Kairopolitics of Revolution

Rowan G.
Tepper
Walter Benjamin
Prof. Gisela Brinker-Gabler
14 December 2009
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-Democratic3 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.

1
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.
2
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.
3
[Specify]
4
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
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
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
2
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, 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 –
3
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 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
5
Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,”pg. 99.
6
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
4
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
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
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.
7
Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's “On The Concept of History,” Trans. Chris Turner (New York:
Verso, 2005), pg. 87.
8
Ibid, pg. 134n161.
9
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.
10
Ibid. and John E. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” in Rhetoric and Kairos, 46-57.
11
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 47-8.
5
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
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 Be-
wegung 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
12
Smith, pg. 49.
13
Paul Tillich, “Kairos III,” in Der Widerstreit von Raum und Zeit: Schrifien zur Geschichtsphilosophie,Gesammelte
Werke.(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963), pg. 137.
6
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
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, ev-
ery 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 cab-
balistic 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,
14
Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen (Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), pg. 259.
15
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.
16
Löwy, pg. 87.
7
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 mo-
ment 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 “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 de-
cision 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 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
17
P. Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History & Eschatology (Boston: Brill, 2007), pg. 139.
18
Ibid, pg. 140-1.
19
Ibid, pg. 287.
20
Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Moment and the Continuum,” pg. 111.
8
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 per-
fectly 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
opportunities to experience time as chronos: the experience of awaiting, to provide but one concrete
21
Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, Trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pg. 64.
22
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
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 philo-
sophichen 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
23
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.
24
Ibid, pp. 68-9.
25
Ibid, pg. 78.
26
Ralf Konersmann, “Walter Benjamins philosophichen Kairologie,” in Walter Benjamin, Kairos: Schriften zur
Philosophie (Frankfurt Am Main: Surhkamp, 2007), 327-348. pg. 331-2.
10
presence in Benjamin's thought from the dawn of his career, and places kairos in relation to virtually
all of 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 ap-
plied 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 sec-
onds, 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
27
“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.
28
Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Moment and the Continuum,” pg. 100-109.
29
Ibid. pg. 99
11
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 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
30
“State of emergency,” in Zohn's translation – it would be preferable to translate ausnehmezustand as “state of
exception.”
12
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 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
31
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Trans. George Schwab (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985), pg. 36.
32
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
13
theology,” (I, SW 4: 389) if it is to articulate a concept of 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
(Adelaide, ATF Press, 2006), 63-77. pg. 64

33
This phrase should recall Origen's doctrine of apokatastasis, particular as it relates to Thesis III.
14
winds of the story that “we call progress,” but also because it is not granted to angels the power to
decisively intercede and 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
34
Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” pg. 115
35
We shall return to this in section VI.
15
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 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
16
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
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 now-time, 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
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
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 now-
time,” 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 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
18
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 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)
37
This passage can be found both in “Central Park,” Selected Writings, Volume 4: 170 & [J50,2]
38
J. M. Baker Jr. “Vacant Holidays: The Theological Remainder in Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Benjamin,” in MLN, Vol.
121, No. 5 (Dec. 2006), 1190-1220.
19
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
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
39
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in SW 4, pg. 331.
20
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 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.”
21
[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 “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
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.
22
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 Now-
Time/Image-Space (1998) was among the earliest thoroughgoing interpretations of Benjamin to truly
mobilize the concept of kairos, as opposed to merely highlighting its similarity, as one would a mere
curiosity. She begins defining the term kairology in loosely, by means of its opposition to chronology,
such that: “kairology differs from chronology... through emphasizing singular moments in history or in
the present.”42 In a chapter dedicated to Benjamin's famed fourteenth thesis, the very same thesis
which, nearly seventy years ago, provoked the very first intimation as to the implicit presence of the
concept and experience of kairos, Lindroos writes:
A kairological approach “emphasizes breaks, ruptures, non-synchronized moments and multiple temporal
dimensions.... [and] brings forth qualitative differences in time, as they have the possibility to become actualized...
in temporally changing situations. The variety of moments... produce a different view on time and its dimensions
[than the chronological perspective] ...the present and its experiences are temporarily 'frozen' in any historical or current
material and phenomena. This 'condensed time' creates another perspective on time, and these moments of
temporal insight are possible to decipher as 'seeds of the present.'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
kairo-politics, which would oppose every chronopoltical strategy of reguarlizing and homogenizing
time, subdividing time ad infinitum, and wielding time conceived as chronos as an instrument of
41
Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” pg. 115.
42
Kia Lindroos, Now-Time/Image-Space: Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy and Art
(Jyväskylä: SoPhi, 1998, pg. 11.
43
Ibid, pg. 85
23
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.
24
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(Oxford: Polity Press, 2008).
Philip Sipiora & James S. Baumlin, Ed., Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory & Praxis (Albany: SUNY Press,
2002).
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 Scribners Sons, 1936).
Systematic Theology Volume Three, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963)
Der Widerstreit von Raum und Zeit: Schrifien zur Geschichtsphilosophie,Gesammelte Werke.(Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1963).
P. Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History & Eschatology (Boston: Brill, 2007).
Samuel Weber, “Taking Exception to Decision,” in diacritics, Volume 22, No. 3-4: Commemorating Walter Benjamin
25
(Autumn-Winter 1992), 5-18.
26
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.
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
We find the following in the Arcades: Modest methodological proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic. It is
very easy to 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)
iii
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.
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.
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On the Centrality of ‘Bilderverbot’ (Ban on Images) in Adorno’s Negative Dialectices: Social and Political
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Kairopolitics of Revolution

