The Unfinished Book of Time

1. Time and History After Post-Histoire I. Progress and Retrogression Temporal experience, and the understanding of time according to which it is articulated, has, from the Enlightenment period onward, been explicitly and indissociably linked to a concept of history, or historicity, which determines its possible coordinates, frame of reference, and orientation. The possibilities so determined are characteristic of a particular historical epoch, and define the content and value of the concepts in which these possibilities are thought by philosophy and applied in political theory and practice. Insofar as historicity is explicitly thematized, and history and historical time are understood in the singular, i.e. as Universal history, we are already dealing with a quintessentially post-Enlightenment, modern mode of understanding temporality. Understood in terms of the concept of progress, temporality in modernity is articulated according to a linear, future-oriented teleology. In accordance with this concept, as the thirteenth thesis of Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History makes explicit, time is thereby required to be conceived as a homogeneous, empty medium, in which events take place according to a causal sequence. Pursuant to these characteristics, given sufficient information, the future must be subject to rational prognosis, while the concept of Revolution can no longer refer to the periodic motion of celestial bodies, but rather refers to a political-historical event that can only be, as Marx said, “the locomotives of World History,” that is: historical accelerators. Indeed, acceleration as such – with or without political revolutions to speed it along – is yet another hallmark of modern temporality. Where do we stand today, in an increasingly interconnected, globalized world, the Enlightenment project of a Universal History of the progressive realization of human freedom, equality, and justice has come to a deadly standstill, or indeed, entered into a period of retrogression, 1 from which we can have no assurance that we can or will escape. Are we still within the limits of the modern? Has history – at least in its modernist guise – come to an end? It is quite possible that the acceleration of social – that is, historical – time, which so characterized the modern age, reached an escape velocity, with the resultant ejection of our historical present beyond the threshold of modernity. But this is speculative, and is only the description of an effect, an observation of a symptom, rather than the determination of a cause, the diagnosis of the underlying disorder. It would be more accurate to advance the claim that our present state of political paralysis in the face of events unfolding before us in real-time is a belated consequence of the unchecked advance of scientifictechnological progress, which has by far outstripped any possible progress of humanity’s capacity for ethics and empathy. What’s more: as Benjamin and his Frankfurt School colleagues have masterfully shown, the infinite and future perfectibility of humankind was never anything more than an ideological illusion – the inevitability of “progress” never being anything but a more-or-less welldisguised blind faith in the future to-come. Must we then discard the concept of progress entirely? Already in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno advanced the compelling thesis that “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”1 Thus, when in the latter half of his essay “Culture and Ideology,” Jacob Taubes calls attention to the technocratic-industrialist take-over of the idea of progress, an observation he then denounces as a mere mythologeme, so as not to affirm conclusions which could possibly be drawn, one only suspects that it stands closer proximity to truth than it seems even at first glance. If progress… itself overturns into routine and blind automatism, the critical edge of this concept is blunted, and progress transforms into an organon of repression. Even the Marxist concept of progress was not able to withstand the pull of technological illusion… 1 Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic Of Enlightenment, Trans. Edward Jephcott (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002), xviii. 2 The fronts have switched places. Today the reactionary theoreticians appear as the ideologues of technological progress, while the theoreticians of enlightenment carry out the business of critique in order to rescue the concept of progress from the technological stretto. If progress takes place as a matter of routine, as Gehlen notes, then humans will be taken blindly into bondage by technological progress without being able to constitute themselves as subject in the progress of technology and industry.2 Hokheimer and Adorno dispose with Taubes’ “if,” and reject the very project of rescuing the concept, arguing that “Adaptation to the power of progress furthers the progress of power, constantly renewing the degenerations which prove successful progress, not failed progress, to be its own antithesis. The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.”3 It is therefore unsurprising, and in keeping with Taubes’ observation that by the beginning of the 1980s it would be left to the likes of the right-wing sociologist Raymond Aron to defend the concept of progress against all comers: Progress signifies, I assume, economic development, which is more or less identified with science, technology, industrialisation. This progress having become reactionary (how? why?), a uniform and linear progression toward Evil (what evil?), is leading the world to catastrophe (which one? the one foreseen by the Club of Rome?), to uniformity, the low ebb, the mean (which? the ebb or the mean?)…. Are the employees and managers of today victims of progress? Is it reaction, that progress which reduces the number of blue collars and increases the number of white collars, which multiplies the wage-earning bourgeois, those who manipulate signs and figures, and thins out the wage-earning Jacob Taubes, “Culture and Ideology,” in From Cult To Culture, Ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 266. 3 Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 28. 2 3 workers, those who lay hold of raw material? By what right are these ordinary men scorned? By whose right?4 Those “theoreticians of enlightenment,” for whom the legitimacy and perseverance of the concept of progress, and more generally of the modern age, as such, remains a cause worthy of defense and/or continuation must increasingly resort to what could be called “ostrich strategies,”5 which would regard our contemporary situation as an aberration or obstacle to be overcome, by a process of incremental “progress, [which is] certainly precarious permanently threatened by relapses, in the products of legality, if not in the structures of morality altogether… Perhaps this progress generates its regressions, but of course that is where political action begins. ”6 This is not to say that such epigones of enlightenment as Jürgen Habermas have not been known to leave one eye un-covered by sand, clear-sighted enough to recognize that under (then – as now) contemporary political, economic and technological conditions “wouldn’t it be just as possible to have emancipation without happiness and fulfillment as it is to have a relatively high standard of living without the abolition (Aufhebung) of repression?” Habermas continues: “This question, posed on the threshold of posthistoire, when symbolic structures are spent and threadbare, divested of their imperative function… is not a safe question, but it is not a totally i d l e one either.”7 Habermas’ answer is far from convincing, yet his diagnosis provides confirmation that the fundamental categories of modern thought threaten to become obsolete, if they have not yet become so. Leaving aside the question as to whether “a differentiated concept of progress [can] ensure that political Raymond Aron, “For Progress, after the Fall of the Idols,” Chicago Review, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Winter 1981), 108-118. 110, 115. 5 A term borrowed from Vilém Flusser. 6 Jürgen Habermas, “Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism,” in New German Critique, No. 17 (Spring 1979), 30-59. 58. 7 “Now it is true that the liberation of culture is not possible without overcoming the repression anchored in institutions. Yet, for a moment, one is beset by suspicion: wouldn't it be just as possible to have an emancipation without happiness and fulfillment as it is to have a relatively high standard of living without the a b o l i t i o n (Aufhebung) of r e p r e s s i o n ? This question, posed a t the t h r e s h o l d of posthistoire… is not a safe question, but it is not a totally i d l e one either.” Habermas, 57. 4 4 action can hit its mark with g r e a t e r accuracy...” (which is doubtful), we may give him due credit for acknowledging that “under historical circumstances which prohibit the thought of revolution and give grounds for expecting a long sustained process of upheaval, the conception of revolution… must also be transformed.”8 “On the threshold of posthistoire,” Harbermas perceives a mortal danger to critical thought. At the same time, he acknowledges a certain exigency: theories of post-history, of which posthistoire is but one among many, and their diagnoses of the conditions of the contemporary world must not be dismissed out of hand as millenarian fantasies, but must be taken seriously. In this chapter, we shall attempt to do so. This is a pressing concern because, as Boris Groys points out, the Kojèvean “philosophical discourse on the ‘post-histoire’ [posthistory] in many ways defined our understanding of postmodernity, and thus our present moment.”9 In my view, the discourses of post-modernity failed to provide a viable way “forward,” and succumbed to the same pessimistic visions of a society as are found in Arnold Gehlen’s posthistoire: “’The fiction of freedom and self-determination is more easily preserved than any other,’ because in the ‘second nature’ of industrial society, ‘adopted opinions and dispositions can be experienced as one's own. It would require no effort for me,’ says Gehlen, ‘to imagine a termite society in which every individual thinks itself free.’10 We must therefore go back to the End of History, so as to forge a new path, free of post-modern cynicism. Thus, in the first section, we shall develop and differentiate the various theories of post-history, in opposition to the general tendency to collapse all into a single concept of posthistoire. This is done in view of assessing the merits and demerits of these post-historical theories of history, specifically as 8 Habermas, 59. Boris Groys, “The Photographer as Sage,” in Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, Exhibition and Programs. Exhibition at The Center for Humanities (CUNY), New York, NY, April-June 2013.5. 10 Arnold Gehlen, Über kulturelle Evolutionen, 218. Quoted in Taubes, From Cult to Culture, 262 9 5 pertains to the renovation and rehabilitation of the concept of revolution in a time when all teleology is suspended, and all events are threatened with meaninglessness. II. A Short History of Post-History In the conclusion to his magisterial study, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End, Lutz Niethammer writes: “Posthistory is not a developed theory; it is more a symptomatic sensibility. The word itself is an allusive code which refers to a mood but also presupposes a great deal of theory.”11 While this is true, to an extent, the weaknesses of Niethammer’s extraordinarily comprehensive study are his emphasis on German theories of posthistoire, at the expense of the more philosophically elaborated French version, and his impulse to unify these theories.12 Posthumously published in 1988, and curiously missing from his oeuvre in translation, Jacob Taubes’ essay, “The Aestheticization of truth in Posthistoire” opens with an injunction to differentiate and connect the various theories of post-history, and the observation that these concepts reflect something fundamental about our place in the world and time, in the time since the end of the Second World War. Die Vokabel vom »Posthistoire« tritt gegenwartig in verschiedenen Versionen mit sehr verschiedenen Akzentsetzungen und Parteinahmen auf, nicht nur entgegengesetzten… Diese Vokabel, die seit dem Ende des II. Weltkrieges kurrent geworden ist: deutsch, franzosisch und jetzt auch amerikanisch, also »Zeitgeist« signalisiert, greift zuriick auf eine Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart.”13 Lutz Nietzhammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come To An End? Trans. Patrick Camiller, 138. It is also unfortunate that Niethammer’s book was published only a few months before the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, and the publication by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. Naturally, the rise to public prominence and political influence of an elaboration – however misconstrued – of Kojève’s thesis presents problems for Niethammer’s theses. 13 Jacob Taubes, “Asthetiesierung der Wahrheit im Posthistoire,” Streitbare Philosophie ; Margherita von Brentano zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin: Metropol, 1988), 41-51. 41. 11 12 6 A. Post-Histoire Proper: Cournot and The German Tradition We must thus trace the genealogy of the idea of post-history from its origins. The roots of the two principal branches of post-historical theory lie in the first half of the 19th century: in the works of A.A. Cournot, for the posthistoire of Arnold Gehlen and Hendrik de Man, and in the philosophies of Hegel, Marx, and – this is less well-known – the works of the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, for Alexandre Kojève’s End of History. By dint of a remarkable coincidence, expositions of both the concept of a “post-historic phase” of human existence, inspired by a reading of Cournot’s Traité de l’enchaînment des idées fondemntales dans les sciences et dans l’histoire, by Raymond Ruyer, and the earliest formulation of Alexandre Kojève’s concept of a necessary End of History, in his doctoral thesis, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Waldimir Solowjews,14 were published in 1930. As Niethammer rightly states, “When we examine Cournot’s writings, we do not actually meet the central concept of ‘posthistory,’ but a related idea. History ‘in the narrower sense’ or ‘as it is normally understood’ is reserved for a heroic and turbulent period of transition between two nonhistorical, stable conditions: that is, between the tribal culture s of early times and ethnology, and the socio-economic civilization of the future.”15 The actual text of Cournot’s provides the following vision of the future state of humanity that is in any case imminent: “Just as human societies went on existing before they lived a life of history, so we can image that they can, not exactly attain, but stretch out towards a condition where history is reduced to an official gazette recording regulations, statistical data… [etc.] which therefore ceases to be history in the customary sense of the word… a new phase in which people… are able to calculate the exact results of a clockwork mechanism.”16 Published under Kojève’s original name – Alexander Koschewnikoff (Anglicized as Kojevnikoff or Kozhevnikoff). Kojève changed his last name upon his naturalization as a French citizen. 15 Niethammer, 16. 16 Augustin-Antoine Cournot, Traité de l’enchaînment des idées fondemntales dans les sciences et dans l’histoire, vol 3 of Oeuvres Complètes, (Paris: 1982), 484-5. Cited in Niethammer, Posthistoire, 17. 14 7 It is, I daresay, obvious that Cournot’s prediction of a stabilized society has not been fulfilled, and constitutes an archetypal 19th century dream of progress, of “the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge)… something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind…. [which] was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course.”17 In light of subsequent appropriations and elaborations of the post-history idea, it would be instructive to note that Ruyer does not accede unconditionally to Cournot’s thesis. In fact, he expresses serious doubts as to the possibility of a thoroughly stabilized society – while, in keeping with the idea of history still dominant during the interwar period, he pointedly affirms the inevitability of social progress: L'histoire est le domaine de l'accident, du hasard, maisen dessous on est vite conduit a soupçonner une trame plus reguliere, faite surtout de· la civilisation generale. Pendant la phase post-historique, on peut l'accorder a Cournot, cette trame finira probablement par affieurer, elle ne sera plus masque par les accidents. Mais cet affieurement signifiera-t-il forcement stabilite? C'est douteux. La trame sous-historique presente evidemment un developpement , plus mecanique, plus logique que le cours de l'histoire ; les considerations de Cournot « sur la marche des idees dans les temps modernes » ne sont moins fertiles en accidents que l'histoire diplomatique et politique des memes periodes, mais neanmoins, il y a une marche, une evolution.18 As of this time the term post-histoire has not entered the lexicon of philosophers, sociologist, and historians. It is nowhere to be found until 1950, and it appears that the credit for its coinage is due to one Henri, or Hendrik de Man, the uncle of the literary critic Paul de Man, and a man of dubious Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken: 1985), 260. 18 Raymond Ruyer, L'Humanité De L'Avenir D'Après Cournot (Paris: Alcan, 1930), 133. 17 8 political virtue. In an unpublished manuscript, written in English, bearing the title “The Age of Doom,” de Man proffers a first view of posthistory: "The term posthistorical seems adequate to describe what happens when an institution or a cultural a c h i e v e me n t ceases to be historically active and productive of new qualities, and becomes purely receptive or eclectically imitative. Thus understood Cournot's notion of the posthistorical would ... fit the cultural phase that following a 'fulfillment of sense,' has become devoid of sense.' The alternative then is in biological terms, either death or mutation.”19 There is a certain resonance between this diagnosis and our present social existence: the sharing of digital content, the circulation of memes, the recycling of cultural artifacts, and so forth, are present and prevalent phenomena. However, this does not in any way imply an inescapable regime of meaninglessness. In fact, the velocity and 9 volume of the flows of communication and consumption virtually assure incessant mutation. It is as if we have entered into an epoch that no longer belongs to history.. 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 effects20 Hendrik de Man. unpublished manuscript. "The Age of Doom·· (1950). Published in Peter Dodge. A Documentary Study of Hendrick de Man. Socialist Critic of Marxism (Princeton, Princeton University Press. 1979). 345. The same year, the American sociologist, Roderick Seidenberg devoted a book to theorizing Posthistoric Man, in which he writes: “The 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.”19 I have discovered no connection between these two works and writers. 19 20 Hendrick de Man, Vermassung und Kulturverfall (München: Lehnen, 1951), 124-5. Vis-à-vis political associations, the chief exponent of the theory of posthistoire after de Man’s untimely death in an automobile accident while in exile in Switzerland, the German social philosopher Arnold Gehlen was scarcely better. A central figure in the right-wing Leipzig school of sociology, Gehlen could be best considered a “fellow traveler” during the Nazi era, but kept his nose clean, as it were, such that his public stature was unchanged in the post-war period. What is surprising is that, in private communications with Theodor Adorno – very nearly his political opposite – “they assured each other – like ‘people lost in the forest… despite the wolves’- that their cultural critiques were in agreement on the subject, the predominance of evil and the petrification of the conditions of life.”21 In Gehlen’s vision of posthistory, the autonomy of the subject is neutralized by a crystallized social order, and as previously indicated, exists in a society likened to a termite colony. In “Über kulturelle Kritallisation” he writes: “I will stick my neck out and say that the history of ideas has been suspended, and that we have now arrived at posthistory… In the very epoch when it is becoming possible to see and report on the earth as a whole, when nothing of any import can pass unnoticed, the earth is in this respect devoid of surprises.”22 And in Zeit-Bilder, he writes: “Now there is no longer any internal de v e l op me n t within art. It is all up with art history based upon the logic of meaning, and even with any consistency of absurdities. The process of development has been completed, and what comes now is already y in existence: the confused syncretism of all styles and possibilitiesposthistory!23 There is, in posthistoire, and as we shall see, in the Kojèvean End of History, what I would like to call “the chauvinism of the hic et nunc.” By this, I mean the privileging of the vantage point of the 21 Niethammer, 11. Arnold Gehlen, “Über Kulturelle Kristallisation,” in Studien zur Anthropologie und Sociologie, (Berlin: Neuwied, 1963), 322. 23 Arnold Gehlen, Zeit-Bilder, 1961 22 10 here and now the philosopher happens to inhabit. Of course, history appears as finished from such a standpoint, as it is only natural to neglect that which is not yet. If the grand narrative of WorldHistory, as told from a European or American perspective, should seem to have exhausted all genuinely historical possibilities, combinatorics and the finitude of human history (at least heretofore) would contradict and refute the chauvinism of the hic et nunc: there has been an insufficient duration of historical time for the torch of culture to have been passed between all cultures across the world. The shining beacon of the present has followed the geographic dispersion of the human race from its African cradle, through the Asia of classical Indian and Chinese civilization, through the "Western World" - a "first world" now breathing it's last - and, if it is true that in our age civilization has become truly global, eventually to its grave, which will - one way or another - make its place in deep space. This is not to say that this narrative has any absolute value, but it illustrates the fact that a philosophy of post-history may be valid within certain spatiotemporal constraints, but to invert Seidenberg’s description of history, post-history “itself is thus marked off as a transitional interregnum... a relatively fixed state of stability and permanence.”24 Before we move on to Kojève’s Hegelian version of post-history, it is worth noting the chief deficiency of this version of posthistoire, which in spite of its sometimes accurate portrayal of social phenomena that are at odds with modernity. Posthistoire in this tradition locates the End either in the present, or in a soon-to-arrive future, and depicts a crystalline dystopia that is without end, and without escape. This differs little from the post-modern dystopia of acceleration and simulation; they are negative images of one another – the one, rooted in an experience of industrialized society, the other in a post-industrial one. Like post-modernism, posthistoire is without prognostic value, for 24 Roderick Seidenberg, Posthistoric Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 52. 11 it lacks a future into which it can project different possibilities, rather it predicts an absence of a meaningful future, so as to make the absence of meaning into the ultimate meaning of history. In light of Adorno’s secret solidarity with Gehlen on the subject of cultural critique it is less surprising than it might at first seem that by the mid-1950s, Horkheimer could claim that “we expect nothing more from mankind than a more or less worn-out version of the American system. The difference between us is that Teddie still retains a certain penchant for theology.”25 The publisher’s note correctly interprets Horkheimer’s position at this time: “Though still blaming the West for what went wrong with the Russian Revolution and rejecting any kind of reformism, his general outlook was now close to Kojève’s a decade later.”26 In light of his proximity to Kojève, Horkheimer’s disdainful remark about Adorno’s so-called “penchant for theology” acquires a rather ironic tone, for Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel and his thesis on the End of History are saturated with 12 theological notions. The following remark from the conclusion of Niethammer’s Posthistoire study rings true for every posthistorical tradition other than Kojève’s, where there is a critical inversion. Whereas “posthistory presupposes constructions of meaning in the form of meta-narratives about world-history – and so remains marked by the legacy of salvationist history. Within this traditional mold the polarity is simply reversed, so that instead of the euphoria of progress we have the fear of apocalypse,”27 in Kojève and his successors, we find a “euphoria of the apocalypse.” And this apocalypse has always already happened. B. Alexandre Kojève’s “Ende Der Geschichte” Carl Schmitt, with whom Kojève corresponded at length, and who was described – colorfully – by Taubes as “the apocalyptic prophet of the counterrevolution,” raises a good point, Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Toward a New Manifesto, Trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2011), 21. Ibid. ix. 27 Niethammer, 144. 