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

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]

1
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.

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

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.

2
[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 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”

3
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 – 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

5
Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,”pg. 99.

4
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

5
Konersmann, entitled “Walter Benjamins philosophiche Kairologie.”6 Moreover,

even scholars who remain skeptical with respect to this interpretation, notably

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

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
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.

6
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 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

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.

7
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 Bewegung 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

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

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.
14
Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen (Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), pg. 259.

8
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, every 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 cabbalistic
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

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.

9
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, 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 moment 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'

17
P. Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History & Eschatology (Boston: Brill, 2007), pg. 139.
18
Ibid, pg. 140-1.

10
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 decision 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 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 perfectly 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

19
Ibid, pg. 287.
20
Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Moment and the Continuum,” pg. 111.

11
 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 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
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.
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.

12
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 philosophichen 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 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,

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.

13
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 applied 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 seconds, 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

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

14
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 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

15
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 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:

30
“State of emergency,” in Zohn's translation – it would be preferable to translate
ausnehmezustand as “state of exception.”

16
 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 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

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

17
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
33
This phrase should recall Origen's doctrine of apokatastasis, particular as it relates to Thesis
III.

18
blown by 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
34
Agamben, “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” pg. 115
35
We shall return to this in section VI.

19
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 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

20
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 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

21
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 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

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].

22
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

23
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 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

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.

24
 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)

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
39
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in SW 4, pg. 331.

25
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 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,

26
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.” [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

27
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
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.

28
radical opposition to the time designated by chronos, each and every moment is

qualitatively distinct from every other, however infinitesimal the 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
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.

29
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

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.

43
Ibid, pg. 85

30
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Das Passagen-Werk: Erster Band, Hrsg. von Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt Am Main:
Surhkamp, 1983).
Kairos: Schriften zur Philosophie, Ausgewählt von Ralf Konersmann (Frankfurt Am Main:
Surhkamp, 2007)
Frank Kermode, The Sense of An Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
Ralf Konersmann, “Walter Benjamins philosophiche Kairologie,” in Walter Benjamin, Kairos:
Schriften zur Philosophie, Ausgewählt von Ralf Konersmann (Frankfurt Am Main: Surhkamp,
2007), 327-353.
Kia Lindroos, Now-Time/Image-Space: Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamin's
Philosophy and Art (Jyväskylä: SoPhi, 1998).
Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's “On the Concept of History”, Trans. Chris
Turner (New York: Verso, 2005).
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 (Adelaide, ATF Press, 2006), 63-77.
Antonio Negri, Time For Revolution, Trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Continuum, 2003).
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Trans. George
Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
Political Theology II: The Myth of Closure of Any Political Theology, Trans. Michael
Hoelzel & Graham Ward (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

31
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 (Autumn-Winter 1992), 5-18.

32
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.