

the close relationship between these Benjaminian concepts and Tillich's kairos – in 1941. Likewise, Ernst

Bloch noted the relation between Jetztzeit and kairos in Benjamin fifteen years later, in “On The Present In

Literature”(1956) – he views them as sharing a “decisive sense... [and] is certainly the most revolutionary

time, also in its religious and chialiastic form.”33 Bloch however refuses to equate the two terms, arguing

that kairos and the pleroma are of the chialiastic form – in most cases. It was Giorgio Agamben, shortly

before his discovery of Benjamin's second Nachlass in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (assisted by

Pierre Missac), in Infancy and History (Italian, 1978, English, 1993), and developed later in “The Time That

is Left” (English, 2001) and The Time that Remains (Italian, 2000, English, 2005), who first proposed that not

only does Jetztzeit stand in close relation to kairos (as conceived by Tillich), but that Jetztzeit maps onto the

kairos of St. Paul as aliases, as it were, of messianic time. While I agree with Michael Löwy's brief note –

like him, “I do not think that Jetztzeit refers directly to the expression ho nyn kairos which Paul uses in the

New Testament to refer to messianic time, particularly as the term Jetztzeit does not appear in Luther's

translation (which has: in dieser Zeit).”34 I hasten to add, however, that it must be emphasized that a relation

between kairos and Jetztzeit exists and must be articulated. It does not suffice to dismiss Agamben's claim in

its entirety. This is all the more so for the fact that when first he reads kairos in Benjamin's concept of

Jetztzeit, he refers to the Gnostic-Stoic cairos, “the abrupt and sudden conjunction where decision grasps

opportunity and life is fulfilled in the moment. Infinite, quantified time is thus at once delimited and made

present: within itself the cairós distils different times ('omnium temporum in unum collatio') and within it

the sage is master of himself and at his ease, like a god in eternity.”35 There is nothing particularly

problematic involved in this formulation; this is in stark contrast to his rather dubious claims in The Time

That Remains, that Benjamin “endows the term [Jetztzeit] with the same qualities as those pertaining to the

ho nyn kaiors in Paul's paradigm of messianic time,”36 and that each Jetzt der Erkenntbärkeit/Lesbärkeit is

32 Giorgio Agamben, “Walter Benjamin & The Demonic,” 141-2.33 Ernst Bloch, “On the Present in Literature (1956),” Translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, in Literary Essays, 131.34 Löwy, 134n161.35 Giorgio Agamben, “Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” Infancy and History, Trans. Liz Heron (London & New York:

Verso, 2007), 111.36 Agamben, The Time That Remains, 143.

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predetermined in a manner analogous to Pauline typological prefiguration. Most subsequent research

concerning Benjamin and kairos, with the notable exception of the work of Giacomo Marramao, has taken

either Agamben or Adorno as both authority and point du départ, thus leading to numerous efforts to

reconcile Benjamin's thought with either Pauline eschatology or Tillich's religious socialism (K. Lindroos

1998, 2006).

Clearly, there is in Benjamin a relationship between Jetztzeit and messianic time, in terms of which

kairos can be situated: as the opening unto messianic time – the revolutionary emergency brake on the train

of world history in thesis XVIIa. Jetztzeit would thus be rather the mode of temporal experience proper to

such an interruption of progress as the emergence of “classless society, [in which] Marx secularized the idea

of messianic time... (Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently

miscarried, ultimately achieved interruption)... Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world

history... Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train to activate the emergency

break”.37 While it is true that Georges Bataille likewise eschews explicit use of the term kairos, like in

Benjamin it is no great stretch to see analogues in his work on the issue of time in relation to sovereignty,

desire and history. While the nature and extent of the relationship between Bataille and Benjamin is a

matter of contention, their kinship is particularly visible in the following passage drawn from Sur Nietzsche

(1945): ¨I can imagine some kind of historical situation emerge, in which all possibilities of action are held

in reserve... abrogating all their further hopes and plans beyond limits already attained.* A revolutionary action

would found classless society – beyond which no further historical action could come into being¨38

2.3. Danièlou-Bataille

Fortuitously, a variant of this passage is found in the manuscripts of Sur Nietzsche and the lecture

given by Bataille at a “conference on good and evil,” held at the home of his friend Marcel Moré on 5

March, 1944, which was followed by a critique presented by his friend, Father Jean Daniélou, “a Jesuit and

future cardinal, with whom Bataille had been discussing his ideas regularly since the spring of 1942..."39

Bataille's biographer, Michel Surya adds, “ he seems to have seen [Danièlou] often during the war, and... he

apparently had some long conversations"40 (Surya, 348)κ. These two lectures and the discussion that 37 Benjamin, “Paralipomena to 'On The Concept of History,'” Selected Writings, Vol 4, 401-11. 401-2.* Plus de bien d'autrui prétexte à des mouvements me dépassant moi-même: ce bien serait assuré une fois pour toutes, du

moins, dans la mesure où il serait, ne resterait-il plus de moyen de l'assurer davantage: plus de project de réforme qui suscite un grand espoir. (OC VI 392)

38 Bataille, On Nietzsche, 42. Translation modified according to the text of Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes VI (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 60.

39 Stuart Kendall, The Unfinished System of Nonkowledge, xxix.40 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille, 368.

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followed have been published under the title, “Discussion sur la Pèche.” Bataille's lecture, i.e. the text

containing this and other variants, constitutes a complete manuscript version of the chapter “Summit and

Decline,” in Sur Nietzsche. In a letter written on the occasion of the publication of the “Discussion” in Dieu

Vivant (1945), Bataille notes that the changes to the text as it appears in Sur Nietzsche were made in

response to problems raised either by Danièlou's presentation41 or in the discussion.42 There are many

traces of the concept of kairos that can be found in Bataille' s writings of the 1940s, as Bataille had

previously appropriated a closely related concept of l'instant privilegée from Émile Dermenghem's 1937

essay, "L'Instant chez les mystiques et quelques poètes," (Measures 1938(3)15/7/1938, 105-123), in “Le

Sacré”

The term privileged instant is the only one that, with a certain amount of accuracy, accounts for what

can be encountered at random in the search; the opposite of a substance that withstands the test of

time, it is something that flees as soon as it is seen and cannot be grasped... nothing is more

desirable that what will soon disappear... [and yet] vain efforts are expended to create pathways

permitting the endless re-attainment of that which flees.43

The privileged instant is, according to Dermenghem, an essential support subtending life and experience,

without which "La vie serait difficilement supportable si elle ne reposait pas sur des instants privilegies qui

font jaillir la saveur d'une réalite estompée la plupart du temps."44 This is a moment in which chance is

seized and in which the new can emerge (“Le « moment du genie » a reuni des « elements » jusque-lit isoles

dans un « mouvement d'ensemble » nouveau...”)45and in the absence of the concern to fix or grasp, such

moments reprise those once situated in the sacrificial festival: moments of liberation – once ritually

invoked, now a matter of “La Chance,” the title of an essay contemporaneously written.

...Les chances humaines ont ete utilisees a des fins particulièrs et, s'il veut, consumees egoistement a

l'écart des ensembles dont elles auraient d'être l'orgueil et le moment liberatoire d'fête. Il est naturel

que le détournement des chances ait abouti à leur negation. Mais rien n'alourdit davantage les jeux

de l'existence humaine que la suspicion ou le dénigrement s'attachant a chacun de ses «moments

privilegies»46

Dermenghem further describes this singular moment, writing:

41 In a letter dated 11 May 1943, Michel Leiris wrote to Bataille that “"Father Danielou would also like to write an article [on Inner Experience] but has no idea where to place it." (#31, Bataille-Leiris Correspondence, 142-4). Danièlou's review did, in fact, appear the following February in Études. See Appendix A for the text of the review..

42 Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Completes VI, 377, 382.43 Georges Bataille, “The Sacred,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Translated by Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt

and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 241.44 Emile Dermenghem, "L'Instant chez les mystiques et quelques poètes," Measures 1938(3), 15/7/1938, 105-123. 105.45 Georges Bataille, “La Chance,” Oeuvres Complètes, Tome I (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 535,538.46 Georges Bataille, OC I, 543.

15

Il ne peut plus se préoccuper ni du passé ni de I'avenir et s'absorbe dans son instant, completement

dominé par la touche divine (présence ou absence, union ou séparation, joie ou angoisse) qui lui

arrive sans que sa volonté puisse rien pour l'attirer ou la repousser, car l'instant ne dépend pas de

l'effort humain et ne peut « s'acheter au marche ». Et revenant à comparaison avec le sabre... «

L'instant coupe Ies racines du futur et du passe. L'epee est un compagnon dangereux ; elle peut,

faire de son maitre un roi mais peut aussi Ie detruire. Elle ne distingue pas entre Ie cou de son

maitre et celui d'un autre. »47

The time during which Bataille's initial theoretical constructions of this kairos-like conception of

qualitatively distinct moments was soon48 to be followed by a period of close dialogue with Danièlou – for

whom the concept of kairos is theologically and historically indispensable, drawn from his studies of

Origen and John Chrysostome:

Si nous nous rappelons l'importance capitale de ce mot de kairos dans l'Évangile pour désigner les

événements essentiels de la vie du Christ... Ainsi les sacrements... sont-ils marqués de ce caractère

histoirique, de cet aspect d'événement qui constitue la réalité chétiennne propre par opposition à la

pensée philosophique.. et qui en fait la continuation au milieu de nous, de l'histoire sainte. Chaque

messe est un kairos, une circonstance exceptionnellement favorable - et ceci en relation avec le

kairos par excellence .."49

Jean Danièlou's rejection of the orthodox Marxist theory of history bears many resemblances to

Benjamin's. There are, of course, differences that go far beyond their theological milieus, but we do find

them in agreement concerning the critique of progress and the thought of redemption not as a singular

event, but as the task of human historical action:

For the Marxist, history has not yet set its course: he looks toward the future. For the Christian,

history is substantially fixed and the essential element is at the center, not at the end... Does this

mean that there is nothing more to be done? Yes, if, after the event of the Redemption, no

fundamental task remained to be accomplished. But the Redemption is a reality of incomparable

dynamism; for what is acquired by right for all humanity remains indeed to be transmitted to all

47 Dermenghem, 112-3. “Ces instants sont intermittents, dit Al Sarraj (Luma); s'ils etaient continueIs, ceux qui Ies subissent ne seraient plus sociables; les forces humaines ne pourraient plus les supporter. Leur exces, leur frequence, Ie desequilibre entre leur. force et celle du sujet, ne sont pas des signes de perfection mais plutot de faibiesse ; c'est seulement l'etat de grace, Ie hal, qui affermit en l'homme delivre alors du temps, zaman, I'instant changeant, waqt, et transforme ce1ui-ci en une vie dans I'eterneJle presence..(Hujwiri).”

48 “Le Sacré,” and “La Chance” were both written in 1938, while the encounter with Danièlou began around 1941-2.49 Jean Danielou, “Le Kairos de la Messe D'Apres Les Homélies Sur L'Incomprehensible de Saint Jean Chrysostome." in Die

Messe in der Glauberwerkündigung: Kerygmatische Fragen, Hrsg. F. X. Arnold & Balthazar Fischer (Freiburg: Herder, 1950), 71-78. 75ff.

