Staging The Non-Event: Laura Hengehold

04Hengehold (bc/d) 8/4/02 1:39 pm Page 337
Laura Hengehold
Staging the non-event

Material for revolution in Kant and
Foucault
Abstract Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, and following
geographical and technological changes in the global economy, theorists in
Europe as well as the United States have lamented the confusion and
emotional disengagement of many groups formerly identified with the left.
This paper addresses the Kantian origins of the idea that ‘revolution’,
however defined (or deferred), is the only plausible image for effective
historical engagement capable of motivating spectators to action. Drawing
on Foucault’s inquiries into conditions for the possibility of ‘heroizing’ the
present, I examine two frameworks for understanding the ontological
impact of historical models for ‘eventfulness’, those offered by Heidegger
and Bergson. I then explore their implication for debates between
Foucauldian theorists over the technological and bodily bases required to
recognize the optimistic moral significance Kant attributed to revolution in
practices characterizing the ‘new capitalism’.
Key words Bergson · Foucault · Heidegger · historiography · Kant ·
revolution
What understanding of the relationship between being, time and the

desire for action underlies the Euro-American left’s emotional response
to recent changes in its self-conception? Paolo Virno describes the Italian
left’s emotional situation as increasingly marked by ‘sentiments of disen-
chantment’ such as opportunism, fear and cynicism (1996: 14). Speaking
for the French, François Ewald laments the widespread conviction that
significant political events will no longer punctuate history or alter the
status quo (1997: 208). According to American journalist William
Greider, the left is ‘pinned down in rearguard models, defending social
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 28 no 3 • pp. 337–358

PSC
Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
[0191-4537(200205)28:3;337–358;022814]
Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at TEXAS A & M INTL UNIV on March 14, 2015
338
Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (3)
structures built by the past’ (1997: 36); spectacular increases in inter-
national investment and production, the shift from an industrial to an
information-based workforce coupled with attacks on the welfare state
in the older democracies, and the fall of the Soviet and other affiliated
bureaucratic socialist regimes ‘[make] people feel small and helpless’
(1997: 15). Each of these changes, of course, has improved the lives of
certain groups, but it has also effectively reduced the political or finan-
cial autonomy available to others and created profound and volatile
discouragement with the viability of democracy. Some celebrate this
supposed ‘end of history’ as the advent of an era in which political
differences, including conflicts over the distribution of material
resources, can be ironed out by investors so that human nature can be
uncontroversially identified with the capacity for indefinite consump-
tion. But many are profoundly dispirited by this prognosis, and feel the
dissolution of the imagined revolutionary project as a genuine loss. This
paper seeks to explore the notion of ‘eventfulness’ implicit in their con-
fusion.
Two approaches to the relationship between being, time and desire
can be found in the work of Michel Foucault. Understanding these
approaches in greater detail allows us to assess the import of debates
over Foucault’s conception of modernity as ‘heroization’ of the present
in what seems to be a distinctly ‘un-heroic’ time. What interests me is
the place that a certain ideal notion of eventfulness associated with
revolution had in a fantasy about history shared by many on the left,
especially those untouched by the worst depredations of capitalism, such
that its loss threatens to strip remaining historical opportunities and
struggles of their potential meaning. When I speak of the revolutionary
model as a ‘fantasmatic’ condition for political engagement, I mean that
this model has provided many individuals with an imaginative frame of
reference for action whether or not specifically ‘revolutionary’ activity
was an element of their empirical experience. As Kant was one of the
first to suggest, images of historical change, while themselves histori-
cally mutable, also ‘measure’ the desires, pleasures and displeasures
provoked by social practices. Like analysands acknowledging lost loves
in order to find love again, therefore, we must take stock of our invest-
ments in the staging of history anchored and measured by revolution.
In a famous passage from Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, ‘revol-
ution’ is presented as the methodological and political model through
which we become capable of recognizing historical opportunities as
meaningful steps toward justice. ‘If the course of human affairs seems
so senseless to us,’ he writes,
. . . perhaps it lies in a poor choice of position from which we regard it.

Viewed from the earth, the planets sometimes move backwards, sometimes
339
Hengehold: Staging the non-event
forward, and sometimes not at all. But if the standpoint selected is the sun,
an act which only reason can perform, according to the Copernican
hypothesis they move constantly in their regular course. (1992: 149)
But a (Copernican) revolution in the observer’s standpoint is not, in

itself, sufficient to identify a sign of meaningful moral progress in
historical events. An exemplary event is also required – not the revol-
ution of 1789 itself, but the selfless solidarity which this revolution
inspired in the hearts of observers around Europe. ‘The revolution of a
gifted people which we have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or
miscarry’; Kant warns,
. . . it may be filled with misery and atrocities to the point that a sensible
man, were he boldly to hope to execute it successfully the second time,
would never resolve to make the experiment at such cost – this revolution,
I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged
in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on
enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this
sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition
in the human race. (1992: 153)
Perhaps it seems circular to suggest that observers’ enthusiastic desire

