The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought

217 Pages·2001·0.998 MB·English

by  Heidrun Friese

The Moment
STUDIES IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT 4
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STUDIES IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
Editor: Gerard Delanty, University of Liverpool
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Essaying Montaigne
John O’Neill
The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought
edited by Heidrun Friese
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The Moment
Time and Rupture in Modern Thought
Edited by
HEIDRUN FRIESE
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
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First published 2001 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © Liverpool University Press 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored
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electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise
without the prior written permission of the publishers.
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Contents
Acknowledgements page vii
Introduction Heidrun Friese 1
1 Is it Time? Geoffrey Bennington 17
2 The Aporia of the Instant in Derrida’s Reading of Husserl
Maurizio Ferraris 33
3 Existential Moments Peter Poellner 53
4 Augen-Blicke Heidrun Friese 73
5 On Alain Badiou Simon Critchley 91
6 Instants of Diminishing Representation: The Problem of Temporal
Modalities Karl Heinz Bohrer 113
7 Poetry and the Returns of Time: Goethe’s ‘Wachstum’ and ‘Immer
und Überall’ Andrew Benjamin 135
8 ‘NOW’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time Werner Hamacher 161
Notes on Contributors 197
Index 199
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Bewußtsein könnte gar nicht über das Grau verzweifeln, hegte es nicht den Begriff von
einer verschiedenen Farbe, deren versprengte Spur im negativen Ganzen nicht fehlt.
(Greyness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbour the concept
of different colours, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative
whole.)
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to the UK Economic and Social Research
Council, whose support for the research seminar on Social Theory and Major So-
cial Transformations made possible the discussions at the Social Theory Centre of
the University of Warwick on which this book draws, as well as to the European
University Institute, Florence for the support provided for the seminar series on
The Languages of the Political. A note of thanks is also due to my colleagues at the
University of Warwick for the warm interest with which they approached me and
my work. Peter Wagner knows what the singular moments of our endless dia-
logues mean to me.
Heidrun Friese
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Introduction

HEIDRUN FRIESE
Were this then this ungraspable something … the moment … this ungraspable
something that does not belong to any time.
Plato
This gradual crumbling, which did not alter the physiognomy of the whole, is
interrupted by the rising that, a lightning flash, creates in one stroke the forma-
tion of the new world.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel1
The ‘moment’, Momentum, movere, that which moves, that which irrefutably van-
ishes. Clin d’œil, en un clin d’œil, en un temps très court, an ‘infinitely short space of
time’, Augenblick, the ‘blink of an eye’, glance, eye, the eyelid, a steady, unperceivable
rhythm of opening and closing, the infinitely short interruption of seeing that
only allows to see. And, at the same time, an opening glance, by which we are
being seen, an open eye that lets the glance abide.
The ‘moment’, this is a word which addresses particular relations to time and
temporality; a word that questions the empty continuity of an infinite linear time
in which one moment devours the other one like Chronos devoured his children;
a word that asks for fine rifts, sudden fractures and interruptions in such perma-
nence. This is also a double word, since philosophical and scientific traditions
linked the eyesight, the glance, the faculty of vision to cognition, knowledge and
theoria; they have posed an original relation of curiosity, of seeing and knowing, of
looking and cognising, of sighting and conceptualising, and have endowed these
relations with a specific reference to time.
1
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Introduction
The ‘Moment’, therefore, is a word that has become a central concept in all at-
tempts at questioning the idea of empty, homogeneous and continuous time. The
social sciences, in the form in which they emerged at the turn of the nineteenth
century, commonly declared time to be a function of structure, continuity and eter-
nity, not least with a view to postulating an ontological stability and a lawlike regu-
larity of social life.2 Philosophy, in some contrast, avails itself of an old – even if
manifold – heritage in thinking the moment, a concept the elaboration of which,
within different strands of modern philosophy, reaches from romanticism to Søren
Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche to Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger or
Walter Benjamin. In these lines of thought, the moment negates the empty con-
tinuum of time – and, that is, a view of time as an empty stretch of objective and
quantifiable units in which past and future are separated from one another, yet at
the same time connected to each other, at the point of the boundary of the ‘now’.
The moment is the decisive caesura, which bids its farewell to the irrevocable past
and opens up towards that which is to come, to the not-yet of the future. The sig-
nificant, decisive, historic moment – which calls for presence of mind, and needs
to be grasped – demonstrates that neither the time of the singular human beings
and their – more or less determined – actions3 nor history and, with it, language
unfolds within a continuous and chronological measure of time, but in tremen-
dous disruptions, leaps and breaks. While philosophy remained able to think phe-
nomena from the discontinuity of the moment, the social sciences have banned
the interruption, the sudden loss of context, the caesura from their perspectives.
They have privileged identity and regularity over singularity and structure over
event to be able to establish the temporal tenacity of social institutions, the steadi-
ness of repetitions in routine actions and societal life and, thus, have grandiosely
ever again confirmed the continuity of temporal connections.
The moment, therefore, demands the questioning of all too common notions of
time, of past, present and future; it demands that we think about uniqueness and
repetition, identity and difference, suddenness and duration, rupture and conti-
nuity. As the contributions to this volume illustrate, addressing the moment – its
inaccessibility and unattainability – inevitably requires us to engage in questions
that concern vision, the glance of the eye in its relation to cognition and theory. In its
complexity, the moment does not just place demands upon the thinking of pres-
ence and representation, of temporality and historicity, of the closure or incom-
pleteness of history, time, eternity and rupture, but can open up the question of the
relation of decision, event and authenticity.
The following contributions unfold in a complex rhythm created by these as-
pects and by the paradoxes of the moment. At the same time, they demonstrate
how such manifold philosophical and literary heritage can be read today – and be
2
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