Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

Darkness in a Blink of an Eye

Suvi Alt
To cite this article: Suvi Alt (2016) Darkness in a Blink of an Eye, Angelaki, 21:2, 17-31, DOI:
10.1080/0969725X.2016.1182721
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2016.1182721

Published online: 24 May 2016.

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ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 21 number 2 june 2016

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n a square of light, she sits on a chair, motionless. Slowly she bows her head and briey
closes her eyes. When someone appears opposite
her, she raises her head and xes her gaze on
them. They look at each other, and the
moment appears to extend to innity.
Marina Abramovic performed The Artist Is
Present in the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) in New York for three months in
2010. The performance consisted of Abramovic
sitting on a chair across from an empty chair in
the atrium of the museum. Anyone could come
in and sit on the empty chair for any length of
time. Abramovic and the person in front of
her simply sat and looked at each other.
Although seemingly nothing more than this
happens in the performance, it captured both
the attention of the art world and the imagination of many others: hundreds of thousands
of people sat in front of Abramovic in the
course of the three months and many more
have seen the subsequent documentary lm
Marina Abramovic the Artist Is Present that
depicts the creation of the piece. The performance is lauded for having ignited in the
broader public the idea that one can co-create
a work of art, instead of passively experiencing
an artwork created by the artist alone (Danto).
The Artist Is Present became a great
success, and people described participating in
it as a transformative moment. While many of
them were unable to fully explicate what happened during the performance, in different
ways they described it as an opening onto a
time and space beyond.
Spaces beyond are often the substance of
apocalyptic and eschatological visions that
draw on originally religious themes, yet carry

suvi alt
DARKNESS IN A BLINK
OF AN EYE
action and the onto-poetics
of a beyond
secular and historical signicance that gets redeployed in situations of socio-political oppression, especially when a repressive regime is
seen to be coming to an end (Ward 109). As a
result of the contemporary sense of the crisis
of the economic, political, ecological and social
situation, conventional conceptions of politics
are increasingly losing credence and there is a
call for politics and theory that are capable of
engaging with the beyond. If by beyond
we do not mean merely an overturning of a particular government, a transition from one political or economic ideology to another, or even a
change in relations of powerknowledge, it
seems that any politics that wishes to attach

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/16/020017-15 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2016.1182721

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darkness in a blink of an eye

itself to a beyond must take its bearings from
the poetic, i.e., from the event that cannot be
articulated in terms of strategy. While the strategic is preoccupied with continuous capacity
to intervene in the orchestration of the play of
objectication and subjectication, the poetic
is an event that takes place at the limits of
the intelligible (Dillon 1418). Michael Dillon
follows Michel Foucault in arguing that thinking
politically must have a strategic aspect to it,
meaning that it requires analysis of the specicity of mechanisms of power, thereby developing strategic knowledge appropriate for political
struggles. Yet Dillon recognizes that the political is not exhausted by this strategic dimension
but also requires nurturing through poetics.
The realm of this article is this poetic, or
rather onto-poetic, conception of the political.
I understand onto-poetics as a site of transformation that draws attention to the relations
between poetics, life and the political. My use
of the concept also emphasizes the ontological
nature of poetics, and thus the ontological constitution of the beyond. Poetics, then, is not
merely a strategy of living or an artful existence (cf. Soguk 38182). Rather, poetics in
itself is a way in which Being happens. Such
an approach refuses the explanation of art in
terms of cultural, political, historical or social
categories (Ziarek 17576). While certainly
related to these categories, art and ontopoetics, as understood in this article, cannot
be interpreted through them.
A particular kind of onto-poetic moment of
the beyond coming to presence can be
located in Martin Heideggers concept of
Augenblick, a blink of an eye.1 The Augenblick
is a moment akin to that experienced by some of
those who sat in front of Abramovic in MoMA.
It is a momentous event a site of transformation that opens one to a different Being.
Although often referred to in passing, in examinations of Heideggers oeuvre, the Augenblick
has remained a relatively neglected concept
(McNeill ix). One of the reasons for this
neglect is perhaps the way in which, after his
mid-1930s turn (Kehre), Heidegger explicitly
moves away from the concept of action which
was central to his early notion of the

Augenblick. In his later work, Heidegger recognizes the problems implicit in moments of
action and emphasizes the importance of shepherding the openness of being. The moment of
vision (Augenblick) gives way to letting be
(Gelassenheit).2
In nevertheless choosing to discuss the
concept of the Augenblick, I wish to retain
and emphasize the connection between
action and a beyond, even if action in the
Augenblick does not necessarily conform to
conventional conceptions of the term. My aim
in this article is not to provide a systematic
examination of Heideggers conception of the
Augenblick but to suggest that an engagement
with the idea of the Augenblick allows us to
ask critical questions about the nature of
action and of those who act when it comes to
conceiving of a beyond. Such questions are no
less pertinent in the context of contemporary
desires for end times and coming politics
than they are in relation to Heideggers own political engagements.3 I discuss in this article the
politics of such onto-poetic moments as the
Augenblick through a reading of Abramovics
performance piece and the notion of
darkness.
Firstly, I follow Giorgio Agamben in discussing darkness as the colour of potentiality, as the
irreducible that remains in each moment of
actualization. Darkness in a blink of an eye
emphasizes that action in the Augenblick is
always only nite. Darkness as an ontological
idea thus draws attention to the presence of
the concealed in each moment of actualization.
Furthermore, I argue that the Augenblick
ought not to be understood as the moment of
action of a visionary individual, but as the creation of a space where darkness invites nearness
to both other beings and to Being itself. In order
to argue this, I make use of Peter Sloterdijks
elaboration of a poetics of space to highlight
the way in which the beyond created in the
Augenblick is both relational in itself and
needs relations in order to come about.
Throughout the article I discuss Abramovics
performance as a moment and a site of such
augenblicklich onto-poetics that conveys a
sense of what I call here darkness in a blink