to find evidence for the triumph of justice is our best evidence that justice
will indeed prevail. Nevertheless, Kant’s diagnosis illuminates something
important about the role played by revolutions in the type of fantasy
that enables spectators to become participants in historical action.
Whether or not we can or would wish to repeat the revolutionary anti-
colonial and Marxist projects of the past century, we spectators suffer
from the seeming absence of contemporary events embodying an
ongoing desire to evaluate and ‘measure’ the world with respect to its
progress in justice. Even if one can enumerate the many reasons why a
logic of simultaneous and overlapping struggles tends both to preserve
the democratic character of social movements and to be a more effec-
tive use of popular power than the search for an all-encompassing
‘fundamental contradiction’, many on the left are nostalgic for political
structures that provide this emotional focus.1
Although he claims to find evidence of a moral predisposition in the
revolutionary enthusiasm of his time, Kant warns that technically it is
impossible to assume the Copernican standpoint ‘when it is a question
of the prediction of free actions’ (1992: 149). The existence of such a
standpoint – the standpoint of Providence itself, within which our hap-
piness would be compatible with a moral vocation – is a necessary
assumption for moral action but a merely problematic object for
thought (in the sense that the noumenon, likewise, is a problematic
object (Kant, 1996: A254/B310)). The empirical event of the French
Revolution took the stage in 1789, involving certain actors and props
340
drawn, according to Marx, from Roman dressing-rooms (1963: 15), but
to Kant it also represented the existence of an ahistorical desire for
justice implicit within and beneath empirical events. Kant’s own dis-
course on moral progress, we see, is marked by identification with a
‘scene’ he himself recognizes as only a product of theoretical imagin-
ation, and yet the very attractiveness of the scene produces real effects.2
The search for a proper standpoint contributes in its own way to the
staging of moral progress, and in bringing out actors’ words or reveal-
ing the subtlety of their interaction with the audience and outside world,
this standpoint alters how audience members view themselves as well
as the actors; it changes their very being.
Analyzing the way in which revolution has functioned as a fantas-
matic sign and standpoint for the left may enable us to resist the oppor-
tunism and cynicism which are encouraged by new capitalism, which
favors psychological skills and responses such as ‘habitual mobility, the
ability to keep pace with extremely rapid conversions, adaptability in
every enterprise, flexibility in moving from one group of rules to
another, aptitude for both banal and omnilateral linguistic interaction,
command of the flow of information, and the ability to navigate among
limited possible alternatives’ (Virno, 1996: 14).3 But such an analysis
may also protect us against the desire to replace ethically significant
emotional investments in the image of revolution with a populist or
religious programme, especially given that these economic and political
changes have disorganized but not eliminated or invalidated efforts to
bring about a geographically and culturally egalitarian world. To be
effective, finally, the proposed analysis must take into consideration the
way in which everyday and philosophical understandings of ‘eventful-
ness’, what counts as ‘currentness’ or ‘actualité’, shape us as beings
capable of consumption, labor and political action.
In a lecture from 1983 entitled ‘What is Revolution?’ Foucault sug-
gested that ‘The two questions: “What is the Aufklärung?” and “What
to do with the will for revolution?” together define the field of philo-
sophical questioning that is concerned with what we are in our present’
(1997: 99). In other essays and lectures, Foucault identifies Aufklärung
itself with curiosity about the changing nature of the contemporary in
its own right, as opposed to its significance for a historical totality or
future achievement. Aufklärung illuminates the difference that ‘today
introduce[s] with respect to yesterday’ (1997: 105), separating the time-
worn stage and script from the novelty of this, tonight’s, performance –
and allowing us to reflect upon the potential limitations of the stage.
Although ‘modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of
the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of
vertigo in the face of the passing moment’, for Baudelaire and implicitly,
for Foucault, ‘being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting
341
this perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain
attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult
attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the
present instant, nor behind it, but within it’ (1997: 114).
As reflection on the qualities differentiating the present from the
past, Aufklärung need not take the form of reflection on an empirical
revolution. For Foucault, therefore, the question ‘What to do with the
will for revolution?’ or perhaps ‘How to heroize the present?’ is con-
ceptually separate from the question ‘How to measure change or
progress?’ Perhaps we have inappropriately confused the two questions,
then, if the demise of ‘revolution’ as a fantasmatic standpoint or
measure implicit in the left-wing staging of every political event has
managed to cast the effectiveness of ‘actual’, ongoing, empirical revo-
lutions or insurrections into profound doubt. Recall Kant’s advice that
the disorder of human history arises in part from ‘the poor choice of
position from which we regard it’. The props, actors and struggles are
present, but arranged so poorly that we are unable to recognize any
sense or progress therein. In the wake of the post-Soviet transformation,
injustices remain and many oppositional movements continue to act,
but their ability to radically change the ‘normal’ balance of profit and
starvation seems more fragile, the ‘normality’ of war more likely to reign
supreme.
How should we understand the relationship between the emotional
perspective or ‘staging’ of the present and our being as actors or spec-
tators? Foucault’s work consistently tries to undo a certain under-
standing of the world as a simultaneous, unified scene in which actors
and beings share a common ‘meaning’ of being. ‘European space is not
space in its entirety;’ he cautioned in a 1978 interview with Japanese
director Moriaki Wantanabe; ‘one lives in a series of polymorphous
spaces.’ Moreover, ‘we are not confronted with only one single history
. . . there are many of them; many times, many durations [durées], many
speeds, which tangle with one another, cross and thereby form events.
An event is not a segment of time, but fundamentally the point of inter-
section between two durations, two speeds, two evolutions, two lines
of history’ (Foucault, 1994: III, 581) – many of whose elements,
moreover, lack ‘being’ and have a fantasmatic character from one
another’s standpoints.4
Foucault’s understanding of history draws on that proposed by the
Annales school, which contested the idea of ‘a single time in the
Hegelian or Bergsonian manner, a species of grand flux which would
carry everything away’ when in fact ‘there are different histories that
are superimposed’ on one another (1994: III, 580).5 Fernand Braudel,
for example, argued that the temporality or rate at which meaningful
changes could be observed in maritime routes differed greatly from the
342
rate at which alterations arose in the natural environment, staple prices,
or political regimes. Arlette Farge, likewise, points out that a history
which highlights the important changes in men’s work patterns may
completely obscure those causes and conditions which were involved in
the historical evolution of women’s work (1997: 21; 1994: 33). This
approach to historiography has important ontological implications, for
it suggests that certain kinds of beings can only ‘be’ effective or ‘actual’
for historical actors and witnesses over certain spans of time; thus
women or other social groups disappear from many standard peri-
odizations of history and their lives appear incapable of genuine change
or agency.
In the above interviews and in texts such as The Order of Things
(1973), one can discern a veritable – and uncompleted – war between
conceptions of temporality and eventfulness, in which Heidegger and
Bergson play important roles.6 It is useful to ask what ‘heroizing the
present’ would mean to each of these thinkers in order to understand
how we would have to think about our present in order to become
beings ‘capable of justice’. Heidegger, for example, is known for chal-
lenging the idea that ‘being’ paradigmatically means ‘being consciously
present’ to ourselves and others, where past and future are mere ‘vari-
ations’ or ‘failures’ to be present (1962: 425). Rather, the specific
contours and opportunities for thought and action presently confronting
us are shaped by our past and given coherence by the certitude that our
future is limited by mortality.
The ordinary understanding of time as a series of ‘nows’, Heidegger
argues in Being and Time, is logically secondary to the movement of
coming-to-be and passing-away which brings humans, nature and cre-
ations into involvement with one another. The ecstatic temporality
underlying this ordinary understanding is both a condition and an effect
of Dasein’s active efforts to actualize possibilities. Thus time is rooted
in being, specifically the being of those (Dasein) who question them-
selves about being. But the tendency to think of presence as ‘nowness’
and to understand temporality as a linear flow of events which can be
‘nows’ makes it difficult for Dasein to recognize the extent to which its
possibilities for involvement and action in the present must be drawn
from ongoing involvement with past events and gain significance by
contrast to the possibility of future ‘impossibility’, i.e. death (1962:
434–5). As with other elements of our historical world, we inherit these
everyday understandings of time and being from prior generations, but
must actively take them up and criticize the ways in which they reframe
the past and future in becoming present for us. The most authentic
meaning of Dasein’s being, according to Being and Time, is thus the
kind of involvement with our past that ‘actualizes’ certain inherited
possibilities for action and speech in light of a necessarily limited future.
343
Time, he writes, is ‘the making-present which interprets itself – in other
words, that which has been interpreted and is addressed in the “now” ’
(1962: 460). The task of philosophical thought, consequently, is one of
uncovering the historical processes through which Westerners came to
understand being in terms of the stable presence of objects, an ability
to be ‘counted upon’ or ‘resourced’ which is exploited by modern capi-
talist technology.
The experience – or choice – of authentic temporality creates collec-
tive historical involvement in two ways. First, the past we are able to
reinterpret is one that involves collective meanings and actions.
Secondly, the fact that our interpretation of time is always conditioned
by present and future concerns requires it to make reference to the
concern of others and to assume a provisionally public form (1962:
464). In the end, however, publicly calculated, measured time is only a
derivative of the decisive event (Augenblick) in which the interdepen-
dence of past, present and future is acknowledged and affirmed. It is
from public measures peculiar to the technology of timekeeping and
production that we derive our ordinary sense of presence as ‘nowness’,
as well as the public attention to and desire for novelty that we have
come to recognize as modern.
In other words, our choice of a rate at which to mark time’s passage
betrays certain interests, including an interest in the persistence of
whatever we perceive as continuous beneath the flux of events:
Dating does not simply relate to something present-at-hand; this kind of
relating has itself the character of measuring. Of course the number which
we get by measuring can be read off immediately. But this implies that when
a stretch is to be measured, we understand that our standard is, in a way,
contained in it; that is, we determine the frequency of its presence in that
stretch. . . . The idea of a standard implies unchangingness; this means that
for everyone at any time the standard, in its stability, must be present-at-
hand. (1962: 469–70)
But we forget about these interests as soon as the chosen yardstick is

