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4 Maurice Blanchot, Exemplary Acts,Political Writings: 1953-1993, 98-9. 5 Blanchot, Exemplary Acts,Political Writings: 1953-1993, Trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 98. 6 Maurice Blanchot, [A rupture in time: Revolution], Political Writings: 1953-1993, 100.
less explicitly political-historical register, retaining an implicit reference to Benjamins reflections on time and history: from what comes to pass, the present is excluded. Radical change would itself come in the mode of the un-present which it causes to come, without thereby either consigning itself to the future (foreseeable or not), or withdrawing into the past (transmitted or not). 7 It is this moment, which is always now, and yet never present, in relation to our unquenchable desire both for it and that for which it serves as a transcendental, that is at the center of this work. The word kairos signifies the opening of a discontinuity in a continuum... a decisive moment that must be caught in passing, 8 while the kairic designates the mode of temporal experience to which kairos corresponds experience in which time itself is invested with desire. An experience and concept of time in the kairic mode is as much a condition of possibility for revolution, for a foreseeable future to which action must be subordinated is every bit as stultifying as the constraints of the past upon the present. That revolutionary insubordination with respect to the future itself is now possible is emblematic of a break with the political thinking and epoch of modernity. The exemplary is more precisely the singular, historically determined instance of an idea; the extreme, excessive moment of the dialectic, in which the singular can be nothing other than a repetition of the idea that makes the idea itself possible. Singular instances, exemplary instances, of one and the same idea can and must, at times stand in relationship of contradiction with regard to one another, while at the same time differ only according to their historical-material context. Every idea is originally overdetermined, insofar as the category of origin describes that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance9 meaning (singular/exemplary instances & ideas, e.g. the monad, are nonunivocal a 'variant' of the 'invariant,' structure of the totality. 10) The exemplary instance as the superposition of Ursprung (though in Benjaminian terms), Entstehung and Herkunft, pace Foucault's reading of Nietzsche, with the latter term understood in an expanded sense,
7 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, Trans. Ann Smock (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 114. 8 Francoise Balibar, Philippe Bttgen, Barbara Cassin, Moment, instant, occasion, in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire europen des philosophies. Dictionnaire des intraduisibles. (Paris: Le Robert/Seuil, 2004) 813-818. 815. Trans. H. Jordheim, 2007. 9 Benjamin, Origin, 45. 10 Louis Althusser, On the Materialist Dialectic, For Marx, Trans. Ben Brewster (London & New York: Verso, 1996), 209.
as inclusive of both fore- and after-history: Where anachrony becomes for an instant contemporaneous (C.f. Agamben, Nudities, See Koselleck below).
What's more: this over-determination is itself at least double. As the situation 'in principle' can only be said to exist as an idea developed in the course of time by its various exemplary repetitions, overdetermination must be understood spatio-temporally and conceptually. In the exemplary, what shall be termed a sur-representational excess arises as the idea itself instantiated simultaneously de novo and as a repetition. Excess is the essence of the sur-representational: it is by means of this surplus representation that novelty can emerge to develop and adumbrate the idea. It is also by exceeding, outstripping, the images and forms of the past that such events and such times release their emancipatory potential. The sur-representational excess, forming a constellation with its combined fore and after-history, its innumerable repetitions, would present its truth. We may more precisely define the term sur-representational excess as the individuating and determining elements and phenomena of the historical instantiation of an idea that neither arise from, nor can be reduced to concepts or archetypal figures. In other words, it designates the aleatory nature and particularity of each historical exemplar of an idea and marks the divergence between each time it is (sur)-represented. Or, more poetically, the excess is all that in the sur-representational image which evokes in us the mmoire involuntaire of an ungraspable, nonconceptual reality the true experience [Erfahrung] corresponding to the idea (memory of the immemorial). Inasmuch as sur-representations are matters of contingency and the ostensibly accidental determined minimally in terms of its spatio-temporal coordinates and, importantly, grant access to a measure of the truth inaccessible to conceptual representation, we may note for the moment in passing the structural analogy to the Benjaminian category of the Auratic, in terms of which the phenomenon, logic and significance of the sur-representational and exemplary will be further developed. Truth is in transgression, in the difference of repetition; the truth of an epoch in its manner of exceeding and violating the limits and constraints of past and place. Our truth, our origin and goal, the New, is at once what is most foreign and what is most familiar to us, it is the home we have never had the place after which we have always sought where we have always already been. We catch sight of this (home) land in the moment and movement of rupture, in crisis and dis-aster in breaking with old stars and
constellations; in this ephemeral image we are at home in time: this is our moment our kairos our chance. (Images of Truth) This image is an image of redemption if redemption is conceived as the end of alienation, and if alienation is understood as all that binds man to a nation and time, a point of near-total agreement for not only Benjamin and Blanchot, but Bataille and Bloch as well. This is what is fundamental to any genuinely radical thought or practice, as the final sentences of The Principle of Hope emphatically state: True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e. grasp their roots. But the root of history is working, creating a human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises something which shines into the childhood of all and where no one has yet been: Home.15 If it is true that the principle of all history heretofore has been alienation (whether its manifest, historically determined face is one of dispossession, exile and eschatological expectations, or one of rootedness, nostalgia and fantasies of decadence and the autochthonous) it is our task, not only to pull the emergency brake, but to bring this history to an end, to clear a way for a new beginning, a new story, illuminated by the dawning of the New.
Following Blanchot's reflections, etymology and historical/mythological use of terms must be qualified as only valid in the restricted context, indicative of conceptual transformations. Transformations & Discontinuities in Conceptual History that is, ruptures in the history of a form of knowledge analogous to mutations in the episteme and changed historical a prioris in Foucault. Conceptual transformations as historical events. Space of Experience / Horizon of Expectation
attitude or conduct; they give structure to a world, representing the nonexperienceable, nonapprehensible totality of the real... they therefore indicate the fundamental certainties, conjectures, and judgments in relation to which the attitudes and expectations, actions and inactions, longings and disappointments, interests and indifferences, of an epoch are regulate. 22 Absolute metaphors therefore not only express a given world, but in metaphorics' pragmatic-paradigmatic function, metaphor passes into the structures of a given world, producing an entirely new world when the answers previously received (or produced) become obsolete even refuted leaving vital needs unfulfilled, for concepts and metaphors abhor a vacuum. The dualistic model is pregnant with myth,23 while dualism present or produced at the origin ought render impossible a singular, definitive conclusion. One sees dualistic models and vocabularies of time cutting across countless cultures and languages, with a conceptual-linguistic history extending far into the past, for the diremption-bifurcation of temporality first took place at, or very shortly following the dawn of historical time. The sacrifice of the sacred: The myth has a nonmythical core, just as man, in the world contains an unworldly deposit that... has no need of instruction, but only of awakening, of the removal of deception, of self-discovery.24
22 Ibid, 14. 23 Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, pg. 179-180. 24 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, pg. 187.