18

alt
of an eye. Before turning to this discussion, a
few words on ontology and art.

the ontological significance of the

artwork

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Were you expecting to be transformed? No,

it was just when I sat there the rst time, I
came and just wanted to experience it and
then, you know, everything happened.
(Marina Abramovic)

When planning the performance, Abramovic and

Klaus Biesenbach, the curator of MoMA,
assumed that sometimes the chair in front of
her would be empty and she would be sitting
by herself. However, as soon as the performance
began, there was no shortage of people wishing to
sit with Abramovic. Many of them describe the
moment of sitting and looking as magical,
transformative or luminous (Marina Abramovic). According to Abramovic, the performance is about addressing the question that has
followed her for over four decades: Why is
this art? (qtd in Marina Abramovic).
For Heidegger, art happens whenever Being
is carried into a different disposition of relations
(Origin 131). Hence, much of what is generally considered art would not be so for Heidegger. And conversely, the poetic is a
particular kind of unfolding of a peoples historical existence rather than a cultural achievement (Heidegger, Contributions 2527, 58
61). This reects the way in which Heideggers
investigations into all kinds of entities,
whether they are artworks or cultural artefacts,
are always carried out in relation to the Seinsfrage, the question of Being (D. Palmer 397).
Barbara Bolt points out that Heidegger is not
concerned with the artwork per se but rather
how, through the work of art, the Being of
beings is revealed (5).
The distinction that Heidegger makes
between particular artworks and art as such corresponds to the ontological difference that he
identies between beings and Being. Instead of
merely examining ontic beings the particular characteristics of entities Heidegger argues
that we should inquire into Being as such, that

19

is: ontology (Being and Time 34 [13]). Ontology, however, does not refer here to something
immutable and essentialist but to a historical
way of revealing beings. The artwork thus performs an ontological function for Heidegger
(Dreyfus, Heideggers Ontology 407). In discussing The Artist Is Present, my emphasis
is also on the revealing of Being that the performance can be argued to enact. I do not
discuss the content of what may be revealed by
the performance. Rather, I am discussing the
mode of revealing. This distinction is important
because it shows the ontological process that
enables the artwork to function as an event
without xing the performance with a specic
meaning. Art, therefore, manifests a revealing
that lets come into the open not only a particular
way of being but Being itself as everything that
it might yet be. This is also why poetic being is
fundamentally a political mode of being.
Yet it is worth remembering that Heidegger is
critical of approaches to art that render the
artwork superuous by focusing on either the
artist as a creator or the experiencing subject.
Thus, Heidegger argues for turning our attention
back to the artwork itself (Origin 90). But what
the artwork itself is is not as easy a question as
it might appear to be. While Heidegger demands
that the artwork be addressed on its own terms,
he has also been criticized for his supposed lack
of interest in the artworks that he discusses.
Just as poetry is nowhere to be found in Heideggers analysis of Holderlin, painting is nowhere to
be found in his analysis of Van Gogh, JeanMarie Schaeffer argues (272). Similarly, Julian
Young points out that Heideggers evocation of
Van Goghs painting in The Origin of the
Work of Art is largely irrelevant, if examined
analytically. Hence, its role within his overall
argument should rather be understood poetically
(Young 22). Within the arguments of this article,
Abramovics performance has a similar, primarily poetic role.
In performance research, Laura Cull identies ontological commonality a similar way
of conceiving of the real as the rationale for
constructing a parallel between performance
and philosophy. She argues that from this perspective, the boundary between what counts as

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darkness in a blink of an eye

performance as distinct from philosophy
becomes increasingly blurred, such that performance can be seen as a philosophical activity
and philosophy as a score for performance
(Attention Training 80). By reading Abramovics performance in relation to the concept of
the Augenblick, I discuss the ontological condition that is opened up by the performance,
which enables any number of interpretations
and outcomes to emerge. According to Cull,
performance should aim at creating the conditions for experiments the results of which
remain unknown (Performance 23). Likewise, it is in the nature of the Augenblick that
it cannot be known, rationalized or represented.
I argue that, when read together with an ontopoetic understanding of darkness, the idea of
that which resists representation and capture
is already within the concept of the Augenblick.
Thus, in the following sections I discuss the
ontological commonality between Abramovics
performance and the kind of reading of the
concept of the Augenblick that is advanced
here. I begin below by introducing the concept
of the blink of an eye and its relation to action.

action in a blink of an eye

To conceive nitude and opening simultaneously: that is the matter at hand. (Sloterdijk, Neither 190)

As the performance ows forward with each

person leaving the chair and giving way to the
next person, Abramovic blinks. The closing of
the eyes enables the artist to establish a new
relation to whoever sits in front of her. She
closes herself for a moment to be able to
become open to another beyond. The way in
which Abramovic closes her eyes, and herself,
appears crucial to her ability to be present.
However, after her initial closure, she is
clearly outside herself, with and in the person
in front of her. Abramovic notes that even in
hindsight it is difcult to explicate what
happens in such moments, but one simply
knows that something is different (qtd in The
Artist Was Here).

