History and Theory 50 (February 2011), 120-128

Wesleyan University 2011 ISSN: 0018-2656

HIStory aNd KAIRS KaIrS: toWardS aN oNtology oF dUe tIme. by giacomo marramao. aurora, co: the davies group, 2007. Pp. 102.
abStract

the recent wave of interest in the theological-political has focused scholarly attention on the constellation of ideas associated with messianic time. the term kairs belongs to this constellation, and giacomo marramaos brief but ambitious text of the same name both proposes and performs a kairological reconfiguration of the close relationship between philosophy and time. marramaos argument for the productive potential of cosmic disorientation and contingency will merit the attention of historians interested in benjamins blend of messianism and historical materialism, and of anyone who is intrigued by the prospect of a messianism without apocalypticism. Keywords: giorgio agamben, Walter benjamin, kairs, philosophy of time, messianism, Jetztzeit

It is not necessary to believe that every book raises the question of its own timeliness to accept that in the case of a book entitled Kairs, this question is going to have to be addressed. to address it, one would want to have an idea of what timelinessor kairsentails, and this is where ones troubles might begin. In a brief introduction to a volume called Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis (a collection that manages to be both exactly what its title suggests, and more interesting than that), carolyn miller points out that there is a division, and maybe a conflict, in the concept of kairs as it is elaborated in classical rhetoric. on the one hand, there is a position usually associated with cicero, wherein kairs is closely associated with propriety or decorum. It becomes a principle of adaptation and accommodation to convention, expectation, and predictability. on the other hand, though, there is the gorgian position, in which kairs is understood to represent not the expected but its opposite: the uniquely timely, the spontaneous, the radically particular . . . the timely action will be understood as adaptive, as appropriate, only in retrospect, it cannot be discovered within the decorum of past actions.1 departing from this admittedly slender and heuristic framing of the question, one is left to wonder whether to locate the timeliness of a book entitled Kairs in its fulfillment of readers prior expectations, or rather in the aspects of the book that defy these expectations so as to create the possibility of reconfiguring them retrospectively.
1. carolyn r. miller, Foreword, in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Practice, ed. Philip Sipiora and James S. baumlin (albany: State University of New york Press, 2002), xii-xiii.

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today, what a reader might expect from a book entitled Kairs is a treatment of the concepts relation to what is now called messianic time. Walter benjamins critique of the ideology of historical progress and the homogeneous, empty time of chronology upon which it depends are by now surely familiar to readers of History and Theory. Famously, benjamin opposes to these the concept of a Jetztzeit, or now-time, in which the continuum of homogeneous, empty time can be exploded through a tigers leap into the past.2 though benjamin does not explicitly refer to kairs in the theses, and though the vast secondary literature on the theological bases of benjamins understanding of messianic time tends to turn first to the influence of kabbalah and Jewish mysticism rather than to New testament theology, the similarity between benjamins presentation of Jetztzeit in the theses and Paul tillichs recourse to the concept of kairs was noticed by the earliest readers of the theses, notably adorno.3 of course, benjamins synthesis of revolutionary politics and messianic theology has been enormously influential, not least in its foregrounding of time as an issue for emancipatory politics. After reading the Theses, it is difficult to return to an unreflective notion of a linear chronology as the neutral field in which history unfolds. the Italian philosopher and critic giorgio agamben has emerged over the last thirty years or so as perhaps the most important reader of benjamin on time; no writer has been more diligent than Agamben in elaborating the significance of a kairological perspective on time for our historical moment. the last section of an essay entitled time and History: critique of the Instant and the continuum declares with precision and urgency what is at stake for historians and philosophers of history in a retrieval of the concept of kairs:
adams seven hours in Paradise are the primary core of all authentic historical experience. For history is not, as the dominant ideology would have it, mans servitude to continuous linear time, but mans liberation from it: the time of history and the cairos in which man, by his own initiative, grasps favourable opportunity and chooses his own freedom in the moment. . . . true historical materialism does not pursue an empty mirage of continuous progress along infinite linear time, but is ready at any moment to stop time, because it holds the memory that mans original home is pleasure. 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. but a revolution from which there springs not a new chronology, but a qualitative alteration of time (a cairology), would have the weightiest consequence and would alone be immune to absorption into the reflux of restoration. . . . 

thanks to the abiding interest in benjamins theses on the concept of History, the growing influence of Agambens work on sovereignty and the state of exception, and the widespread discussions of the theological-political in which Benjamin and Agamben are towering figures, it would be difficult to imagine a more timely topic for a scholarly work than kairs considered as messianic time. Whether readers will consider marramaos Kairs: Towards an Ontology of Due
2. Walter benjamin, theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations (New york: Schocken books, 1969), 253-26. 3. theodor adorno, quoted in michel lowy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamins On the Concept of History (New york: Verso, 2005), 87. . giorgio agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience (london: Verso, 1993), 10-105.