16

men... Sacred history is the history of the present in which we live50

Danièlou's concept of kairos is highly determined by his theological studies and vocation, in

particularly from the Early Church Fathers – some of whom, Origen (the subject of Danièlou's first major

study) had been condemned as heretical for his Gnostic-influenced doctrine of αποκατασταςις. Bound up

in the same conceptual nexus as αποκατασταςις, as kairos is always characterized as a point of

communication between the present or temporal and the future/past or the eternal. P. Tzamalikos writes

of this, that “Origen holds a view of kairos on account of the character of an action mainly from a point

of view of time. It is not only an action which requires the proper time... but also each time requires the

proper action befitting a particular moment... in the light of the eschatological purpose of salvation.”51

(137) Amusingly, Danièlou cites Origen's contemporary, a great critic of Gnosticism and opponent of

Valentinus, Iranaeus, who

was clearly the first one who discovered the solution by showing that, again to the dismay of

reason, the temporal aspect, the chairos, should enter into the value-judgments to be brought to a

reality... An effort must not be made to keep them when their time, their chairos, is over. The sin of

Judaism is a sin of anachronism; it consists in wanting to arrest God's plan at a moment in its

growth, to maintain out-of-date forms.52

Chrysostome:

Il constitue un évènement extraordinaire, un moment unique... [le] kairos: "Quelle espérance de

salud ne peux-tu pas avoir en ce moment (kairos). Ce ne sont pas seulement les hommes qui

lancent ce cri rempli d'effroi sacré, mais les anges. Ils ont la circonstance (kairos) qui combat en leur

faveur, l'oblation (prosphora) qui leur vient en aide" (726D). C'est pourquoi le diacre profite de ce

kairos; pour amener les possedés (727 A)53

Danièlou was, in fact, but one among those in Bataille's intellectual and social milieus to have potentially

exposed Bataille to the concept of kairos in the (Hellenistic) Judeo-Christian tradition. Notable among these

were Gaston Fessard, another Jesuit who had attended Kojève's course on Hegel, and one of Bataille's

closest associates, Roger Caillois, who in 1963 wrote of kairos as the “instant [that] largely determines the

occurrence... its fortune, its scope, its character... The Greeks called this cosmic timeliness kairos, but they

reserved this appellation for privileged occasions when destiny seemed to intervene.”54. Forgoing, for the

50 Jean Danièlou, “Marxist History and Sacred History,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Oct.,1951), 503-513. 507.51 P. Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History and Eschatology, 137.52 Jean Danièlou, “The Conception of History in the Christian Tradition,” The Journal of Religion,Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1950), 171-

179. 173.53 Danièlou, “Le kairos de la Messe...,” 75ff.54 Roger Caillois, “Circular Time, Rectilinear Time,” Trans. Nora McKeon, Diogenes, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1963), 1-13. 8-9.

17

time being, detailed analysis of Bataille and kairos, it would suffice to say that there is no less reason to

consider Bataille's temporal concepts, including “l'instant/moment privilegé,” “moment perdu,” “moment

souveraine,” or “sommet,” in terms of and in relation to kairos.χ

Le mystère du temps présent est en effet qu'il comporte cette présence simultanée d'un monde

passé, qui se survit à lui-même, et d'un monde futur qui est déjà existant de façon anticipée- C'est

dire qu'en fait il n'y a pas de monde présent, ou que ce monde n'est qu'un passage. Pour lé chrétien,

le monde de la vie naturelle et de la science, le monde de la cité temporelle et de la vie économique

a quelque chose d'essentiellement anachronique. Il est dépassé radicalement par le monde de

l'Église qui est son avenir déjà présent. Le monde de l'Église, à son tour, paraît, par rapport au

monde de la. société politique, « catachronique » [1] dans la mesure où il appartient à l'avenir.

Juxtaposition d'un passé et d'un futur, tel est le présent chrétien. [1] Je hasarde ce mot, qui exprime

le contraire do l'anachronisme, c'est-à-dire anticipation d'une réalité avenir.55

2.4. Concepts of Kairos

It is only possible here to give a brief summation of other 20th century and contemporary concepts

of kairos. We shall proceed in roughly chronological order – if only ironically. First, we must note the

contribution of Jacob Taubes in Occidental Eschatology, who emphasizes the influence of the Gnostic and

Neo-Platonic traditions. According to Taubes, both Marx and Kierkegaard “have one mutual premise: the

disintegration of God and the world. World-history... is understood by Marx and Kierkegaard as history of

the 'world.' In the presence of kairos, world history is downgraded to prehistory. The End Time and

primordial time intersect in kairos.”56 This has been the case since St. Paul, in whom “eschatology and

mysticism meet,” introduced Gnosis into apocalypse, for “The moment when 'this' world touches 'that'

world, when they interlock, is the kairos. Paul defines the time between the death of Jesus and the Parousia

of Christ as the kairos, which is characterized by the crossing over of the still natural and the already

supernatural states of the world.”57 Furthermore, Taubes draws the connection between eschatological /

apocalyptic thought and the conviction that motivates Hegel's philosophy of history, for Hegel and

Joachim consider themselves “to be positioned at the time of the greatest tension in the history of

salvation, positioned in the kairos, in which the new spiritual world is dawning, and he himself is called to

aid the breakthrough of the ecclesia spiritualis.”58

55 Jean Danièlou, “Christianisme et histoire,” Études, Vol. 80, No. 254 (Jul-Sept 1947), 166-184. 182-3.56 Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, Trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2009), 9.57 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 68.58 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 97.

18

As noted previously, Gaston Fessard, a Jesuit auditor of Kojève's lectures, in Hegel, le Christianisme et

L'histoire, drew the connection between the moment in which history concludes in Absolute Knowledge

and kairos, of which he writes “C'est [en la distension que le temps introduit dans la représentation] que l'hypothèse

de Hegel sur la 'fin ultime du monde' peut me rendre service, si du moins, au lieu de la prendre pour une

'fiction' irréelle, j'y vois au contraire la nécessité du Concept qui ne triomphe d'une représentation qu'en lui

en opposant une autre qui la nie. 'Prendre sur moi la croix du présent' consistera donc à appliquer cette

hypothèse aux points où passé et futur s'articulent avec mon hic et nunc, en le concevant dans son amplitude

objective et universelle aussi bien que dans la profondeur subjective et individuelle.”59 More recently,

following in the same theological-philosophical tradition, Jean-Yves Lacoste defines kairos as “le présent

[est] construit alors comme suvenir d'un avenir.”60 Here, anachrony and the superposition of past and future

in the present define the temporality of kairos.

It is thus quite apropos of Giacomo Marramao to also emphasize the anachronistic dimension in a

secular milieu, writing that “'asynchronies' inevitably arise within Historical Time, time and rhythms change

according to the fields and domains of action.”61 Kairos is a figure for asynchronic/anachronic moments

interrupting historical time and changing its rhyhm, or tempo. Tempo is, of course, an apt choice of terms,

for Marramao concludes: “The Greek correlative of tempus is not chronos but kairos... Far from the meaning

of “momentary instant,” or “opportunity” ...kairos comes to designate... a very complex figure of

temporality which recalls the “quality of conformity” and the proper mixture of different elements – exactly

like the notion of weather. 62 It is this temporality, not chronological time, that is ours – for “our time is the

time of living forms, of the world that evolves, precisely because it is originally ingratiated by the kairos. We

can only experience the dimension of due time, of “kairological” time independently from the nature of the

disorientation that delimits it.63

59 Gaston Fessard, Hegel, le christianisme, et l'histoire (Paris: PUF, 1990), 149-150.60 Jean-Yves Lacoste, Note sur le temps (Paris: PUF, 1990), 187.61 Giacomo Marramao, Kairos: Toward an Ontology of 'Due Time,' Trans. Philip Larrey and Silvia Cattaneo (Aurora, CO: Davies,

2007), ix. First published 1992, 3rd Edition 2005, English Translation 200762 Marramao, 71. W. Benjamin's comment on temps qua tempus in Das Passagen-Werk.63 Marramao, 72.

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III. Kairos: Creating a New Concept (Difference)

The essay entitled “In the Time of Fascist Desire” (to be included after revision in this

dissertation), written during my first semester of graduate study, was not only significant as the first time

the problematic of kairos took center stage in my work. Rather, the task of “the constructing a secular

concept of kairos” answered to the exigency of proposing an answer to the following question posed by

Deleuze & Guattari:

What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power…only microfascism

provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it

desire its own repression? ...It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the

fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both

personal and collective.1

Thus, from the outset, kairos had to be thought in connection to desire – eros – a conceptual linkage for

which there is much support – for the answer was to claim that the experience of time toward which all

desire tends is the interruption of indifferent, chronological time, by a qualitatively distinct moment, kairos.

Furthermore, in Eric Michaud's “Nazi Architecture as an Acceleration of Time” (1993) and The Cult of

Art in Nazi Germany (published in French as: Un Art de l'Eternité: L'image et le temps du nationale-socialisme:

1996; English translation: 2004), and in Klaus Theweileit's Male Fantasies (Volume 1: 1977; English

translation 1987), there was much to be found that suggested a linkage to the domain of aesthetics – art,

architecture, photography and film appeared to be instrumental in evoking such an experience of time and

in providing some amount of satisfaction to desire. According to the logic of kairos, first presented in the

essay in question, this evocation can only ape kairos, for the architecture of Nazi Germany, for example,“

made the monument as messiah for an impatient community, the heralded new man who came when

summoned to liberate the community from time, who came to put an end to its waiting.”2 If, however, a

moment worthy of the name kairos cannot be objectively distinguished from any other time, how then can it

be distinguished with certainty from pseudo-kairos? The true from false messiahs? Furthermore, this

indicates that kairos is not only emergent but effective in history and in politics, as Paul Tillich writes:

Kairos ...was used not only by the religious socialist movement in obedience to the great kairos... but

also by the nationalist movement, which, through the voice of Nazism, attacked the great kairos and

1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 214-5.

2 Eric Michaud, “National Socialist Architecture as an Acceleration of Time” Translated by Christopher Fox, in Critical Inquiry, Volume 19 Issue 2 (Winter 1993), 233.

20

everything for which it stands. The latter use was a demonically distorted experience of a kairos3 and led

inescapably to self-destruction.4

In a very real sense, Benjamin was correct to characterise fascism as the aestheticization of politics – as

opposed to the politicization of art by Communism/Historical Materialism. Fascism used aesthetic means

to evoke kairos – through mass spectacle, propaganda, and so forth,

Symbols chosen for their stimulative power helped in total mobilization: the city was a sea of

waving swastika banners; the flames of bonfires and torches illuminated the night... [Yet,] not

satisfied with having created a state of ecstasy, the Convention leaders [at Nuremberg] tried to

stabilize it by means of proved techniques that utilize the magic of aesthetics forms to impart

consistency to volatile crowds.5

Fascism is thus fabrication of aura in the political via aesthetic means (propaganda, monumental art, mass

spectacle) directing desire – kairos as aura: not objective, neither truly subjective – production of kairos and

kairic experience in a particular, concrete, momentary encounter. The fascist distortion would therefore

amount to an attempt to prolong the moment of kairos by the same means by which it had been evoked. In

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin explains the concept of aura as that

property of the work of art that derives essentially from “its presence in time and space, its unique

existence at the place where it happens to be;” 6 its authenticity; and in the case of natural objects: “the

unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”7 This is to say, while eliding a good amount

of Benjamin’s thorough analysis, that the aura may be conceived of as the effect of the apperception of the

object of aesthesis, except that this effect is, strictly speaking, neither in the subject nor in the object, but

arising out of the determinate spatio-temporal locus of the confrontation of subject and object and

exhibiting the irreducible singularity of the object and the time of the encounter. While Benjamin restricts

the term aura to the authentic work of art, it seems fruitful to appropriate this concept as part of our

conceptual. As such, I propose the following modification of the Benjaminian concept: that the term aura