Nevertheless, the performance does not function here as a mere visualization of the concept
of the Augenblick simply because Abramovic
blinks. Rather, thinking the Augenblick in
relation to Abramovic closing her eyes in the
performance helps us to consider the idea of
ontological difference: the relation of the ontological to the ontic. The closure enacted by
Abramovic in the performance happens within
the ontic realm of the artwork. It is different
from, yet crucially connected to, the event that
takes place when the performance becomes art
in the ontological sense. That is, when the performance constitutes an opening onto something that goes beyond the ontic conditions of
the artwork.
The notion of a beyond is thus central to
both the Augenblick and The Artist Is
Present. There is, however, a necessary ambiguity in the concept of the beyond (Caputo and
Scanlon 2). If we knew to begin with what the
beyond consists of and how it comes about, it
would no longer be a beyond. For the purposes
of this article, I understand a beyond as something that is constituted by a disruption in the
happening of Being. Heidegger describes such a
break in the unfolding of Being with the
concept of the Augenblick. Yet the Augenblick
does not refer to the end of the world in any conventional sense, or to the end of history as such.
The eschaton that is seen in the Augenblick
exposes the limitations of contemporary modes
of being and opens a being to its possibilities.
What is revealed in the Augenblick is therefore
not any particular end but a eld of possibilities that is opened up by the suspension of the
existing order of things.
While for Heidegger the Augenblick is the
moment of vision of genuine action (Fundamental Concepts 295), the presence and action
implied by the Augenblick ought not to be
understood in terms of completeness but as a
way of being that is responsive to the factical
spatial and temporal situation. Hence, in the
Augenblick, action in the present is the condition of possibility of the opening of a
beyond; a beyond that is created from within
the conditions of the present, yet undoing
the present. Although the literal meaning of

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alt
the Augenblick implies something sudden, dramatic, quick and momentary, Heidegger notes
that it is a phenomenon which in principle
can not be claried in terms of the now [ ]
the moment of vision permits us to encounter
for the rst time what can be (Being and
Time 38788 [338]). While the Augenblick is
authentic present, it also transcends and
undoes the present. It draws attention to and
brings about that which is not.
In The Artist Is Present, the present has
both temporal and spatial signicance. Biesenbach describes Abramovic as an artist who
visionizes time (qtd in Marina Abramovic).
He explains that what you see in the performance is the way in which time is not something
ephemeral merely rushing by. Rather, you
come to feel time as a weight in space
(Marina Abramovic). Many of Abramovics
performance pieces engage with the notion of
time, yet The Artist Is Present is particular
in that it invites the public to co-create the
moment that transcends chronological time.
Abramovic notes: I dont want an audience to
spend time with me looking at my work; I
want them to be with me and forget about
time. Open up the space and just that moment
of here and now, of nothing [ ] In that way
you can extend eternity (Marina Abramovic
211). Similarly, for the eschatological conquering of time to occur, eternity must enter the
temporal zone of history (Taubes 4). The eschaton that opens up other possibilities of being is
encountered in the moment where the present
and eternity co-exist. The performance captures
this temporal sense of the Augenblick as that
which connects the present to innity, resulting
in a moment of transformation. Considering the
exposure and popularity of The Artist Is
Present, it is of course possible that people
learn to partake in a discourse of transformation
that comes to reproduce itself. However, it is
not for me to determine whether someone has
been really transformed by the performance.
What is central to the Augenblick is not that
it changes a being in any clearly visible or explicable sense. Rather, it is a moment that opens
Being itself so that beings may become
augenblicklich.

21

But how is one to arrive at such a moment of

transformation? In Heideggers reading of
Nietzsche, the Augenblick comes to he or she
who questions critically. It is a common
element of various eschatologies that knowledge
of the ways in which the world errs is a precondition for the revelation of truth (Taubes 6). Yet
Heidegger argues that only individual action
itself can dislodge us from [the] brink of possibility into actuality, and this is the moment of
vision (Fundamental Concepts 173). While
questioning is necessary in leading us to the
brink of our possibilities, in the Augenblick
those possibilities are actualized. To inhabit
the Augenblick means to assume a stance in
the situation one is in. Stance, however,
does not refer to some xed position but to
the coming into being of a nite response
(McNeill 233). If instead of being open and
responsive to the situation one encounters the
artwork armed with preconceptions, intentions
and existing modes of interpretation, one will
not be able to move from the ontic circumstances of the artwork into the openness of
Being (Bolt 110). Some of the people who
came to sit with Abramovic attempted to turn
the performance into one of their own, for
example by undressing themselves after stepping into the performance space. While providing the drama of unpredictability to those
watching the performance from the outside, it
seems that such pre-scripted encounters
remained far from allowing for the openness of
Being.
While the Augenblick is an existential
moment that concerns ones very being, it is
not disconnected from the historical situation.
Abramovic argues, likewise, that when art is
good it changes the way in which the society
thinks. According to her, different societies
need different kinds of artworks (Abramovic
qtd in Barnthaler). Similarly, for Heidegger,
for an artwork to become art in the ontological
sense it needs to be an absolute need
(Nietzsche: Volume 1 84). A person taking
part in the performance also describes it thus:
This is a need for me. I have to be here
(Marina Abramovic). But no matter how
badly needed, the Augenblick cannot be

