Binghamton University

Doctoral Candidate, Comparative Literature

Other Affiliations: Boston College, Philosophy
Goucher College, Philosophy

Adjunct Lecturer

Harpur College

Thesis Title: The Transcendentals of Revolution: Instants/Instance of Kairos

About

My dissertation and current research are principally concerned with the conditions of possibility for real radical change in politics, history and modes of thought and writing. The central concept in play is time, thought as kairos, as conditioning the very possibility of revolution. Drawing principally on the work of Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, I aim to construct a secular-political conception of kairological time, all the while retaining elements of Christian formulations, such as those of Paul Tillich and Fr. Jean Danielou, S.J.

In the course of this work, the interplay and affinities between Bataille and Benjamin come to the fore, and I advance a thesis of reciprocal influence between these two seminal figures respectively at the roots of post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School. Thus, my project seeks to understand the affinities between these two schools of thought through this encounter, and in the context of their mutual rejection of Alexandre Kojève's End of History Thesis.

---Introduction to Kairoticism----

The present dissertation, engages with and builds upon recent conceptualizations of time as kairos,as qualitative, as opposed to chronological, quantitative time (G. Agamben and G. Marramao). My aim is to construct an understanding of temporality qua kairos, without reference to essence or static being, in connection to eros/desire - in view of which I coin the term 'kairic' (or, when the erotic dimension is to be emphasized, 'kairotic') - that is both descriptively and practically efficacious in terms of radical or revolutionary change on the personal, social, historical and political registers. Under what circumstances and on what conditions vis-à-vis temporality does such change succeed or fail? How can this understanding be mobilized? And, how to think this without falling into an eschatological / millenarian (i.e. Fascist/'totalitarian') discourse? These are the principal questions. Finally, there is the intellectual - historical question as to the relative dominance of chronology in modernity and the preoccupation with the experiential dimension of time (i.e. A re-emergence of a dualism or multiplicity in thinking and speaking of temporality) that characterizes late modernity (Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard, Proust, etc.) and the epoch (the term 'postmodernity' has endured too much denigration and ridicule to rehabilitate, let alone use without here) that succeeded it (Bataille, Benjamin, et seq). Key theoretical sources not already mentioned include Paul Tillich, Jean Danièlou, Reinhart Koselleck, Maurice Blanchot, Jacob Taubes, Gaston Fessard, Alexandre Kojève, the negative/mystical theological tradition, and to a lesser extent, Foucault, and the Russians Lev Shestov, Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev. More simply, the aim is to delineate the conditions of possibility (the transcendentals) of changing oneself and the world (revolution).

I should like to begin A very short piece published during May of 1968, published in the first and only issue of Comité by Maurice Blanchot (which, fortuitously, appears in the very recent (2010) English translation of Écrits Politiques: 1953-1993), entitled [A rupture in time: Revolution] in the form of a reflection on the fifteenth thesis of Walter Benjamin’s On The Concept of History, In this text, he writes:

"As soon as, through the movement of forces tending toward rupture, revolution appears possible, in a possibility that is not abstract but rather historically and concretely determined, It is in these moments, at these instants, that evolution 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." (Blanchot, Political Writings)

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).” (Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster) It is this moment, which is always now, and yet never present, in relation to our unquenchable desire both for it and that for which it serves as a transcendental, that is at the center of this work. The word kairos signifies “the opening of a discontinuity in a continuum... a decisive moment that must be caught in passing,” while the kairotic designates the mode of temporal experience to which kairos corresponds – experience in which time itself is invested with desire.

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