3 “Since then [Darwin's time] there has been a continuous search for new interpretations and ersatz religions which strive to extract a promise of salvation from the material of experience, a promise that may provide a common directive for thought and action... In order to exorcise the fatal meaninglessness of the empty future, they must inhibit criticism—that is, set themselves up as dogma. The ideology of National Socialism was a product of such fear. Its regressive mythology banished collective historical fear and also the individual fear of death as life grown meaningless. If the individual is nothing and the nation is everything (though possessing value only because of its racial quality), the practical survival of the individual in the nation guarantees the fulfillment of his existence and prescribes his political line. The same, with appropriate transpositions, is true of the mythology of class struggle.” (Plessner, 244)

4 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Volume Three, 371.5 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Revised and Expanded Edition, Ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2004), 301.6 Walter Benjamin Illuminations, Translated by Harry Zohn, Edited by Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1968),

220.7 Benjamin, Illuminations, 222.

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should be understood as the qualitative singular that arises out of the multiplicity of a constellation. To

state this explicitly in other terms, the aura is the product of our immanent relation to the totality of our

experiences, present, past and future, at a specific historical “now,” a product irreducible to the brute facts

of the factical situation. The kairos-quality of an experience can be conceived of as the qualitative product

of an absolutely unique situation. According to Georges Sorel:

we must ‘carry ourselves back in thought to those moments of our life when we made some serious

decision, moments unique of their kind, which will not be repeated…’ It is very evident that we

enjoy this liberty most of all when we are making an effort to create a new individuality within

ourselves, thus endeavoring to break the bonds of habit which enclose us...When we act we are

creating a completely artificial world placed ahead of the present world and composed of

movements which depend entirely on us... when the masses are deeply moved it then becomes

possible to describe a picture which constitutes a social myth8

Experience is really produced by desire according to a particular modality: “if we admit that there is a

specifically ‘fascist’ mode of producing reality and view that as a specific malformation of desiring-

production, we also have to admit that fascism is not a matter of form of government, form of economy

or of as system in any sense.”9 Pseudo-kairos: product of malformed relation of desire, time and

experience – ultimately the negation of desire in the future stasis of the Thousand-Year Reich. Kairos

would therefore be produced by the free play of desires in their absolute particularity and transience. Our

kairos cannot be maintained, but that reality we then create, that can endure a while. That desire which in

desiring-producing kairos renounces the temptation to vainly prolong it is stronger than the desire to

continue existing and desiring, conatus. This is the “sovereign instant” of which Georges Bataille writes in

“The Sovereign” (1952):

[And in] this final and mischievous solitude of the instant, which I am and just as assuredly I will

be… nothing in my rebellion evokes it, but nothing separates me from it just the same. If I

envision the instant in isolation from a thought that entangles the past and future of manageable

things, the instant that is closed in one sense but that to another, much more acute sense, opens

itself up while denying that which limits separate beings, the instant alone is the sovereign being…

I must strive and struggle to deny the power of that which alienates me, which treats me like a

thing, and confines that which wanted to burn for nothing to utility…10

8 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Edited by Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26-7.9 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume One: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, Translated by Stephen Conway in collaboration with

Erica Cater and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 221.10 Georges Bataille, “The Sovereign,” The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Trans. Michelle and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 185-195. 187.

22

Kairos is reality-producing not only by freeing one creatively for the future but in transforming the

past both materially and in terms its relationship of meaning with the present kairos. The event11 of kairos

effectuates the potential for a revolutionary rupture with the past. What’s more is that the rupture takes

place also as a refusal to subordinate the present that we experience to a future we may very well not. Not

only does kairos constitute the immanent self-transcendence of history; it is also the liberation of desire, a

singular sovereign moment in which it is possible to “transcend without transcendence.”12 The sovereign

instant is:

That in relation to which the meaning is given cannot but be indefinitely postponed: this is a

sovereign moment13 lost in the inconsequence of the instant... A senseless background, sometimes a

composition of the imagination, sometimes of disorder, occasionally the extreme tension of life,

clearly escapes every conceivable rationalization; otherwise we would cease being in the present: we

would be completely at the service of moments to come… Humanity, oriented by prohibitions and

the law of work since the beginning, is unable to be at once human… and authentically sovereign:

for humanity, sovereignty has been forever reserved, as a measure of savagery (of absurdity, of

childishness, or of brutality, even more rarely of extreme love, of striking beauty, of an enraptured

plunge into the night).14

3.2. Krisis: Kairos as Critical Moment in History

The history of civilization... is to be regarded as a series of kairoi, moments of decision, crises,

each representing at once the break-up and the condemnation of a society that has committed the

sin of hubris in the pride of life... These decisive moments, times and seasons, each reflect the

supreme kairos of the passion and resurrection... as they also anticipate the ultimate kairos of the

Last Judgment....15

Prior to the articulation of the conceptual and semantic network that links up kairos with krisis and

other concepts, their linguistic/etymological relatedness has long since been established: the entry for

kairos in Émile Boisacq's Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Greque (2nd Ed. 1923, 1st Ed. 1903) includes the

following: “καιρός a été rapproché de κρίσις f. lat. discrimen 'decision'... au sens premier de 'moment

11 The use here of the term “event” is intended in the specific sense developed by Deleuze and Foucault, drawing upon Nietzsche.

12 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, Trans. J. T. Swann (London: Verso, 2009), n.p. (epigraph).13 I have written elsewhere (The Logic of the Lost Moment) of the terminological difficulty presented by Bataille’s usage of the le

moment and l’instant, and I have concluded that they are to him interchangeable. 14 Bataille, “The Sovereign,” 194.15 Jean Danièlou, The Lord of History, Trans. Nigel Abercrombie (London: Longmans, 1958), 32.

23

décisif.'”16 It is thus that any given krisis would take place as and in a heterogeneous moment interrupting

the continuum of history & time. In this sense, krisis refers to “a historically unique transition phase. It

then coagulates into an epochal concept in that it indicates a critical transition period after which-if not

everything, then much-will be different. The use of "crisis" as an epochal concept pointing to an

exceptionally rare, if not unique, transition period, has expanded most dramatically since the last third of

the eighteenth century, irrespective of the partisan camp using it.17 The moment, however, in which this

kairos-krisis is experienced as present, is not itself transitional but a transitory interruption – part of neither

ho aiōn touto (this epoch) nor ho aiōn mellōn (the coming epoch). Indeed, this expansion into the historical-

philosophical domain represents a dramatic expansion from the derivation of “kρισις... [from] the Greek

verb χρίηω: to 'separate' (part, divorce), to 'choose,' to 'judge,' to 'decide.'”18 Kρισις, according to Boisacq,

signifies by contrast “faculté de distinguer, choix; dissentiment; décision; interprétation,”19 which more

strongly implies an agency or at least a determinate standpoint or frame of reference.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition of eschatology, the term krisis designates the Last Judgment in the

Septuagint, and the anticipation of the final krisis thoroughly colors thought concerning history and

historical time. Reinhart Koselleck writes of this:

Christians lived in the expectation of the Last Judgment (χρίσις/krisis = judicium), whose hour, time,

and place remained unknown but whose inevitability is certain. It will cover everyone, the pious and

the unbelievers, the living and the dead. The Last Judgment itself, however, will proceed like an

ongoing trial... While the coming crisis remains a cosmic event, its outcome is already anticipated by

the certainty of that redemption which grants eternal life. The tension resulting from the

knowledge that because of Christ's Annunciation the Last Judgment is already here even though it

is yet to come, creates a new horizon of expectations that, theologically, qualifies future historical

time. The Apocalypse, so to speak, has been anticipated in one's faith and hence is experienced as

already present. Even while crisis remains open as a cosmic event, it is already taking place within

one's conscience.20

This is obviously an instance in which the ordinary succession of events of chronological historical time is

disordered – anachrony defined by the anticipation of the future end of the world. This anachrony found

universal history, according to Taubes: “Apocalypticism is the foundation which makes universal history

16 Émile Boisacq, Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Grecque, 2nd Ed. (Heidelberg & Paris: C. Klincksieck & C. Winters, 1923), 392.

17 Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” 372.18 Koselleck, “Crisis,” 358.19 Boisacq, 518.20 Koselleck, “Crisis,” 359-60.

24

possible... The eschatological chronology assumes that the time in which everything takes place is not a

mere sequence but moves toward an end... Apocalypticism reveals knowledge of what in time is like crisis

[das Kriesenhafte der Zeit]. Time appears as a stream... after descending various gradients it pours into the sea

of eternity and redemption.”21 Following the transition from sacred history to the secular project of a

universal history, “The concept of crisis has here lost its meaning as a final or transitional stage-instead it

has become a structural category for describing Christian history itself. Eschatology is now incorporated

into history.22

3.3. Secularization: Political Theology at the end of Modernity

All significant concepts of the modem theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not

only because of their historical development-in which they were transferred from theology to the

theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver-

but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a

sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the

miracle in theology.23

Secularization takes place selectively; rather, what is carried over is nether arbitrary nor systematic:

secularization is a historical process determined by the reply of desire to the withdrawal of the divine. Even

such a critic of the secularization thesis in its simple form such as Hans Blumenberg supports a reading of

the transposition of eschatology from theology to the domain of history. In the first place, Rudolf

Bultmann has observed, that with the establishment of the Church as a temporal institution, “eschatology

is not abandoned, but it is neutralized insofar as the powers of the beyond are already working in the

present.”24 This tactical sublimation was obviously dependent upon faith in the intrinsically meaningful

nature of the world, which is in turn dependent upon a divine guarantee. Thus, Blumenberg writes in Care

Crosses the River,

If the world becomes meaningless... then the world arouses a wish for its destruction, an

indeterminate rage at its continued existence and those in it. The apocalyptic threat is transformed

into the hope that what is suspected of being meaningless – if it were only destroyed – will let

nothing arise or leave nothing behind other than what proves to be meaningful.25

21 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 33-4.22 Koselleck, “Crisis,” 398-99.23 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1985), pg. 36. 24 Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 54.25 Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses The River, Trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 40.

25

Secularization not a linnear and straightforward process; it is often accompanied by its inverse image, the

process of sacralization. Secularization occurs and is shaped by a need – by a call – analogous to

Benjamin's appropriation of Schmitt's concept of the ausnehmezustand and re-introduction of theology into

the philosophy of history at the end of Modernity.

3.4. The End of History/Modernity

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ausnehmezustand in which we live is not the

exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that accords with this insight... it is

our task to bring about a real ausnehmezustand, and this will improve our position in the struggle

against fascism.26

During the long interval preceding Tillich's revival of kairos, especially as the Enlightenment and the epoch

commonly given the name of Modernity, the eschatological concepts of prophecy and of acceleration were

secularized and underwent a sort of reversal: prophecy became rational prognosis and acceleration, according to

“Luther, the compression of time is a visible sign that... the Final Judgment is imminent, that the world is

about to end. For Robespierre, the acceleration of time is a human task, presaging an epoch of freedom

and happiness, the golden future.” Robespierre's pronouncement, that “the progress of human Reason laid

the basis for this great Revolution, and you shall now assume the particular duty of hastening its pace,”27

indicates the following. That the “goal” of historical progress took over the structural and dynamic

function of eschaton, and the fact that such a goal should be subject to prediction and the belief in its

inevitable realization – with or without revolutionary intervention – first requires that historical time arise

out of chronological time, and then that progress become ideological and forget the experience of time that

gave birth to history. On the other hand, as Benjamin noted, there remain traces of a qualitative experience

of time – in holidays – the repetition of which was, in fact, an archaic signification of the word

“revolution.” And “since the onset of such acceleration, the tempo of historical time has constantly been

changing, and today... acceleration belongs to everyday experience...”28 Accordingly, it follows “...the desire

to accelerate the moment leading to eternal beatitude was clearly not peculiar to Nazism... The desire for

acceleration of the end, which was in truth a constitutive element in the whole structure, was always

associated with the toppling of the established order.”29 This, of course would be the particular modernity

of the Nazi apocalypse – its originality and decisively anachronistic lies in having developed techniques of

26 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392.27 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, 12. 28 Koselleck, Futures-Past, 50.29 Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 186.