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darkness in a blink of an eye

achieved through strategization, calculation or
any intentionalistic activity. While calculation
proceeds step by step in order to establish something known from what is unknown, in the
Augenblick one takes a leap without guidelines,
and this leap is a journey into truth (Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume 2 37). Abramovic maintains that in art one must be ready to fall off the
earth (qtd in Barnthaler), to let go of the world
that one has known so far. It is common to
various eschatologies that the beyond requires
a leap. Whereas for Marx this is a leap from
the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom,
and for Kierkegaard it is a leap towards God,
the leap and thus the action in the Augenblick does not operate on the basis of the protection of a truth that pre-exists it. As the action in
question cannot be deliberated or calculated, it
must be something that does not conform to
existing logos. The Augenblick functions as
the limit of reason.
Abramovics performance captures Heideggers assertion that although nothing as such
happens in the Augenblick, it lets one encounter what can be. Abramovics remark that
the hardest thing to do is something which is
close to nothing (qtd in Marina Abramovic)
could be followed by Agambens observation
that the hardest thing is being capable of annihilating this Nothing and letting something,
from Nothing, be (Potentialities 253). When
it comes to the moment of transformation,
Abramovic emphasizes that there is no story
or objects. Just pure presence [ ] stillness
in the middle of hell (qtd in Marina Abramovic). Yet, it is this seeming nothing that
brings about the transformation. The work of
art is not the artwork itself but the revelation,
the movement in understanding that happens
through ones encounter with it (Bolt 41, 48).
The performance is thus an onto-poetic site
where although the material space remains
the same a beyond opens up on an ontological
level.
Yet the way in which the beyond translates
into the materiality of this world cannot be
known by examining the performance. The
resoluteness arising from the Augenblick does
not culminate in the release of energy in activity

in the moment. Rather, resoluteness is the

decisive inception of action that reaches ahead
of and through all action (Heidegger, Introduction 22). The action of the Augenblick does not
happen in a eeting moment but is rather an
ongoing responsiveness to the situation one is
in. This means not attempting to see that
which is to come nor ascribing content to the
beyond that is to be decided in each factical
situation. Following this, the presence of The
Artist Is Present is also something that, if
augenblicklich, is carried far beyond the
factual site and moment of sitting and looking.
Yet if the Augenblick is a moment of
vision, with all the connotations of light,
clarity and brightness that implies, there must
always also be that which is left unseen.

to see darkness
Various renditions of the Augenblick give a suggestion of vision related to brightness and light.
Apocalypticism in general associates this world
with darkness and the beyond with light, envisaging a move from the former to the latter
(Taubes 29). More broadly, the dualism
between light and darkness is the founding
metaphor of Western philosophy and metaphysics. Whether in ancient Greek thought, Christian imagery, or the ideals of the
Enlightenment, light has been prioritized
throughout the Western tradition, standing as
a metaphor for truth, reason, purity and salvation (Vasseleu; Blumenberg). Heidegger
himself refers to the forgetting of the question
of Being as the darkening of the world (Introduction 47) and Hannah Arendt famously poses
the question of the possibility of politics in
dark times (Men in Dark Times).
Yet the negativity associated with darkness
has never been universal but rather related to
culturally and historically specic sensibilities
as well as economic, practical and political interests related to, for example, the rise of capitalism and liberal governance (B. Palmer 1320,
20956). Writing in 1933, the Japanese novelist
Junichiro Tanizaki pointed out that whereas
Western houses are built so as to expose the
interior to as much light as possible, people in

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alt
the East nd beauty not in the thing itself but
in the patterns of shadows, the light and the
darkness, that one thing against another
creates (29, 46). In a similar vein, yet in a
very different context, Sloterdijk points out
that Heidegger incites us not only to see that
which we nd in the light, but also to reect
on the way in which the light and things encounter one another in other terms: we must meditate on the clearing as such (Neither 113).
Clearing (Lichtung) refers to an open space
where one can encounter things that show up
in the light of our understanding of being
(Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World 163).4 The
Augenblick is a kind of clearing where Being
is illuminated in a new way. While Hubert
L. Dreyfus claims that the idea of clearing
places Heidegger within the tradition that,
from Plato to the Enlightenment and further,
equates intelligibility with illumination (ibid.),
William McNeill argues that clearing as such
is neither dependent upon, nor to be thought
starting from, visibility or light (335). What
is most proper to presence is not grasped beginning from its visibility.
More recently, Agamben has sought to
reclaim darkness as the colour of potentiality.
When we do not see (that is, when our vision is
potential), we nevertheless distinguish darkness
from light; we see darkness, Agamben explains
(Potentialities 18081). In darkness, vision is
both potential and impossible, and that is why
it marks the experience of pure potentiality.
Although actuality is that which is visible,
potentiality is not simply a lack of vision but
the relation between vision and darkness, a capability to see darkness. In associating darkness
with potentiality and light with actuality,
Agamben appears to be doing nothing to challenge the dualisms that abound in the history
of light and darkness. Yet this is not the case
because he emphasizes that darkness, too, is a
form of actualization. By engaging with the
concept of darkness, Agamben attempts to
show why his ontology of potentiality does not
refute action and lead to passivity, as is often
suggested. Rather, seeing darkness is an active
vision of the that which is not of the current
order of things.