cut and marked, or the dossier filed away; it confronts us as a ready-
made unit. As Heidegger continues, ‘Measuring time is essentially such
that it is necessary to say “now”; but in obtaining the measurement,
we, as it were, forget what has been measured as such, so that nothing
is to be found except a number and a stretch’ (1962: 469–71). What
counts as the next big thing depends, among other things, on how often
the news comes out.
Modernity’s enthusiasm for novelty, according to Being and Time,
forgets that things are never new ‘in themselves’ but are new only on
the basis of expectations and desires established in the past; unfortu-
nately, the very preference for the new directs modern attention away
344
from modernity’s own historical preconditions, rendering the past
further ‘unrecognizable’ (1962: 444). Later, in the essay ‘Age of the
World Picture’, Heidegger identifies modernity with a way of thinking
that attributes the most proper being to stable, mathematizable and
ahistorical phenomena or aspects of phenomena even when it investi-
gates the past:
The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as
picture. The word ‘picture’ [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild]
that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before.
In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that
particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for
everything that is. (1977: 134)
Heidegger thus heroizes the present ‘despite’ modernity, and despite the
pragmatic demands of public coexistence, by encouraging us to
‘measure’ time in terms of time’s own mutually appropriative engage-
ment with the coming-into-being and passing-away of beings, rather
than in terms of the movement of individual beings such as celestial
bodies, clocks, or factory inventories (1972: 21–2). But the concept or
meaning of ‘being’ remains the constant thread of Heidegger’s own
inquiry into the temporality and historicality of societies and their arti-
facts; ontology, even when it results in a temporal conception of being,
lends unity to the ‘event’ that we call historical/ontological reflection.
Although Foucault characterizes Bergson’s thought regarding time as
unitary and evolutionary (1994: III, 576, 580), the latter’s understand-
ing of the present is surprisingly compatible with Foucault’s own effort
to think of historical temporality as essentially plural. For Bergson, the
present is the most dense or confused point of human interaction with
others and the world, not the stable basis for its mathematical ossifica-
tion. Bergson considers the distinction between the meaning of ‘being’
and the meaning of ‘being consciously apprehended’, therefore, as one
of degree and not of kind. All of matter, he writes in Matter and Memory,
is always given at any time (as ‘present’ in Heidegger’s terms). Only
entities we have previously encountered and might yet encounter once
again in varying forms can be the object of conscious representations,
but entities with which we are involved in the ‘present’ are too close to
permit any latitude in our actions or responses (1991: 37–9). The
computer on which I type, the chair on which I sit or am about to sit,
are so involved with my action that they form part of the very system of
my body; I cannot distance myself from them without additional con-
scious or physical effort. The present is for Bergson an indefinite duration
on whose basis objects of consciousness and action are measured or
delineated by thought; it is not what it means for them to ‘be’. And
because the present is indefinite in this way, Bergson is unable to use
345
‘being’ as a common reference point for reflecting philosophically upon
the duration and change of historical phenomena:
May we not conceive, for instance, that the irreducibility of two perceived
colors is due mainly to the narrow duration into which are contracted the
billions of vibrations which they execute in one of our moments? If we
could stretch out this duration, that is to say, live it at a slower rhythm,
should we not, as the rhythm slowed down, see these colors pale and
lengthen into successive impressions, still colored, no doubt, but nearer and
nearer to coincidence with pure vibrations? In cases where the rhythm of
the movement is slow enough to tally with the habits of our consciousness
– as in the case of the deep notes of the musical scale, for instance – do we
not feel that the quality perceived analyses itself into repeated and success-
ive vibrations, bound together by an inner continuity? (1991: 203)
Bergson, like Heidegger, objects to characterizations of time as a
linear sequence of ‘nows’ (1960: 121). However, this has more to do
with the fact that a linear conception of time presumes that beings and
actions are temporally homogeneous and can be ranged next to one
another simultaneously, as if time were simply another way of being
‘spatial’. The indefinite nature of the temporal overlap and contact
between Bergson’s beings can be compared to the structured openness
of Heidegger’s futurity. For Bergson, however, presence, the past, and
futurity are not necessarily moments of ‘authentic temporality’ because
there is ultimately no common measure to the presencing of different
beings, including that provided by Dasein’s own ‘Augenblick’ or seizure
of the past in light of mortality. There are only particular rhythms that
coexist and strike the embodied perceiver more or less quickly as having
visual or melodic harmony. And what is more, Bergson suggests that we
are implicated in durations corresponding to acts and beings that are not
yet conceivable because they remain unfinished. These involvements, too,
shape our being in ways that seem neither present, nor past, nor future.
From Heidegger, Foucault seems to have inherited a profound
interest in the ways language shapes our philosophical and scientific
understanding of the being of beings (such as madness, life, or language
itself), as well as the ways in which this linguistic and ontological frame
is capable of changing dramatically over history. But perhaps as a result
of his philosophical proximity to Deleuze at certain points in his career,
Foucault’s work seems to bear traces of the Bergsonian idea that ‘pres-
encing’ is an intensely conflicted event out of which beings, individuals
and practices are identified by thought and come to take up roles in con-
sciousness and action.7 In fact, a careful reading of these two thinkers
suggests that Foucault would more likely object to Bergson’s charac-
terization of space as necessarily unified and continuous than he would
object to Bergsonian duration as an overly spatialized, linear evolution.
In his books, Foucault explains,
346
I try to seize an event which appeared to me and seems important for our
current events [‘actualité’] even though it is past [tout en étant un événe-
ment antérieur]. For example, for madness, it seems to me that there was,
at a given moment, in the Western world, a link between madness and non-
madness; there was, at another moment, a certain way of taking into
account the intensity of crime and the human problem posed by crime. It
seems to me that we repeat all these events. We repeat them in our actu-
alité, and I am trying to identify the event under whose sign we were born,
the event that continues to touch us [nous traverser]. (1994: III, 574)
Like unconscious fantasies that continue to shape an individual’s action,