25 26 to which it will be necessary to respond, as my criticism of Kojève, like many others, involves – at least in part – certain theological elements secreted within his philosophy of post-history: “In a positivistic age it is easy to reproach an intellectual opponent with the charge of indulging in theology or metaphysics. If the reproach were intended as more than mere insult, at least the following question could suggest itself: What is the source of this inclination for such theological and metaphysical derailments?”28 In the case of our criticism of Kojève, the source of our “inclination” to found our critique on the latent theological content of his philosophy is a – wellfounded, in our view – distrust of millenarianism in the domain of history and politics. As Lessing notes: The enthusiast often has correct glimpses of the future but cannot wait for this future. He wants this future to be accelerated and to be able to bring it about. In doing so, he is expecting something to come about in the moment of his lifetime which takes nature millennia to achieve (Lessing)29 It is well-known that Kojève’s lectures on Hegel were as much, if not more, a presentation of his own philosophy. It is equally well-known that he liberally read into Hegel elements of the philosophies of Marx (insofar as Kojève insisted that Hegel was atheistic without knowing it, and insofar as he privileges the dialectic of the Master and the Slave as the primal scene of the dialectic), and Heidegger (insofar as he assigns an ontological privilege to negation and death, and assigning the Phenomenology an existential importance). It is less widely known the extent to which Kojève’s interpretation was formulated in his doctoral thesis on Vladimir Solovyov’s Philosophy of History. In his final interview with Gilles Laponge in 1968, Kojève – and it is entirely unclear the extent to which he was telling the truth – told his interlocutor that prior to taking over the lecture course on Hegel’s Phenomenology from Alexandre Koyré in 1933, he had “read the Phenomenology of Spirit in its 28 29 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 38-39. Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, cited in Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 96 13 entirely four times, and I didn’t understand a word.”30 As Benjamin wrote in a letter to Horkheimer “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.”31 In his reading of Solovyov – who, incidentally, is sometimes called “the Russian Hegel” – Kojève emphasizes the importance of Solovyov’s final work, published in 1899, shortly before his death, which has been published in English translation under the title War, Progress, and the End of History.32 It is possible to see in this, Kojève’s earliest philosophical work, key elements of his concept of the End of History as Absolute Knowledge realized in the empirical world of history and politics. Prinzipiell ist der auf die Ausbildung der Metaphysik folgende geschichtsphilosophische Standpunkt dadurch charakterisiert, daB Solowjew jetzt die historische Entwicklung als eine allmähliche Wiederherstellung der All-einheit auffaBt, der All-einheit die am Anfang und am Ende der Geschichte als ewiges Gottmenschentum steht. Die Geschichte im weitesten Sinne des Wortes ist für ihn im Grunde genom men nichts anderes, als eine Ausbreitung des zeitlosen Absoluten in der Zeit. 'Die seit aller Ewigkeit bestehende Vereinigung der Sophia (d. h. der ideellen Menschheit und Natur) mit Gott im Gottmenschentum tritt in der 30 Gilles Laponge, “Hegel, das Ende der Geschichte und das Ende des philosophischen Diskurses: Gespräch mit Alexandre Kojève (1968),” in Vermittler H. Mann/Benjamin/Groethuysen/Kojeve/Szondi Heidegger in Frankreich Goldmann/Sieburg: Deutsch-franzosisches Jahrbuch 1, Herausgegeben von Jiirgen Siess (Frankfurt Am Main: Syndikat, 1981), 119-125. 121. Benjamin to Horkheimer, December 6th, 1937, cited in Michael Weingrad, “College,” 141. His translation. Also in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 16:315. 32 The title of this text in German and French translation is simply “Three Conversations,” and is referred to as such in Kojève’s thesis. 31 14 Oeschichte als ein zeitlicher ProzeB auf, in dem immer innigere Formen der durch die Annaherung an Gott bedingten Einheit der Welt und der Menschheit erzielt werden. Will man den Standpunkt Solowjews in einem Satze ausdrücken, so kann man sagen, daB für ihn die empirische Welt werdende Sophia, die wirkliche Geschicht werdendes Gottmenschentum ist.33 In Solovyov’s last work, the story is told of the rise of the Antichrist, who’s Empire constitutes a truly universal and homogeneous state. A “story, which was to picture not the final catastrophe of the Universe, but only the conclusion of our historical process,”34 after which the final conversation concludes – like the Phenomenology (at least according to some interpretations) – where it began: “So the end of our discussion comes back to its beginning.”35 Naturally, this does not in any way exhaust the meaning of Kojève’s concept of the End of History. It does, however, draw attention to the chiliastic, millenarian elements latent in his philosophy of post-history. According to Taubes – and this is certainly the way that Kojève sees a things, “Hegel is aware of coming at the end of the last Christian world age in the same way that Alexander Koschewnikoff, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Wladimir Solowjews (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1930), 9. Vladimir Solovyov, War, Peace, and the End of History, Trans. Stephan A. Hoeller (Breinigsville, PA: Lindisfarne Books, 2011), 193. 35 Alexander Koschewenikoff, 17. “Die zur vollen Verwirkliehung des theokratischen Ideals führt, sondern sie wird and as Ende der Geschichte verlegt. Erst am Ende der Tage treffen sieh in der Wilste die Haupter der orthodoxen, katholischen und protestantischen Kirchen (von denen jede eine notwendige und gleichberechtigte Riehtung des Christentums vertritt) und reichen sich die Hand. Wahrend derganzen historischen Entwicklung bleiben die Kirchen also getrennt, verlieren allmahlich aIle reale Macht und schlieBlich bleiben ihnen nur noch ganz wenige ihrer Adepten treu. Daraus sieht man, daB Solowjew seinen Glauben an die Verwirklichung des theokratischen Weltstaates aufgegeben hat. Zweitens geht aber aus der Schrift hervor, daB er auch den Glauben .an die Weltmission RuBlauds verloren hatte: im XX. Jahrhundert erwartete er eme mongolische Invasion, im XXI. die Befreiung Europas und die Bildung einer Union demokratischer Republiken, in die auch RuBiand als ein unbedeutendes Glied eintritt· es wird weder von dem absoluten Wert der Zarenregierung noch von der besonderen kulturellen und politischen Bedeutung RuBlands gesprochen… glaubt Solowjew nicht mehr daran, daB die Geschichte im stetigen Fortschritt zur Verwirklichung des "totalen Lebens·, des .Gottesreiches auf Erden" fiihrt und mit ditser Verwirklichung ihren natürlichen AbschluB findet. Er nimmt jetzt im Gegenteil an, daB die Geschichte in der Bildung eines Weltreiches endet, das aber nur ein Zerrbild der Theokratie ist, denn es wird durch das in der Gestalt des Antichristen verkorperte bose Prinzip geieitet. Ausserlich wird dieses Reich den Schein einer absoluten Vollkommenheit haben, und nur wenige Getreue werden sieh dem Antichristen (der sich Christus bewuBt entgegenstellt und das Christentum bekämpft) nieht unterwerfen.” 33 34 15 Joachim sees himself at its beginning. Joachim knows he is at the turning point, when the new world age is already beginning to unfold of its own accord, while the old age is still in full swing and asserting its exclusive historical claim. The two world ages collide and the resulting situation of coartatio is fundamental to Joachim’s understanding of his own age… he considers himself 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. Joachim recognizes that he is witnessing the struggle between two world ages and this motivates all he does and says.”36 Furthermore, we can see in Kojève’s interpretation of Solovyov the origins of his conception of history – World-History as the progressive dialectical process ending in the universal, homogeneous State – as the world-immanent development of the Hegelian Geist. It is also possible to see that Kojève’s famous proclamation of “the man on horseback at the end of history” as corresponding to Solovyov’s doctrine of the theandry of Sophia. Moreover, Kojève’s scandalous self-correction as to the identity of this man, as Stalin rather than Napoleon is less problematic in light of the fact that in Solovyov’s late philosophy, it is the under the reign of the Antichrist that the universal, homogeneous state is established. In Kojève’s view, “History is a more or less uninterrupted sequence of foreign wars and bloody revolutions. But this sequence has an aim, and consequently an end. For being born from the desire for recognition, history will necessarily stop at the moment at which this desire will be fully satisfied… history will stop when man will be perfectly satisfied by the fact of being a recognized citizen of a universal and homogeneous State, or, if you prefer, of a classless society comprising the whole of humanity.37 As Walter Benjamin wrote, in an unpublished note to his “On The Concept of History,” “In the idea of classless society, Marx secularized the idea of messianic 36 37 Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 96 Kojève, “Hegel, Marx, and Christianity,” in Interpretation, Vol. 1, No. 1, 33-34. 16 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)38 Is post-history not the time after the end of historical time, but rather than an interruption of time, an interval between the end of the time of “Universal history [as] the history of philosophy,”39 and the beginning of a new history, a new philosophy of history? Beyond the Hegelian dialectic, which is articulated according to a ternary structure that secularizes the millenarian structure of the Joachimite apocalypse, is a post-secular messianic politics possible? 17 C. Messianic Post-History: Anders, Flusser In Endzeit und Zeitenende Günther Anders, 1945 marks “Year Zero”40 of a new epoch, if it can be called by that name, and one which is possibly the final state of humanity. After the advent of the atomic bomb, and the demonstration of the destructive power now available to humankind at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “the fact is so tremendous that all historically recorded developments, including epochal changes, seem trifling in comparison: all history has been reduced to prehistory. For we are not merely a new historical generation of men; indeed, we are no longer what until today men have called men.”41 It is not an insignificant fact that Anders, as well as more recently, Vilém Flusser, stand apart among our post-historians, as owing no debt to either the Hegelian end, or to Vol 4, 401-11. 401-2. Kojève, “Hegel, Marx, and Christianity,” 35. 40 “Den dem so ist, muss die Antwort auf diese Frage, welche Verwendung der Termini “Weltende” oder “Apokalypse” unmetaphorish sei, lauted: Ihnen ernsten und unmetaphorishen Sinn gewinnen der Termini erst hbeute, bzw, erst seit dem Jahre Null (=1945), da sie nun erst den wirklich möglishen Untergang bezeichnen.’ Günther Anders, “Apokalypse Ohne Reich,” in Streifzüge, No. 61, Sommer 2014. 41 Günter Anders, “Reflections on the H Bomb,” in Dissent, Vol 3, No. 2 (Spring 1956), 146-155. 146. 39 the one read into Cournot. Rather, their diagnoses and theoretical elaborations rest not on theoretical abstractions, dubious teleology, or philosophical-prophetic visions. On the other hand, like Kojève among others, both Anders and Flusser transpose the End from an event in the future into the past, as a fait accompli. Where they differ is that inasmuch as the future remains available to humanity, this future is open – radically open – if we prove ourselves worthy of it. Instead of an Eternal Return of the Same, an empty time filled with fictive and formal repetitions, of events without content, our future will be determined by how we respond to the fact that “at Auschwitz all of our categories, all of our “models,” suffered an irreparable shipwreck. Auschwitz was a revolutionary event, in the sense that it overthrew our culture. Insofar as we seek ways to cover up such revolution with trips to the moon or with genetic manipulations, we are counter-revolutionaries: we are inverting the course of history in order to cover up the past… it is not an event that can be ‘overcome,’ because it is the first realization of an inherent virtuality within the Western Project, which will repeat itself in other formats unless we become totally conscious of it.”42 Ob wir das Ende der Zeiten bereits erreicht haben, das steht nicht fest. Fest dagegen, dass wir in der Zeit des Endes leben, und zwar endgültig. Also dass die Welt, in der wir leben, nicht fest steht. “In der Zeit des Endes” bedeutet: in derjenigen Epoche, in der wir ihr Ende täglich hervorrufen können. – Und “endgültig” bedeutet, dass, was immer uns an Zeit bleibt, “Zeit des Endes” bleibt, weil sie von einer anderen Zeit nicht mehr abgelöst warden kann, sondern allein vom ende…Möglich, dass e suns gelingt – auf ein schöneres Glück zu hoffen, haben wir kein Recht mehr – das Ende immer von Neuem vor uns her zu schieben, den Kampf gegen das Ende der Zeit immer neu zu gewinnen, also die Endzeit endlos zu Machen.43 42 43 Vilém Flusser, Post-History, Trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novales, (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013), 6-8. Anders, “Apokalypse Ohne Reich,” 11. 18 The End of Time is the Time of the End. The latter is, of course, Giorgio Agamben’s formula for messianic time. Might the End of History as envisioned by Anders – as our historical time in its specificity – be a time in which “the messianic – the ungraspable quality of the ‘now’ – the very opening through which we may seize hold of time, achieving our representation of time, making it end,”44 is a genuine historical possibility. This is, to be sure, a more optimistic reading than Anders would authorize, but it is nevertheless a valid one. Whereas according to Agamben Hegel’s “French interpreters – Koyré and Kojève, who are actually Russian, which comes as no surprise given the importance of the apocalypse in twentieth century Russian culture – thus start off with the conviction that ‘in Hegelian philosophy, the ‘system’ is only possible if history is over, if there is no more future and if time stops.’(Koyré) But what happens here, as is clearly the case in Kojève, is that both of these interpretations end up flattening out the messianic onto the eschatological, thus confounding the problem of messianic time with the problem of posthistory,”45 might not an optimistic reading of Anders reveal the posthistorical Time of the End bring the messianic into relation with the eschatological in a way that is profoundly fecund? To “make the Time of the End endless,” would this not be to recognize “that ausnehmezustand in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” and to “bring about a real ausnehmezeustand?”46 The time in which we exist according to the idiosyncratically posthistorical accounts of Anders and Flusser, places us “In the presence of kairos, [where] world history is downgraded to prehistory. [For] the End Time and primordial time intersect in kairos.47 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, Trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 100. Ibid, 101. 46 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. 47 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 9. 44 45 19 It is possible, rather it is probable, that Sergei Prozorov’s diagnosis of the (post)-historical situation of post-communist Russia is applicable more generally to the global post-Cold War condition: The messianic end of history is the very opposite of the teleological ‘end of history,’ introduced by Kojève, and indeed functions as the demonstration of the impossibility of the latter. History ends not when it arrives at a certain teleological end-state but when the very presupposition of such an end state is terminated. In this sense, a messianic end of history is a double end, both an expiry of history in terms of its teleology and the expiry of the very teleology that made it meaningful to talk about the fulfillment of history in the first place. At stake is not merely the loss of a future open to competing teleologies and projects of transformation but the very loss itself, a certain forgetting of the future. All that remains 20 after the end of history is the present, the now in which we live and which we may appropriate as the time we have.” 48 As such, Anders’ second Thesis for the Atomic Age is, in spite of his extreme pessimism, the most hopeful, clearest statement of our political – existential – task in post-history: The Time of the End Versus the End of Time: Thus, by its very nature, this age is a "respite," and our "mode of being" in this age must be defined as "not yet being nonexisting," "not quite yet being non-existing." Thus the basic moral question of former times must be radically reformulated: instead of asking “How should we live?", we now must ask “Will we live?" For us, who are "not yet non-existing" in this Age of Respite, there is but one answer: although at any moment The Time of the End could turn into The End of Time, we 48 Sergei Prozorov, “Russian postcommunism and the end of history,” in Studies in East European Thought, Vol 60, No 3 (September 2008), 207-230. 228-9. must do everything in our power to make The End Time endless. Since we believe in the possibility of The End of Time, we are Apocalyptics, but since we fight against this manmade Apocalypse, we are – and this has never existed before "Anti-Apocalyptics.”49 III. In Defense of Post-histoire As we have seen, to varying degrees post-history concepts provide diagnoses of the contemporary situation contains a substantial element of truth: not the least of which is the fact that the events of the 20th century reflect and effectuate an epochal rupture, encompassing but not limited to the end of Occidental Modernity. The concept of post-history is itself historical – or, less self-referentially said, temporal. Distinct from the facts it relates, and the particular stories that constitute the singular narrative of history and its end, these facts and events are re-constituted according to its concept, and re-cast as temporally interrelated events endowed with meaning. Inasmuch as the concept of history at the heart of the diagnosis of posthistory is universal in scope and teleological in orientation, it is in relation to this end that historical events acquire meaning, direction, and momentum – even retrospectively, as meaningless, aimless, and idle, events (if one may call posthistorical facts events) are only so in view of the end. Whether it is a matter of technological advances that alter the world on a grand scale, such as the advent of nuclear weapons and the capacity to destroy ourselves and our world (Anders), or of technologies that alter the fabric of our everyday lives, or at any level in between these two, posthistory reflects a change in our experience of the world, of our historicity, and of temporality that has a concrete reality. A fundamental change has occurred that corresponds to the “abrupt break with the time-structure of capital… due to the shock wave generated by the advent of that ‘new 49 Günther Anders, “Theses for the Atomic Age,” in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 3, No. 3. (Spring 1962), 493-505. 493494. Translation by the Author. 21 time’ in the middle of the 19th century… The time of the industrial revolution replaced an older time-structure, that of feudalism; the latter had its own characteristic crises and terrors… the time rupture around 1800, in which oscillating or circular historical time models were supplanted by linear-oriented models has real, empirical experiential basis.”50 It will be the task of our next chapter to further determine the nature of this basis and the model of temporality – and of history – that our times demand. In our times, “rapid change is experienced as a frenetic standstill in the absence of a goal or direction. If this experience potentially leads to individual depression insofar as it touches one’s own life, then as a collective form of historical perception it winds up in the paralytic experience of posthistoire. Thus the experience of history in the sense of the ‘collective singular’ … [is] only possible when social change remains within a definite ‘speed window.’ Beyond this speed limit, political events again take on the situational character of episodes and are comparable to the compressed episodes of individual experience… because they lose their status as elements of a meaningful historical change of development and can no longer be transformed into genuine historical experience (Erfahrung) in Benjamin’s sense, they also lose any (‘deeper’) significance in general, as countless cultural observers of the present attest.”51 Does this not present us with an opportunity for political action? An interruption of the course of history, already present? It will be the the subject of a later chapter to tease out the political possibilities opened up – the new beginnings presented by the posthistorical condition, that respond to the possibility of stagnation, crystallization, homogenization, and the désouvrement of humanity. To a great extent, Benjamin’s Theses remain relevant, insofar as the politics of the present do not acknowledge the fact that we have indeed passed beyond the horizon Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, “Reflections on the Construction of Historical Time in Karl Marx,” In History and Memory, Vol 3, No 2 (Fall – Winter 1991), 62. 51 Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, Trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 272. 50 22 of Modernity, and this is largely the case today. Retrogression is still considered a historical anomaly to be overcome by conventional means. While the idea of progress has been abandoned in the sciences, and in philosophy, it remains active in the politics of the moderate “left.” On the “threshold of posthistoire,” they, like Habermas, recoil, and by increasingly desperate means attempt to recuperate and propagate a Modernist concept of history and practice of politics. After the End of History, there exist a plurality of possible histories to-come, and our task is to actualize one that accords with our sense of justice, that rights the wrongs of the past. There will be a struggle, and we must do without any teleological preconceptions or previsions, and so, as Blanchot wrote: “Let us gamble on the future: let us affirm the indeterminate relation with the future… Let us welcome to the future that does not come, that neither begins nor end and whose uncertainty breaks history. But how do we think this rupture? Through forgetting. Forgetting frees the future from time itself… I love my ignorance of the future.”52 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, Trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 280. 52 23 II In the Time of Fascist Desire §0 – Preface “Smooth space and striated space... are not of the same nature.”1 Like space, time too is by turns smooth and striated, never remaining entirely the same. The smooth, non-pulsed time of Aeon, “the indefinite time of the event”2 is continually striated by the clock and calendar, transformed into “Chronos: the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject.”3 In truth, we know and experience time in both modalities, however Chronos, or clock-time, predominates our conscious awareness of time. What we desire of time, and the time of desire is, on the other hand, the time of Aeon or what will be designated in the present essay by the word kairos, the privileged moment of the event, the qualitative experience of time. But what occurs when this temporality is produced by massively coordinated desire and striated not by the clock but by images, architecture, music and any or all of the trappings of the political? This is where fascism arises, not only historical fascism, but the microfascism of which Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari write elsewhere in A Thousand Plateaus – it is when the time of Aeon or kairos is artificially striated and fixed that fascism emerges. Of course these temporalities coexist and our experience oscillates between these poles, it is however the desire and attempt to fix, to striate, smooth time, to at once keep it close and submit it to perpetual deferral, that constitutes the virtual fascist within every one of us. The present essay should be read both as an attempt to answer the fundamental questions of fascism, i.e. how does desire come to desire its own repression, and how we remain forever virtually complicit with fascisms, by means of some examination of actually existing historical fascism. At the same time this essay should be read as an effort to produce a concept of this elusive smooth temporality which, with Giorgio Agamben, we shall term kairos. The use of this term is intended both to designate a departure from Deleuze & Guattari and to indicate the long history of this idiosyncratic and ephemeral 1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Translated by Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 2 Ibid, pg. 262. 3 Ibid. experience of temporality. This essay aims to articulate at once an answer to the questions of fascism and to elaborate a concept of time with an explanatory, if bivalent, capacity. §1 – Historical Fascism Perhaps we do not yet have the temporal distance that would allow the phenomenon of fascism to come into focus. As yet we have what amounts to but fragments of the total picture, if indeed a total picture of this phenomenon is at all possible. There is neither the space nor the time here to survey the competing fragmentary images of the fascist phenomenon. Seemingly neither space nor time thoroughly contains the phenomenon of fascism. Some predecessor, successor or distant contemporary is always yet to be discovered. A forteriori, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus: What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism…only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? …Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. 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.4 This citation should raise more questions than it at first glance answers. However, as a methodology, this micrological view of fascism bears fruit with which no other theory of fascism can compete. Further, this micrological view is augmented when seen in light of the specific and pervasive (spatio-) temporal content of the fascist imagination implicit in psychoanalytic critiques of fascism, such as Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies. Strong temporal themes are present not only in the fantasies and fictional writings of the (pre-) fascist German soldier-males, but also in the writings of Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, Mussolini, and Italian fascist theorists, such as Panunzio and Pellizzi. In the Italian theorists particularly, this attention to temporality can be seen to have been influenced by Henri Bergson and Georges Sorel. The first question arising out of the afore cited section of A Thousand Plateaus consists in asking: “What constitutes a microfascism?” This question, however, is premature, because first and foremost, microfascism is tied to the problematic of desire and more importantly, desire that runs counter to rational interest. Thus, rather than initially asking of the definition of a microfascism, we must ask of the nature of desire such that it can seem to “desire its own repression.” 