23

This becomes clear in Agambens essay

What Is the Contemporary? where he
denes the contemporary, the poet, as one
who rmly holds his gaze on his own time so
as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness (What Is 44). The seeing involved is an
activity and a singular ability: To perceive
this darkness is not a form of inertia or of passivity, Agamben proclaims (45). Rather, contemporaries consider the darkness of their time as
something that ceaselessly concerns and
engages them. Contemporaries are those who
perceive and grasp their own time but who
nevertheless (or perhaps because of this)
refuse to adjust themselves to its demands
(40). The contemporary attempts always to
examine that which is left in the dark by
people who are blinded by light. In this vein,
Abramovics performance is an examination
and an exploration of the kind of actualization
that can happen in and through immobility,
inaction and silence.
Thus, Agambens engagement with darkness
helps to give a more nuanced account of the role
we can ascribe to vision, light and action in the
Augenblick. It highlights the idea, prominent in
Heideggers later work, that each revelation,
each revealing of Being, is always also a concealing. Even if in Being and Time the Augenblick
refers to Daseins ecstatic, authentic presence in
the moment (376 [328]; 387 [338]), the insistence on authentic presence should not be
taken to mean that Heidegger was oblivious to
the signicance of absence. Rather, the presence
of the Augenblick should be understood as the
presence of an absence, as Agamben would say
(Potentialities 179). Similarly, the present in
Abramovics performance is not the same as
actuality but a connecting to that which is
absent.5 Perhaps paradoxically, it is by attending to the present that one can gain access to
the beyond. Hence, absence carries political relevance that goes far beyond the contestation of
particular absencepresence relations and the
social positions that they create. Absence,
rather, is always already part of everything
that is (seen), and recognition of such constitution of presence is the condition of possibility
of the political in the rst place.

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darkness in a blink of an eye

Henri Michaux points out that any progress,
every new observation, every thought, every creation, seems to create (at the same time as light)
a zone of darkness (78). Instead of seeking to
eradicate this darkness, and that which may
yet come out of it, we should aim to preserve
it as best we can. What the ontological elaboration of darkness thus highlights is that each
vision, action and space beyond creates its own
darkness. And the challenge, both to being
and to thinking the political, is how to stand
in the moment, to be the Augenblick, while at
the same time not closing off permanently the
underlying darkness that ultimately is that
from which the moment emerges. Darkness,
then, is neither a negation of being nor what
Heidegger calls the oblivion of Being. On the
contrary, an onto-poetic attention to darkness
is recognition of the presence of that which is
not, but which may yet be. Although arguing
that darkness implies not passivity but a different kind of actualization, Agamben is nevertheless content with conceiving of the seeing of
darkness as the singular activity of the poet.
In the following section I use Heideggers
engagement with the concepts of the look and
the Ungeheure, the extraordinary,6 to bridge
the problematization of the poets singular
ability to see darkness with a further discussion
of an onto-poetics of space that allows for a
relation to both beings and Being.

the look of the augenblick

In both Agambens contemporariness and
Heideggers Augenblick one is concerned with
the acquisition of a genuine understanding of
ones time that is available, at least implicitly,
only to the very few. Whether it is Agambens
contemporary who sees darkness or Heideggers
being of the Augenblick, the beyond seems to
require the presence of an exceptional, visionary
individual. Koral Ward argues that in Heideggers Augenblick the eschatological moment
which comes at the culmination point of a
state of crisis must give way to change and the
instigation of a new order, brought about by
the right man in the right time (xii).

Ward also identies aspects of the Augenblick in the ways in which artists have sought
to express and see beyond the Zeitgeist of
certain epochs. She argues that the task of
artists is to be the right man of the
moment and to seize the moment of change
and respond to it in their works (Ward 177
78). Yet, as I pointed out in the beginning of
the article, this is not the sense in which Heidegger understands art. While Abramovics performance can be read as an augenblicklich
moment, I do not think that it is an expression
of her being the right man of the moment
capable of representing her subjective experience that connects with the beyond. Rather,
it seems that the beyond in question is intimately related to the space that Abramovic
creates with each new person who sits in front
of her, and the Augenblick instead of being
a subjective vision is the site that gathers
together the elements of the performance into
a moment of transformation. As opposed to conceiving of the Augenblick as beginning from the
extraordinariness of the being that experiences
it, the performance makes tangible the relational character of the transformative moment.
The extraordinary in the Augenblick can be
further dislocated through a reading of Heideggers engagement with the concepts of the Ungeheure and the look.
In his lectures on Parmenides in 1942, Heidegger points out that we moderns, or, to
speak more broadly, all post-Greek humanity,
have for a long time been so deected that we
understand looking exclusively as mans representational self-direction toward beings
(103). The look of the modern subject is the
look that advances by calculating (108).
However, for Heidegger, the Ungeheure is
something ungraspable by the fangs of the
will, withdrawing itself from all artices of calculation, because it surpasses all planning
(101). Instead of understanding looking as a
self-accomplished activity, Heidegger points
out how in the Greek thea looking is not an
activity of a subject but the emergence of
the object in its coming to our encounter
(103). Action, then, refers to an ongoing responsiveness to the approach of the Ungeheure, and