26

evoking what Tillich called “demonically distorted kairos” by means of aesthetics, propaganda and

spectacle (Speer's “Theory of Ruin Value” clearly displays anachrony as a principle), but in the failure of

these techniques clearly demonstrated the fact that such moments cannot be indefinitely sustained, for “not

[being[ satisfied with having created a state of ecstasy, the Convention leaders [at Nuremberg] tried to

stabilize it by means of proved techniques that utilize the magic of aesthetics forms to impart consistency

to volatile crowds.”30

The experience of time in kairos is frequently conflated with or reduced to a qualitative alteration of

the passage of time – acceleration/deceleration – and consequently of history. While it is true that

moments experienced as unique and of significance often bear such associations, this is readily explained

by cognitive psychology. Rather, the qualitative difference lies in the disordering of time, in the anachrony

of remembrance in Benjamin, for example.

On the question of the incompleteness of history, Horkheimer's letter of March 16, 1937: “The

determination of incompleteness is idealistic if completeness is not comprised within it. Past

injustice has occurred and is completed. The slain are really slain. . . If one takes the lack of closure

entirely seriously, one must believe in the Last Judgment...” The corrective to this line of thinking

may be found in the consideration that history is... not least a form of Eingedenken. What science has

“determined,” remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness)

into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is

theology; but in Eingedenken we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as

fundamentally atheological, little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately

theological concepts. [N8,1]31

In the mindfulness of Engedenken there is a parallel and potential connection to the Pauline concept of

recapitulation. This is the very structure of time defined as kairos by Jean-Yves Lacoste: “le présent est

construit alors comme souvenir d'un avenir...” which is “l'abolition des distances temporelles. Il est la réalité

exclusivement théologique du temps. Le kairos n'est pas l'eschaton, puisqu'il ne déploie sa logique qu'à

l'intérieure d'une histoire à laquelle il n'appartient pas de détenir quelque dernier mot que ce soit.”32 Internal

to history, kairos disrupts and abolishes temporal distances and their consequences - “Elle affirme qu'entre

mémoire et espérance, le présent ne jouit d'aucun statut qui lui soit propre. Tout est donné au présent, sauf

la conscience qui porte cette presence: passé et avenir, promesse et espérance... L'ordre kairologique rompt

30 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Revised and Expanded Edition, Ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 301.

31 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 471.

32 Lacoste, 187-8.

27

l'ordre chronologique.” (188) Kairos is a structure of time in an essentially theological mode, that within

history voids temporal distance – supporting the many claims concerning kairos either as an implicit

structure of Benjamin's philosophy (Ralf Konersmann, in a selection entitled Kairos: Schriften Zur Philosophie),

as analogous to Tillich's concept of kairos (Adorno, Lindroos, Marramao, Agamben), and/or as to some

extent mapping on to, or in direct relationship with Jetztzeit – without leading to an indistinct conceptual

mess.

If this is in fact the case, then the anachrony of kairos and Eingedenken – of the dialectical image in

its Jetzt der Erkenntbärkeit – is sufficient to demonstrate that this is not at all the time of Modernity (the time

of the absent kairos). This is but one indication among others. It is clear that Benjamin's theological

understanding of history, kairos and pleroma inherent in every jetztz of Jetzt-zeit, and the potential imminent

messianic event, all run against the grain of Modernity's doctrine of progress and continuous process. It is

more than enough to find something strangely amiss when examining the three French versions of

Benjamin's Theses: In both Benjamin's own 1940 French translation and the definitive 1971 translation by

Maurice de Gandiallac, the fifteenth thesis is rendered comparably, Benjamin's translation merely adding to

the description of the repeated inaugural day of the calendar the property of integrating the preceding time

(Tikkun Olam?). However, in the 1947 translation by Pierre Missac, published presumably with

Horkheimer's approval in Les Temps Modernes, the phrase rendered into English as “history in time-lapse

mode” is instead replaced by “the rhythm of history accelerating.”

Maurice de Gandillac, 1971Le jour avec lequel commence un nouveau calendrier fonctionne comme un ramasseur hisorique de temps. Et c'est au fond le même jour qui revient toujours souce la forme des jours de fête...33

33 “Thèses sur la philosophie de l'histoire,” Oeuvres II: Poésie et Révolution, Trad. Maurice de Gandillac (Paris: Denoël, 1971).

Pierre Missac, 1947La jour où un calendrier entre en vigueur, le rhythme de l'histoire s'accélère. C'est au fond le même jour qui revient sans cesse sous les espèces des jours de fête...34

34 “Sur le concept d'histoire,” Trad. Pierre Missac, Les Temps Modernes, No. 25 (Oct., 1947), 623-634.

Walter Benjamin, 1940Le jour qui inaugure une chronologie nouvelle a le don d'intégrer le temps qui l'a précédée. Il constitue une sorte de raccourci historique (eine Art historischen Zeitraffer). C'est encore ce jour, le premier d'une chronologie, qui est équivoqué et même figuré par les jours fériés qui, eux tous, sont aussi bien des jours initiaux que des jours de souvenance.35

35 “Sur le concept d'histoire,” Écrits Française.

We must first note that the phrase “the rhythm of history” is also of terminological importance in Kojève,

with whom both Benjamin and Missac had contact. According to Kojève, acceleration of the historical

rhythm is an acceleration of the coming end of history.

As for the rhythm of History, it is indeed such as I indicated previously: action → coming to

28

consciousness → action. Historical progress... a 'mediation' ...of the Past is what..., transforms the

Present into an historical Present... [if this] is Time, it is because it has a beginning and an end... a goal

(Zeil) which can no longer be surpassed.36

It is especially incongruous to find this phrase used here, for Benjamin had written to Horkheimer

following his attendance at Kojève's December 4th 1937 lecture at the Collège de Sociologie, with which Missac

had numerous contacts:

Kojevnikoff is as much an expert in Hegel as one can be without having much proficiency in materialist dialectics.

Regardless, his conceptions of the dialectic seem to me highly contestable. They don't hinder him in any case in his

talk – in the 'Acéphale' circle! - from developing the thesis that only Man's natural dimension, in its

manifestation in his history up until now, which as it is running out shares the fixed quality of his natural being, can

be the object of scientific knowledge. .37

On the other hand, Benjamin had, on at least one occasion, provided evidence in his correspondence with

Adorno that he was less than forthright with Horkheimer, particularly in the context of his relationships

with his French associates (often with multiple, specific motives). We are left with to decide between two

unpleasant alternatives: either on the one hand, he did not entirely reject Kojève's thinking of the end of

history, but objected to his idealism – which allowed him to make the claim that it was with Stalin and not

Napoleon that, according to Gaston Fessard, “l'histoire universelle parvient donc elle aussi à son

achèvement: “Kairos” où la Verité se manifeste comme Savoir absolu.... En d'autres termes, comme le

Christ, apparu à la plénitude des temps... de même Hegel dévoile d'une manière définitive la philosophie et

sa rationalité produit de l'histoire... 38 – or to the political conclusions themselves. It is also possible that

Missac, who at Bataille's request arranged for the post-war transfer of the Benjamin Nachlass hidden in the

Bibliothèqie Nationale into Adorno's care, was supported by or even induced to make this substitution on

behalf of Horkheimer. One might suspect as much in light of “La perspective de Horkheimer pendant les

années 1940-50 [qui] est celle d'une critique rationaliste des errements de la raison, une critique par un

Aufklärer des limites de l'Aufklärung. Toute thématique romantique lui semble suspecte – et son

argumentation ne comporte, à cette époque, aucune dimension religieuse.”39 And yet, “the end of

exploitation, writes Horkheimer, 'is not a further acceleration of progress, but a qualitative leap out of the

36 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1969), 163-4.

37 Benjamin to Horkheimer, December 6th, 1937, cited in Michael Weingrad, “College,” 141. His translation. Also in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 16:315.

38 Gaston Fessard, Hegel, le christianisme, et l'histoire , 145-6.39 Michael Löwy, “Ün Saut Hors du Progrès” L'hommage de Horkheimer a Walter Benjamin,” Archives de Philosophie, 49 (1986),

225-229. 229.

29

dimension of progress', i.e. a break in historical continuity.”40 This leap would locate the end of

exploitation, of alienation, in a history after history, a condition that maps onto the condition of das

Posthistoire. Blanchot underlines the political value of the thought of the end of history – as an exigency:

I do not believe this, but from now on I will hold onto an exigency: to become fully conscious, and

always anew, that we are at the end of history, so that most of our inherited notions, beginning

with the ones from the revolutionary tradition, must be reexamined and, as such, refuted. The

discontinuity that May ('68) represented (no less than produced) strikes language and ideological

action equally.41

3.5. La Révolution Post-historique

Arnold Gehlen, in ¨The Roll of Living Standards in Today´s Society¨ (1952) and Hendrik de Man

(Paul´s uncle), in Vermassung und Kulturverfall (1952), present another “end of history” scenario emphasizing

das Posthistoire42, the-post historical period; that period into which we entered after the Second World War

(and of modernity, see exhibits: a) the unprecedented scale of the war, b) Auschwitz, and c) the Bomb),

and made possible by the post-war economic and technological acceleration, which ensured that all could

enjoy a high standard of living as compared to before (this parallels Kojève´s footnoted suggestion that the

classless society was in fact American consumer capitalist society).

The mathematician A. A. Cournot had envisioned, as it was about a century before the phrase post-

histoire was coined; then, Cournot wanted to designate the position that emerges when any human

invention or innovation has been so perfected that every further morphological change appears

closed off...the conclusion that our culture has filled its “archetypal” sense and is thus has entered a

phase of meaninglessness; the alternative was then, viewed biologically, death or mutation...Post-

histoire is not concerned with the lethargy of a culture in which its vital powers have been

extinguished, rather with the entry to a phase of world-events occurring overall outside of the

framework of History because they lack any noticeable historical connection between causes and

effects.43

40 Ibid, 225.41 Maurice Blanchot, “On the Movement,” Political Writings 1953-1993, 106-9. 109.42 Which, as Lutz Niethammer has noted in Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? “does not exist in French” but is a German

coinage inspired by the mathematician A.A. Cournot, in his reflections on the dynamics of history in the mid-19th century.43 Hendrick de Man, Vermassung und Kulturverfall (München: Lehnen, 1951), 135f, quoted in Arnold Gehlen, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 7:

Einblicke, “Anmerkung des Herausgebers,” 468-9. Gehlen: Hendrik de Man has recently expressed the interesting thought that we have entered into an epoch that no longer belongs to History, an age of “post-histoire” as Cournot called it. If this should be the case, naturally one can say nothing more about the future. Is it not the case then that one can still always find in the past keys to the future and must then already derive the reaction of humanity to these increases in consumption, impoverishment of existence and loss of personality, from the obligations of our actual lifestyles. Perhaps then one can once again see ascetic elites that exclude themselves from the general race toward “a good life,” and would in so doing deny the

30

At this point, our capacity for prognostication fails, as the logic of necessity (causes and effects) is

disestablished. The logic of history, which is defined by a form of causality dependent upon a concept of

temporality that has been decisively refuted, ¨ a phase of world-events occurring overall outside of the

framework of History.” Essentially, this amounts to claiming that “History with a capital H” (Perec) came

to an end (epic history) without people having thereby ceased to live, act and make history. Micro-history

goes on after the end, albeit only for those whose eyes can see it. Viewed from the standpoint of history,

the post-historic epoch would indeed appear as it did in Kojève's footnote or through the eyes of an

unreformed Fukuyama. For, an “historical situation coming to pass in which all possibilities of action are

held in reserve ...abrogating all their further hopes and plans beyond limits already attained. Revolutionary

action would found classless society, beyond which further historical action wouldn't arise.”44

For my part, I view this as an epochal transition by which History, i.e. the epic element of history,

only pauses, as it were, being a hiatus, or interval, in an ausnehmezustand that is often also political, and since

the micro-histories and singular agents have already been emancipated from a great degree of their material

constraints, revolutionary action can produce a recommencement – or defer, or at least shape the form of

the recrystallizing logic of a new history. what is significant is that this maps onto messianic time perfectly,

with kairos standing as the moment of entry into messianic time, rather than being conflated with it. And as

such, for a time, the experience of time and the possible forms of history and politics would be altered, for

sovereignty is likewise suspended, attenuated, devolved or deferred. This was certainly the case in both

post-war Germanies, regaining sovereignty piecemeal over a 45 year period.45

In the idea of classless society, Marx secularized the idea of messianic time... Once the classless

society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogeneous time was transformed

into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary

situation... (Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried,

ultimately achieved interruption)... Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history...