even though other aspects of her personality or his surroundings may
change, the ‘event’ is a scene which both enables and limits historical
agency. We can do many of the things we do because we have been
subtly put ‘onstage’ by the enclosure of madness or the creation of sur-
veillance and disciplinary technologies, but the fact that our stage has
this scenery and not some other, a proscenium this tall and not some
other height, affects what it occurs to us to do and say (Veyne, 1997:
154–5).8 Every time we act, we reactivate and reinforce this set-up.
Thus, on the one hand, the ‘event’ is that which is repeated every time
we act, a stage characterized by a certain degree of light and a certain
positioning of microphones, which must be viewed from a particular
distance to make sense to the spectator. But on the other hand, this event
includes all the myriad entities which the spectator can see as a result
of his or her distance from the stage, as well as all those virtual actions
performed by actors too subtly or quickly to be noticed by the audience,
and the longer-term events such as the contractual relations binding
actors and management, governing the building lease, or even enabling
spectators to pay for their tickets – transactions and relationships that
rarely ‘take the stage’ except, perhaps, when they fail, and the building
is sold, the actors go on strike, or subscriptions shrink.
Now, paradoxically, our present seems to be characterized less by
the repetition of an event than by that of a ‘non-event’; the end of revol-
ution. It is not even that revolutions cease to be staged in various parts
of the world – certainly wars are in full swing – but rather that the stage
on which they appeared to spectators and potential participants has
shrunk, or become fatally dim. How can a ‘non-event’ take the stage?
Like any other event, according to the above description, it arises at ‘the
point of intersection between two durations, two speeds, evolutions,
two lines of history’. But in this case the speed at which we regard the
scene or our distance from the staged action is either too great or too
small to let us find what we were expecting, or to recognize what’s
‘actually’ happening.
For sociologist François Ewald, this ‘non-event’ is a crisis without
precedent. ‘We are profoundly marked – it is a fundamental philosophical
347
difficulty today, I believe – by this idea that nothing more can happen. It
. . . seems that one can no longer produce events, that things and time
are constituted in such a way that, whatever one does . . . time and
meanings have become immobilized’ (1997: 207–8).
It is clear that the end of revolution and the end of history are the same
event, an event in the consciousness of time. It is a time which is transformed
into a sort of infinite space, a time which becomes an eternal present. When
one lives time as in a revolutionary hypothesis, one understands it as some-
thing that can be essentially changed, which can be essentially interrupted,
split [scindé]; when one lives the end of revolution, time takes on a kind of
calm, of terrifying immobility and leads to an action which can only be of
an administrative, a managerial order: one lives the end of time, and then
one keeps busy, since nothing more can happen. (1997: 207)
As a result, he suspects that the explanation of ‘événementalization’

offered in Foucault’s 1978 interview with the Japanese director Moriaki
Wantanabe (1994: III, 571–95) must be supplemented with the analysis
of modernity he offered in his 1984 essay on Enlightenment. If, in 1978,
Foucault explained his work as an attempt to identify ‘the event under
whose sign we are born’, in 1984 he stressed that the philosophical act
of identifying this event ‘interrupted’ its power to determine us and pre-
sented us with the option of setting the lights differently, moving chairs
forward or back, speeding or slowing the musical effects. In calling
attention to an unexamined framing element of the action, it altered the
action, and thereby participated in ‘actualizing’ a different scene. Now,
for known or unknown reasons, it has become clear that we cannot
effectively understand our political action under the sign of ‘revolution’,
neither that of the liberal 18th-century revolutions nor that of Marxist
struggle. What do explain both the goals and habits of public and
private action are ‘norms’, but the ‘norm’ neither inspires us with spec-
tatorly enthusiasm nor enables us to justify demands for increasing
liberty and dignity.
The norm in Surveillir et Punir is the description of what counts as a
common measure in a given group, which lets us say: here is the instru-
ment by means of which we moderns measure ourselves, as we render our-
selves comparable, commensurable. Now this question here – how does
one man become commensurable with another? – is a difficult philo-
sophical question. It is the very question of justice. You can only speak of
justice, that is to say equality, from the moment when you introduce a
measure, a principle of commensurability. . . . Today . . . we live precisely
in a crisis of measure without precedent. We have no more common
measure and we do not know if we can have one. (1997: 209)
If our actualité, and especially that of our political institutions, arises at