24

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alt
to that which may yet await us (McNeill 313).
Following this, the blink of an eye, too, should
be understood as starting not from the right
man of the moment but from that which he
or she encounters. What is seen in the Augenblick is the Ungeheure: i.e., that which one
cannot grasp as an object or order through the
will.
Entering the Augenblick opens one to the
possibilities that are available to, yet not realized
by, ones being. Similarly, the present, for
Agamben, is an unlived element in everything
that is lived, and attention to this unlived is
the life of the contemporary (What Is 51). Abramovic undoubtedly exhibits many of the characteristics that Agamben ascribes to the
contemporary, the poet. But what is remarkable
about her contemporariness is that her presence
in the performance is not the unlived of her
own life but that of the person sitting in front
of her. According to Abramovic, in the
moment of the look it is not about her
anymore, but she becomes something like a
mirror to the other. Yet one of the visitors
also describes the moment by saying that it is
not about him, that it goes beyond who he is
as a person (Marina Abramovic). In discussing
the Greek thea, Heidegger argues that
looking is self-showing and indeed that selfshowing in which the essence of the encountering person has gathered itself and in
which the encountering person emerges
in the double sense that his essence is collected in the look, as the sum of his existence,
and that this collectedness and simple totality
of his essence opens itself to the look opens
itself at any rate in order to let come into
presence in the unconcealed at the same
time the concealment and the abyss of his
essence. (Parmenides 10304)

In other words, the look is the opening of a site

where one encounters the concealment of being
darkness as the that which is not of ones
being as well as the abyss (Abgrund) of
ones being as the Nothing from which all creation derives (Agamben, Potentialities 253).
The look between Abramovic and the person
opposite her in the performance both gathers

25

the persons existence and opens it to a

beyond. Such a look is not human as such but
belongs to Being itself (Heidegger, Parmenides
104), perhaps explaining Abramovics description of it as holy.

augenblicke, darkness, nearness

In a world of chance is there a better and a
worse? We yield to a strangers embrace or
give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of
an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are
asleep; and when we awake we have lost the
direction of our lives. What are these blinks
of an eyelid, against which the only defence
is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness?
Might they not be cracks and chinks
through which another voice, other voices,
speak in our lives? By what right do we
close our ears to them? (Coetzee 30)

The meaning of the Augenblick evolves

throughout Heideggers thinking from the
early Sophist lectures through Being and
Time to his later engagement with Nietzsches
work, changing from being an ecstatic presencing of a situation to being a presencing in
response to the call of a world. Yet even in his
later work Heidegger follows Nietzsches formulation of the Augenblick as the vision of the
most solitary man, where being becomes
visible in our loneliest loneliness (Nietzsche
176; Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume 2 37). Sloterdijk argues somewhat polemically that
Heidegger is ultimately left with a lonely and
weak hysteric-heroic subject that always
believes itself to be the rst to die and that
remains miserably ignorant concerning its
embeddedness within relations of intimacy and
solidarity (Nearness 40). For Sloterdijk, Heidegger is an expression of the kind of solitary
heroism that he identies with twentiethcentury thinking.
Although Sloterdijks critique disregards,
perhaps wilfully, the relationality of the Heideggerian being-in-the-world, his explicit emphasis
on the nearness to other beings, alongside Heideggers focus on the nearness of Being, is
nevertheless worth considering.7 For Sloterdijk,
positive subjectication presupposes invasions

Downloaded by [Princeton University] at 09:02 31 May 2016

darkness in a blink of an eye

by what he calls life-enriching intruders
(Bubbles 96). Yet, such passings-through are
not something that comes from the outside as
such. Subjects are always already created by
and involved in them. At the core of Sloterdijks
political poetics of space is the concept of a
sphere as a relational space with intimate tonality (Neither 144). Humans come into the world
never as individuals but always as a part of such
spheres. Sloterdijks ideas concerning poetic
space are indebted to Gaston Bachelard, who
emphasizes that even though ontologies are
always also implicit geometries, inhabited
space transcends geometrical space. Whereas
the geometrician is interested in surfaces,
leaving the sphere essentially empty, the
poetic sphere is attached to impressions of
immensity that are not subject to geometrical
delimitation (Bachelard 184, 235). Such space
in itself is poetry. Yet while Bachelards
theory is an ontology of human depth, he
emphasizes that the poetic space does not
simply enclose us in affectivity a discourse
that has become popular in recent years.
Rather, a poetic space concerns the expansion
of Being (201). Likewise, for Heidegger, it
would be banal to conceive of the Ungeheure,
the extraordinary, as something impressive
or moving that brings about this or that affective or psychic state. What comes from the
Ungeheure towards beings is Being itself (Heidegger, Parmenides 106).
Sloterdijks political poetics, with its conception of the sphere as a relational space
attached to impressions of immensity, echoes
the way in which dark space is conceptualized
in work on the phenomenologies of darkness.
Various accounts of the sensory apprehension
of darkness emphasize the ways in which darkness blurs the distinction between the inside
and the outside, between the boundaries of the
body and that which lies beyond it (Edensor
451; Morris 316; Daniel 29; Dean Moore 12;
Vidler 175). Darkness sensitizes one to the presence of the other, creating both a heightened
awareness of that which is outside oneself and
difculty in distinguishing oneself from the
outside (Edensor 451). Those who are concerned about the way in which darkness is