Perhaps revolutions are an attempt... to activate the emergency break. (XVIIa)46

Kairos is rather the opening of post-histoire, and the mode of temporality proper to the condition of

common conditions that all present social and political contradictions still have, and which and are so noisily fought over.44 Bataille, On Nietzsche, 42. Je puis imaginer un développement historique achevé qui réserverait des possibilités d'action comme

un viellard se survit, éliminant l'essor et l'espoir au-delà des limites atteintes. Une action révolutionnaire fonderait la société sans classes – au-delà de laquelle ne pourrait plus naître une action historique. Oeuvres Complètes, Tome VI (Paris: Gallimard.1973), 60.

45 The position of post-history inaugurated by kairos (kairology rather than chronology) stands diametrically opposed to the earliest concept of post-history, R. Seidenberg's “final posthistoric phase, more or less symmetrical with the prehistoric phase. History itself is thus marked off as a transitional interregnum... a relatively fixed state of stability and permanence.” Roderick Seidenberg, Posthistoric Man (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), 56.

46 Benjamin, “Paralipomena to 'On The Concept of History,'” Selected Writings, Vol 4, 401-11. 401-2.

31

History having been held in abeyance. It is a rupture, inaugurating a new history as a time filled with a

plenitude of moments, bearing the emancipatory possibility of defying the constraints and false continuity

of the future and past and interrupting history: Revolutionary rupture.47 Kairos is active in our production

of reality as our freedom for the future and in transforming the past in terms its relationship of meaning

with the present kairos. True revolution is in fact messianic, for blueprinting utopia or having a ¨plan¨ is

impossible from this side of the event – as rational prognosis is interrupted by a change, as it were, in

historical rationality. The messianic need not be deferred, but neither can its advent be accelerated: no

deferral. Those who wait, wait in vain, because they are only waiting for themselves (F. Nietzsche, Beyond

Good and Evil, #274 – see below). Those who have recognized that the pleroma (fullness of time) is here and

now, also recognize that it is bound up inextricably with our desires, such that any moment can be the

kairos of the revolution that would mark the start of an interregnum of messianic time, the hiatus that

exists before a new history can be constructed or installed. In such moments there is brought about “a real

ausnehmezustand”48 liberating the present from this servitude to the future and constraint of the past in view

of making experience in the strong erfahrung sense possible again. In L'entretien infini, Blanchot writes of a

“pure time of suspended history marking an epoch [called] a revolutionary regime”(Sade). No conception

of the temporality of revolution could be at once as opposed and as similar to Robespierre's exhortations

to accelerate the Revolution. Rather than the time of a new, ever-accelerating history inaugurated by the

Revolution, “it is the time of the between-times where... there reigns the silence of the absence of laws, an

interval that corresponds precisely to the suspension of speech when everything ceases, everything is

arrested... because there is no more interdiction. Moment of excess, of dissolution and of energy.. Always

pending, this instant of silent frenzy is also the instant at which man, by a cessation wherein he affirms

himself, attains his true sovereignty.” 49 To await, to say that action is to bring about, is to still subordinate

oneself to the future and to never even see that opening onto a different future, a different form of history.

It henceforth becomes the task of the revolutionary to maintain that lapsus, a time simultaneously post-

historical and pre-historical, in which every moment is unique, irreplaceable and contemporary (if virtually,

or by means of remembrance) with every other – in which every being is likewise irreplaceable in its

singularity and yet immanent to every other.

When one commentator says, The Messiah is perhaps I, he is not exalting himself. Anyone might

be the Messiah – must be he, is not he. For it would be wrong to speak of the Messiah in Hegelian

47 Post-historical period = hiatus in history (epic/ideological), of indeterminate duration but unable to endure eternally. That desire which in kairos renounces the temptation to vainly prolong it is stronger than the desire to continue existing and desiring, the supersession of conatus.

48 Benjamin,“On the Concept of History,” 392.49 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, Trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 226.

32

language – “the absolute intimacy of absolute exteriority.” – all the more so because the coming of

the Messiah does not yet signify the end of history, the suppression of time. It announces a time

more future.. than any prophesy could ever foretell50

Everyone is messianic when aware that kairic moments are to be found everywhere in Erfahrung. by the

historian who “brushes history against the grain.” When the “principle of alienation constituting man...

imprisoning him in a contentment with his own reality... leading him to... impose it as a conquering

affirmation” is overturned, when one has extirpated all that “roots men in a time, in a history... in a

language,”51 it is beyond all possibility for me to deny that, as Bataille wrote in Devant un Ciel Vide (1946),

“these moments are relatively banal: just a little ardor and abandon is sufficient (on the other hand, just as

little weakness turns us away, and the next instant expels us from the moment;. Laughter to the point of

tears, fucking and crying, obviously nothing is more common... ecstasy itself is right under our noses.”52*

Unexpectedly, the moment “opens itself up while denying that which limits separate beings, the instant

alone is the sovereign being…”53 No great event or historical/epochal/cosmic crisis is really needed in

order to overcome such a blinding alienation from life in the present, from the present itself, from others,

for “ Every just act (are there any?) makes of its day the last day or – as Kafka said – the very last: a day no

longer situated in the ordinary succession of days but one that makes of the most commonplace ordinary,

the extraordinary.”54 In consideration of the fundamentally immanent quality of kairos, Blanchot was

absolutely correct in asserting that demonstrations “express the right of all to be free in the streets, freely

to be a passerby and to make something happen in the streets.”55 The significance of May '68 lies in the

fact that “the rupture... is decisive. Between the liberal capitalist world, our world, and the present of the

communist exigency, there is only the dash of a disaster, an astral change.”56

Unbinding revolutionary possibilities is a matter of relinquishing that which resists this anachrony –

that is, according to Blanchot, “everything that through values and through feelings roots men in a time, in

a history, and in a language is the principle of alienation constituting man as privileged in his particularity,

imprisoning him in a contentment with his own reality, and leading him to propose it as an example or to

impose it as a conquering affirmation.”57 In this Blanchot takes over and develops an insight given to us by 50 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 142.51 Blanchot, Political Writings, 97.52 Georges Bataille, “Devant un ciel vide,” Fontaine, Nos. 48-9, Fevrier 1946, 207-212. 212. My translation. * Les moments soverains sont extérieures à mes efforts. Mais ces moments sont d'une banalité relative: un peu d'ardeur et

d'abandon sufissent (un peu de lâcheté par allieurs en détourne et, l'instant d'après nous discourons. Rire aux larmes, charnellement jouir et crier, rien évidemment n'est plus commun... L'extase même est proche de nous.

53 Georges Bataille, “The Sovereign,” 187.54 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster,143.55 Blanchot, Political Writings, 91. Cf. Bataille, ON, 157.56 Blanchot, Political Writings, 93.57 Blanchot, “[Communism without heirs],” Political Writings 1953-1993, 92.

33

Bataille in 1945, who wrote, “actually, our native country is what belongs to the past in us. It's on this and

this alone that Hitlerism erects its rigid value system, adding no new value.”58 The experience of kairic

heterogeneity and the rupture interrupting history thereby inaugurated removes that which “...impedes

access to the present is precisely the mass of what for some reason (its traumatic character, its excessive

nearness) we have not managed to live... [and constitutes our contemporaneity, in the sense that] to be

contemporary means in this sense to return to a present where we have never been.”59

3.6. Going out of synch(rony): Creating community with the quodlibet-Messiahs: Kairos and Immanence, Messianism and

Apocalypse

Substituting the word “messiah” for “being” in the opening chapter of Agamben's The Coming

Community, we arrive at an instructive formulation: “The coming messiah is whatever messiah. Whatever

messiah has an original relation to desire. The whatever in question relates to singularity... only in its being

such as it is... The singularity exposed is as such is whatever you want, that is, lovable.” 60 Moreover, when

Benjamin references Origen by way of Leskov in Der Erzähler, we may interpret αποκαταστασις as not only

the restitutio in integratum and the tikkun olam, but as a restoration to immanence, through kairos (in Origen,

kairos and αποκαταστασις cannot be understood but in relation to one another in his eschatology ) – and

through new modes of (hi)story-telling. Community and others would thus stand in a relationship of

immanence to us in kairos, for community is produced/actualized in the present – made contemporary –

apres coup: “We wouldn't have ever known transcendence if we hadn't first constructed and then rejected it,

torn it down... But just as the event being past, the community discovers itself beyond the calamity – in the

same way, the 'tragedy of reason' changes to senseless variation,”61 and “the feelings of immanence I have

when talking to them, that is, when we're together in our sympathies are an indicator of my place in the

world - a sign of the wave in the midst of ocean.”62

The anachrony introduced by kairos undermines the chronopolitical regime that imposes and is

supported by temporal structures in the mode of chronos - on the model of the clock. For example,

Western-syle liberal democracy is bound up with contemporary forms of capitalism. And at the base of

capitalism is an organization of time into a unilinear succession of identical days, this time is also a measure

- which translates time into capital. This is disrupted by the anachrony of kairos, the experience of which

58 Bataille, On Nietzsche, 171-2.59 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 18.60 Apologies to Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1993), 1.61 Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, 165-6.62 Bataille, On Nietzsche, 157.

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reintroduces the heterogeneity of erfahrung in a qualitatively unique moment. Such disruption is that

opening which makes the moment of rupture possible. We can thus sum up the revolutionary task of the

quodlibet-Messiah by once again appropriating Blanchot's words, that is: “Let us share eternity in order to

make it transitory.”63

Reading Walter Benjamin's Theses it is striking that such a thinker drawing upon the tradition of

Jewish messianism should mention an “Antichrist” in the following passage: “Articulating the past

historically does not mean recognizing it 'the way it was.' It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up

in a moment of danger [krisis]... The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over

the Antichrist. ”64 To understand this better it is instructive to note first the influence of the Russian

Apocalyptic tradition in the French intellectual circles frequented by Benjamin – which he had previously

encountered through the mediation of Fritz Lieb. Both Lieb and Kojève had written on Vladimir

Solovyov65, while both Lev Shestov66 and Nicolai Berdayaev were actively publishing in France during the

1930s – the former of which had been an early and important philosophical influence. In this context the

notion that kairos might be simulated and that pseudo-kairos and pseudo-messianism, as exemplified in the

fascist/Nazi historico-political tragedy indicates a structure found in the Apocalyptic tradition. That is, a

structure of mimesis corresponding to the apocalyptic figures of the Antichrist and the False Prophet –

hence Tillich's appropriation and mobilization of kairos can be seen as an effort to combat the pseudo-

messianism of the German Right, and subsequently the NSDAP.