the crossroads of revolution and normalization, we are faced with an
348
ontological crisis, for creatures and events can meaningfully evolve in a
revolutionary theatre while the being of those who act in relation to a
norm has already been ‘set’ or ‘measured’ under a given set of sup-
posedly optimal or natural circumstances. In this sense, the end of revol-
ution implies risking the end to a historical understanding of political
events altogether; some atrocities are unfortunate natural deviations
from a natural economic and ecological status quo, that’s it. Therefore
Ewald seeks an effective ‘interruption’ of the normalizing stage.
In response to Ewald, Bruno Moroncini argues that the ‘end of
revolution’ is the end of a particular way of staging history and not the
dehistoricalization of the stage. Both Moroncini and Ewald agree that
war – military, economic and ecological – continues to characterize our
present. As Foucault himself noted in the above interview, ‘European
space is not space in its entirety; one lives in a series of polymorphous
spaces’. Moroncini, drawing on Foucault’s 1976 lecture course on the
rise of modern ‘raison d’état’, even suggests that war is the best possible
characterization of the motley elements – curtains, props, actors,
management office and audience – which go to make up the politically
staged event (1998: 114–15). Western modernity has tried to charac-
terize this war theoretically, as an object of knowledge, in terms of a
state formation which is either already achieved, or yet to be formed,
or in the process of being seized by one social formation or another.
Thus the revolutionary model of events is profoundly implicated in the
overall strategy for winning the war by interpreting it – and its inhabi-
tants – as knowable elements of a state. But according to Moroncini,
the end of the revolutionary model, far from freezing the stage, allows
us to reconceptualize this war as a matter of practice or ethos; it stages
our individualization differently, allowing us to take a far more active
role in our own individualization, and alters what we are by altering
the distances and media through which we recognize ourselves. Thus,
‘actualité itself ceases to be the object of a savoir in order to become a
manner of being [être], a form of life. . . . To prepare the present as space
of actuality, that is to say as repetition of a previous event, is already in
itself, a form of subjectivation and therefore the reengagement of a war
against discipline’ (Moroncini, 1998: 120).
The question of how staging reveals or conceals events from us by
focusing our attention on some intervals of action rather than others is
one that directly involves our ‘media’ for apprehending events and
beings, whether bodily or electronic, as Wantanabe noted in his immedi-
ate reaction to Foucault’s comments: ‘What you say regarding secret
events seems very important, especially since the inflation of events or
the mass-media overvalorization of all events risks disqualifying events
as events; one develops a sort of mistrust for events, which are only
representations carried by the web of the mass media’ (1994: III, 574).
349
This problem is also important for our evaluation of the respective merits
and demerits of Ewald and Moroncini’s reactions to the ‘end of revol-
ution’. It is not even that the mass media, tending to represent the inter-
ests of diversified first-world corporations, have framed the end of the
cold war as the end to any essential, meaningful conflict or questioning
of the resultant economic order. It is rather that the varying technolo-
gies and practices of labor, private interaction and consumption that
characterize this ‘new world order’ seem to stage the events that happen
at a pace and distance from which our actualité makes little sense.
The raw materials for the statist/revolutionary arrangement of dis-
ciplined selves, like the raw materials for work on the self, are always
bodies and practices actualized in varying ways. Discipline and Punish
described some of the techniques through which bureaucrats, prison
wardens, educators, military leaders and industrial engineers trained the
mass of workers to break down unruly and idiosyncratic gestures into
smaller and smaller parts, and then recombine them in more efficient
ways so as to become individuals – but to become individuals in a
similar and easily recognizable manner. Discipline, by contrast to earlier
measures of time which discouraged idleness,
. . . arranges a positive economy; it poses the principle of a theoretically
ever-growing use of time: exhaustion rather than use; it is a question of
extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each
moment, ever more useful forces. This means that one must seek to inten-
sify the use of the slightest moment, as if time, in its very fragmentation,
were inexhaustible or as if, at least by an ever more detailed internal
arrangement, one could tend towards an ideal point at which one main-
tained maximum speed and maximum efficiency. (1977: 154)
These techniques, which serve various structures of domination

(capitalist, administrative, sexist), define the being of modern indi-
viduals. The aesthetic technologies of feminization, for example,
regulate women’s everyday regimen, insert them effectively into the
labor force, but also detach the significant rhythms of their lives from
the rhythms of career and citizenship recognized and valorized by the
state and business. Similarly, informational technologies focus and
regulate the concerns of the individuals who consume their products
as well as those who produce the raw materials and labor for their
distribution. Commodities themselves, however humble, increasingly
mediate membership in social groups and the rhythm of their use or
replacement is an important indicator of an individual’s ‘belonging’.9
Media and the rate at which they update the public or allow its interest
to lapse ensure that the continuities of workers’ lives center on their
employment and structure their access to historical events in which
they might or might not become participants. Each of these practical
350
ensembles puts individuals in relation to themselves and others at rates
which have profound physical and emotional connotations, enabling
them to find order and significance in their activity as well as introdu-
cing suffering and ambivalence. They have an ontological significance
in that they govern how often we are able or required to reflect upon
the nature of our present and thus limit the extent to which we can vary
those rates according to a different vision of who we are and what we
would like to do. ‘The tempo of these small-scale periodicities’, Arjun
Appadurai notes, ‘may be set in more than one longue durée, with the
processes implied by history and genealogy creating multiple temporal-
ities for any given practice’ (1996: 74).
The body is a privileged locus for intensifying and recognizing
conflict within the present. In their sicknesses, stress, emotional suffer-
ing, and outbreaks of violence, bodies reflect a certain staging of
elements which may seem private and accidental but takes on a public
significance when regarded from the proper perspective. As Bartky
notes, ‘sometimes, instances of resistance appear to spring from the
introduction of new and conflicting factors into the lives of the domi-
nated: The juxtaposition of old and new and the resulting incoherence
or “contradiction” may make submission to the old ways seem increas-
ingly unnecessary’ (1990: 81). But the era of the ‘end of work’, at least
in the older industrialized countries, has forced individuals to fracture
their activities and often to inhabit scenes spanning two or more coun-
tries in order to survive under uncertain employment conditions and
employer demands for adaptability rather than specific skills.10
As families move to new locations, or as children move before older gener-

ations, or as grown sons and daughters return from time spent in strange
parts of the world, family relationships can become volatile; new com-
modity patterns are negotiated, debts and obligations are recalibrated, and
rumors and fantasies about the new setting are maneuvered into existing
repertoires of knowledge and practice. . . . Women in particular bear the
brunt of this sort of friction, for they become pawns in the heritage politics
of the household and are often subject to the abuse and violence of men
who are themselves torn about the relation between heritage and oppor-
tunity in shifting spatial and political formations. (Appadurai, 1996: 43–4)
Too often these conflicts are what is meant by ‘modernization’, even in