increasingly being banished from our immediate lived environments are often, if not primarily, concerned about the way in which the
disappearance of darkness entails also a disappearance of a sense of mystery about Being
(see Bogard). Tanizaki had already suggested
almost a hundred years ago that it is in the
world of the arts that we must look to nd the
darkness and the shadows that have been banished from our immediate lived space (63).
But where, then, is darkness in Abramovics
performance? She sits in a square of white
light and, at rst glance, it would seem that
there is no darkness to be found, not even on
a metaphorical level. The Artist Is Present
is distinctly different from much of Abramovics work that due to the recurring themes
of violence, pain and sexuality has for the
past four decades often been labelled as
dark. Yet, despite its seeming calm and serenity, Abramovic describes The Artist Is
Present as the culmination of everything she
has been striving for her whole life (qtd in
Marina Abramovic). Seeing the strong reactions of both Abramovic and the people sitting
in front of her, it is clear that, despite appearances, the performance is very much about
pain. The pain may not be inicted with razor
blades, but it is all the more penetrating for it.
However, my point is not to make a metaphorical association between darkness and pain.
Rather, the darkness of the performance is the
sense that another Being lies beyond, and in
the time-space of the Augenblick, created in
the look, one may have access to that beyond.
In The Artist Is Present the time-space of
the performance enables an openness to something that resists rationalization and capture:
the happening of Being. For contemporary
people, immersed as we are in a sea of strategies
and calculation enabled by all-penetrating light,
such an openness may be as painful as it is rare.
Yet, of course, there is no guarantee that any
given person sitting across from Abramovic
would have experienced the present, let alone
the beyond, in the terms I have discussed
above. Certainly not everyone was transformed
by the experience. Some dismissed the performance as a staring contest or a circus

26

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alt
(Marina Abramovic). What is relevant for the
purposes of this article, however, is the way in
which the performance apparently lets at least
some beings open, even if eetingly, to what
Heidegger would call nearness of Being
(Letter 167). Whether the look becomes
augenblicklich or merely a staring contest
cannot be determined beforehand. It depends
on both beings and Being, and, crucially, the
time-space of the moment.
However, the augenblicklich moment of
transformation in the performance is not a privative event but comes about through the formation of a sphere between Abramovic and
the person sitting in front of her. The performance, and the centrality of the look in it, allows
us to grasp more fully and tangibly the importance of relationality in the Augenblick. For
Heidegger, it is the work of art rather than
an individual human being that opens up a
world. Yet, as far as human beings participate
in that opening, Sloterdijk emphasizes the creation of space as always having the character
of being-with. New worlds are produced
neither by solitary beings with visions of the
beyond nor by beings that are open to anything
and everything all the time. They are produced
by the interplay between blinking and intrusion,
between the resoluteness of being and the excess
of what that being cannot capture. The truth of
the Augenblick emerges out of such encounters.
To think of a better and a worse in a world of
chance is the task of a being who is capable of
taking a stance within the current order of
things while simultaneously creating a different
truth by taking a leap in the dark towards beings
and Being that are different from ones own.

conclusion
In apocalypticism life is understood as a state of
exile in the world, waiting for the homecoming
that is to follow: the beyond is beyond the
world in its entirety (Taubes 27). But
whereas religious apocalypticism often gives an
account of the homeland where the beyond
awaits envisaging a move from darkness to
light for Heidegger, homecoming is the
home. Homecoming, then, implies dwelling