Furthermore, during a 1984 course on Benjamin's Theses, Taubes emphasizes the importance of this

opposition in the thesis and its relation to the apocalyptic view of history:

Dieses Theologumenon ist die zentrale Stelle der ganzen These: Der Messias kommt nicht als

Erlöser, sondern auch als Überwinder vom “Was ist.” “Was ist,” ist der Antichrist[; die] Rezitation

der Herrschersicht wird blankgeputzt vom Historismus. Der Messias, in apocalyptischer

Perspektive[,] nur in dieser Perspektive kann das Vergangene einzig gerettet werden.67

63 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 146.64 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” SW 4, 391.65 Fritz Lieb, “Der Geist der Zeit” als Antichrist. Speckulation und Offenbarung bei Vladimir Solovjev (1934), also in Sophia und Historie

(1962). Cited in Chryssoula Kambas, “Actualité politique: Le concept d’histoire chez Benjamin et l’échec du Front Populaire,” Walter Benjamin et Paris: Colloque international 27-29 juin 1983, Ed. Heinz Wismann (Paris: Cerf, 1986), 273-284. 283n. Also contained in the same volume is one of the few essays to argue in favor of a strong intellectual exchange between Batialle and Benjamin: Jochen Hörisch, “Benjamin entre Bataille et Sohn-Rethel: Théorie de la dépense et dépense de la theorie,” 343-359.

66 According to Raymond Queneau, in “Premières confrontations avec Hegel,” (1963), Shestov – whose book, L'Idée du bien dans Tolstoi et Nietzsche, Bataille had translated in 1925 – was pivotal in inciting and guiding Bataille's earliest philosophical studies.

67 Jacob Taubes, “Walter Benjamin: Geschichtsphilosophiche Thesen,” Der Preis des Messianismus, Ed. Elettra Stimilli (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2006), 67-92. 85.

35

It takes but a shift of register to see the way out of the dilemma presented by the possibility that kairos

might be convincingly simulated : to attain to “a conception of the present as Jetztzeit shot through with

splinters of messianic time.”68 That is, to grasp that “every second was the small gateway in time through

which the Messiah might enter.”69 And who enters? The quodlibet-Messiah – at any moment, everyone in

their irreducible singularity can, by embracing anachrony, recognizing the heterogeneity of time, and acting

without hesitation to produce-seize the kairos, redeem the past and unchain the present from its servitude

to the future.

68 Benjamin, SW 4, 397.69 Benjamin, SW 4, 397.

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The problem of those who wait. Strokes of luck and many unpredictable factors are needed for a higher person, who contains the dormant solution to a problem, to go into action at the right time, “into explosion” you might say. This does not usually happen, and in every corner of the earth people sit waiting, hardly knowing how much they are waiting, much less that they are waiting in vain. And every once in a while, the alarm call will come too late, the chance event that gives them “permission” to act, – just when the prime of youth and strength for action has already been depleted by sitting still. And how many people have realized in horror, just as they “jump up,” that their limbs have gone to sleep and their spirit is already too heavy! “It’s too late”

What if in the realm of genius, the “Raphael without hands” ...is not the exception but, perhaps, the rule? Perhaps genius is not rare at all: what is rare is the five hundred hands that it [takes] to tyrannize the καιρός, “the right time,” in order to seize hold of chance by its forelock!1

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 168.

‘Kairos’... the brief, decisive moment which marks a turning-point in the life of human beings or in the development of the universe... was illustrated by the figure vulgarly known as Opportunity... His attributes were a pair of scales, originally balanced on the edge of a shaving knife, and, in a somewhat later period, one or two wheels. Moreover his head often showed the proverbial forelock by which bald-headed Opportunity can be seized.2

2 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1972), 71-2. Cited in Philip Sipiora & James Baumlin, Ed., Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and Praxis (Albany: SUNY, 2002), xii.

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Kairos. (Turin Museum)

IV. Programmatic: Revolution.

4.1. Exemplary Acts

Written in Paris during his intellectual and political engagement with the tumultuous events of the

student revolts of May 1968 – a revolution successful at best in part – Maurice Blanchot's unsigned

political tract in the sole number of Comité defines the “'exemplary act' [as being] such because it goes

beyond itself while coming from very far away, superseding itself and in an instant, with a shattering

suddenness, exploding its limits.”1 Two exemplary acts will serve as our approach to the problematic of the

eminently temporal conditions of possibility for revolution, to kairos. First, an event of May '68 itself:

The highest violence was no doubt in an instant of nonviolence, when, to reject the ban (the

banning of (Daniel) Cohn-Bendit was the pathetic “exemplary act” of the powers that be),

thousands of workers and students – revolutionaries in an absolute sense – stamped their feet and

chanted: “We are all German Jews.” Never has this been said anywhere, never at any moment:

inaugural speech, opening and overthrowing the frontiers, opening and disrupting the future.2

Second: In Walter Benjamin's fifteenth thesis of “On the Concept of History,” we are presented with a

tableaux of a peculiar event that took place during the July Revolution, a rare instance of successful

insurrectionary action, one of the very few truly and unreservedly hopeful images in the whole of the Theses.

The episode in question took place during the course of a spontaneous revolution, which swept Charles X

out of power in the course of three days. On the evening of July 27th 1830, without any form of

coordination or plan, “revolutionaries’ fired upon the faces of clock-towers ““at the very same hour, in

different parts of the city. [And this was the expression not of an aberrant notion, an isolated whim, but of

a widespread, nearly general sentiment.””3 [a21a,2]

The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar presents history in

time-lapse mode. And basically it is this same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays,

which are days of remembrance [Tage des Eingedenkens]. Thus, calendars do not measure time as

clocks do... On the first evening of fighting, it so happened that the dials on clock-towers were

being fired at simultaneously and independently from several locations in Paris. An eyewitness,

who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:

Qui le croirait! On dit, qu'irrités contre l'heure,

De nouveaux Josués, au pied de chaque tour,

1 Maurice Blanchot, “Exemplary Acts,”Political Writings: 1953-1993, 98-9.2 Blanchot, “Exemplary Acts,” Political Writings 1953-1993, 99.3 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 737.

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Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour.4

This moment of revolution acted upon what Benjamin calls “Joshua's Intention,” that is, the intention to

interrupt the course of time, “to interrupt the course of the world... The intention of Joshua.. From this

intention sprang [Baudelaire's] violence, his impatience, and his anger; from it, too, sprang the ever-

renewed attempts to stab the world in the heart of sing it to sleep.”5 This is the intention, conscious or no,

behind all exemplary acts, “moments when revolutionary possibility not only was present but was affirmed

in a negation that, while opening a void and stopping time, also pointed toward the future.”6 This episode

did not escape Blanchot's notice, as has already been seen.

J. M. Baker Jr. notes, in an essay entitled “Vacant Holidays: The Theological Remainder in

Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Benjamin,” that “Prior to Baudelaire, Marx and Engels had already noted the

resentment workers bore toward the factory bell and clock. And from their vantage point utopia, or the

liberation from working time, would consist in the ability to influence historical time, to change the

economy of time.”7 This revolutionary incident, according to Koselleck, marks a discontinuity in the

history of the concept of revolution – an alteration in the constitutive relationship between revolution and

temporality.

Immediately following the July Revolution of 1830 the expression “revolution in permanence”

appeared... the (permanent) revolution that survived the (actual) revolution of 1848-50 was a

historicophilosophical category... Within the declaration of the revolution's permanence lies the

deliberate and conscious anticipation of the future, as well as the implicit premise that this

revolution will never be fulfilled.. bound up with this is the conception that men could make

revolutions, an idea that was previously unutterable.8

Kairos, though as the revolutionary present, the present conceived on the model of jetztzeit (which inheres in

the past, future and present – i.e. in history) as the moment blasted out of the continuum of history, is

precisely that concept for which Benjamin has no name. It is the very present announced as a task in

Thesis XVI as an interruptive moment “in which time takes a stand and has come to a standstill” (SW 4:

396). It is in this moment that in no way interchangeable with any other that truth emerges as though in a

flash, as a direct consequence of the fact that, in opposition to “the relation of what-has-been [Gewesene] to

the now [Jetzt] is dialectical: is not progression [Verlauf] but image, suddenly emergent,” [N2a,3], time

4 Walter Benjamin, “On The Concept of History,” SW 4, 395.5 Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 161-199. 170.6 Blanchot, “Exemplary Acts,”Political Writings: 1953-1993, 98.7 J. M. Baker Jr. “Vacant Holidays: The Theological Remainder in Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Benjamin,” in MLN, Vol. 121, No.

5 (Dec. 2006), 1190-1220.8 Koselleck, Futures-Past, 53-5.

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conceived on the basis of ordered, regular chronological time is essentially composed of little more than an

infinite succession of infinitely brief moment, which projected onto a spatial model produces the image of

a continuum. This is the time of modernity, of the clock, which is entirely alien to theology as Benjamin

understands it. Indeed, it must be recalled that the concept of kairos has traditionally designated the

opportune time for action – and therefore, a politics of kairos. At the forefront of history is the present

conceived as kairos - “a conception of the present as now-time shot through with splinters of messianic

time.”9

Taken together, the concepts of kairos, Jetztzeit and messianic time appear as constitutive elements

of “revolutionary time” – a time comprised of heterogeneous, qualitatively distinct moments, in their

capacity for non-contemporaneous correspondence and their fundamentally disruptive quality viz-à-viz the

continuum that history establishes between distinct moments. Moments best denoted as kairoi are those

moments in history in which the past is superimposed upon the present, moments in which continuity is

not merely disrupted, but rather, as Benjamin writes in uncharacteristically violent terms such instances

“blast open the continuum of history.” – it is thus that the conception of time as “filled full with Jetztzeit”

gives to every moment a secret, almost magnetic, charge, a revolutionary potential, which can be unleashed

at the appointed time so as to rupture the continuity of time, and thereby to make present what was thought

of as irretrievably lost to the past. This is the anachrony of memory, the constitution of a future-past or

past-future, for “What science has 'determined,' remembrance can modify... That is theology; but in

remembrance we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological,

little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately theological concepts.” [N8,1] Remembrance

is in fact doubly anachronistic – and this is again that which Horkheimer rejected – insofar as it mobilizes

an archaic understanding of the concept of Revolution, that is “[as its meaning was] at first derived from

the natural movement of the stars and thus introduced into the natural rhythm of history as a cyclical

metaphor.”10

Time inheres not only in movements, but also in stoppages and ruptures; time does not pass as a

uniform flow. Moreover, it would stand to reason that, in radical opposition to the time designated by

chronos, each and every moment is qualitatively distinct from every other, however infinitesimal the

difference may be. It is by seizing hold of a moment, fully cognizant of the power which inheres in its

qualitative dimension that makes revolution possible, not as a means to inaugurate a new chronology, but

to effect “a qualitative alteration of time (a kairology),[which] would have the weightiest consequence and