the eyes of its most ardent defenders. Presented with such confusion,
it is understandable that many individuals and communities affirm
norms and scripts they consider ‘counter’ or ‘anti-modern’, drawn from
religious life or a mythic national past. Even when these norms reflect
or have been invented under wholly contemporary circumstances, even
when they reinforce conflicts that are currently oppressive or represent
oppressive rather than liberatory elements of religious and national
351
tradition (as is the case for many right-wing or traditionalist women),
they testify to the felt importance of reducing temporal discontinuity,
introducing a difference between the degrading and violent or poten-
tially utopian/nostalgic elements of the present. It is this sentiment of
enthusiasm for an event capable of measuring history, provoked by a
palpable feeling of incongruity or confusion, which constitutes mod-
ernity, not enthusiasm for a particular change of government, religion,
or production/consumption pattern. In this sense even archaisms are
paradigmatically modern, although they may constitute a local or dias-
poric public space which positions itself in opposition to liberal govern-
ment or property relations.
Moroncini argues that the demise of the revolutionary model, which
perpetuated the (statist) interpretation of war as an object to be known
and controlled from a statist or proto-statist (revolutionary) perspective,
permits us to challenge the disciplinary manner in which modern indi-
viduals – including leftists – become subjects and actors for themselves.
And yet nothing guarantees that the ethical forms of life replacing
Marxist interpretations of international struggles for justice will consti-
tute, in and of themselves, standpoints from which the course of partici-
pants’ own struggles shows moral promise. One may agree, in principle,
that ‘what must be avoided is transforming the ontology of the self or
the search for our historical being into a project that tries to be global
and radical’, and that ‘partial transformations, local changes, small
experiences are preferable’ (1998: 123). But Moroncini has himself
explained that what characterizes our present is the way in which war
is staged or made comprehensible to us. In an economy and inter-
national culture characterized by global production and the formation
of diasporic medias, a non-disciplinary ethos may still fail to reveal the
connections between instances of domination and liberation that cross
continents. As Bergson might say, we are involved too closely with the
raw material of these changes to be capable of recognizing them as
objects of free action.
But one question remains. Given Moroncini’s presumption that
the new ethos will actualize a struggle, if only a struggle against disci-
plinary forms of subjectivity, we must reconsider the fact that Kant’s
enthusiasm for the revolution of 1789 was tied to the anticipation of
perpetual peace. The revolutions which overthrew the Soviet regimes
in 1989 inspired similar enthusiasms, but Kant had not foreseen that
the very economic motives which ought, in his view, to lead providen-
tially to the cessation of warfare seem to have contributed both to an
increase in small wars and to the feeling that human progress will
henceforth be measured only in economic rather than moral terms.
Kant was also sufficiently perspicacious to note that the confidence in
human moral progress indicated by this event might be limited by the
352
possibility of ‘a second epoch of natural revolution which will push
aside the human race to clear the stage for other creatures’ (1992: 161).
Today we recognize that the very economic practices that testify to
reduced risks of mutual ideological extermination may still lead to eco-
logical catastrophe.
In a recent essay on Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’, Jürgen Habermas has
suggested that meaningful as opposed to merely abstract peace between
materially unequal regions of the globe will eventually require, among
other provisions, ‘shared historical consciousness of the nonsimul-
taneity of societies which are nevertheless simultaneously dependent on
a peaceful coexistence’ (1998: 185). Such a comment seems to speak to
Ewald’s concern that contemporary societies lack a ‘common measure’
for justice and humanity beyond the market. For peace to retain the
complex nuances of Kant’s understanding of modernity, however, such
a consensus must protect both the bodily well-being of citizens and the
possibility of introducing new differentiations into the nonsimultaneity
of the present, rather than homogenizing both hopeful and dispiriting
differences within a ‘neutral’ legal framework. Rights and institutions
are, of course, required; every stage must have foundations. But the
‘war’ in which bodies are claimed by multiple histories and actualize
different roles for those seated in different regions of the audience is not
to be resolved by consensus on the least awkward distance from the
stage. As Etienne Balibar argues, the egalitarianism and libertarianism
attributed to rights should move ‘from the point of view of limitative,
mutually exclusive rights to expansive, mutually multiplying powers’
(1994: 212).11 The kind of peace sought by the enthusiastic spectators
of 1789, one imagines, would give individuals the liberty to vary the
rate and distance at which they apprehended their relation to history in
such a way as to permit a maximum sentiment of ‘universal yet dis-
interested sympathy’ for players who tend towards a republican ideal
of political existence.
‘The material for madness (behavior, neuromicrobiology) really
exists’, according to Foucault’s friend Paul Veyne, ‘but not as madness;
to be mad only materially is precisely not yet to be mad . . . what we
see as the stuff of madness will be material for something entirely
different in another practice’ (1997: 170). Likewise, one might say that
the material for revolution is really present in every age, but not as
revolution. Perpetual peace, if it is to be worthy of Kant’s enthusiasm,
has to be a peace that preserves the material for moral progress – we
could talk about human dignity as an end in itself – while allowing
the differences between historical trajectories that constitute the being
of men, women, differing religious practices and political institutions,
to remain in play against one another. ‘So what unites the software
technician, the autoworker at Fiat, and the illegal laborer?’ Virno
353
inquires. ‘We need the courage to respond: nothing unites them any
longer with respect to the form and content of the productive process.
But also: everything unites them regarding the form and content of
socialization. What is common are their emotional tonalities, their
inclinations, their mentalities, and their expectations’ (1996: 19). Nor-
malized, multi-tasking or unemployed, voluntarily tattooed or veiled,
we embody the measure that we cannot think because all that ‘presents
itself’ to our awareness are conflicts between historical rhythms and
scenes.
Because the idea of a ‘common measure’ violates the modernist
ethos (according to Foucault’s reading of Kant) of differentiating the
present and seeks to impose a single beat on necessarily plural beings
and their histories, it is not only morally problematic but a metaphysi-
cal illusion. Even if revolution were – or may be – still capable of moti-
vating us to hopeful action on behalf of justice, it can never be more
than an ‘image’ of the ideal but abstract harmony to which we might
dance ‘as the totality of men’ and women ‘united socially on earth and
apportioned into peoples’ (Kant, 1979: 141). On the other hand, if we
do not actively seek out historical trajectories and beings constituted by
the new elements or actualité of the post-cold war economy and cultures
with an eye to ‘doing them justice’, rather than viewing them as ‘acci-
dental’ tragedies in an essentially peaceful time, we will be unable to
recognize our own daily practices as possessing historical significance at
all. It is for this reason that I earlier proposed an analysis of the fantasy
concerning revolution’s exemplary status as a political event, one that
illuminates its emotional importance to potential actors (present spec-
tators of struggle) rather than a dismissal – or religious renewal – of the
fantasy qua fantasy.
To be sure, these elements, when they occur, may look more like
‘private’ devotions, ‘stylizations’, or sufferings than we would prefer,
until the history in which they signify progress and provoke enthusi-
asm regarding international justice begins to show its contours. But
they still have the potential to be real ‘events’, as feminists in many
countries discovered when they realized that private pleasures and suf-
ferings could constitute the basis for forms of solidarity capable of
overturning laws, claiming rights from employers, and challenging
military powers. From their experience, we learn that the body is a
name for the medium or fact of our implication in certain differenti-
ating conflicts, as opposed to an object that can be easily differentiated
from others, the place of private individuality. Contra those who
believe that the goals of history have been achieved in the supposedly
equal guarantee that all individuals may fashion themselves or starve
as private persons, the political significance of such practices lies not
in their private aspects but in the conflicting rhythms which link us to
354
others and point toward an irresolvable historical harmony, the con-
temporary ‘problematic’ which promises, if vainly, to measure all the
rest.
Department of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland,