4 Ibid. pg. 214-5 Theweleit, in the first volume of Male Fantasies, explicates the Deleuzeo-Guattarian interpretation of desire. He writes that their term ‘desiring-production’: Is used to refer to a function: the mode of functioning of the unconscious, which in the first instance wants nothing other than to produce. Its content is ‘the desire to desire,’ and what it produces is reality. This productive force, this ‘desire to desire’ is directed toward all the part-objects and objects within reality. No one and nothing enjoys the privilege of being the true object of unconscious desire… Desire orients itself directly toward the social arena.5 Theweleit then moves to discern the particular mode of desiring-production evident in the soldier-males under consideration in his study. For, it becomes clear to Theweleit that there is a peculiarly fascist mode of desiring-production. Consequentially, “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.”6 Theweleit continues, concurring with Deleuze and Guattari, that we must understand fascism “primarily because, as a form of reality production that is constantly present and possible under determinate conditions, it can, and does, become our production. The crudest examples of this are to be seen in the… male-female relations, which are also relations of production. Under certain conditions, this particular relation of production yields fascist reality; it creates life-destroying structures.”7 The problematic of fascism and desire is swiftly becoming more entangled; however, Theweleit has elucidated a crucial insight, namely, that fascism as such is asytematic and is most emphatically, in essence, not a form of government or economy. However, Theweleit’s argument is that the male-female relations constitutes the exemplar of the total phenomenon, rather than forming a constituent element of the fascist malformation of desiring-production or appearing as a symptom of some constituent element. In this view, the manifestation of the fascist constellation is the manifestation of its symptoms. Moreover, Theweleit leaves the status of the fascist mode of reality production ambiguous. It is “constantly present and possible under determinate conditions… and does become our production.” This ambiguity stems, it seems, from an unwillingness to situate the fascist desiring-production in everyone. Here following Deleuze 5 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), pg 212-3 6 Ibid, pg. 221 7 Ibid and Guattari, I must assert strongly that this fascist desiring-production is situated in everyone; not merely as a malformation of ‘normal’ desiring-production as a whole, but rather as a particular modification of one of desiring-production’s most basic modes. The male-female relations evidenced in the writings of the Freikorpsmanner are symptoms as much of both the fascist constellation taken as a whole and a symptom of one of the deformations of desiring production constitutive of the fascist malformation that leads to the crystallization of the full fascist phenomenon. Our previous discussion has left us with a crucial question: “What is this basic mode of desiringproduction that is susceptible to fascist deformation?” We find the indication of an answer in Sorel’s introduction to Reflections on Violence, in which, starting from Bergson he wrote: In order to acquire a real understanding of this psychology 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 might at first be supposed that it would be sufficient to say that, at such moments we are dominated by an overwhelming emotion; but everyone now recognizes that movement is the essence of emotional life and it is then in terms of movement that we must speak of creative consciousness…. 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... These artificial worlds generally disappear from our minds without leaving any trace in our memory; but when the masses are deeply moved it then becomes possible to describe a picture which constitutes a social myth8 This is, I think, the hard kernel of the experience or mode of reality-production that is susceptible to the transformation into fascism. To this modality of psychic reality-production corresponds the production or transformation of a material Reality in addition to a merely psychological one. This mode of production translates psychic production (which is incessant) into material reality in a creative moment; a moment almost invariably associated at once both with decision and extreme emotion, but absolutely tethered to neither. Insofar as the moment is decisive, it is only the potentiality of decision that is necessary. What this mode of reality-production is tied to is the total experience of this moment insofar as it is the manifestation of a particular constellation. This constellation is as much historical as it manifests itself in a moment, which will later be argued to be both within and without history. The writings of Mussolini and the Italian fascist theorists evidence this same fascination with this quasi-Bergsonian creative moment in which ones relationship with the world is completely upended. Mussolini wrote: 8 Georges Sorel Reflections on Violence, Edited by Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pg 26-7 Man can and must create a world for himself through the exercise of his free will… In the fascist conception of history, man is only by virtue of the spiritual processes to which he contributes… there is no escaping history and life, both of which are founded upon continual flux and change… Only by entering into the process of reality and taking hold of the forces at work within it can man act upon man and upon nature … a moral law… [which] supplants the… life enclosed within the circle of evanescent pleasure with a higher life founded on duty; a life free from the limitations of time and space…9 While Sergio Panunzio and Guiseppe Bottai, theorists of Italian fascism wrote: We renew by preserving, we preserve by innovating. These are the two faces of fascism, apparently contradictory but fundamentally united in a single reality of thought, life and history. … As such it has preserved the past, acted in the present, and directed all its energies toward the future…10 [Fascism]…arose as a revolutionary gesture of refusal: of the culture that preceded it… Refusing the culture of the nineteenth century… means enabling one’s intelligence to grasp things with immediacy, that is, to understand them anew and to reevaluate them.11 Without straying into the territory of exegesis, we may see that to varying degrees the idea of the creative moment articulated by Sorel (and Bergson) is present. At minimum, there is an obsession with the relation between time, action and history. This obsessive theme is not restricted to the Italian variant of fascism, but is also prominent in Nazism. In Nazism it is particularly present in the speeches of Hitler and Goebbels and in Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century. Particularly relevant citations from Hitler, Goebbels and Rosenberg are found both in “The Nazi Myth,” by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe LacoueLabarthe and in Eric Michaud’s article “National Socialist Architecture as an Acceleration of Time.” Lest we hold that this idea of a decisive moment in which, psychologically and materially reality is radically transfigured and in which one stands open and creative toward the new, be held to be the fascist deformation of desiring-production, we should examine two contemporaneous views of what appears to be the same concept: Walter Benjamin’s messianic time and Paul Tillich’s kairos. §2 – Producing the Concept of Kairos Benjamin most clearly articulates the relationship between the messianic, time and history in Theses on the Philosophy of History, his last completed work, written in spring of 1940 while France, where he was living at the time, came under attack by the Germans.12 To the secular Bergsonian creative moment, 9 Benito Mussolini (in collaboration with Giovanni Gentile) Foundations and Doctrine of Fascism, in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Ed. A Primer of Italian Fascism, Translated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Olivia E. Sears, and Maria G. Stampino (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pg 46-8. 10 Ibid, pg. 47. 11 Sergio Panunzio in Ibid, pg 90-1. 12 Although, the concept of the messianic had long since been part of Benjamin’s conceptual apparatus. The category of the Benjamin opposes a version of the Judaic conception of Messianic time. The concept of Messianic time has since been further developed and elaborated upon not only by Benjamin’s friend Gerschom Scholem, but also by Kia Lindroos in Now-Time/Time-Image where it is seen in relation to Tillich’s concept of kairos, and by Giorgio Agamben whose development and interpretation of Benjamin’s concept of Messianic time throws the Judaic Messianic time into relation with the idea of kairos in early Christianity (in St. Paul particularly) and Stoicism. When Messianic time is seen in terms of kairos, it can enter into a constellation with not only the conception of kairos revived by Paul Tillich in the 1920s but also with the BergsonianSorelian creative moment, which clearly falls into the category denoted by kairos and Messianic Time. Only then may we see not only the concrete role that the experience of temporality served in the rise of fascism but also its role in the psychology of desire that underwrote the achievements and failures of the fascist regimes. We will then be in a position to answer the critical question – that is: “in what general circumstances and on what ground does temporal experience become productive, and a forteriori, in which general circumstances does this experience give rise to fascism?” In Benjamin’s eighth thesis, he wrote: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ in which we live is rather the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about an actual (wirklichen) state of exception and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm.13 This ‘actual’ state of exception that Benjamin invokes as a counter-measure to fascism is nothing other than the present of messianic time. This is, however, not immediately evident. That which is evident, however, is that to the state of exception corresponds a conception of history proper to it. Furthermore, because every conception of history “is invariable accompanied by a certain experience of time, which is implicit in it, conditions it and thereby has to be elucidated,”14 to the state of exception corresponds a messianic makes its first appearance (to my knowledge) in 1919 in a fragment entitled “The Currently Effective Messianic Elements.” The messianic reappears in the Theologico-Political Fragment, which, according to the recollection of Adorno, was written in December of 1937. (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vols. 1 & 3, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 13 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, Translated by Harry Zohn, Edited by Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pg 257. Translation emended slightly – Ausnahmezustand should be ‘state of exception’ to correspond to the standard translation of Schmitt’s concept of the same name. Also, wirklichen has been retranslated as ‘actual’ instead of ‘real.’ This emendation is necessary in order to maintain the relation between Messianic time and Actuality. 14 Giorgio Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum” in Infancy and History, Translated by Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1993), pg 91 certain experience of time. This experience of time corresponds to the state of exception in the same manner as “The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.”15 However necessary the experience of time that corresponds to the state of exception may be, its definition is by no means an easy or readily approached task. However, in subsequent theses, he sketches out this experience of time. In theses fourteen and fifteen, Benjamin wrote: History is the object (Gegenstand) of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the Jetztzeit... The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera…Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years.16 Finally, in thesis eighteen and the appended aphorism A, Benjamin continues: The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe... No fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It becomes historical posthumously… A Historian who takes this as his point of departure… grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.17 The actual experience of this time seemingly cannot be spoken of from within a completely secular-logical discourse. It is a indeed a theological category, however, theology in itself would only be capable of articulating one facet of this polyvalent experience. We must first extract and take note of the experiential content that may be gleaned from Benjamin’s theses prior to viewing this phenomenon from other perspectives. Messianic time is characterized experientially by a momentary hiatus from the continuum of history, that is rich with its own form and fecundity and bears within it an entirely different temporal structure of contracted time, abridged time, in which this moment corresponds to the whole of history; it also gives a redemptive image of the past that provides a “dialectical image,” the “standpoint of redemption,” a perspective from which a break with the past in the moment of Jetztzeit becomes possible, which permits the constitution of a radically different future (in Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope, we find a secularized 15 Benjamin, pg. 260 16 Ibid, pg. 261-2 Translation emended – original translation has subject for Gegenstand, Gegenstand is more appropriately translated as “object.” 17 Ibid, pg 263 version of this).. Thus, the corresponding mode of temporality to the actual state of exception is precisely what is contained in the literal translation of the word Ausnehmezustand i.e. the state of being taken outside. This is to say that in the actual state of exception Messianic time constitutes time outside of the continuum of time. We may thus add to our exegesis, that Messianic time has its genesis in lived time as such, not in empty time, spatially represented. Here we may take up Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of Benjamin and his contribution to the puzzle of Messianic/creative temporality, which at first seem to be mirror images of one another. Agamben first takes up Benjamin’s concept of Messianic time in his essay “Walter Benjamin and the Demonic” in which he writes that in Benjamin’s theses, “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.”18 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.”19 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.”20 Thus, Messianic time exerts a retrodictive power upon the past, bringing about a qualitative alteration. However, in “The Time that is Left,” Agamben directly engages the concept of Messianic time and brings Benjamin’s Judaic notion of Messianic time into contact with the early Christian concept of kairos. It must be stressed that in this essay, Agamben approaches the Judaic concept of Messianic time in such a 18 Giorgio Agamben, “Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption” in Potentialities, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pg 151-2. On Benjamin's practice of citation, see Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Translated by Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 138-141 19 Ibid, pg 158. 20 Giorgio Agamben Bartleby, or On Contigency, in Potentialities, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pg 267. way that it is annexed to, or made virtually indistinguishable from the Christian conception of kairos.21 My position is rather, that this indistinguishability stops short of identity and Messianic time refers to one aspect of the unified phenomenon that will emerge under the name kairos. To support my argument, I may cite Agamben’s essay “The Time that is Left,” which frames his explication of Messianic time within the distinction between the prophet and the apostle.22 From this distinction, Agamben writes: The word is now given to the apostle, the messiah’s envoy, whose time is not the future but the present. That’s why the technical term for the messianic event is, in Paul’s letter, ho nyn kairos, the now time, the jetztzeit, the actuality. (2) This is to say that in Benjaminian terms, the messianic event is the state of exception. The state of exception engenders the experience of Messianic time in the same manner as the kairos or jetztzeit. However, it should be noted that the apostle, while inhabiting the present, exists essentially in relation to the past and future. Indeed, “Greek speaking Jews distinguished two aoines or kosmoi: ho aion touto, ho kosmos autos (This aeon, this world), and ho aion mellon(the coming world or aeon)… the time in which the apostle lives… [is] neither chronological time nor the apocalyptic eschaton: it is, once again, a remnant, the time that is left between two times.”(3) While the Messianic present is sandwiched between two aeons yet nevertheless extends sway over both aeons. Of these two aiones, Agamben continues to write that: We have first, profane or chronological time, which goes from creation to the messianic event. With the messianic event, time contracts itself and begins to finish, and this shrinking time, which Paul calls ho nyn kairos, goes on up to the parousia, the full presence of the messiah, which concludes with the end of time. Here time explodes – or rather implodes into the other aeon, into eternity… messianic time, the ho nyn kairos, coincides neither with the end of time nor with profane chronological time…. [it] is not exterior to chronological time: it is, so to say, a portion of chronological time, a portion that undergoes a process of contraction which transform it entirely. (3) This is to say that Messianic time or a kairos is, strictly speaking, un-representable. This is especially evident as Agamben notes “it says nothing about the experience of contracted time.” (4) It is, strictly speaking, impossible to spatialize messianic or kairological time, to do so would be to banish the messianic event or the kairos and throw the kairological back into the chronological. Thus even the representation of kairos as situated between two aeons is a misrepresentation. While I shall resist the temptation to spatialize, I would 21 The word kairos does however first appear in Isocrates and also appears in Book VII and X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, however, the word did not acquire a specifically philosophical meaning until the advent of Christianity. Until that time, the word designated merely an opportune time. 22 Giorgio Agamben “The Time That is Left” in Epoche, Volume 7 Issue 1 (Fall 2002), pp 1-14. This essay, which is an extract from The Time That Remains, published the same year in Italian, was also delivered as a plenary lecture at the annual Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy conference held at Goucher College in September of 2001. Citations of this essay shall appear in parenthetical form. suggest in this case that it may not be in a horizontal relationship with the two aeons i.e. between them on a line of time, but rather laterally, between two entirely different temporal modalities. Perhaps the most feasible spatializing schema is to situate the kairos as between, both horizontally and laterally. This latter hypothesis is suggested in Agamben’s analysis of Paul’s use of the term parousia. [parousia] designate[s] the ultimate individual structure of the messianic event, insofar as it is composed by two heterogeneous times, kairos and a chronos, an operational time and a represented time, which are coextensive, but cannot be added one to another. The messianic presence lies beside itself, because without ever coinciding with a chronological instant and without adding to it, nevertheless grasps and fulfills it. (7) Here we may preliminarily enumerate the characteristics of kairos or Messianic time: 1) Kairos or the Messianic event constitutes the caesura that divides two aiones: the past from the future. 2) Kairological23 or Messianic time is coextensive with, but heterogeneous with respect to Chronological time. 3) There is continual slippage between Kairos and Chronos, yet precise coincidence is in principle impossible. 4) Chronos and Kairos are tightly interrelated. Agamben cites the Corpus Hippocraticum in preliminarily determining an interrelation, that is, “the chronos is where we have kairos and the kairos is where we have a little chronos.”(5-6) At this point, the Christian kairos diverges from Judaic Messianic time by virtue of its turning its gaze from the past, through the present and toward the future to come. This is to say that the Pauline definition of the relation between kairos and chronos contains within it relationships contain relations that would aid in the role of the prophet: those of types and those of anakepgalaioisis or recapitulation. “Through the concept of types, Paul establishes a relationship – which we from now on call typological relationship – between each event of the past and ho nyn kairos, the now-time, present-messianic time… The point here is not simply that each event of the past becomes a figure or allegory of the present time… decisive is rather the transformation of the time structure that the typological relationship brings about.” (8)24 Agamben continues to write that the significance of this typology is that “What is at stake in the figure, is… a tension that transforms and binds together the past and present, types and antitypes, in an inseparable constellation. The messianic is not one of the terms of the typological relationship: it is the relationship itself.”(9) Finally, anakepgalaioisis refers to a phenomenon analogous to Nietzsche’s Eternal Return or 23 From this point I will use the term kairological to refer to the phenomenological unity of the conceptions of kairos and Messianic time. 24 See The Time That Remains, pp. 73-77 and 141-143 for Agamben's more detailed account of these Pauline concepts . Kierkegaard’s Repetition and numerous other ideas, a phenomenon that corresponds to the contraction and abridgment of time that we have already seen in Benjamin’s eighteenth thesis. Specifically, Agamben writes of this recapitulation of the past that it “produces a pleroma, a fulfillment, and accomplishment of the kairoi – the messianic kairoi are then eventually full of chronos, but of a specific summary chronos that anticipates the eschatological pleroma at the end of time…”(10) To this point, Benjamin’s concept of Messianic time emphasized the relationship between the messianic present and the past. Agamben’s Pauline interpretation of kairological time likewise places great emphasis on the relationship between past and the messianic present. The Pauline introduction of typoi and anakepgalaioisi, in their orientation toward the past also orient kairos toward the future.To conclude our consideration of Agamben’s modification of Benjamin’s Messianic scheme, we must consider the experiential content anakepgalaioisi, or recapitulation in its specifically temporal meaning. He compares the experience anakepgalaioisi as analogous to the “panoramic vision of their life said to be had by men at the moment of dying” arguing that, “in the messianic recapitulation there is something of a memory and a recollection of the past.. as in memory, the past becomes again somehow possible, what was left unaccomplished – in the sense that in the messianic recapitulation can finally take leave from this [personal] past.”(10) It is only thus in recapitulation that one truly comes to terms with ones past and can orient oneself toward the future in the moment. We now have an initial typology of kairological time. Kairological time along with kairoi themselves are simultaneously directed toward both past, present and future, if these terms still retain sufficient meaning to orient us with regards to a fuller typology of kairoi. While both Benjamin and Agamben have much to say regarding the relationship of the present kairos and its past, they said little about the relationship between the moment of kairos and the future. The past is drawn into the present moment in the experience of kairos, however, what comes of the futural indication given by Benjamin when he wrote: The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar.25 In order to complete our typology, we must briefly examine one further theorist of kairos, quite likely one 25 Benjamin, pp. 261-2. of the first to re-introduce the term kairos into philosophical discourse, the German émigré theologianphilosopher Paul Tillich. Significantly, his introduction of the term kairos in 1926 pre-dates the rise of Nazism. In the third volume of Tillich’s Systematic Theology, published in 1963, he wrote of the genesis of the term kairos, which: 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 should express the feeling of many people in central Europe after the First World War that a moment of history had appeared which was pregnant with a new understanding of the meaning of history and life.26 This differs little from his conception of kairos in his 1926 piece, “Kairos and Logos” in which he wrote: in this dynamic thinking in terms of creation, time is all-decisive, not empty time, pure expiration; not mere duration either, but rather 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.27 In Tillich’s conception of kairos, there is a fundamental openness to that which is to come. For Tillich, kairos is essentially a category of the future, insofar as kairos manifests itself either as an event, which approaches us “as fate and decision” out of the future, while the actual experience of a kairos is one of “creation, fate and decision.” As we see in abridged form, Tillich has the most developed conception of kairos yet, viewing kairos in its necessary interrelations with logos, being, knowledge and subjectivity. It is impossible to thoroughly catalogue these interrelations; however, for Tillich the relation between kairos and subjectivity is particularly striking and will become relevant shortly. Tillich asserts that “subjectivity is always ‘akairos.’”28 He continutes more emphatically, that “The possibility of recognizing truth is dependent on decision and fate and cannot be separated from the Kairos.” This is to say that absolute subjectivity and truth are at loggerheads with one another. Only the openness of the kairos gives us access to truth. Furthermore, in an extremely sympathetic and perspicacious reading of Nietzsche, Tillich wrote that Nietzsche: …thinks consistently in terms of the Kairos. He knows that he is living in the hour of fate, the great moment, the beginning of the superman; he knows that one cannot think everything at all times and most surely not in all places of society. He knows that spirit is blood, and that only what is written in blood is worth reading and learning. With this, the decision-character of truth is brought to clear expression.29 26 Paul Tillich Systematic Theology Volume Three, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pg. 369. 