9 Benjamin, “On The Concept of History,” SW 4, 397.10 Koselleck, Futures Past, 23.

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would alone be immune to absorption into the reflux of restoration.”11

4.2. Revolution, Rupture: Kairoticism & Kairopolitics

Revolution... has, since 1789, led forward into an unknown future. The nature of this future is so

obscure that its recognition and mastery have become the constant task of politics... [and]

“Revolution” spatially impl[ies] a world revolution and temporally imply that they be permanent until

their objective is reached.12

Revolutionary praxis truly worthy of the name would aim to interrupt and continually disrupt chronology

and to, in its place, inaugurate a kairology. That is, according to Kia Lindroos, whose Now-Time/Image-Space

(1998) was among the earliest thoroughgoing interpretations of Benjamin to truly mobilize the concept of

kairos, as opposed to merely highlighting its similarity, as one would a mere curiosity. She begins defining

the term kairology in loosely, by means of its opposition to chronology, such that: “kairology differs from

chronology... through emphasizing singular moments in history or in the present.”13 In a chapter dedicated

to Benjamin's famed fourteenth thesis, the very same thesis which, nearly seventy years ago, provoked the

very first intimation as to the implicit presence of the concept and experience of kairos, Lindroos writes:

A kairological approach “emphasizes breaks, ruptures, non-synchronized moments and multiple

temporal dimensions.... [and] brings forth qualitative differences in time, as they have the possibility

to become actualized... in temporally changing situations. The variety of moments... produce a

different view on time and its dimensions [than the chronological perspective] ...the present and its

experiences are temporarily 'frozen' in any historical or current material and phenomena. This

'condensed time' creates another perspective on time, and these moments of temporal insight are

possible to decipher as 'seeds of the present.'14

The unspoken task inherited by us directly from Walter Benjamin, would be task of articulating a kairo-

politics, which would oppose every chronopoltical strategy of reguarlizing and homogenizing time, subdividing

time ad infinitum, and wielding time conceived as chronos as an instrument of oppression, which we can see

at work today insofar as measurable time is used to control the lives of workers even when they take leave

of their workplace. The properly revolutionary political praxis would be essentially kairopolitical.

The kairopolitical refers us immediately to the kairotic, as kairopolitics does likewise to kairoticism, for as

Bataille wrote in 1947, “we must continuously choose between immediate interests and anxiety about the

11 Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” 115.12 Koselleck, Futures-Past, 49-52.13 Kia Lindroos, Now-Time/Image-Space: Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy and Art (Jyväskylä: SoPhi, 1998,

pg. 11.14 Ibid, pg. 85

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future: the moment is at stake in the smallest desire.”15 Kairoticism and kairopolitics respond to a historical

situation – one of crisis. They respond to the opening and exigency noted by Bataille in 1945:

Not much keeps us from concluding that the immense convulsion now going on relates necessarily

to the destruction of the old order, with its lies, frantic shouts, sophistication, morbid sweetness.

On the other hand there is a world of real forces being born, a world acting freely. The past (the

deceit required to maintain it in existence) is now dying... woe betide those who won't be here to

see the coming of the time for casting off old clothes and going naked in the new world: a world

where what has never been seen before remains the sole condition of possibility! But what does this

world being born want? What does it seek? What does it signify?16

In this opening, we can see that for kairoticism and revolutionary action guided thereby, “the undefined goal

is openness, the surpassing of individual limits. The goal of present activity is the unknown future.”17 Such

agency is based upon an experience of time, which could be well described as “a state that eludes the

slightest attempt, on the part of aesthetic description to grasp or comprehend it.”18 The call to action is

never anticipated, never looked-for, for “we never find anything except on the condition of not searching

for it…”19 But it is nevertheless desire that guides action and imbues “Revolutionary Ideas” with their

power, and gives us the will to act and, as Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition, “condense all the

singularities, precipitate all the circumstances, points of fusion, congelation or condensation in a sublime

occasion, Kairos, which makes the solution explode like something abrupt, brutal and revolutionary... the

condensation of singularities... defines the concentration of a 'revolutionary situation' and causes the Idea

to explode into the actual.”20 Kairoticism designates an orientation of desire, thought and action toward time

that permits one to recognize and experience the potential latent in any moment – that makes every

moment in its singularity into an opportunity for revolution.

15 Georges Bataille, “Initial Postulate,” The Unfinished System of Nonknoweldge, 105-8. 106.16 Bataille, On Nietzsche, 164-5.17 Bataille, On Nietzsche, 150.18 Bataille, On Nietzsche, 141-2.19 Bataille, “The Sovereign,” The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 193.20 Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 190.

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Appendix A: Chapter Summaries

I. Prologue

Blanchot – “There is no Revolution without 'exemplary acts.'” But Revolution is without example. “...the 'exemplary act' is such because it goes beyond itself while coming from very far away, superseding itself and in an instant, with a shattering suddenness, exploding its limits.”21

Exemplifies Revolution in the world, but only a concrete, historically determined and non-repeatable instance of Revolution. No recycling.

May '68: The Barricades, The occupation of the Sorbonne, active/general strikes(look up: Grenelle agreement (rejected) and Flins.)

July Revolution of 1830 – Benjamin

Blanchot: As soon as, through the movement of forces tending toward rupture, revolution appears possible, in a possibility that is not abstract but rather historically and concretely determined, It is in these moments, at these instants, that revolution takes place. The only mode of presence of revolution is its real possibility. Then there is a state of arrest and suspension. In this suspension, society undoes itself entirely. The law collapses. Transgression occurs: for a moment, there is innocence; interrupted history. 22

The Emergence of Temporal Dualisms in Indo-European Languages and CulturesLinguistic/conceptual distinction as old as written culture, i.e. historical culture. Kairos attains full

form and its revolutionary potentiality when in early (Hellenized) Christianity, this qualitatively distinct and heterogeneous moment/time becomes bound up via krisis/Last Judgment with eschatology and associated with the messianic event. Its revolutionary nature persists even in the post-revolutionary epoch, viz the history of the established church, which in late Antiquity and early Medieval times in turn suppressed this mode of temporal/historical experience, both in terms of theoretical development and political praxis. This exemplifies a general tendency of revolution to betray itself and relapse into the reactionary.1. Vedic Sanskrit: a) rtu b) kala, 2. Egypt a) calendar b) clock (then invented), 3. Babylonian a) 7 day week b) “evil day” → taboos enforced → evolves into sabbath day in Judaism, 4. Zoroastrian a) indivisible time b) divisible time. 5. Greek a) Chronos b) Kairos. 6. Judaism a) Historical time b) Messianic time 7. Early Christianity and Neoplatonism a) Profane / Historical b) Sacred / Eschatological 8.Sufism a) l'instant privilegée b) Duration & Substance

II A. The Duplication of Time: Language and the Inception of History – Sacrifice

An account of the pervasive dualisms in Occidental thought without reference to universals, essences or being.

1. Relative universality of temporal dualismDualism codified in Zoroastrianism, therefore historical

2. The problem with universals – essentialism and ahistoricality

21 Maurice Blanchot, “Exemplary Acts,”Political Writings: 1953-1993, Trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 98-9.

22 Maurice Blanchot, “[A rupture in time: Revolution],” in Political Writings: 1953-1993, Trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 100.

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1. Distinction between linear and cyclical time evinces this problem1. Repetitions mark heterogeneous dates2. Repetition – historical

2. All events occur within and in relation to milieu – i.e. History & Society3. How to historicize duality?

4. The desire to stop time – the will to permanenceKnowledge implies ability to record events, Introduction of writing and beginning of historical societiesFixing the transient and inscribing memory

First spatialization of time

5. Better to speak of doubling than duality 1. Doubling of time marks the dawn of history 2. Doubling as event 3. Doubling made necessary by:

a) The necessity of apprehension and prediction of future eventsb) The transformation of memory into history

(End of oral culture – The Storyteller)c) The nature of language itself

Operative time – G. Guillaume 4. Doubling subordinates present in view of future ends – utility – however:

5. Primacy of lived time retained in the festival – the other side of time – The anti-sabbath

6. Sacrifice and the violation of taboo (transgression), the festival 1. Suspension of ordered time 2. Return to sacred time and qualitative time

II B. “Sacrifice will illuminate the culmination of history as it did the beginning.” - Bataille, Guilty(History, Language, Revolution)

1. Double sense of history: Events & Connections, Chronology & Narrative/Memorial

1. Concept of History implies concept/experience of time and arises from samea) events: inhere in temporal continuum homogeneously, or form a series of discrete

heterogeneous momentsb) connections: produced by narration, meaning production, interpretation. Requires radically different concept of time to account for non-linearity

2. History and Literaturea) Both forms of narration – language permits us to speak of a sequence of events in

timeb) What's more – while sequence can be represented without recourse to language

Second Spatialization of Timeinterpretation, meaning and superposition require language

44

c) Insofar as it depicts and evokes experience, literature is indispensable if we are to understand temporality in its subjective, experiential and sensuous aspect

d) Lost Time & Time Regained – irreducible to objectivity Thus, the necessity of a literary approach

Time experienced with Acceleration & Arrest, not as a monotonous experience of “movement” through an empty manifold. These experiences are evidence of the kairic dimension of time. In Fascism, there was a Revolutionary, qualitative concept of time subordinated to reactionary, nostalgic politics and concept of history, the experience of which was evoked by aesthetic means (propaganda, rallies, architecture, costume and film) but was structurally impossible to sustain or tame; but supported by a radical experience of time. By contrast, Marxist & Progressive Time is characterized by radical politics and revolutionary conception of history, bound up with quantitative traditional concept of time as a measure and means of inevitable progress and the triumph of Reason. It is thus that the historical narrative of progress in its various guises necessarily had to come to an end for time qua kairos to grasped and experienced as revolutionary possibility. As kairos has always been conceptually and semantically tied to Christian eschatology, it is all too easy to mistake for kairos its “demonically distorted” form, and likewise to conflate an end of history with the end of time.

III. Contributions to the Concept of Kairos

Conceptual history (semantic development) of the concept of kairos as distinct from abstract chronological time and the naïve or phenomenological “lived experience” of time or durée, and its network of associated terms. Specific attention is paid to the profound changes undergone at two historical junctures: the inception of modernity with the Enlightenment and French Revolution and the culmination and termination of the modernist project and the beginning of the age crudely designated by the term “post-modern,” at the close of the Second World War. The sunset of the modern age was heralded and sealed by the massive scale of the war, the camps and the Bomb. It was at this critical moment in history, the crisis of modernity, that the term kairos re-emerged.

IV. Intellectual History

Intellectual history of the Parisian intellectual scene and philosophical milieu in the context of which Benjamin developed his conceptions of history and time in the 1930s. An exploration of the historical-political philosophy and theology circulating among the various thinkers with whom he was known to have associated, as well as subsequent developments in their work. Independently of Paul Tillich's mobilization of the concept of kairos in the context of “religious socialism” and existential theology, numerous figures in the Parisian intelligentsia, including the future cardinal of Paris and close friend of Bataille, Jean Danièlou and the Vie Spirituelle and Dieu Vivant circles, those associated with the Collège de Sociologie – in particular, Alexandre Kojève – and writers of the avant-garde, had given new currency to thinking time in qualitative (kairos) terms. Along with the Russian philosophers in exile in Paris and associated with Vie Spirituelle and Dieu Vivant, these thinkers of time and history – and at a critical moment in the history of the west – constituted the bulk of Benjamin's social and intellectual contacts in the years during which his thinking of history and time attains its full development and comes to map onto kairos.