OH, USA
PSC
Notes
1 For example, even the model of multiply grounded struggles presented by
Laclau and Mouffe (1985) acknowledges the psychological momentum
that one struggle gains from metaphorically representing all the others.
Rorty (1998) sharply criticizes Continental philosophers on the left for
insisting on the complexity – and international scope – of such hegemony
formation, arguing that the emotional crises of the American left can be
resolved only by a return to pragmatic optimism that seems more religious
than materially grounded. Hardt and Negri contend that ongoing struggles
against national or international oppression fail to create plausible
momentum because, despite the rise of complex communications tech-
nologies, these struggles do not ‘communicate’ in the sense that Kant’s
aesthetic judgement inspires witnesses of beautiful or sublime presen-
tations to spontaneously share or demand that others share their judge-
ment (2000: 54–5).
2 The theatrical metaphor is Kant’s own: ‘If seeing a virtuous man struggling
with tribulations and temptations towards evil and yet holding his own
against them is a sight fit for a divinity, so is it a most unfit sight for even
the commonest but well intentioned man, not to mention a divinity, to see
the human race advancing from period to period towards virtue and then
soon afterwards to see it again falling as deeply back into vice and misery
as it was before. Observing this tragedy for a while may perhaps be moving
and instructive, but the curtain must finally fall. For in the long run it
becomes a farce; and if the actors do not become weary of it, since they are
fools, the spectator will when, after one or another act, he has sufficient
grounds for assuming that the never ending piece will be eternally the same’
(‘Theory and Practice’, from Kant, 1983: 86).
3 See also the extensive discussion of the moral dilemmas posed for members
of the American workforce in Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character
(1998). Skills enabling workers to move flexibly between different companies
and between work and family environments, Sennett finds, tend to generate
detachment from particular communities of involvement and even make
commitment appear a sign of undesirable rigidity or personal weakness.
4 Where no translator is identified in the bibliography, translations from
French are my own. I offer many thanks to Paul Merrill for helpful
comments and subtle improvements.
355
5 One of the best treatments of Foucault’s relationship to the Annales school
can be found in Leonardo Daddabbo’s Tempocorpo: Forme Temporali in
Michel Foucault (1999: especially pp. 43–56). According to Daddabbo, the
Annales historians self-consciously set out to describe differing modes of
‘being in time’ (ibid., p. 29); but his analysis of Foucault goes further to
suggest that being is an effect or a consequence of viewing non-synchron-
ous becomings from a standpoint which is itself in flux rather than stable.
Thus, for example, in The Order of Things, the being of man is a shadow
cast by the attempt of modern thinkers to synchronize or discover simul-
taneity between the realms of historical becoming associated with life, labor,
and language (ibid., p. 37). It is my intention to explore the details of this
approach to the philosophy of history elsewhere. See also Leduc (1991:
48–53), where the question of whether each being has its own temporality
or whether varying temporalities are simply tools of analysis enabling the
historian to shake up the record and reveal the significance of hitherto
unnoticed historical events is addressed. Krzysztof Pomian (1999) and
Fernand Braudel (1980), respectively, exemplify these two positions.
6 Two excellent essays by Stephen Crocker explore conceptual links between
Kant, Foucault and Heidegger, as well as between Heidegger and Bergson.
For Crocker, who is also concerned with the way in which contemporary
technologies of communication and production affect the lived experience
of temporality, what is crucial is the way that Kant’s identification of time
with the inner sense of the epistemological subject enabled practices shaping
the subject to structure time ‘itself’, including the time in which such
practices are analyzed or fall outside of our awareness (1997a). Crocker is,
however, concerned that a simplistic critique of these technologies’ capacity
to ‘spatialize’ lived duration still treats duration as a ‘thing’, rather than
actively seeking to ‘open’ time through particular practices such as reflec-
tion on being (1997b).
7 Though an extended analysis of Foucault’s text is beyond the scope of this
essay, he does make use of Bergson’s imagery of the cone in trying to explain
the relationship between the origin and the originary, by which modern
thought situates itself transcendentally with respect to its particular
empirical history (1973: 329–30). This does not make Foucault a Bergson-
ian; this simply shows that Bergson is one point of reference for his attempt
to historically situate Heidegger’s own understanding of resoluteness (or,
later, appropriation) as the originary basis of every historicizing act: ‘rather
than a cut, made at some given moment in duration,’ Foucault remarks,
man ‘is the opening from which time in general can be reconstituted,
duration can flow, and things, at the appropriate moment, can make their
appearance’ (ibid., p. 332).
8 This is, in fact, what Heidegger means when he says that the hidden basis
for our ability to take up historical possibilities and act towards the future
is our thrownness, our subjection to the temporal finitude represented by
mortality as well as cultural situatedness. ‘The resoluteness which comes
back to itself and hands itself down, then becomes the repetition of a possi-
bility of existence that has come down to us . . . repetition does not let itself
be persuaded of something by what is “past”, just in order that this, as
356
something which was formerly actual [wirkliche], may recur. Rather, the
repetition makes a reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility of that existence
which has-been-there. But when such a rejoinder is made to this possibility
in a resolution, it is made in a moment of vision; and as such it is at the
same time a disavowal of that which in the “today”, is working itself out
as the “past” ’ (Heidegger, 1962: 437–8).
For another view on the project of staging repetition so as to success-
fully break with the past, see Proust (1997: especially Chapter 3, ‘Nouvelles
Intempestives’).
9 Liberal theorist Michael Walzer points out that any egalitarian political
theory must come to terms with the fact that social membership and many
of the emotional goods of such membership are mediated by participation
in rituals of consumption. ‘In America today and in every society where the
market is triumphant,’ he warns, ‘commodities mediate membership’, and
those who lack the opportunity to participate in consumption rituals over
and above simple survival suffer a kind of ‘status starvation, a sociological
disinheritance’ (Walzer, 1983: 106, 105). For Walzer, who believes that the
very idea of the state implies the provision of welfare capable of maintain-
ing citizens as ‘members’ rather than mere living bodies, the fact that certain
commodities give individuals access to other social arenas means either that
they must be made generally available in some minimal form or that other