27 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), pg 129. 28 Ibid, pg. 147. 29 Ibid, pg. 140. Thus, to our phenomenology of the kairos and kairological time, we may add the following propostions: 1) Kairos here is primarily futural in orientation; Tillich conceives of kairoi as moments in relation at once to both the “great kairos” and to the authentic possibility of the new. 2) Kairos is intended by Tillich as a dynamic conception of qualitative time. 3) Because “subjectivity is always ‘akairos’, Kairos stands in opposition to subjectification. 4) Kairos is always in relation to truth, creation and fate. 5) Kairos is manifest in the fact that history is “a dynamic force moving through cataracts and quiet stretches.”30 Once again, as in our examination of Benjamin and Agamben, the question that remains after explication is the same. That is, “How does one know that one is ‘in’ a kairos?” or “What constitutes the kairic experience?” In response to these questions, we find that according to Tillich in The Interpretation of History, and later in Systematic Theology: 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. To look at a time thus, means to look at it in its truth.31 Awareness of a kairos is a matter of vision. It is not an object of analysis and calculation…. It is not a matter of detached observation but of involved experience… Observation and analysis do not produce the experience of the kairos.32 §3 – A Phenomenology of Kairos In the previous section, kairos and kairological time were defined in terms of their formal characteristics. Kairos, taken as a unified phenomenon, has an essentially tripartite structure, which manifests itself in the temporal modality of the kairoloigical. Kairos as such is structured in such a way that it is a moment to which the entirety of past time corresponds, while at the same time opens up a locus for decision and an openness to the future to come. In all the three models of kairos, the moment of kairos produces reality; not only by freeing one creatively for the future, but also in transforming the past both materially and in terms of significance. Further, in all three models kairos is the qualitative counterpart to continual, homogeneous, chronological time and its mathematical conception of the instant; the event of kairos effectuates the potential for a revolutionary rupture with the past. Not only does kairos constitute the 30 Tillich, Systematic Theology¸ pg 371. 31 Tillich, The Interpretation of History, pg 173. 32 Tillich, Systematic Theology, pg. 370-1. self-transcendence of history but in addition, the self-transcendence of the individual. However, for all the detail of our formal examination of the phenomenon of kairos in Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben and Paul Tillich, we have not by means of exegesis uncovered the experience of kairological time, except in a few scattered hints. The importance of this lacuna must be strongly emphasized, for kairos and kairological time are, above all, experiential in nature. Furthermore, while we have seen that kairos and the kairological are modalities of temporal experience, we asserted at the outset that as a mode of reality-production, it is subject to malformation and deformation. Thus, inevitably, the kairological is emphatically not univocal in its experiential manifestation. The kairological , as a mode of temporality, has as many (if not more) modalities in which it manifests. This section will attempt to articulate the primary modalizations of kairological experience. Initially, it seems as though kairos would forever elude our attempts to grasp its concrete experience. The rarity and empirical non-demonstrability of kairos prohibit all exhaustive characterization. The fruits of the previous section include the characterization of kairos as a moment which is “not a matter of detached observation but of involved experience… Observation and analysis do not produce the experience of the kairos.”33 Kairos comprises a moment within which is contained the contracted past and present. This contraction of time into the moment of kairos would, as both a process and a state, be experienced simultaneously as a revolutionary rupture replete with possibilities for the new and at the same time as a process of contraction in which time would be ‘lived-through’ at a greater ‘rate.’ Here we must recall the interrelation between chronos and kairos suggested by Agamben, that kairoi come to contain chronos in contracted form. However, this characterization does not sufficiently bolster my claim that the experience of kairos is the particular mode of reality-production that constitutes the Urphaenomenon, which is deformable into a fascist mode of desiring-production, much less explains the process by which it is subverted. In “Time and History,” however, Agamben suggestively writes that “for everyone there is an 33 Ibid. immediate and available experience on which a new concept of time could be founded… it is pleasure. Aristotle had realized that pleasure was a heterogeneous thing in relation to the experience of quantified, continuous time.”34 By virtue of pleasure’s (according to Aristotle) being neither a process taking place in time, nor an eternal form,35 Agamben argues that the experience of pleasure is, if not the necessary concomitant to the experience of kairos, both propaedeutic to and a sufficient cause for the experience of kairos in each of its modalizations. Conversely, in articulating what I am convinced is the same concept as kairos (this similarity, if not identity, will become apparent) Georges Bataille contributes a second experience that gives us immediate access to kairos, that is, violence.36 The difficulty of distinguishing the modalities of kairos is a necessary consequence to its nonrepresentability. Given that we experience kairos, we must ask ourselves, “By what signs do we know ourselves to be experiencing a kairos?” Moreover, given that pleasure constitutes a sufficient cause for the understanding of kairological temporality and constitutes a common concomitant element of the experience, we can hypothesize that specific, intensely pleasurable experiences have a kairos-quality to them. Conversely, although there is not the space here to discuss this in depth, intensely displeasurable experiences should likewise have a kairos-quality. The association of pleasure with kairos accounts for the desirability of the experience as such. As the formal characteristics of kairic experience are at this point lacking, in order to properly characterize experiences as having a kairic nature, we must with hesitance turn to exemplars that satisfy the formal characteristics of kairos proper: that is, a superimposition of temporal totality and moment, a dynamic character, a decisiveness and an orientation toward self-transcendence; it must, above all, be irreducible to the factum brutum of its empirical occurrence. Experiences fitting these criteria can be classified as belonging to one of the following four categories: the Aesthetic, Ethical, Theological , and PoliticalHistorical, which then constitute our fundamental taxonomic categories of kairos’ manifestation in 34 Agamben, “Time and History,” pg. 104. 35 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1174b. 36 Georges Bataille, Theory of Relgion, Translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989). It should be noted that Bataille uses the term violence in a radically different sense than Sorel. His sense, in spite of having been influenced by Sorel, differs particularly in scope. experience. While an exhaustive discussion of each of these categories individually would be a work unto itself, it needs to be established the manner in which these categories may be seen as the principle experiences in which kairos manifests itself. From this, we may see the manner in which a common experiential characteristic of these experiences gives us the fundamental trait of kairic experience that will allow us to see this experience can be “demonically distorted,” “deformed” or “malformed” in political experience. This experiential characteristic must also account for the irreducibility of this experience to its facticity; it must account for the qualitative aspect of the kairos experience that is irreducible to it’s factical occurrence in the same manner that the temporally qualitative aspect of kairos is irreducible to the chronological dimension of the kairos moment. In illustrating the modes in which the kairic experience manifests itself we must make use of experiences that are not explicitly named as such, but exhibit such emphasis on their temporal aspect so as to be readily recognizable as kairic experiences. Despite the initial context of the appearance of kairos as a specifically philosophical term being in the sphere of the theological, in order to thematize the common grounding of these four categories in kairos necessitates beginning with its aesthetic manifestation. The differentiation of kairos into these categories of manifestation is brought properly to a thematic unity through an interpretation of Benjamin’s concepts of Aura and Constellation. These concepts, despite initially having been developed in the context of aesthetics and history respectively, are by Benjamin’s own suggestion37 meaningful in, if not entirely portable to other fields.38 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;”39 its authenticity; and in the case of natural objects: 37 Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, pg 221. In reading this sentence, I read Bedeutung in the German text as Meaning rather than Zohn’s translation of it as significance 38 I have not included a reference for the portability of the concept of Constellation, because its formal characteristic as qualitatively transforming a quantifiable multiplicity into a singular. On the relation of aesthetics with the Messianic in Benjamin see “The Currently Effective Messianic Elements” in Selected Writings I, an early fragment in which he identifies the content of the work of art as the “messianic element.” This would be to say that in terms of his later work, the “messianic element” of the work of art is its Aura. -39 Ibid, pg. 220. “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”40 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 apparatus to thematize the issue of kairic experience in terms that will allow us to see the manner in which kairos plays into Fascist desire, politics and aesthetics. As such, I propose the following modification of the Benjaminian concept: that the term aura 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 being at a given historical moment, which is irreducible to the brute facts of the situation seen in everyday terms. This is to say that the kairos-quality of an experience can be conceived of as the qualitative product of an absolutely unique situation. This modality of kairos is the only one that is possible in isolation. In this category we find experiences such as that of the sublime, those of the mystic, Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and Kierkegaard’s Repetition. In the last of these, we find a most beautiful description of this experience: My body had lost its terrestrial gravity; it was as if I had no body simply because every function enjoyed total satisfaction, every nerve delighted in itself and in the whole, while very heartbeat, the restlessness of the living being, only memorialized and declared the pleasure of the moment… I had a presentiment of every impression before it arrived and awakened within me. All existence seemed to have fallen in love with me, and everything quivered in fateful rapport with my being. Everything figured in my microcosmic bliss, which transfigured everything in itself, even the most disagreeable…41 In this experience, Kierkegaard’s narrator undergoes this experience spontaneously; it persists for precisely one hour; and then vanishes out of the most minute of events: an irritation of the eye. This minute event is sufficient to collapse the constellation that constituted the experience. As this experience fulfills all the formal characteristics of kairos, we may provisionally take this experience as an exemplar of the solitary modality. The aura of our immanent confrontation with being thus takes on the quality of kairos. Here, the 40 Ibid, pg. 222. 41 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling / Repetition, Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) pg. 173 fundamental kairos-quality appears to be the conjunction of “the pleasure of the moment,” the anticipation and embrace of the new, as well as a sense of Amor Fati. It is the last experiential characteristic that draws us on to the next kairic category, i.e. that which I broadly refer to as the ethical-sexual. It is referred to as such because in this modality the experience of kairos is intimately tied to the relationship between the self and the other, as well as the possibility of communication as such. This experience most often manifests itself in the relationship between lovers. This modality is best exhibited in the second volume of Bataille’s The Accursed Share,42 when he wrote: the object of individual love is, from the start, the image of the universe that is presented for the measureless consumption of the subject standing before it… the beloved in love is always the universe itself… [and] The obscure feeling of coincidence, which determines the choice [of a lover] assumes qualities such that the moral requirements of the subject will be satisfied.43 Furthermore, The union is never stabilized except in appearance… On the contrary, everything indicates that the love union is never given in duration. It genuinely endures, and even this is deceptive, only provided it arises from a desire itself rising again from its ashes.44 And finally: …by achieving perfect moments, which we know we can’t surpass, that we have the power to assign to the movement of history that end which can only be insofar as it escapes us.45 Once again we may readily see in this experience the formal characteristics that were outlined above. It would be unnecessary and tiresome to exhaustively compare this experience to formal kairos; instead we may see that which can be gleaned from this experience. Once again, we find that kairos is radically finite, 42 Bataille’s articulations of situation of the lovers are not only exceedingly compelling exemplars of this modality; Michel Surya indicates that according to Alexandre Kojève “Bataille held [Benjamin] in the highest esteem.” Not only that, but “it was Bataille, moreover, according to Pierre Missac, who first welcomed Benjamin to Paris.”40.1Moreover in Allan Stoekl’s introduction to a collection of Bataille’s earlier essays, Visions of Excess, notes that both Benjamin and Bataille had similar projects and that the main point of divergence was on religious grounds, insofar as Stoekl notes that where the ‘heterogeneous shock’/kairos occurs, in Benjamin “this shock comes to be associated with the ‘Messiah’ or with ‘Messianic Time,’ whereas for Bataille the experience of heterogeneous shock is associated precisely with the death of God.”40.2 One must ask whether, considering their respective religious outlooks, the form and experience of these shocks differ significantly. In fact, Messianic Time or Kairos is indeed operative in Bataille’s The Accursed Share Volume Two, and Theory of Religion, and even more so in the three volumes later gathered together under the title La Somme Athéologique. The essential point here is that there is a historical-factual basis for the notion that there is a kinship between the thought of Bataille and Benjamin. Moreover, it is worth noting that Benjamin was present at Kojève's December 1937 lecture at the College de Sociologie (established by his letter to Max Horkheimer of December 6th). Michel Surya Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, Translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002) 40.2 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) pg xxv n18 43 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volumes II & III, Translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), pg 161-2. 44 Ibid, pg. 164. 45 Ibid, pg. 191. 40.1 yet does not take place in chronological time as such; eo ipso, the passage of chronological time makes the kairos vanish, and it must be re-invoked by “ a desire itself rising again from its ashes.” Kairos in this sense can be indefinitely re-created, but cannot persist. Furthermore, in this modality, the re-signification of the world is more radical than before. Here, desire that is directed toward the lover passes through the lover toward the totality of being and the experience of kairos. Here we find the locus of true communication. It is by means of this something else that arises in each lover in the constellation of their tightly-intertwined selves and the world in the midst of which they are. In this, there is, according to Bataille’s reading, a fusion of subjectivities and desires in kairos. Here we can see a modality of kairos in which it is immediately apparent that fascists could not tolerate. Theweleit notes that “What we have here is a desire for, and fear of, fusion, explosion.”46 The lover’s absorption in one another and their world is anathema to the fascist, who is seemingly incapable of expressing genuine love or even having a genuine acceptance of a woman’s subjectivity outside of the role of the mother or nurse. The fascist desiring-production of kairos is inevitably directed elsewhere into another modality, because the realms of the interpersonal and the individual are seen by the fascist as inconsequential to the Nation. This is evidenced, writes Theweleit, in the fact that the fascist language cannot describe, or narrate or represent or argue. It is alien to any linguistic posture that respects the integrity of the object or takes it seriously. The language seems just as incapable of forming ‘object relationships’ as the men who employ it… The emotional force and sexual intensity emanating from women seems unbearable…47 But where is this desiring-production directed if one cannot produce kairos in solitary or interpersonal life? Furthermore, the question must be asked, even prior to fully elaborating the categories in which the fascist can still produce kairos, whether their experience of kairos is qualitatively different. It seems as though the theological and political modes of kairos are tightly intertwined. The theological mode consists in a self-transcendence toward the world that is to come and toward God. In Theory of Religion, Bataille’s analysis shows that the fundamental experience of religion is a longing and striving for an intimacy from which we have over history become more estranged. In this case, Benjamin’s 46 Theweileit, pg 205 47 Ibid, pg. 215. Messianic Redemption can be seen as the reunification of the sacred and profane worlds into the originary immanence. This immanence is opposed to chronological time insofar as the transcendent positing of the world of things [as opposed to the world of immanence] has duration as its foundation: no thing in fact has a separate existence, has a meaning unless a subsequent time is posited… Future time constitutes the real world to such a degree that death no longer has a place in it.48 This is to say that the immanence toward which the religious mode of desire points is toward a moment or continuum without chronological determinations. It is purely qualitative. In the act of sacrifice and the constellation of the festival, Bataille locates the experience in which one does “leave a world of real things, whose reality derives from a long term operation and never resides in the moment. – a world that creates and preserves. Sacrifice is the antithesis of production… it is consumption that is concerned only with the moment.”49 This is to say that in Bataille’s conception, the return to intimacy is produced in archaic religions through the festival, in which a regulated and limited kairos manifests in “The sacred… effervescence of life, that for the sake of duration, the order of things hold in check, and that this holding change into a breaking loose, that is, into violence.”50 The experience of the festival is, however, an incomplete return to immanence. For …the intimate order is represented only through prolonged stammerings. These stammerings till have an uncommon force because they still have the virtue of generally opposing the reality principle with the principle of intimacy… ...The intimate order is not reached if it is not elevated to the authenticity and authority of the real world and real humanity… It implies SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS taking up the lamp that science has made to illuminate objects and directing it toward intimacy. 51 . According to Bataille’s diagnosis, which is more or less accurate, developments in philosophy, economics and politics have ultimately silenced the possibility of an experience of kairos through religion. That which was once the theological experience of kairos had become largely inaccessible; and with that, the yearning and striving for intimacy can only manifest itself in other modes, primarily in the aesthetic and political modes.52 However, the characteristics of a religious kairic experience are to an extent transferred into and 48 Bataille, Theory of Religion, Translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989). pg. 46. 49 Ibid, pg. 49. 50 Ibid, pg. 53. It must be stressed that Bataille uses the term violence in the broad sense of transgression whether it be linguistic or of the boundaries of the Other, regardless of whether this transgression manifests itself in the form of physical or psychological violence. 51 Ibid, pg. 96-7. 52 Even Tillich locates kairos in the realm of properly philosophical concepts as opposed to theological. Indeed, his description of kairos is, at least in The Interpretation of History, highly politically charged. This diagnosis is also supported in Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s article entitled “The Nazi Myth” in found in both the political and individual. The individual aspect is far less dangerous, Bataille asserts, for “insofar as clear consciousness prevails that the objects actually destroyed will not destroy humanity itself. The destruction of the subject as an individual is in fact implied in the destruction of the object as such, but was is not the inevitable form of the destruction: at any rate, it is not the conscious form.”53However, we must retain one critical statement, that kairos, whether authentic, inauthentic or in between, subverts the reality principle, and replaces it with the production of a reality that is radically new. §4 – Fascism & Kairos As we have just seen, the possible modalities of kairic experience are articulated in such a way that they bleed over into one another. Because we have argued that kairos is a mode of desiring-production, which operates in opposition to the reality principle, desiring-production is quantitatively un-changed by the disappearance of a category of possible kairic experience, however, on the qualitative level, everything is altered. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows.”54 Desire is simultaneously flow and initiator/breaker of flows. Desire is that which produces its objects on the molecular level and likewise produces molar aggregate objects that differ essentially in nature from its molecular products. However, what is essential here is that even under repression desire is still operative on both levels. We read in the dense heart of Anti-Oedipus that: If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society… Despite what revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence – desire, not left wing holidays! – and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised… both social production and desiring-production are one and the same… desiring-production – a ‘real’ desire – is capable of demolishing the social form.55 What is most striking is that fascist regimes did not initially repress the desiring-production of kairos; neither did it ever become fully repressive of desire as such. What may be easily mistaken for repression of desire was in fact the precondition which permitted fascism to rise on the molar level and take power. Critical Inquiry, 16:2 (1990:Winter), in which they write, specifically apropos of the development of fascism, that “following the collapse of religious transcendence and its corresponding social and political structure” Germanys (and Germans) needed a model for identity, yet could only look to the Greeks for a model. 53 Ibid, pp. 103-4. 