27

in the sites of nitude, whereby a being

remains open to the abyss that dislocates it
from dominant world disclosures and provides
the ground for being otherwise without,
however, determining any nal ground
(Joronen 1147). The beyond rather than existing as some discernible telos must be thought
of in terms of nearness to Being, in terms of
asking the question of the truth of Being.
Instead of a move from darkness to light, such
eschatology implies inhabiting the darkness of
the blink of an eye.
The beyond cannot, however, be willed into
existence. But neither should recognition of
the limits of human action be taken to renounce
such action altogether. Arendt identies in Heidegger the danger of an existential culpability
inspired by Goethes one who acts always
becomes guilty (Life 184). In order not to fall
prey to the potentially paralysing effects of
such existential culpability, engagements with
the idea of a beyond need to take action
seriously. In the site and moment of the Augenblick, action is the condition of possibility for
the opening of a beyond. Yet I have argued
that action in the blink of an eye does not
refer to the protection of a pre-existing truth
but to assuming a stance in each nite situation.
Through an onto-poetic elaboration of darkness
I have also sought to draw attention to the presence of the concealed in each moment of actualization. Darkness reminds us that action in the
Augenblick is always only nite. Such nitude,
however, is not privation but the ontological
condition of possibility for being otherwise
and, indeed, the condition of possibility for
the political.
Whereas specic, ontic political struggles
require the kind of strategic knowledge called
for by Foucault and those working in his
wake, a politics that aspires beyond cannot be
limited to strategy. Instead it must attach
itself to the poetic: to the possibility of a
moment that surpasses all strategy. I have discussed the Augenblick here as one such
moment. But what neither Heideggers Augenblick nor Agambens contemporariness sufciently acknowledges is that an afrmative way
of formulating such a politics will need to

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darkness in a blink of an eye

recognize the central role of relationality in
actualizing the beyond.
Abramovics performance is a culmination
and an explication of the themes that I have
wished to emphasize in considering the notion
of the Augenblick. Whereas others have interpreted artists as the men of the Augenblick
capable of representing their subjective experience that connects with the beyond, I have
argued here that the transformative moment in
Abramovics performance comes about
through the creation of a poetic space between
her and the people who sit in front of her. The
inhabitation of such a space may enable a
relation to that which is not immediately
obvious within ones own terms of intelligibility
or which may even be inexplicable. The look in
the performance and the look of the Augenblick
are not those of visionary individuals seeing the
beyond. The look, rather, is the opening of a site
where one encounters both other beings and
Being itself as everything that it may yet be.
The problematic created by the onto-poetics of
a beyond and, therefore, the challenge of a
politics of the Augenblick is how to inhabit
the site of the moment, and to act according to
its insight, while recognizing
that such a politics will always
be nite, opening as it does
onto another Being that can no
longer be grasped within its
order.

disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by
the author.

notes
I would like to thank Gideon Baker, Tim Edensor,
Mikko Joronen and Luis Lobo-Guerrero for their
insightful and encouraging comments on earlier
versions of this article. Title page image: Carnival
Nights 4 (oil on board) by Salah el Moncef.
1 Augenblick is variably translated into English as
moment, moment of vision, moment of transformation, decisive moment, instant, glance
of an eye, twinkling of an eye or blink of an

eye. The concept and its various translations can

be traced from interpretations of Sren Kierkegaards ieblik, Friedrich Nietzsches gateway
Moment, Karl Jaspers pure eye and Heideggers Augenblick. See Ward xixv; McNeill ix.
2 A detailed examination of the relationship
between these concepts is beyond the scope of
this article. I follow here William McNeill, who
argues that although Heideggers later work
focused on Ereignis and Gelassenheit, this should
not be read as a move away from the Augenblick.
The shift in emphasis regarding the Augenblick pertains to the originating power of Dasein, which in
Heideggers later work becomes more and more
decentred in relation to other worldly beings.
Instead of being conceived of as Daseins own, the
event of origination comes to belong to the strife
between earth and world. Yet, for Dasein, the
site of this strife is still the Augenblick. See
McNeill 289301.
3 Following the recent German publication of the
first three volumes of Heideggers Schwarze Hefte
[Black Notebooks], the diaries that he kept from
1931 to 1941, the relationship between his philosophy and involvement in Nazi politics has again
become a subject of debate. I follow here those
who argue that while Heideggers politics can
neither be simply explained away nor neatly separated from his philosophy, it is possible to make use
of his thought for more progressive political purposes than those of his own. Although there are
aspects of Heideggers thought that are problematic and need to be condemned, this does not
mean that the whole logic through which he analysed the question of the meaning of Being needs
to be abandoned. See Elden 17080; Nancy, Heideggers Originary Ethics, 6586. On the Black
Notebooks, see Gordon; Fried.
4 On the etymological connection between Augenblick, Ereignis and Lichtung, see Sheehan 19699.
5 Debates on presence and the (im)possibility of
immediacy and authenticity thereof have been at
the core of performance theory and practice
since the late 1950s. Whereas the 1960s and
1970s emphasized the presence of the live body
in performance, the rising popularity of deconstruction since the late 1980s has explicitly
rejected the valorization of presence. More
recent performance art has re-focused on practices of presence, creating a resurgence of interest
in the ways in which presence may be experienced,

28

alt
produced and performed. See Giannachi, Kaye, and
Shanks. The highly staged and modulated presence
in The Artist Is Present can be interpreted in the
light of this reaction to deconstruction. Further
discussion of this aspect of the performance is,
however, beyond the scope of this article.

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6 Ungeheure is variably translated into English as

monstrous, daimonic, uncanny, enormous,
immense, colossal, tremendous, extraordinary or infinite. See translators note in Sloterdijk, Bubbles 663; McNeill 306; Sloterdijk,
Geometry 29.
7 Being-with as an essential trait of Dasein has also
been emphasized by others. See, most notably,
Nancy, Being Singular Plural.

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Suvi Alt
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Lapland
PO Box 122
96101 Rovaniemi
Finland
E-mail: suvi.alt@ulapland.