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Kairopolitics of Revolution

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Rowan G.

articulates every conception of time.

provides names, and particularly for the present moment.

II. The Experience of Time: Chronos & Kairos

(2007), accompanied by an afterword by Ralf Konersmann, entitled “Walter Benjamins philosophiche

or in its later metamorphoses, from Tillich to Agamben.

characteristics of the concepts of kairos and chronos. In “Kairos III,” he writes:

the equivalent concept in Jewish mystical and messianic theology, tikkun:

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

interest, since, according to Agamben's account:

the eschatological and the messianic conceptions of time:

messianic time22 is apprehended as a representation, we gain no knowledge of or access to the real

Kairos emerges as an interruption of continuity and homogeneity from out of chronological

well occupy in Benjamin's thought as a whole. He writes:

recognizability” and “logical time.”27

provide a concrete description of this critical experience of time:

(XI, SW 4: 393). Furthermore, we read in the following thesis that:

Democratic, progressive conception of history presupposes a traditional concept and experience of

of time proper to the ausnehmezustand.

It would thus be miraculous in a certain sense if “a real ausnehmezustand” were to be actualized – as

sovereign who decides on the exception.”(Schmitt, 5) Furthermore, from a Hegelian-Marxist

Marx secularized the idea of messianic time.” (XVIIa, SW 4: 401).

IV. History as Catastrophe

Benjamin's diagnosis of his contemporary political-historical situation as a period in which the

ausnehmezustand had become the norm, in a very real sense.

both revolution and rescue.

(Adelaide, ATF Press, 2006), 63-77. pg. 64

continuum of history” and to thus make time stand still.35

undergoes a fundamental change.

V. Redemption and Historical Experience

abbreviation”.(SW 4: 396). Furthermore, Jetztzeit is an immediately political concept, for thought in

In other words, “the 'essences' of phenomenology” amount to formal, intentional knowledge

irreducible to a temporal continuum.

messianic time breaks through the continuum of chronological time.

VI. Jetztzeit – Blasting open the continuum – Revolution & Remembrance

possibility for the possibility of truly revolutionary activity.

anonymously written poem closes this thesis which reads as follows:

Who would believe it! It is said that, incensed at the hour,

ever renewed attempts to cut the world to the heart.”37

historical time, to change the economy of time.”38

chronological reckoning subordinates duration to regularity, it cannot prevent heterogeneous

measurement of quantity is the accomplishment of calendars” [my emphasis]39

VII. The Present As Rupture and Interruption

historiography and politics as constitutive elements of “revolutionary time” – a time comprised of

heterogeneous, qualitatively distinct moments, in their capacity for noncontemporaneous

remembrance we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally

time will be recovered in a final restitutio in integratum.

VIII. Conclusion: Awakening to a Kairology

Baudelaire's experience of time while intoxicated with Hashish.

concept and experience of kairos, Lindroos writes:

would be essentially kairopolitical.

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