54 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pg 5 55 Ibid, pg. 116 That is, fascism incites desiring-production long before it becomes repressive, if it truly becomes repressive at all. Te repressive aspect of the fascist constellation, in fact, was never directed at desire as such, but rather at specific modes in which desire manifests. We can now give a further meaning to our understanding of Kairos. Kairos is that which makes desire revolutionary. Kairos is the possibility of a radical break with the past and the possibility of the new. If desire was not repressed as such under fascism, what gave the appearance of such? The answer lies first in the diminution, if not outright disappearance of the theological-religious as a mode in which kairos could be experienced. In Theory of Religion, Bataille traces the growth of the gulf between the sacred and profane worlds and the eclipse of the sacrificial violence of the festival by the organized violence directed toward the outside in the form of war. This also coincides with the rise of industry, as well as the subordination of “the satisfaction of desire in the moment”56 to the need of production, accumulation and the future. Fascism seems not to have done this, but rather incited desire to the production of reality in the mode of kairos and never subordinated the fulfillment of desire to the needs of production. Lacking the theological mode of kairos, fascism then directed this mode of reality production and desire into the political and military arena. Thus the war-experience of Theweleit’s soldiermales is in fact a fulfillment of desire; it is fulfilled in the moment of the act of violence. However, the simple disappearance of the theological modality of kairos that brought about and enabled fascism’s rise and radicalization. The other modalities of the production of kairos likewise were directed into the political arena. First, and foremost, the aesthetic production of kairos was co-opted by the fascists and utilized for political purposes, while at the same time banning ‘deviant art’ and thus eliminating a great degree of the interiority that aesthetic production entails. This is what Benjamin mistakenly refers to in “The Work of Art…” as the “introduction of aesthetics into political life” that can only “culminate in one thing: war.” 57 However, what is at work here is not a mere aestheticization of politics, but a complete merging of aesthetics into the political, such that private aesthetic experience is virtually impossible. Thus, ironically, the rise of fascism restores a measure of aura to the work of political art. The rally was a unique 56 Bataille, Theory of Religion, pg. 87. 57 Benjamin, “The Work of Art…” in Illuminations, pg 241 non-reproducible political-aesthetic experience in the same manner as Benjamin discusses staged plays Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy write in “The Nazi Myth,” that “National Socialism did not simply represent, as Benjamin said, an ‘aestheticization of politics,’ but rather a fusion of politics and art, the production of the political as a work of art.”58 Furthermore, the fascist modification of kairos also intimately involved the priority of der Vaterland and das Volk over the singular relations of individuals to one another. The Fatherland and the Fuhrer were the only acceptable objects of love and its mode of kairos. Analyzing the role of the mythos in the theory and practice of Alfred Rosenberg and Hitler, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write tellingly of this, that “There is only a single mythical choice, which is the choice between love and honor… the choice that makes him an Aryan, is the choice of the honor of the race“59 Thus, in fully articulated fascism we find that all of the modalities of kairos aside from the political have been incorporated into the political. Even in fascist kairos, there is still self-transcendence; however, it had been so brought into accord with fascist politics that this self-transcendence was experienced as a fusion into a greater whole, an organic whole comprising the ‘German Soul.’ Seen from the perspective of kairos, the full fascist syndrome is characterized by what can be called a Gleichschaltung of desire. The modes of manifestation of desiring-production in the fascist state were coordinated with the desire of the fascist state itself. With the decay of the theological mode of kairos, desiring-production is shunted into the realm of political life through the annexation of the aesthetic and the sexual so profound that Deleuze and Guattari could remark in Anti-Oedipus that “Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused… It is through a restriction, a blockage, and a restriction that the libido is made to repress its flows in order to contain them…”60 However, the peculiarity of fascism (Deleuze and Guattari come to realize this in A Thousand Plateaus) lies in the fact that it doesn’t contain these flows. It is not as Theweleit writes of the Nazi mass rallies that “the purpose of these displays, in fact, was to transform organic ‘exuberance’ into spirals; the purpose of the 58 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth” in Critical Inquiry, 19:1 (Winter 1990), pg 303. 59 Ibid, pg. 310. 60 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pg. 293. fascist mass ritual was to channel streams into a monumental series of dams.”61 Rather, we have an incitement to desire, within the realm of the political. The aura of the displays, rather than blocking flows as such, co-ordinates these flows and produces a kairos qualitatively different from the three modalities already described. Of the manifestation of kairos in Nazism, Tillich wrote: The term kairos… was used not only by the religious socialist movement in obedience to the great kairos – at least in intention – but also by the nationalist movement, which, through the voice of Nazism , attacked the great kairos and everything for which it stands. The latter use was a demonically distorted experience of a kairos and led inescapably to selfdestruction…62 But nevertheless, according to Tillich, the experience as the dark pulsating heart of Nazism was one of kairos, albeit distorted. If we consider the mass rally as the paradigmatic experience of kairos in Nazism in distinction from the experience of kairos in war-experience and death, we may see the fascist syndrome in full bloom. Theweleit writes of the rally: The scenario of the parade abolished the contradiction between the desiring-production of the individual and the demands of social power. In the course of the ritual, the fascist came to represent both his own liberated drives and the principle that suppressed them. This inherent contradiction never manifested itself because, during the staging of the ritual, the individual participated in power.63 However, Theweleit continues to assert that “All of that affirmation is theatrical; it never gets beyond representation, the illusion of production.”64 In doing so, Theweleit falls into the misrepresentation of fascism common to its liberal-democratic opposition, namely, the fallacy of progress; Theweleit falls back into representing the fascist as deceived and irrational. However, it is evident that the fascist kairos does differ qualitatively from the other aforementioned modalities. The mistake made in comprehending the kairos-quality of fascist desiring-production lies in mistaking the differentiation to be one of illusion from reality of the kairos itself, rather than a specifically temporal quality of the fascist kairos. The kairos of fascism is explicitly temporal in its characterization, almost to such a degree as to eclipse the other formal and experiential characteristics of kairos. We may recall that Mussolini wrote that the moral law of fascist man: “supplants the… life enclosed within the circle of evanescent pleasure with a 61 62 63 64 Theweleit, pg. 434 Tillich, pg. 371. Theweleit, pg. 430. Ibid, pg. 432. higher life founded on duty; a life free from the limitations of time and space…”65 Compare to this, Hitler as quoted by Michaud: “Who could remain unmoved when thinking that thousands of men parading now before us are not only individuals moving in the present, but the eternal expression of the vitality of our people in the past and future as well?...”66 It appears that in fascism, the formal characteristics of kairos are intact, that, in Michaud’s characterization the fascist kairos as embodied in monumental art and architecture is the “prophecy already realized”67 and that “it makes 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.”68 It appears to me that the Gleichschaltung of desiring-production that is fundamental to the fascist constellation constitutes one crucial formal alteration of kairos. Michaud makes a crucial point, that this manifested itself as “the desire to speed up the natural movement of the community…”69 However, the desire is not for a mere moment in which time speeds up, but rather for a continual acceleration, which requires a deformation in the structure of kairos. Kairos must be continually re-invoked and as such necessarily must not be completely fulfilled even in its fulfillment. As such, on one level, the fascist kairos is dynamically structured such that the oscillation between microscopic and macroscopic characteristic of kairos, is continuous and accelerating: This is to say that the individual and collective are dynamically superimposed in such a manner that one continually gives way to the other and ceaselessly accelerates. The microscopic aspect of fascism, microfascism, constitutes the revolutionary aspect of fascism, whereas the macroscopic constitutes the conservative aspect. Thus, as microfascism explains the permeation of the entire social body by the potentially fascist mode of kairos and the possibility of fascism’s irrupting at any place and time, macrofascism accounts for the mythological content of fascism and the fascist State itself. However, the qualitative shift between kairos proper and the fascist kairos lies in its very temporality. 65 Mussolini, in Schnapp, pg. 47. 66 Adolph Hitler, quoted in Eric Michaud, “National Socialist Architecture as an Acceleration of Time” Translated by Christopher Fox, in Critical Inquiry, Volume 19 Issue 2 (Winter 1993), pg . 228. 67 Michaud, pg . 232. 68 Ibid, pg. 233. 69 Ibid, pg. 229. This oscillation implies a necessary incompletion in the qualitative fulfillment of kairos. This is to say that while the monumental work of art or the rally is posited as a sort of messianic fulfillment, this fulfillment is necessarily partial or passes swiftly and dissipates. We need not even posit the incompletion of fulfillment, corollary to Tillich’s definition of kairos, we need only posit an ultimate fulfillment, which for fascism, would be constituted in total war and death. What is essential here is the fact that total fulfillment is deferred yet promised. In the fascist syndrome, kairos is structured in the mode described by Derrida as Messianicity. Ernesto Laclau glosses Derrida’s term as “one without eschatology, without a pre-given promised land, without determinate content. It is simply the structure of promise which is inherent in all experience…”70 More directly applicable to our problematic is Jane Bennett’s formulation in the introductory lecture to a recent course at Johns Hopkins University, that ...once Messianicity is thought to name the very structure of experience, then suspense becomes our ontological condition. Messianicity would refer then to the hope- or expectation-inducing quality of words, things, experience… The final dimension of Derrida’s Messianicity that I want to note concerns the perpetual postponement of the fulfillment of the promise. Even when the messianic event ‘happens,’ the promissory note is not fully redeemed. The promise — and the “straining forward toward the event of him/...that which is coming” is never replaced by a pay-off that is satisfactory or satisfying.71 This is to say that the Derrida’s Messianicity describes the temporal structure of the fascist instantiation of kairos. This indefinite deferral is the aspect of the fascist experience that forms the motor that drives its radicalization and necessitates the incessant re-invocation of kairos-experience. Credit in the fascist promise must be maintained at all cost, hence the essentiality of ritual, mass rallies, monuments and art. This is to say that acceleration and the maintenance of the fascist state and movement are inseparable. The promise of the future to come can only be backed by the credit of political kairos in fascism. This acceleration and messianic deferral are what distinguishes the fascist regimes from the merely authoritarian regimes. This messianic deferral prohibits stabilization. Likewise, the acceleration achieves intensively what the deferral does temporally; each successive monumentalization or enactment of the movement must exceed the previous so as to redeem the promise to a greater degree and maintain messianic suspense. The effects of these can be seen in interpreting Deleuze and Guattari’s statement that: 70 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s), (New York: Verso, 1996), pg. 74. 71 Jane Bennett, “The Theological Turn”, Introduction to American Political Thought Seminar, The Johns Hopkins Universtiy, Spring 2004. Fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State… every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, centralized black hole. There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequalled ability to act upon the ‘masses’72 What I am asserting here is that it is the continual acceleration, intensification and deferral that characterized the fascist kairos is the means by which microfascism remained operative throughout the duration of the National Socialist regime, the means by which the fascist desiring-production eluded the gravitation of the ‘central black hole’ of the State and drove, at once, the increasing penetration of the social body, the radicalization of the regime, the war effort and the Judeocide. Thus, when kairos becomes possible as an experience solely within the realm of the political, the fascist constellation is at risk of coalescing. However, it is the deferral and infinitely incomplete fulfillment of kairos in the fascist constellation that sets it apart from any other political movement. 72 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 214-5. III Kairos: A Political Post-History of the Concept of Time 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 homogeneous 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 nonspatial (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 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. 1 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. 3.1. A Conceptual History of Kairos 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 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 2 3 4 5 Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, Trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 437. Philip Sipiora, “Introduction,” in Rhetoric and Kairos, 2. Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, Volume One, Trans. Philip Krapp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 80. 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. 2 assimilation.7 The fact that such linguistic doublings as kairos and chronos 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 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 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. 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. 3 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. 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 now 13 P. Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History & Eschatology (Boston: Brill, 2007), 130. 4 In Futures Past, Koselleck observes: “A ruling principle of the Roman Church was that all 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 16 th 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.” 3.2. Paul Tillich: Kairos & Logos 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 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. 5 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 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 unconditional. Secondly, if “to look at a time thus, means to look at it in its truth,” 20 this means that the relation17 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. 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. 6 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 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. 21 John E. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” Rhetoric and Kairos, 53. 22 Karl Löwith , Meaning In History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 185-6. 7 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 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 3.3. Walter Benjamin: Jetztzeit und Kairos 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. 24 Bataille, On Nietzsche, Trans. Bruce Boone (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1992), 158-9. 8 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 Erkenntnis 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 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. 9 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 Erinnierung 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 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. 10 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 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 – 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. 11 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 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 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. 12 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 3.4. Jean Danièlou, S.J. & Georges Bataille: Mysticism & The Instant 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 followed have been published under the title, “Discussion sur la Pèche.” Bataille's lecture, i.e. the text 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. 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. 13 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 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. 14 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: 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 46 Georges Bataille, OC I, 543. 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. 15 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 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 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. 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. 16 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 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. 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, 52 Jean Danièlou, “The Conception of History in the Christian Tradition,” The Journal of Religion,Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1950), 171179. 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 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 3.5. Concepts of Kairos in the (Post) Modern Age It is only possible here to give a brief summation of other 20 th 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 is but the repetition in Modernity of what 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 56 57 58 Jean Danièlou, “Christianisme et histoire,” Études, Vol. 80, No. 254 (Jul-Sept 1947), 166-184. 182-3. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, Trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2009), 9. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 68. 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 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 2007 62 Marramao, 71. W. Benjamin's comment on temps qua tempus in Das Passagen-Werk. 19 the disorientation that delimits it.63 3.6. Fascist 'Kairos' / Eros & the Aura 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.” 64 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 everything for which it stands. The latter use was a demonically distorted experience of a kairos65 and led 63 Marramao, 72. 64 Eric Michaud, “National Socialist Architecture as an Acceleration of Time” Translated by Christopher Fox, in Critical Inquiry, Volume 19 Issue 2 (Winter 1993), 233. 65 “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, 20 inescapably to self-destruction.66 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.67 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;” 68 its authenticity; and in the case of natural objects: “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”69 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 is true of the mythology of class struggle.” (Plessner, 244) 66 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Volume Three, 371. 67 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Revised and Expanded Edition, Ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 301. 68 Walter Benjamin Illuminations, Translated by Harry Zohn, Edited by Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 220. 69 Benjamin, Illuminations, 222. 21 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 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 myth70 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 desiringproduction, 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.”71 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 70 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Edited by Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26-7. 71 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. 22 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…72 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 event73 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.” 74 The sovereign instant is: That in relation to which the meaning is given cannot but be indefinitely postponed: this is a sovereign moment75 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, 72 Georges Bataille, “The Sovereign,” The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Trans. Michelle and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 185-195. 187. 73 The use here of the term “event” is intended in the specific sense developed by Deleuze and Foucault, drawing upon Nietzsche. 74 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, Trans. J. T. Swann (London: Verso, 2009), n.p. (epigraph). Principle of Hope III 75 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. 23 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).76 3.7. 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....77 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 décisif.'”78 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 76 Bataille, “The Sovereign,” 194. 77 Jean Danièlou, The Lord of History, Trans. Nigel Abercrombie (London: Longmans, 1958), 32. 78 Émile Boisacq, Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Grecque, 2nd Ed. (Heidelberg & Paris: C. Klincksieck & C. Winters, 1923), 392. 24 the eighteenth century, irrespective of the partisan camp using it. 79 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 historicalphilosophical 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.'” 80 Kρισις, according to Boisacq, signifies by contrast “faculté de distinguer, choix; dissentiment; décision; interprétation,” 81 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.82 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 79 80 81 82 Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” 372. Koselleck, “Crisis,” 358. Boisacq, 518. Koselleck, “Crisis,” 359-60. 25 universal history, according to Taubes: “Apocalypticism is the foundation which makes universal history 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.”83 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.84 3.8. 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 lawgiverbut 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.85 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, a process of 'reoccupation,' as he designates it in Work on Myth. 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 83 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 33-4. 84 Koselleck, “Crisis,” 398-99. 85 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pg. 36. 26 neutralized insofar as the powers of the beyond are already working in the present.” 86 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. 87 Secularization not a linear 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. 3.9. 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.88 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 86 Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 54. 87 Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses The River, Trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 40. 88 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392. 27 the basis for this great Revolution, and you shall now assume the particular duty of hastening its pace,” 89 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...”90 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.”91 This, of course would be the particular modernity of the Nazi apocalypse – its originality and decisively anachronistic lies in having developed techniques of 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.”92 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 89 90 91 92 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, 12. Koselleck, Futures-Past, 50. Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 186. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Revised and Expanded Edition, Ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 301. 28 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]93 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.” 94 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 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 93 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 471. 94 Lacoste, 187-8. 29 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.” 30 Maurice de Gandillac, 1971 Pierre Missac, 1947 Walter Benjamin, 1940 Le jour avec lequel commence un nouveau La jour où un calendrier entre en vigueur, Le jour qui inaugure une calendrier fonctionne comme un le rhythme de l'histoire s'accélère. C'est chronologie nouvelle a le don ramasseur hisorique de temps. Et c'est au fond le même jour qui revient d'intégrer le temps qui l'a précédée. Il au fond le même jour qui revient constitue une sorte de raccourci historique sans cesse sous les espèces des toujours souce la forme des jours jours de fête...96 (eine Art historischen Zeitraffer). C'est de fête...95 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.97 95 “Thèses sur la philosophie de l'histoire,” Oeuvres II: Poésie et Révolution, 96 “Sur le concept d'histoire,” Trad. Trad. Maurice de Gandillac (Paris: Pierre Missac, Les Temps Modernes, No. 97 “Sur le concept d'histoire,” Écrits Denoël, 1971). 25 (Oct., 1947), 623-634. Française. 31 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 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.98 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. .99 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 98 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1969), 1634. 99 Benjamin to Horkheimer, December 6th, 1937, cited in Michael Weingrad, “College,” 141. His translation. Also in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 16:315. 