social goods be directly accessible to those who lack specific market-driven
status symbols.
10 On the ‘end of work’ and the political consequences of new modes of
temporal regulation tied to a finance- rather than manufacturing-driven
economy, see Virno (1996) and Mongin (2000).
11 Françoise Proust (1991) and Etienne Balibar (1994) both call for a ‘maxi-
malist’ as opposed to ‘minimalist’ interpretation of the rights of man
required for Kant’s perpetual peace. In Proust’s interpretation, Kantian
peace means not the cessation of hostilities among republics which preserve
a particular historical meaning of private liberty, but movement toward a
republican ‘ideal’ in which public freedom is maximized; ‘the republic does
not sit in honor at the end of history as achievement and closure: it comes
by surprise, it rises up, rightly, in its time, as practice in act, maximum of
freedoms’ (1991: 23) and its relation with other states is one of defensive
negotiation, a ‘deferral’ of war, rather than active accord.
PSC
Bibliography
Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globaliz-
ation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Balibar, Etienne (1994) Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philo-
sophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson. London: Routledge.
Bartky, Sandra Lee (1990) ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of
357
Patriarchal Power’, in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenom-
enology of Oppression. New York: Routledge.
Bergson, Henri (1960) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Bergson, Henri (1991) Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer.
New York: Zone Books.
Braudel, Fernand (1980) On History, trans. Sarah Matthews. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Crocker, Stephen (1997a) ‘The Fission of Time: On the Distinction between
Intratemporality and the Event of Time in Kant, Heidegger, and Foucault’,
International Studies in Philosophy 29(2): 1–22.
Crocker, Stephen (1997b) ‘The Oscillating Now: Heidegger on the Failure of
Bergsonism’, Philosophy Today 41(3–4): 405–23.
Daddabbo, Leonardo (1998) ‘Foucault et le temps’, in Michel Foucault: Trajec-
toires au coeur du présent, ed. Lucio d’Alessandro and Adolfo Marino.
Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 281–90.
Daddabbo, Leonardo (1999) Tempocorpo: Forme Temporali in Michel
Foucault. Naples: La Città del Sole.
Ewald, François (1997) ‘Foucault et l’actualité’, in Au Risque de Foucault, ed.
Jean-Jacques Aillagon, texts collected by Dominique Franche, Sabine
Prokhoris, Yves Roussel and Roger Rotmann. Paris: Éditions du Centre
Pompidou, pp. 203–12.
Farge, Arlette (1994) ‘Le temps, l’événement, et l’historien’, L’Inactuel 2: 31–6.
Farge, Arlette (1997) ‘L’instance de l’événement’, in Au Risque de Foucault, ed.
Jean-Jacques Aillagon, texts collected by Dominique Franche, Sabine
Prokhoris, Yves Roussel and Roger Rotmann. Paris: Éditions du Centre
Pompidou, pp. 19–29.
Foucault, Michel (1973) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel (1994) Dits et Écrits, 1954–1988, 4 vols, ed. Daniel Defert
and François Ewald. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
Foucault, Michel (1997) The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa
Hochroth. New York: Semiotext(e).
Greider, William (1997) One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global
Capitalism. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Habermas, Jürgen (1998) ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred
Years’ Historical Remove’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, pp. 165–201.
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson. New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, Martin (1972) On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh. New
York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, Martin (1977) ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question
358
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt. New
York: Harper Torchbooks.
Kant, Immanuel (1983) Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted
Humphrey. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Kant, Immanuel (1992) The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. with intro. Mary J.
Gregor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Kant, Immanuel (1996) The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar,
intro. Patricia W. Kitcher. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul
Cammack. London: Verso.
Leduc, Jean (1999) Les historiens et le temps: conceptions, problématiques,
écritures. Paris: Seuil.
Marx, Karl (1963) The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: Inter-
national Publishers.
Mongin, Olivier (2000) ‘Les révolutions du temps. À propos de Manuel Castells,
Daniel Cohen, André Orléan, et quelques autres’, Esprit 260 (janvier):
105–25.
Moroncini, Bruno (1998) ‘La scène du présent. Historicisme et fin de l’histoire
chez Michel Foucault’, in Michel Foucault: Trajectoires au coeur du présent,
ed. Lucio d’Alessandro and Adolfo Marino. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp.
93–131.
Pomian, Krzysztof (1999) Sur l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard.
Proust, Françoise (1991) ‘Introduction’, in Vers la Paix Perpétuelle, Que Signifie
S’orienter dans la Pensée? Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? trans. Jean-François
Poirier and Françoise Proust. Paris: Flammarion, pp. 5–38.
Proust, Françoise (1997) De la Résistance. Paris: Cerf.
Rorty, Richard (1998) Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-
Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sennett, Richard (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Conse-
quences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton.
Veyne, Paul (1997) ‘Foucault Revolutionalizes History’, trans. Catherine Porter,
in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 146–82.
Virno, Paolo (1996) ‘The Ambivalence of Disenchantment’, in Radical Thought
in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 13–34.
Walzer, Michael (1983) Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality.
New York: Basic Books.

Staging The Non-Event: Laura Hengehold

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Staging The Non-Event: Laura Hengehold

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

04Hengehold (bc/d) 8/4/02 1:39 pm Page 337

Staging the non-event

What understanding of the relationship between being, time and the

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 28 no 3 • pp. 337–358

. . . perhaps it lies in a poor choice of position from which we regard it.

But a (Copernican) revolution in the observer’s standpoint is not, in

Perhaps it seems circular to suggest that observers’ enthusiastic desire

But we forget about these interests as soon as the chosen yardstick is

Like unconscious fantasies that continue to shape an individual’s action,

As a result, he suspects that the explanation of ‘événementalization’

If our actualité, and especially that of our political institutions, arises at

These techniques, which serve various structures of domination

As families move to new locations, or as children move before older gener-

Too often these conflicts are what is meant by ‘modernization’, even in

Department of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland,

You might also like