45

IV. Kairos, Revolution & Reaction

Toward a new thinking of kairos in relation to the purported end of History, theories of an era of posthistoire and the problem of the fascist production of a pseudo-kairos. The recovery of the qualitative experience of time designated by kairos. The overturning of the temporal continuity and eternal recurrence inherent in the capitalist and phenomenological experience of time as a measure and quantity, i.e. time in the model of chronos.

Prospectus chapter IIITime of Fascist DesireFrom History to Story: To Interrupt The Course of the World: Baudelaire and ModernityChrono-kairopolitics of Revolution

VI – Toward Real Revolution

Analysis of the concept of revolution in (post-)modernity; discussion of kairos in Walter Benjamin's On The Concept of History and Arcades Project. From Kairopolitics to Kairoticism – conditions of possibility for genuine revolutionary agency. See prospectus, chapter 4.

VII – Postscriptum: Against The Clock!

Chapter still under development. Delineation of theoretical-practical orientations toward politics and temporality and conceptualization of rupture qua event.

Political/Historical Orientations or Positions & Correlated Event-Types

1. Revolutionary → Rupture and Replacement2. Reactionary/Nostalgic → Return to Known or Idealized Past3. Reformist –> Incrementalism4. Progressive –> Innovation and the New5. Subversive → Voiding of the Given6. Messianic → Arrival/Kairos7. Anarchic/Nihilistic → Rupture & Void8. Apocalyptic/Eschatological → Finality

46

Appendix B: Jean Danièlou, “Georges BATAILLE. — L'Expérience intérieure,” Études, Vol. 78, No. 244 (Jan-Mar 1945), Fiche Bibliographique, Dossier No. 6: Février 1944. n.p.

Georges BATAILLE. — L'Expérience intérieure. Collection « Les Essais », Paris, Gallimard, 1943. In-12, 252 pages. Prix : 37 francs.

M. Georges Bataille est le théologien mystique d'une école philosophique dont M. Sartre est le grand

théoricien, en même temps que le romancier et le dramaturge, et M. Camus l'essayiste. « Théologien

mystique », le mot, qui est de l'auteur lui-même, est singulièrement impropre, car il s'agit précisément ici

d'un effort pour constituer une mystique en dehors de toute théologie. M. Bataille rejoint l'école, issue de

Heidegger, dont on a dit justement qu'elle représentait l'effort le plus radical pour constituer une

métaphysique qui boucle sans que le problème de Dieu y soit seulement posé.

Bataillé, en effet, comme Sartre, comme Camus, comme Heidegger, part de l'idée de la contingence, de la

finitude radicale de l'homme, c'est-à-dire du seul être qu'il soit donné d'atteindre.L'absolu, le «devenir tout»,

comme dit -Bataille, et Dieu par conséquent, est la perfection créée par l'homme de son désir d'échapper à

sa finitude. C'est ce désir qui a suscité toutes les métaphysiques et toutes les religions. L'expérience

intérieure, la « nausée », comme dit Sartre, c'est le sentiment mêlé de désespoir et de libération, qui

accompagne, l'effondrement de l'édifice métaphysique, la « mort de Dieu » nietzschéenne et l'acceptation

de la contingence de l'être.

L'originalité de Bataille est que cette expérience, qui vient remplacer dans cette nouvelle « théologie »

l'expérience mystique, se présente comme un état de grâce, donné à certains moments privilégiés d'une

intensité extraordinaire. Bataille emploie pour décrire cet état tout un vocabulaire qui lui est propre,

d'abord déconcertant, et dont on finit par saisir la signification : c'est à la fois « écoeurement », « supplice »,

« sacrifice», « déchirement », « expiation », «nausée » — et « triomphe », « rire », « extase », « gloire »,

« haussement »; et ce double aspect définit bien une expérience qui est l'éclat d'une destruction.

Rarement, je pense, l'effort concret de l'homme pour atteindre par ses forces une propres expérience où se

consument toutes ses énergies spirituelles dans une dépense, une décharge fulgurante, a été poussé plus

loin. Et ici Bataille a raison de critiquer le yoga! Mais cet effort suprême est bien loin, s'il en emprunte le

langage, de l'expérience mystique authentique, du charbon ardent qui consume les souillures de l'âme pour

la rendre capable de l'union transformante avec le Dieu vivant.

Jean DANIÉLOU

47

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κ There are accounts of Bataille's conversations with Danièlou found scattered across several of Bataille's manuscripts of the period. Two in particular stand out, on account of their length and degree of detail. The earliest account of a conversation between Bataille and Danièlou is found written on the back of the portion of the manuscript containing both Madame Edwarda and the sections “Pèche” and “Chance” in Le Coupable, which dates to between late 1941 and 1943 (OC V: 542, Note to variant of 306). The second and longer one is found in one of the manuscripts comprising Sur Nietzsche, preceded by the date 28 Janvier 1944. χ In 1945, apropos of Sur Nietzsche, and one year after the famed “Discussion Sur la Pèche, “Georges Bataille est l'auteur de l'Expérience Intérieure. Aime tourmentée, ravagée, il cherche à retrouver les etats mystiques – les étapes de. saint Jean de la Croix — indépendamment, de toute foi religieuse et de la réalité du Christ. Aussi agnostique que Sartre, il ne se résigne pas à perdre ce que l'esprit religieux apporte de tourments et de délices sacrés et cherche désespérément à en retenir le tragique tout en refusant de reconnaître le Dieu vivant. Ceci donne à son oeuvre difficile, tendue, un pénible caractère sacrilège et blasphématoire, qui l'apparente à Nietzsche. C'est à cet auteur, d'ailleurs qu'il vient de consacrer son dernier livre, Sur Nietzsche, où il prône un renversement des valeurs : ce que nous appelons sentiment du péché correspond aux moments faibles de notre existence, où notre vitalité s'affaisse ; les sommets, au contraire, sont les moments d'euphorie où nul excès de dépense, fût-ce crime, ne nous paraît répréhensible et où le rire dionysiaque éclate comme un défi dans un monde affreusement désert.” Jean Danièlou, “La vie intellectuelle en France: Communisme, existentialisme, christianisme,” Études, Vol 79, No. 246 (1945), 241-253. 247.

Bataille:

“1. The Search in obscurity. The sacred in reality, neither in the true nor in the beautiful, and neither the good. Like Proust.

2. Analysis of the search for privileged instants. The privilelged instant as chance. 'A value awaiting its instantiation, which gives sense to all other instants that are not thusly privileged.

3. Discovery of the fact that only the sacred can respond to this waitfulness. The purely scientific character of this discovery is bound to the knowledge a) of psychoanalysis b) ethnography c) French sociology

4. In reality, this discovery puts into relief the essential value of certain inaccessibleelements:

eroticismrunning of the bulls

5. The result of the religious attitude and to mythic waiting is a condition of myth, plurality,secret rites, give a meaning to human destiny.

A sacred made of privileged instants and not (as in times past) of Substance.” (OC I: 651)

The indifference of nonknowledge is a fact, the most distant indifference that we were able to tempt, insofar as it ruins our usual position, our servitude to the anticipated result-as much as I might see, since in indifference [nothing] is anticipated any longer, anguish but also the suppression of anguish are essentially present at the same time in nonknowledge. From that moment on, it becomes possible to furtively create the furtive experience that I call the experience of the instant. (Teaching of death 123)

With regard to the instant, all that enters into duration must misunderstand the instant. Pitilessly, the instant demands what can in no way be. It demands the community, but the community is [derisive?]. It wants the poetry that it hates and, like a tragic character, it can scream out nothing that doesn't strangle the scream in the throat. But, impossible, it IS, in what it defiles, though joyously, like a lover. (Aphorisms, 171)

The Sovereign aesthetic “is in a sense misfortune itself, it is the subordination to the instant, and if one wants to have an idea of the difficulties encountered in this case, one must say this: nothing more than hope remains, that of freezing the instant, which literature attempts-for example, Proust (literature is the greatest valorization of the instant)-but culmination is also denial, this already inclining toward the ethical. There is from that moment on a semi-impossibility. Simultaneously with the vulgarity of Proust's ethical judgment on the literary work, one arrives at a substitute for knowledge instead of a loss of knowledge and of the consciousness of the thorough "impossibility" of thought (173)

The sovereign act of the festival, where nothing matters but the instant, the present, compensates for the contrary action, which had engaged subordinated attitudes, and of which it is, through deafness to what it isn't, the resolution and the

end. (189)

The God of the philosophers, a good God in the image of Good and Reason, was introduced by servility, exchanging the present for concern about the future, annihilating the instant and making calculation an empty figure opposed to immensity-like that which is separated, fixed in the refusal of every limit. (191)

But the instant! It is always infinite delirium ...But this supposes an open field. Exactly, if I live an instant without the slightest care about what might happen unexpectedly, I am well aware that this absence of anxiety engulfs me. I should act, parry threats that take shape. If I attain the impalpable crystal of the instant, I fail in my duty with regard to other instants, which will follow if I survive. (Nonknowledge 202)

Nothing in the instant is knowable. In the instant, there is no longer any ego possessing consciousness because the ego that is conscious of himself kills the instant by dressing it in a false costume, that of the future that thisego is. But imagine that the ego doesn't kill the instant! It is the instant that immediately kills the ego! For this reason, there is no more perfect instant than that of death. For this reason, in death alone, the instant offers a crowd of anguished, but provisionally reassured, living beings, its apotheosis, taking their breath away.(204)

ll that I can know about the unknown is that I pass from the known to the unknown. That is the margin abandoned to discourse. I am talking about the instant, and I know that the instant brings about in me the passage from the known to the unknown. Insofar as I envision the instant, obscurely, the unknown touches me, the known dissipates within me. What happens implies the duration (but not the immutability) of what happens. And, in the instant, nothing happens anymore. Eroticism is the substitution of the instant or of the unknown for what we thought we knew. We don't know the erotic, we only recognize this passage from the known to the unknown in it; this passage raises us beyond our abilities, inasmuch as it is true that man aspires toward what does not happen from the beginning! (Beyond Seriousness, 217)

In fact, how are we count on attention to grasp in ourselves a present outside of which nothing divine, sovereign, or uncalculated is offered to us? Attention that takes the present for its object would necessarily entice us: toward this end, attention should first reduce the present to a future. Because attention is an effort with a result in view, It has the form of work, and it is simply nothing more than a moment of work. We can work without attention, but the most inattentive work was first a consequence of attention brought to bear on a difficult operation. It is the effort appliedto the discernment of a given aspect of an object. But if we want to discern this aspect, it is .in order to change this object. We might not want to change anything in the reality of the object thus proposed to our attention, but at least we are then changing (at least losing) the consciousness we have of it: we are changing the insufficiently known object into one that is better known. In this way, attention paid to the instant cannot in truth have the instant itself as its object because the assigned object is the instant in an operation before we make it better known, and consciousness, an end in itself, cannot in truth be consciousness insofar as it is precisely only an operation with an intended result, or as such it ceases to count as soon as it is acquired-unless we will one day have the opportunity to make the result known to others. This amounts to saying that in principle attentive consciousness is never contemplation in the strict sense: it engages in the unlimited development (endless servitude) of discourse. In this way, attention, if it envisions the instant, changes it, in fact, from what unconsciously escaped us, into what escapesus consciously, despite the attention we bring to it.” (290, note 3)

Perhaps we will attain the sovereign moment as a result of our effort, and it is possible in fact that an effort is necessary,but between the time of our effort and sovereign time, there is obligatorily a fissure, and we can even say an abyss. (126)

To be of one's time is quite simply to be a stooge. (167) – contemporary – untimely