32 sa rationalité produit de l'histoire... 100 – 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.” 101 And yet, “the end of exploitation, writes Horkheimer, 'is not a further acceleration of progress, but a qualitative leap out of the dimension of progress', i.e. a break in historical continuity.” 102 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.103 3.10. 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 Posthistoire104, 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), 100 Gaston Fessard, Hegel, le christianisme, et l'histoire , 145-6. 101Michael Löwy, “Ün Saut Hors du Progrès” L'hommage de Horkheimer a Walter Benjamin,” Archives de Philosophie, 49 (1986), 225-229. 229. 102Ibid, 225. 103Maurice Blanchot, “On the Movement,” Political Writings 1953-1993, 106-9. 109. 104Which, 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. 33 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 posthistoire 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...Posthistoire 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.105 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 105Hendrick 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 common conditions that all present social and political contradictions still have, and which and are so noisily fought over. 34 action would found classless society, beyond which further historical action wouldn't arise.” 106 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. 107 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) 108 Kairos is rather the opening of post-histoire, and the mode of temporality proper to the condition of 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. 109 Kairos is active in our production 106Bataille, 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. 107The 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. 108Benjamin, “Paralipomena to 'On The Concept of History,'” Selected Writings, Vol 4, 401-11. 401-2. 109Post-historical period = hiatus in history (epic/ideological), of indeterminate duration but unable to endure eternally. That 35 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”110 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.” 111 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 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. 110Benjamin,“On the Concept of History,” 392. 111Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, Trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 226. 36 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 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 foretell112 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,”113 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.” 114* Unexpectedly, the moment “opens itself up while denying that which limits separate beings, the instant alone is the sovereign being…”115 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.”116 In consideration of the fundamentally immanent quality of kairos, Blanchot was 112Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 142. 113Blanchot, Political Writings, 97. 114Georges 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. 115Georges Bataille, “The Sovereign,” 187. 116Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster,143. 37 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.”117 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.” 118 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.”119 In this Blanchot takes over and develops an insight given to us by 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.” 120 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.” 121 3.11. 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.” 122 Moreover, when 117Blanchot, Political Writings, 91. Cf. Bataille, ON, 157. 118Blanchot, Political Writings, 93. 119Blanchot, “[Communism without heirs],” Political Writings 1953-1993, 92. 120Bataille, On Nietzsche, 171-2. 121Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 18. 122Apologies to Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 38 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,” 123 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.”124 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 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.”125 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 1993), 1. 123Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, 165-6. 124Bataille, On Nietzsche, 157. 125Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 146. 39 in a moment of danger [krisis]... The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. ”126 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 Solovyov127, while both Lev Shestov128 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 pseudomessianism 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. 129 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.”130 That is, to grasp that “every second was the small gateway in time through 126Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” SW 4, 391. 127Fritz Lieb, “Der Geist der Zeit” als Antichrist. Speckulation und Offenbarung bei Vladimir Solovjev (1934), also in Sophia und Historie (1962). 128According 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. 129Jacob Taubes, “Walter Benjamin: Geschichtsphilosophiche Thesen,” Der Preis des Messianismus, Ed. Elettra Stimilli (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2006), 67-92. 85. 130Benjamin, SW 4, 397. 40 which the Messiah might enter.”131 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. 131Benjamin, SW 4, 397. 41 IV Chrono-/Kairo-politics of Revolution: On The Concept (and Experience) of Time in Walter Benjamin I. “Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated.” 1 Thus begins an early essay by Giorgio Agamben, entitled “Time & History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” published in the collection Infancy and History (1978). This opening sentence makes explicit an important theoretical principle upon which Walter Benjamin's “On The Concept of History,” and to a certain extent, The Arcades Project, relies.. Indeed, Agamben's statement is clearly an elaboration on the penultimate sentence of Thesis XIII of “On The Concept of History,” which reads “The concept of mankind's historical process cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.”(SW 4: 394-5)2 Here we see clearly that the Social-Democratic 3 conception of history as perpetual progress is bound up with and dependent upon a conception of “homogeneous, empty time” – that is, time considered at once on the model of space and an empty medium. Such is the case with any conception of history, however many of these conceptions may depend upon a particular conception. Indeed, the inherence of many conceptions of history in any one conception of time speaks to the limited nature of the set of possible experiences and corresponding concepts of time. We find a telling remark in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” one of the last two pieces published in Benjamin's lifetime, in which we read, “it is experience [Erfahrung] that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and articulates time.” 4 It is experience that gives form and content to time, and it is experience that articulates every conception of time. It is clear then that the conception of history which is set forth for “historical materialism,” such that it would accord with the exigency of a historical moment of crisis, would likewise be indissociable 1 2 3 4 Giorgio Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum”, in Infancy & History: On the Destruction of Experience, Trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 2007), 99-115. pg. 99. All references to Benjamin's text will be parenthetical, where “SW 4” refers to the pagination in Walter Benjamin's Selected Writings, and square brackets indicate references to The Arcades Project. All other references will be cited first in the form of a footnote and subsequently in parenthetical notation. [Specify] Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,”in Selected Writings, Volume 4, Ed. Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, Trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 331. 1 from a corresponding concept and experience of time. Benjamin's reflections in “On The Concept of History” appear somewhat elliptical with respect to the specific characteristics of both the “historical materialist” conception of history and the corresponding conception and experience of time. While the essential theoretical armature for the construction of such concepts and the expression of such an experience is certainly contained in “On The Concept of History,” (in particular, in Theses XII, XIV, XV, XVII) and is supplemented by Convolute N of The Arcades Project, no comprehensive definition of the concepts of history and time and no definitive description of the concomitant experience of time is to be found, only, rather, speculations and intimations as to what such concepts and experiences could be. These concepts are frequently presented in “On The Concept of History” in the form of a task that the materialist historian or the revolutionary must undertake. Indeed, we can see this most clearly and explicitly in Thesis VII, at the end of which we read “the historical materialist... regards it as his task [Aufgabe] to brush history against the grain,” (SW 4: 392) and in Thesis VIII, “we must come to a conception of history that accords with this insight [that the ausnehmezustand is not the exception but the rule]. Then we will clearly see that is our task [Aufgabe] to bring about a real ausnehmezustand” (Ibid). Furthermore, Theses XVI and A propose a concept of “a present which is not a transition,” which “the materialist historian cannot do without,” (SW 4: 396), a “conception of the present as Jetztzeit shot through with splinters of messianic time,” (SW 4: 397) which must be established by the historian as a consequence of having “cease[d] to tell the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary... [and having] grasp[ed] the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one.” (Ibid) It is thus that one of the primary tasks undertaken in this essay will be to articulate, inasmuch as it is possible, concepts of time and history appropriate to “historical materialism,” and to delineate the particular experience of time to which these concepts are bound (among the constitutive elements of time and history, the present moment, i.e. “the now,” will be of particular and decisive importance). Charged with tasks yet to be completed, “historical materialism” is itself subject to the contingencies of history in its undertakings. Victory is not assured. This insight sheds light upon the puzzling conditional dimension in the philosophical version of the puppet and dwarf allegory in Thesis I, 2 wherein Benjamin writes, “The puppet, called 'historical materialism,' is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight.” (SW 4: 389). We thus arrive at a second crucial task of this essay, which will be to determine what services and/or concepts are provided to “historical materialism” by theology, and consequently, to determine from which theological tradition or traditions these are to be drawn. These tasks are complementary; they illuminate one another. As we shall see, it is using concepts drawn from certain strains of theology that “historical materialism” can articulate and realize its proper conceptions of time and of history. It is, moreover, wise to take seriously the hiddenness of theology in the allegory, for while it is impossible to dispute the strong influence of mystical Jewish theology, we can readily discover the influence of other theological traditions, whether in “On The Concept of History,” The Arcades Project, or in other essays, most notably in “The Storyteller.” Whatever the case may be, for the experience of time that is bound up in these concepts, theology also provides names, and particularly for the present moment. Our third and final task will be to take up the problematics of historical change and the possibility of revolution, that is, the specifically political dimension of the philosophy of history and of time. This is, however, not so much a question of political theology, in Carl Schmitt's sense, even though theological elements cannot be severed from “historical materialist” politics, insofar as such politics is founded upon particular concepts of time and history, and even more so upon a particular experiences of time, which are all drawn from and modeled upon those provided by theology. Agamben writes that “the original task of a genuine revolution.... is never merely to 'change the world', but also – and above all – to 'change time,'” 5 which is to say that the revolutionary task is, at its heart, to introduce a qualitative change into the concept and experience of time. As an event occurring at a determinate time, change or revolution thus depends upon not only Jetztzeit, which is the condition of possibility for authentic history and for the revolutionary moment, but is, however, present in all of time. Neither does such an event have recourse to messianic time, as such, which is held to be a time to come and for which Jetztzeit can only serve as model. Rather, insofar as revolution aims to qualitatively change time, its possibility depends upon “a conception of the 5 Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,”pg. 99. 3 present as Jetztzeit shot through with splinters of messianic time.” (SW 4: 397) It is thus essential to articulate this conception of the present in terms of the concept of kairos as a qualitative conception of time in opposition to the empty, spatialized and homogeneous continuum of time conceived quantitatively as chronos. What I would like to designate by the term chronopolitics would refer to the politics of time in “normal” times, a temporal politics of the state and of capitalism – a counter-revolutionary practice – while kairopolitics would designate a revolutionary politics premised upon the possibility of recognizing qualitatively distinct, opportune times for action – a practice which would “blast open the continuum of history” and change time itself. II. The Experience of Time: Chronos & Kairos While it remains somewhat controversial and unorthodox to associate the concept of kairos with Benjamin's reflections on the concepts of history and time, recent years have seen the publication of a number of studies of this association: notably, The Time That Remains (2005), by Giorgio Agamben and Now-Time/Image-Space (1998), by Kia Lindroos. Even more recently, Suhrkamp Verlag published a selection of Benjamin's philosophical writings under the title Kairos: Schriften zur Philosophie (2007), accompanied by an afterword by Ralf Konersmann, entitled “Walter Benjamins philosophiche Kairologie.” 6 Moreover, even scholars who remain skeptical with respect to this interpretation, notably Michael Löwy, in Fire Alarm (2005), find it necessary to at least acknowledge at least the appearance of a connection. Moreover, Löwy points out that the fact that it was In a letter to Horkheimer, written in 1941... [that] Adorno compared the conception of time of Thesis XIV with Paul Tillich's 'kairos'. The Christian socialist Tillich, a close collaborator of the Institute of Social Research of the twenties and thirties, contrasted kairos – 'full' historical time, in which each moment contains a unique opportunity, a singular constellation between relative and absolute – with chronos, formal time.7i 6 7 Academic interest in the concept of kairos has increased dramatically in recent years, particularly with respect to a somewhat secularized concept of kairos, which is concerned neither with theological problematics nor with its relation to Benjamin. This uptick is confirmed by the number of publications principally concerned with kairos that have appeared in roughly the past decade, although the literature does remain rather sparse. Two books of particular note have been published in English during the past decade, the first of which is a volume of essays entitled Rhetoric and Kairos (2002), edited by Philip Sipiora and James Baumlin; the second of these most notable contributions to the concept of kairos is to be found in Time For Revolution (2003), by Antonio Negri. Negri's book contains two distinct texts of approximately 100 pages each, written a decade apart. In the earlier text, “The Constitution of Time,” Negri explicitly engages Benjamin's concept of time without introducing the concept of kairos, while the other, “Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitude” is concerned exclusively with constructing a new concept of kairos, and within it we can find not one reference to Benjamin. Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's “On The Concept of History,” Trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2005), pg. 87. 4 Löwy, however, adds in a note, that: “Unlike Agamben, I do not think that Jetztzeit refers directly to the expression ho nyn kairos which Paul uses... to refer to messianic time...”8 In my view, kairos does not in Benjamin refer directly either to Jetztzeit or to messianic time, but rather to the concept of the present “which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand and has come to a standstill. For this notion defines the very present in which he himself [the historical materialist] is writing history” (XVI, SW 4: 396, I: 262). It is necessary, however, to first examine the concept of kairos in its various historical and theoretical contexts, for the concept does not appear full-fledged ex nihilo in St. Paul, but rather its (at least linguistic) use can be found first in Homer and Hesiod, and thereafter in Ancient Greek rhetoric and philosophy, notably in Pindar, Theognis, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Pythagoras, Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle.9 Moreover, according to Philip Sipiora and John E. Smith, kairos can be found throughout the Old Testament, and not only in the New.10 This last claim flies in the face of Frank Kermode's assertion that “the Hebrews lacked this antithesis [between chronos and kairos]; for Hebrew... had no word for chronos, and so no contrast between time which is simply 'one damn thing after another' and time as concentrated in kairoi.”11 This is of course complicated by the fact that Smith refers to the Greek Septuagint, in which the antithesis between kairos and chronos is obviously present.`Nevertheless, the relationship between temporal experience and the languages in which such experience is to be expressed is hardly straightforward. In light of the fact that the capacity to experience time qualitatively, as kairos, persists, even in the absence of clearly defined lexical and conceptual distinctions corresponding to the different modalities of temporal experience, one cannot conclude that the absence of a word equivalent to the Greek chronos in Hebrew necessarily denies the possibility of experiencing this contrast, and indeed of experiencing time in a thoroughly chronological mode. There is little, if any, scholarly disagreement concerning the concept of time as chronos. By all accounts chronos denotes time in its quantitative aspect, and thus, “Time, so conceived, furnishes an 8 9 10 11 Ibid, pg. 134n161. Philip Sipiora, “Introduction,” in Philip Sipiora & James S. Baumlin, Ed., Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory & Praxis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 2-3. Ibid. and John E. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” in Rhetoric and Kairos, 46-57. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 47-8. 5 essential grid upon which the processes of nature and of the historical order can be plotted and to that extent understood. Time as chronos, however, allows no features of events... to be taken into account.” 12 This is to say that the conception of time as chronos is literally the same “homogeneous, empty time” that subtends the doctrines of historical progress. Kairos, on the other hand, designates time in its qualitative dimension, whether in the ancient conceptions of kairos as the “opportune time” or in its later metamorphoses, from Tillich to Agamben. Since it was to Tillich's concept of kairos that Adorno first compared Benjamin's concept of Jetztzeit, it is only fitting to cite Tillich by way of further elucidation of distinction between and characteristics of the concepts of kairos and chronos. In “Kairos III,” he writes: 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. In dem englischen Word “timing” steckt noch etwas von der Erfahrung, die in dem Word Karios bewahrt ist. “Timing” bedeutet, etwas zur rechten Zeit tun. Man kann den Unterscheid zwischen Chronos and Kairos auch so formulieren, daß man sagt, Chronos bringt das quantitative, berechenbare, wiederholdbare Element des zeitlichen Prozesses zum Ausdruck, während Kairos das qualitative erfahrungsgemäße, einzigartige Element betont. 13 He continues to qualify the concept of kairos, as it is transformed in Christianity, from the right time or opportune time to “erfüllte Zeit” (138). Here it would be apt to take note of the fact that, in German, the crucial first sentence of Benjamin's fourteenth thesis reads “Die Geschichte ist Gegenstand einer Konstruktion, deren Ort nicht die homogene und leere Zeit sondern die von Jetztzeit erfüllte bildet [my emphasis].”14 Here there can be no question of a relationship of identity between Jetztzeit and kairos, for Jetztzeit is not “erfüllte Zeit,” but rather that which fills, or fulfills, time. In other words, what we have here is a conception of time which is made full and heterogeneous by the presence within it of Jetztzeit, which can indeed be conceived of as a certain present-ness that inheres in every moment of time, past, present and future. Every moment of time thus conceived would be the unique time of a unique event, kairos, which, once past, would, by virtue of the present-ness given to it by virtue of the Jetztzeit with which it is filled, become citable for certain specific future moments. Here it would be instructive to introduce a theological concept which is drawn from the early 12 13 14 Smith, pg. 49. Paul Tillich, “Kairos III,” in Der Widerstreit von Raum und Zeit: Schrifien zur Geschichtsphilosophie,Gesammelte Werke.(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963), pg. 137. Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen (Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), pg. 259. 6 Christian mystical tradition, that is, specifically the concept of apokatastasis, which Benjamin appropriated from Origen, and which he understands as“the entry of all souls into Paradise.” 15 Michael Löwy rightly situates the concept of apokatastasis within the “Theses;” he then continues to highlight the equivalent concept in Jewish mystical and messianic theology, tikkun: The redemption, the Last Judgment of Thesis III, is, then, an apokatastasis in the sense that every past victim, every attempt at emancipation.... will be rescued from oblivion and... recognized, honored and remembered.... apokatastasis means also, literally, the return of all things to their original state... The Jewish, messianic and cabbalistic equivalent of the Christian apokatastasis is, as Scholem argues... tikkun: redemption as the return of all things to their primal state.16ii Given that there exists an equivalent concept in the Judaic theological tradition, the question arises as to why Benjamin appropriates a heretical Christian doctrine. It does not appear to be a matter of chance or whim, for the concept and term, apokatastasis, appears also within Convolute N of The Arcades Project. If it is true that the correspondence between Benjamin's concept of “time filled full with jetztzeit” and the “full time” of kairos is neither spurious nor accidental, but rather an intentionally concealed theological borrowing, we may propose an answer to the question of Benjamin's appropriation of Origen's doctrine of apokatastasis: it is because, in Origen we find a well-developed conception of kairos of which the apokatastasis is but a special case. P. Tzamalikos, in his recent book, Origen: Philosophy of History & Eschatology (2007), writes: “the apokatastasis which marks the 'end of prophecy' is also a 'kairos'...” 17 and proceeds to further explicate the conception of kairos in Origen: There are two elements, which constitute the very existence of a certain occurrence. First, it is place: this is why it is said that an event takes place. Secondly, it is time: an event becomes 'reality' once the 'fullness of time' comes. Space and time then concur and constitute the reality, the historicity, of a specific event... every moment is actually a kairos which has to be 'filled full' by the appropriate action... by an action which advances the perspective of any person acting in history... all the moments of history are 'kairoi', each one it its own sense and particular significance.18 It is thus no surprise that we find references to Leskov and “The Storyteller” in the “Paralipomena” to “On The Concept of History.” While Benjamin writes in “New Thesis H” that “The structural principle of universal history allows it to be represented in partial histories. It is, in other words, a monadological principle. It exists within salvation history. The idea of prose coincides with the messianic idea of universal history.” (SW 4: 404) The last sentence of the preceding is reproduced verbatim in a fragment entitled 15 16 17 18 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings, Volume 3, Trans. Harry Zohn, Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pg. 158. Löwy, pg. 87. P. Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History & Eschatology (Boston: Brill, 2007), pg. 139. Ibid, pg. 140-1. 7 “The Dialectical Image,” followed immediately by a parenthetical note “(the types of prose as the spectrum of universal historical types).” (SW 4: 406) This addition suggests kairos once again by virtue of the typological relation implied here; such a relation is closely related to the concept of kairos in Paul, according to Agamben's reading in The Time That Remains. It is significant to note the fact that while it departs dramatically from Origen's concept, “the term apokatastasis was also used by the Stoics... In Stoicism, apokatastasis is the restoration of nature, in the sense of 'recurrence' of a next identical world.”19 This connection to the Stoics s of particular interest, since, according to Agamben's account: For the Stoics, homogeneous, infinite, quantified time... is unreal time, which exemplifies experience as waiting and deferral... Against this, the Stoic posits the liberating experience of time as... emerging from the actions and decision of man. Its model is the kairos, the abrupt and sudden conjunction where.... life is fulfilled in the moment. Infinite, quantified time is thus at once delimited and made present: within itself the kairos distils different time and within it the sage is... like a god in eternity.20 Which is to say that Stoicism harbors both an experience and conception of time that presents kairos as an 19 Ibid, pg. 287. Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Moment and the Continuum,” pg. 111. i Adorno's letter reads: “Es ist kein Zufall wohl dass danach die XIV. These dem χαιρός unseres Tillich nicht ganz unähnlich sieht.” – Adorno an Horkheimer 12.6.1941 “It is no coincidence at all that after Thesis XIV, our Tillich's kairos does not seem dissimilar.” Theodor W. Adorno, Briefe und Briefwechsel, Band 4: Theodor W. Adorno – Max Horkheimer: Briefwechsel 1927-1969, Teil 2: 1938-1944, Hrsg. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Christoph Gödde & Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 144-5. 20 Tillich: “...in this dynamic thinking in terms of creation, time is all-decisive, not empty time, pure expiration; not mere duration either, but rather qualitatively fulfilled time, the moment that is creation and fate. We call this fulfilled moment, themoment of time approaching us as fate and decision, Kairos.” (Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History, pg 129.) 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 should express the feeling of many people in central Europe after the First World War that a moment of history had appeared which was pregnant with a new understanding of the meaning of history and life.” (Paul Tillich Systematic Theology Volume Three, pg. 369) Scholem, “Characterized [Paul] as 'the most outstanding example known to us of a revolutionary Jewish mystic.... [and he] seems to suggest, albeit in a cryptic fashion, that Benjamin may have identified with Paul.” (Agamben, The Time That Remains, pg. 144). ii to We find the following in the Arcades: Modest methodological proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic. It is very easy establish oppositions, according to determinate points o view, within the various “fields” of any epoch, such that on one side lies the “productive,” “forward-looking,” “lively,” “positive” part of the epoch, and on the other side the abortive, retrograde, and obsolescent. The very contours of the positive element will appear distinctly only insofar as this element is set off against the negative. On the other hand, every negation has its value solely as background or the delineation of the lively, the positive. It is therefore of decisive importance that a new partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative component so that, by a displacement of the angle of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges anew in it too – something different that previously signified. And so on, ad infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apokatastasis. [N1a,3](459) 8 alternative to the experience of time corresponding to the concept of time as chronos, that is, as quantifiable “homogeneous, empty time.” Stoicism has, therefore, both the concept and experience of kairos and the concept of apokatastasis (in a naturalized, secularized guise) – and since the co-presence of these concepts is evident in both Christianity and in Stoicism, and since apokatastasis has also a nearly exact correlate in Judaism, one may rightly conclude that these concepts, as well as the experience of time upon which they depend, cannot be seen as bound up with any single theological tradition. Rather, they are bound up with the real experience of time. Here we must pause; in the first place, in order to understand how, in spite of our experience of time as qualitative, we come to always represent time on a spatial model, that is, in terms of chronos, and second, so as to better understand how the chronos and kairos are interrelated and interdependent. In The Time That Remains, Agamben approaches the first question in terms of the opposition between the eschatological and the messianic conceptions of time: if you represent time as a straight line and its end as a punctual instant, you end up with something perfectly representable, but absolutely unthinkable. ...if you reflect on a real experience of time, you end up with something thinkable but absolutely unrepresentable. In the same manner, even though the image of messianic time as a segment situated between two eons is clear, it tells us nothing of the experience of the time that remains. 21 That is to say that so long as we strive to represent time according to the spatial model of the world of extension, the result will be a concept of time that lends itself to representation but neither to thought nor to experience, while inasmuch as we hew close to the real experience of time the result will be both thinkable and in accord with the real experience, but unrepresentable. As such, when either kairos or messianic time22 is apprehended as a representation, we gain no knowledge of or access to the real experience of time, considered in its qualitative and unique aspect. The problem is virtually analogous to a specifically political problem presented in one of Benjamin's notes, “The existence of the classless society cannot be thought at the same time that the struggle for it is thought.”(SW 4: 407) This is not to say that the real experience of time is always in the modality of kairos – experience provides countless 21 22 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, Trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pg. 64. It is crucial at this juncture to insist not only upon the distinction between kairos, Jetztzeit and messianic time. The purported equivalence or, at least, seamless interconnection between these three terms is asserted with undue haste by Agamben. Nevertheless, this complaint is intended merely to correct to this theoretical faux pas, for Agamben's study remains invaluable. 9 opportunities to experience time as chronos: the experience of awaiting, to provide but one concrete example. Moreover, kairos and chronos are equally real, and they co-exist in all but the most extreme experiences of time. Kairos emerges as an interruption of continuity and homogeneity from out of chronological time,23 for, following the definition Agamben cites from the Corpus Hippocraticum, “'chronos is that in which there is kairos, and kairos is that in which there is a little chronos,” he continues to say that “kairos does not have another time at its disposal; in other words, what we take hold of when we seize kairos is not another time, but a contracted and abridged chronos.”24 This then explains several other key features of kairos present not only Agamben's account, but throughout the historical development of the concept. These features, which we may only touch upon in passing, include parousia, the typological relation between present, past and future, and recapitulation. Both the typological relation and recapitulation are grounded in a relationship of contact between the present and the past and future, a contraction and intensification of chronos into the qualitative experience of the present moment as kairos.25 If it is true that kairos and chronos necessarily co-exist, kairos would appear as the ever-present possibility of change, revolution and rupture. Moreover, and by way of a return to the Benjaminian texts themselves, a remark in Ralf Konersmann's afterword to the selection of Benjamin's writings published under the title, Kairos, is illustrative of the central position which the concept of kairos might well occupy in Benjamin's thought as a whole. He writes: Der Kairos ist der Anhaltspunkt für “die logische Zeit,” die Benjamin bereits 1920 ins Zentrum seiner philosophichen Epistemologie gestellt hat. 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 Erkenntnis ebenso wie die Erfahrung.26 The term “logische Zeit” appears to be unique to a fragmentary text of 1920-1, entitled “Theory of Knowledge.” That the concept of kairos is bound up with this “logical time” indicates its covert presence in Benjamin's thought from the dawn of his career, and places kairos in relation to virtually all of 23 24 25 26 The interdependence of kairos and chronos has been highlighted by various theorists, and this is not unique to Agamben's interpretation. His account is, however, among the most lucid and concise. Ibid, pp. 68-9. Ibid, pg. 78. Ralf Konersmann, “Walter Benjamins philosophichen Kairologie,” in Walter Benjamin, Kairos: Schriften zur Philosophie (Frankfurt Am Main: Surhkamp, 2007), 327-348. pg. 331-2. 10 Benjamin's conceptual apparatus. This centrality, while perhaps overstated by Konersmann, is, moreover, indicated by the conceptual nexus established in this text between truth, the “now of recognizability” and “logical time.”27 If the experience of time as kairos is indeed the condition of possibility for any authentically revolutionary activity, then the following note from The Arcades Project would appear at last to provide a concrete description of this critical experience of time: A phrase which Baudelaire coins for the consciousness of time peculiar to one intoxicated by hashish can be applied in the definition of a revolutionary historical consciousness. He speaks of a night in which he was absorbed by the effects of hashish: “Long though it seemed to have been... yet it also seemed to have lasted only a few seconds, or even to have had no place in all eternity.” [N15,1] III. Critique of Progress & Political Theology The traditional (metaphysical) conception of time, as a cyclic or linear medium that is infinitely divisible into a series of instants lacking duration and quality, already present in the philosophies of Antiquity and persisting virtually unchanged until at least the time of Hegel, can be viewed as the secularization of Graeco-Roman and Christian conceptions of time. The revolutionary theory of history and politics must break with the traditional concept or experience of time, which we may designate as that of chronological time.28 However, without having elaborated a new conception of time, historical materialism has as its internal contradiction, “a revolutionary concept of history and a traditional experience of time.” 29 It was this internal contradiction between the Social Democratic conception of history, inasmuch as it claims to be revolutionary, and its uncritically traditional concept of time which doomed it to failure and to misrecognition of the phenomenon of fascism. The traditional concept and experience of time supported the ideology of progress, whose concept of historical progress was thought to be the progress “of mankind itself (and not just advances in human ability & knowledge),” as “something boundless (in keeping with an infinite perfectibility of humanity),” and finally, progress was thought to be “inevitable – something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course.” (XI, SW 4: 394) This dilution of the revolutionary impulse by the dogmatic claims of Social Democratic theory “attaches not only to their 27 28 29 “Theory of Knowledge,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Ed. Marcus Bullock and Micheal W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 276-7. Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Moment and the Continuum,” pg. 100-109. Ibid. pg. 99 11 political tactics but to their economic views... It is one reason for the eventual breakdown of their party. Nothing corrupted the... working class as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological development as the driving force of the stream.” (XI, SW 4: 393). Furthermore, we read in the following thesis that: the subject of historical knowledge is the struggling, oppressed class itself. Marx presents it as the last enslaved class – the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden... The Social Democrats preferred to cast the working class in the role of a redeemer of future generations... [and] this indoctrination made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice. (XII, SW 4: 394) “We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.” – Nietzsche If the activity of the working class is subordinated to the future it is because the Social Democratic, progressive conception of history presupposes a traditional concept and experience of time, whether it takes the form of the transcendental aesthetic in Kant or the never-ending series of negations by means of which the Hegelian historical dialectic operates (and one must note that in Hegel, the true historical subject is, in reality, the State) – for the future is supposed to be homologous with the past, while the present is but a moment in the continuum this homology constitutes. The Social Democratic “vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor recognizes only the progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features that later emerge in fascism.” (XI, SW 4: 393) It cannot possibly see what Benjamin observes in Thesis VIII: that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ausnehmezustand30 in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Rather, the Social Democratic conceptual apparatus “treats it [fascism] as a historical norm – and the current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible is not philosophical... is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.” (VIII, SW 4: 392) Likewise, the conception of time corresponding to this view of history is also untenable – thus, “We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real ausnehmezustand, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism.” (Ibid) And, therefore, this task is also to attain to an experience and conception of time in accordance with the insight that “the ausnehmezustand in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” that is, the concept and 30 “State of emergency,” in Zohn's translation – it would be preferable to translate ausnehmezustand as “state of exception.” 12 experience of time proper to the ausnehmezustand. In a very real sense it was by means of invoking the ausnehmezustand provision of Article 48 of the Weimar constitution that fascism rose to power and maintained itself, indicating that the fascist conceptions of history and time were appropriate to the ausnehmezustand. The ausnehmezustand invoked in 1933 was never lifted until the war's end. I leave the term untranslated to emphasize the fact that the term is borrowed from the conservative jurist Carl Schmitt's Political Theology (1922), in which we read: 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.31iii It would thus be miraculous in a certain sense if “a real ausnehmezustand” were to be actualized – as such, it would grant sovereignty to those who brought it about, the revolutionary class, for “he is sovereign who decides on the exception.”(Schmitt, 5) Furthermore, from a Hegelian-Marxist standpoint, the “modern theory of the state” is equally the “modern theory of history,” and thus all the concepts of the philosophy of history are “secularized theological concepts.” Likewise, it would stand to reason, with time. All this suggests that the concept of history which would correspond to the ausnehmezustand, as well as the corresponding experience of time would have to draw upon theological concepts, however secularized they may appear. Indeed, Bram Mertens writes that Benjamin “insisted on secularizing this theology by constructing his philosophy of history on the very profane concept of human happiness.” 32 'Historical materialism' must thereby “enlist the services of theology,” (I, SW 4: 389) if it is to articulate a concept of 31 32 iii Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pg. 36. Bram Mertens, “'Hope, Yes, But Not For Us': Messianism and Redemption in the Work of Walter Benjamin,” in Messianism, Apocalypse & Redemption in 20th Century German Thought, Ed. Wayne Christando & Wendy Baker (Adelaide, ATF Press, 2006), 63-77. pg. 64 Benjamin had previously engaged with Schmitt's ideas in the Trauerspielbuch, and whose influence Benjamin acknowledged in a letter to Schmitt of December 1930: “Esteemed Professor Schmitt, You will receive any day now from the publisher my book The Origin of the German Mourning Play.... You will very quickly recognize how much my book is indebted to you for its presentation of the doctrine of sovereignty in the seventeenth century. Perhaps I may also say, in addition, that I have also derived from your later works, especially the "Diktatur," a confirmation of my modes of research in the philosophy of art from yours in the philosophy of the state. If the reading of my book allows this feeling to emerge in an intelligible fashion, then the purpose of my sending it to you will be achieved. With my expression of special admiration Your very humble Walter Benjamin [GS 1: 3.8871]” in Samuel Weber, “Taking Exception to Decision,” in diacritics, Volume 22, No. 3-4: Commemorating Walter Benjamin (Autumn-Winter 1992), pp. 5-18. pg. 5. 13 history in tune with a truly revolutionary experience of time. And thus, it is unsurprising that Benjamin sees that “in the idea of classless society, Marx secularized the idea of messianic time.” (XVIIa, SW 4: 401). IV. History as Catastrophe It is no coincidence that the famed image of the Angelus Novus appears immediately following Benjamin's diagnosis of his contemporary political-historical situation as a period in which the ausnehmezustand had paradoxically replaced the normal state from which by conventional standards would be suspended by the invocation of the ausnehmezustand, which in this account (which is indeed by all accounts true at least to an extent) has not only replaced the normal state; going further, the ausnehmezustand had become the norm, in a very real sense. The Angel of history is presented as having its back turned toward the future, its gaze forever transfixed by the ceaselessly growing heaps of ruins which present to the angel a vision of the irreparable past, of history as a history composed of little more than a succession of catastrophes. What's more, the Angel, who is here an allegorical image of the materialist historian. If historical materialism's proper concepts of history and time, including the experiences to which they correspond, is defined in terms of a task yet to be complete, we can clearly see the cause of such angelic paralysis that is an integral element of this image, for he does not yet have that “constructive principle,” which we may now see as having always been the already noted incompatibility between the traditional experience of time, which the Angel presumably retains, and the temporal conditions of possibility for both revolution and rescue. On the other hand, while the Angel doesn't see these ruins as they appear to our eyes, as the ruins of this or that catastrophe, he sees them rather as “one single catastrophe” that he would desperately like to bring to a standstill, so as “to make whole what has been smashed,” 33 in the course of history.. This, however, is not a possibility open to the angel, for not only is he continually blown by winds of the story that “we call progress,” but also because it is not granted to angels the power to decisively intercede and 33 This phrase should recall Origen's doctrine of apokatastasis, particular as it relates to Thesis III. It should be noted, if only in passing, that Political Theology II, first published in 1969, amounts to a defense and reaffirmation of this general claim, against arguments that “political theology” had become obsolete. Here, Benjamin would be in agreement with Schmitt, for the theological dimensions of politics and history could never be conclusively cut off, or dissevered. 14 therefore to bring this catastrophe to even a momentary halt. Such power is granted only to the Messiah, whose arrival is immediately a “sign of a messianic arrest of happening... a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past,” (SW 4: 396) which is the messianic concept that corresponds to historical materialist's readiness “at any moment to stop time... It is this time which is experienced in authentic revolutions, which, as Benjamin remembers, have always been lived as a halting of time and an interruption of chronology.”34 This vigilance on the part of the materialist historian makes it possible for him to recognize a moment as precisely the right one to “blast out of the continuum of history” and to thus make time stand still.35 The angel is blown backward, into the future, by tempestuous winds issuing from the past, toward which his gaze is fixed. The angel is powerless to move against the winds, which are Benjamin writes the winds of “...what we call progress [that] is this storm.” (SW 4: 392) The italicization of both “we” and “this” calls into question what, were he able to speak, the angel would mean, were he to utter the word “progress.” In light of several illuminating passages in the Arcades concerning this problem, it would stand to reason that if it is the case that “the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe. It is not as an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given,” [N9a,1] which is continued in a later note in which Benjamin explicitly defines “catastrophe” as “hav[ing] missed the opportunity,” and, in the same fragment, introduces for the first time a positive conception of progress, proposing a new concept of progress in contrast to that which underlies the dominant ideology of progress. Benjamin proposes to define progress, presumable as seen from the vantage point of the angel-historian, as “the first revolutionary measure taken.” [N10,2] And if there were any doubt as to the validity of attributing to Benjamin an alternative, positively defined concept of progress, such doubts ought to be dispelled by one further Arcades note in which he writes: “progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time [Zeitverlaufs] but in its interferences – where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn.” [N9a,7] It is thus that the interruption of the historical continuum by the emergence of qualitatively distinct, non-interchangeable moments, the 34 35 Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” pg. 115 We shall return to this in section VI. 15 recognition of which within time and history is already “the first revolutionary measure taken,” for not only do “the times” thereby change, but “time,” as such, also undergoes a fundamental change. V. Redemption and Historical Experience History finds its proper foundation in an experience of time as Jetztzeit, which Benjamin conceives “as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation”. (SW 4: 396). Furthermore, Jetztzeit is an immediately political concept, for thought in this way, “History is the object [Gegenstand] of a construction [Konstruktion] whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full [Erfüllte] by now-time [Jetztzeit]. (SW 4: 395) This is time which is experienced not as a quantity or empty duration, but as qualified, fulfilled. This is a 'full' time insofar as all historical moments of the past are included and bear with them, as images (for, “ History decays into images, not into stories” [N11,4]), bearing within them a “secret index by which it is referred to redemption,” images which “can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again... it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image.”(II, SW 4: 390-1) In other words, what is at stake is the salvation or redemption of the ephemeral truth of a past moment which would be lost if not recognized at/in the proper time..Were time conceived on a spatial model, as an empty, homogeneous continuum of disconnected instants, truth is always lost, even if knowledge is thereby gained. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin further articulates this mode of temporality in opposition to the tradition of phenomenology, which, even while acknowledging historicity, continued to conceptualize time on the model of a continuum of discrete instants in which lived experience [Erlebnis] occurs. What distinguishes images from the 'essences' of phenomenology is their historical index.... [which] not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time... Every present day [Gegenwart] is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each 'now' is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth). ...The image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded. [N3,1] In other words, “the 'essences' of phenomenology” amount to formal, intentional knowledge (arising from isolated experience [Erlebnis] utilizing timeless categories, while truth can emerge at any 16 moment from an image – every moment can be a moment of recognition – just as every moment of the past imparts some truth to us. The historical index of an image is its only intentional part – its truth, actualized at the intended moment is not. It is in this way that “the chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history. Of course only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past – which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has it become citable in all its moments.” (III, SW 4: 390). Thus in each and every moment wherein an image of the past is recognized and grasped according to its “historical index” that particular past has been redeemed, insofar as its possibilities have been actualized and its truth communicated..36 Redemption appears as happiness in a moment of nowtime, for “the image of happiness we cherish is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. There is happiness... only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past which is the concern of history.” (II, SW 4: 389-90) Perhaps this is our “weak messianic power” – the very possibility of happiness and historical redemption (the Theological-Political Fragment seems to support this interpretation, while Agamben, using the Handexemplar of this thesis, sees the use of “weak” in this phrase as an allusion to Paul – connecting to this the practice of citation). Every moment in which a past moment becomes legible, every moment of citation is “charged with now time... [which] blast[s it] out of the continuum of history” – and this is the construction of authentic history – that is, a history constructed on the basis of a unique moment irreducible to a temporal continuum. The activity of citation finds in the past a certain present-ness, a past that is “charged with nowtime,” which is “blast[ed] out of the continuum of history” (XIV, SW 4: 395), and is a truly revolutionary act – for, whereas fashion cites past epochs (albeit in the mode of the ruling class), as “the tiger's leap into the past.... The same leap in the open air of history [as opposed to the arena of the ruling class] is the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution.” Every moment in history is saturated with jetztzeit and 36 Here, it would be worthwhile to consider the correlate to historical redemption in the epistemo-metaphysical sphere, as Mertens suggests, in what he designates as Rettung der Phänomene in the Trauerspeilbuch. pg. 65-7. See also Arcades [N9,4]. 17 contains the possibility of revolutionary recognition and citation, just as messianic time contains all of history in an abridgment. Through the doorway of the present (thought in terms of Jetztzeit) messianic time breaks through the continuum of chronological time. VI. Jetztzeit – Blasting open the continuum – Revolution & Remembrance In Thesis XIV Benjamin introduces the concept of Jetztzeit and explicitly links it to the revolutionary possibilities presented when the recognition of a correspondence emerges, in the form of a constellation or dialectical image, between the present and the Jetztzeit with which a moment of history in the past is charged. There is thus a revolutionary dimension of time: the moment of recognition is “blast[ed] out of the continuum of history,” as is the past moment, whose recognition in the present introduces ruptures in the order of chronological time, which are the first conditions of possibility for the possibility of truly revolutionary activity. In the following thesis, Benjamin retells an account of a certain peculiar event that took place during the July Revolution of 1830, which, it should be noted, is a rare instance of successful insurrectionary action. The truly revolutionary significance of this episode, of which Benjamin writes as one of the very few truly hopeful images in “On the Concept of History.” 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 on evening, without any form of coordination or plan, fired upon the faces of clocktowers ““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.”” [a21a,2] An anonymously written poem closes this thesis which reads as follows: Who would believe it! It is said that, incensed at the hour, Latter-day Joshuas, at the foot of every clocktower, Were firing on clock faces to make the day stand still. (XV, SW 4: 395) The revolution took aimed not only for political ends, but rather, in an entirely symbolic way, the revolutionaries aimed not only to overthrow the monarchy, but also to act upon “Joshua's Intention,” that is, to interrupt the course of time, and likewise it was “To interrupt the course of the world – that was [also] Baudelaire's deepest intention The intention of Joshua.... From this intention... sprang the ever 18 renewed attempts to cut the world to the heart.” 37 It is of the utmost importance that not only did the gunmen choose clocktower faces to bear the brunt of their wrath, but also that, as has already been mentioned, the same identical action occurred in numerous and distant locales within Paris. Insofar as we are concerned with the first point, that is, with their idiosyncratic choice of target, 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.20 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.”38 Among the most intriguing remarks found in this thesis is the statement that, by virtue of the regular, yearly recurrence of holidays, “which are days of remembrance.” The German word used for “rememberance,” Eingedenken, [which is] a uniquely evocative word which is translated either as remembrance or mindfulness, and which lies somewhere in between the two. The act... seeks to perform a small but never insignificant restitutio in integrum, if only by doing as little as simply refusing to accept the finality of past suffering. Eingedenken can therefore be called messianic... most importantly because it asserts the necessity of a messianic redemption at some point, lest the catastrophe that is the history of human suffering continues for all eternity.”(Mertens, 75) Thus, “calendars do not measure time as clocks do.” (SW 4: 393), for these “days of remembrance” not only interrupt capitalist labor processes, which the clock, conversely regulates, but introduce a heterogeneous element into time with each holiday. Furthermore, it is not by chance that Baudelaire has twice been mentioned in so many paragraphs, for we find that in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” a passage can be found which clearly specifies this difference in the measurement of time, for “Although chronological reckoning subordinates duration to regularity, it cannot prevent heterogeneous conspicuous fragments from remaining within it. Combining recognition of a quality with measurement of quantity is the accomplishment of calendars” [my emphasis]39 37 38 39 This passage can be found both in “Central Park,” Selected Writings, Volume 4: 170 & [J50,2] J. M. Baker Jr. “Vacant Holidays: The Theological Remainder in Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Benjamin,” in MLN, Vol. 121, No. 5 (Dec. 2006), 1190-1220. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in SW 4, pg. 331. 19 VII. The Present As Rupture and Interruption 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 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. It is a theology containing the concept and at very least acquainted with the experience of kairos that determines the every move of historical materialism. Indeed, the concept of kairos in both the rhetorical and theological traditions designates also 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.” (Thesis A) Taken together, the concepts of kairos, Jetztzeit and messianic time underpin a truly materialist historiography and politics as constitutive elements of “revolutionary time” – a time comprised of heterogeneous, qualitatively distinct moments, in their capacity for noncontemporaneous 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.” Historical materialism for Benjamin, as opposed to Marx, is equally not to be conceived of as a science, or even on the model of science – for “nothing is lost to history” (Thesis III), and the redemptive activity of memory has every historical moment for material. The “material” at stake for the historical materialist ought thus to 20 be conceived broadly as to include the materials of history, whether ruins or carefully preserved artifacts – 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 (kairos, once again) so as to introduce a rupture and sever the continuity, which is both the condition of possibility for the Historicist concept and understanding of history, and thereby to make present what was thought of as irretrievably lost to the past. Consequently, the events filling the past lose their unchangeable nature and can, by means of the fundamentally theological practice of Remembrance. In this way, even what was thought to be irretrievably lost can still find redemption. This is, of course, absolutely congruous with what we find in an important note drawn from Convolute N of the Arcades which reads: “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 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] Again we find yet another indication that the concepts which would be of most use to the project of producing a concept of history which no longer imposes an extrinsic order upon events but rather takes close and careful account of the potentialities latent, as Jetztzeit, in each and every moment of history. Such a concept would be truly materialist historiography, for it would take account of all of the materials provided by every moment as it recedes into the past. However, the theological notions of apokatastasis and of the tikkun, do preserve the hope that, at the end of history, all that has been lost to time will be recovered in a final restitutio in integratum. VIII. Conclusion: Awakening to a Kairology Benjamin concludes the exposée of 1935, an essay which outlines a sketch of The Arcades Project as a whole, with the following two sentences: “Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself and unfolds it – as Hegel already noticed – by cunning.”40 These lines highlight a concept and experience common to all men, that is, that of 40 Walter Benjamin, “Exposé of 1935,” in The Arcades Project, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pg. 13. 21 “Awakening.” We must look to certain notes in the Arcades concerning the moment of awakening, particularly the one which follows, in which Benjamin writes “The moment of awakening would be identical with the 'now of recognizability.'” [N3a,3] If Konersmann's claim that Benjamin's early concept of “logishe Zeit,” is something of an alias or antiquated term for kairos, then not only is the moment of Awakening also immediately identical to the “now of recognizability,” but it is also the most fundamental experience we have of time in the modality of kairos. Taking a slight degree of interpretive liberty, the moment of awakening would a be related, if not identical, to Baudelaire's experience of time while intoxicated with Hashish. 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 would alone be immune to absorption into the reflux of restoration.” 41 For this to be possible, the proper time must come, for at all other times, “revolutions are [rather] attemps by the passengers on this train [of world history] – namely the human race – to activate the emergency break.”(XVIIa, SW 4: 402) 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 NowTime/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.”42 In a chapter dedicated to Benjamin's famed fourteenth thesis, the very same thesis which, nearly 41 42 Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” pg. 115. Kia Lindroos, Now-Time/Image-Space: Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy and Art (Jyväskylä: SoPhi, 1998, pg. 11. 22 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.'43 The unspoken task inherited by us, directly from Walter Benjamin, would be expand his insights and reflections on time and history further into the domain of politics. It would be task of articulating a kairopolitics, 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. 43 Ibid, pg. 85 23 Kairoticism: Exemplary Acts, the Whatever-Messiah & Revolutionary Post-History Rowan G. Tepper, M.A., Department of Comparative Literature, Binghamton University Presented at Binghamton University PIC Conference: “The Revolution of Time, Time of Revolution,” March 26th 2011 “There is no revolution without exemplary acts... moments when revolutionary potentiality was not only present but was affirmed in a negation that, while opening a void and stopping time, also pointed toward the future...” Maurice Blanchot, May 1968 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 hopeful images “On the Concept of History.” 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 1 2 3 Maurice Blanchot, “Exemplary Acts,”Political Writings: 1953-1993, Trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 98-9. Blanchot, “Exemplary Acts,” Political Writings 1953-1993, 99. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 737. 1/14 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, 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 everrenewed 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; in fact the following reflection upon Benjamin's thesis was also published in Comité: 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. 7 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).”8 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 4 5 6 7 8 Walter Benjamin, “On The Concept of History,” Trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Volume 4, Ed. Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389-400. 395. Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 161-199. 170. Blanchot, “Exemplary Acts,”Political Writings: 1953-1993, Trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 98. Maurice Blanchot, “[A rupture in time: Revolution],” Political Writings: 1953-1993, 100. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, Trans. Ann Smock (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 114. 2/14 must be caught in passing,”9 while the kairic designates the mode of temporal experience to which kairos corresponds – experience in which time itself is invested with desire. An experience and concept of time in the kairic mode is as much a condition of possibility for revolution, for a foreseeable future to which action must be subordinated is every bit as stultifying as the constraints of the past upon the present. That revolutionary insubordination with respect to the future itself is now possible is emblematic of a break with the political thinking and epoch of modernity, for both Benjamin (as a first apostle) and for all of us, responding to the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment project of the progress of reason by recognizing that it is up to us to live in a world of experience and to fashion a future without thereby forgetting to or devaluing the present. An exigency of our time might well be to invent new ways to tell stories, to narrate our events as a history that oppresses none. How coincidental it was that the closure of history in its modern guise was announced in a book edited by Raymond Queneau, who would later take up this very task and be among the founders of the OuLiPo. 2. Kairos at the End of Modernity ...our experience is dominated by a hypertrophy of expectation. Those who diagnose the “pathology” of Modern man, such as Hans Jonas and Reinhart Koselleck, are right when they point to the prematureness grounding the symbolic dominance of the waiting and of a planning tending towards the future... the pathology does not simply consist in the fact that there exists a form of time that tends to the future... but in its form and degree.10 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,” 11 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 9 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. 10 Giacomo Marramao, Kairos: Toward an Ontology of Due Time, 58 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 12. 11 3/14 “revolution.” And “since the onset of such acceleration, the tempo of historical time has constantly been changing, and today... acceleration belongs to everyday experience...” 12 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.”13 This, of course would be the particular modernity of the Nazi apocalypse – its originality and decisively anachronistic lies in having developed techniques of 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.”14 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]15 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.” 16 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 12 13 14 15 16 Koselleck, Futures-Past, 50. Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 186. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Revised and Expanded Edition, Ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 301. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 471. Jean-Yves Lacoste, Note Sur Le Temps (Paris: PUF, 1990), 187-8. 4/14 l'ordre chronologique.”17 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, 1971 Pierre Missac, 1947 Walter Benjamin, 1940 Le 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... La 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... Le 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. 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 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.18 17 18 Lacoste, 188. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1969), 163-4. 5/14 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. .19 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... 20 – 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.” 21 And yet, “the end of exploitation, writes Horkheimer, 'is not a further acceleration of progress, but a qualitative leap out of the dimension of progress', i.e. a break in historical continuity.” 22 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. 3. La Révolution Posthistorique 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 19 20 21 22 Benjamin to Horkheimer, December 6th, 1937, cited in Michael Weingrad, “College,” 141. His translation. Also in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 16:315. Gaston Fessard, Hegel, le christianisme, et l'histoire (Paris: PUF, 1990), 145-6. Michael Löwy, “Ün Saut Hors du Progrès”L'hommage de Horkheimer a Walter Benjamin,” Archives de Philosophie, 49 (1986), 225-229. 229. Ibid, 225. 6/14 das Posthistoire23, 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. 24 At this point, our capacity for prognositication 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. Microhistory 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. A “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.¨25 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 microhistories 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 23 24 25 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-19 th century. Hendrick de Man, Vermassung und Kulturverfall (München: Lehnen, 1951), 135f, quoted in Arnold Gehlen, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 7: Einblicke, “Anmerkung des Herausgebers,” 468-9. 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. 7/14 post-war Germanies, regaining sovereignty piecemeal over a 45 year period. 26 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) 27 Kairos is rather the opening of post-histoire, and the mode of temporality proper to the condition of 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. 28 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. The event 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 selftranscendence of history; it is also the liberation of desire, a singular sovereign moment in which it is possible to “transcend without transcendence.” 29 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 (Nietzsche, BGE 274). 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”30 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. 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 26 27 28 29 30 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. Benjamin, “Paralipomena to 'On The Concept of History,'” Selected Writings, Vol 4, 401-11. 401-2. 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. Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, Trans. J. T. Swann (London: Verso, 2009), n.p. (epigraph). Benjamin,“On the Concept of History,” 392. 8/14 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.” 31 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 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 foretell 32 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,”33 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.” 34 Unexpectedly, the moment “opens itself up while denying that which limits separate beings, the instant alone is the sovereign being…”35 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.”36 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.”37 The significance of May '68 lies in the 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, Trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 226. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 142. Blanchot, Political Writings, 97. 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.] Georges Bataille, “The Sovereign,” The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Trans. Michelle and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 185-195. 187. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster,143. Blanchot, Political Writings, 91. Cf. Bataille, ON, 157. 9/14 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.” 38 Unbinding revolutionary possibilities is a matter of reliquishing 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.”39 In this Blanchot takes over and develops an insight given to us by 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.” 40 4. Going out of synch(rony): Creating community with the quodlibet-Messiahs – We are the ones we've been waiting for: Kairos and Immanence. 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.” 41 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 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,”42 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.”43 The anachrony introduced by kairos undermines the chronopolitical regime that imposes and is 38 39 40 41 42 43 Blanchot, Political Writings, 93. Blanchot, “[Communism without heirs],” Political Writings 1953-1993, 92. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 171-2. Apologies to Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, 1. Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, 165-6. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 157. 10/14 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 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.”44 We can thus sum up the revolutionary task of the quodlibet-Messiah as being first to attain to “a conception of the present as Jetztzeit shot through with splinters of messianic time.” 45 That is, to grasp that “every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.” 46 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. In this moment, “let us share eternity in order to make it transitory.”47 44 45 46 47 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 146. Benjamin, SW 4, 397. Benjamin, SW 4, 397. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 146. 11/14 Appendix: A Short History of Kairos 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. “The obsession of expectation that, in the Western experience of time, continually surprises the present by neutralizing the 'new' and having it swallowed by a future that is constantly bent toward the past.”48 This led, at the paroxysmal end of Modernity, to the highly unlikely fusion of futurism and archaism in Fascism, for instance the architecture of Nazi Germany “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.” 49 In the 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.”50 The word kairos is first found in the theory and the practice of rhetoric, designating the “proper time,” or “opportune moment” for an action. In the earliest instances of its use, kairos is understood to play 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).”51 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,” 52 the root of which, *kāl-, meaning to calculate, while kairos derives from the root *krr-, meaning “union, communion,”53 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. 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 48 49 50 51 52 53 Ibid, 61. Eric Michaud, “National Socialist Architecture as an Acceleration of Time” Translated by Christopher Fox, Critical Inquiry, Volume 19, Issue 2 (Winter 1993). Philip Sipiora, “Introduction,” in Rhetoric and Kairos, 2. Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, Volume One, Trans. Philip Krapp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 80. Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European languages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964). Boisacq, 393. 12/14 appeasement. Lucid holiness recognizes in itself the need to destroy, the necessity of a tragic outcome.” 54 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 décisif.'”55 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. 56 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). Via Hippocrates, 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 there is little chronos [chronos esti en ho kairos kai kairos esti en to ou pollos chronos].”57 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.... There it is used as a transitional or temporal concept (Verlaufsbegriff), which... leads towards a decision... due but has not yet been rendered”.58 Kairos becomes an eminently temporal-historical concept through the syncretistic development of the early Church, assimilating to kairos concepts appropriated from Judaism, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, and so forth, and in the Septuagint is bound to crisis, decision and finally to eschatology, by using the word krisis to designate the Last Judgment.. Kairos enters the philosophy of history as a secularized catergory of eschatology. This 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 , 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”59 By coming to figure as a much awaited, anticipated and desired eschatological event, kairos stands in relation with Eros. Kairos is the insistence of the now, the demand that this time, this now, 54 55 56 57 58 59 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. Émile Boisacq, Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Grecque, 2nd Ed. (Heidelberg & Paris: C. Klincksieck & C. Winters, 1923), 392. Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” Trans. Michaela Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), 357-400. 372. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 68-9. Koselleck, “Crisis,” 360-1. P. Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History & Eschatology (Boston: Brill, 2007), 130. 13/14 be unlike any other, decisive and fulfilled. Surely, “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.” 60 From about the 16th century forward, it passed to “the state enforced a monopoly on the control of the future by suppressing apocalyptic and astrological readings of the future.”61 Subsequently, “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.” 62 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 alldecisive... 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.”63Toward 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 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.”64 The idea of kairos has since entered into theological discourses: notably, those of Gaston Fessard, S.J., P. Tielhard de Chardin, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and importantly, Jean Danièlou, S.J. (with whom Bataille frequently spoke), and in philosophical discourses: Agamben, Marramao, Negri, Moutsopoulos, Konersmann (on Benjamin), and obliquely (but unmistakably) in Bataille, Blanchot, Taubes, etc. 60 61 62 63 64 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, 13. Koselleck, Futures Past, 16. Koselleck, Futures Past, 21. Paul Tillich, 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. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume Three, 369. 14/14