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Time to be timely will depend, ultimately, on whether they subscribe to a ciceronian or a gorgian view of kairs. marramaos book almost totally thwarts any ciceronian expectations elicited by its title: not only does marramao explicitly bracket away the theological dimension of kairs (directing the reader instead to another of his works), but the term itself is not treated at all until the final pages of the text, and then only in a completely unfamiliar and idiosyncratic fashion: marramaos image of kairs is no longer the chance or the Fortune of the moderns, nor is it the eschatological event of the christians; rather it is the fundamental dimension of appropriate time, of the crucial moment that is nothing but the part of each identity, within which the very phenomenon of the mind, or awareness, takes-place (x). this dimension of appropriate time is not a consciousness of time, but rather a conception of consciousness as time, a time that, moreover, is not the time of the world, or time in-itself, but a distinctively human time that marramao describes as a kind of residue of the other time. In other words, marramao is dealing here with kairs as the time that remains, but not in the messianiceschatological sense that one might expect.5 remember, though, that the gorgian view of kairs suggests that a work is most timely when it defies the expectations of its readers in order to reconfigure them retrospectively. From this perspective, a book entitled Kairs would partake of the most kairs by not addressing kairs, or by addressing it in a singular and unexpected way. If readers are prepared to set aside whatever preconceptions they might have about what a book entitled Kairs should address, I believe I can convince them in the following essay that Marramaos work has the potential to reconfigure their understanding of kairs and its relationship to messianic time and emancipatory politics.
I. tIme aNd PHILO-SOPHIA

In the opening lines of Kairs: Towards an Ontology of Due Time, marramao points out that time has been at the center of philosophical reflection since its inception (ix). the attempt to reconcile an understanding of the time of the world with our experience of time spans the whole of the Western philosophical tradition, and is ongoing. of course, philosophical interest in time precedes, and can be distinguished (at least heuristically) from, a philosophical interest in history. leaving aside the questions of whether and at what point in this tradition it became impossible to make a rigid distinction between the philosophy of time and the philosophy of history, it seems clear that today such a distinction is impossible, insofar as the experience of time itself seems to be historically mutable. as marramao points out:
A specific pathogenesis of temporality is typical of the modern experience. It derives from the disparity between the wealth of possibilities opened to individuals by the technical-scientific project of the control of nature (and of rationalization of social evolutionary processes) and the poverty of its experience. From this derives a phenomenon of acceleration (genealogically traceable to the Judeo-christian roots of modernity), for which time
5. I am alluding here to giorgio agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), especially chapter .

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splits up between an endless projection towards the future, and an atrophy and fossilization of the past, which progressively deprives the present of the space of its existence. (ix)

Of course, Marramao is far from the first to make this point: the idea that the acceleration of temporality and the concomitant disappearance of the present are constitutive features of our modernity is well-known.6 Nevertheless, chief among the many merits of marramaos short book is the persuasive urgency of its contention that the philosophical engagement with time has been so far outstripped by the transformation of its object that it demands to be wholly rethought. However, the rethinking Marramao pursues does not involve the attempt to conceptualize the vertiginous experience of an accelerating temporality. Instead, marramao makes the rather unexpected suggestion that what needs to be rethought is the idea that experience can or should ground philosophys engagement with time. marramaos approach to the question of time involves, on the one hand, the critique and abandonment of the philosophical doxa that opposes the authentic time of inner duration to the inauthentic nature of measured time (1) and on the other, the engagement with current thinking in the sciences (predominantly quantum physics) about time. at the risk of oversimplifying marramaos complex and densely allusive engagement with twentieth-century philosophical reflection on the Zeitfrage, I would summarize his point as follows: philosophy is faithful to its name only in facing the cosmic disorientation that the new scientific image of the universe has transmitted to our experience (x). For marramao, the point of facing this contemporary experience of disorientation is not to master it or to recuperate it for a philosophical tradition. rather, marramao uses it as an occasion to remind the reader that this situation of disorientation, this inability to establish the proper, is, in a sense, the original home of philosophy (considered as a cultural activity, rather than as a discipline). It is this disorientationunderstood as a state of openness to the otherthat lends itself to the appearance of the crucial moment of transformative insight or decisive action that marramao is calling kairs. marramao believes that philosophy should go back to its place of origin (35). this is not exactly an unprecedented view; it is shared by many of the targets of marramaos critique. However, marramaos description of the origin is distinctive in that he doesnt identify it as a lost identity or fullness, but as a site of division and indeterminacy. the passage continues:
but here comes a question: what is this place [of origin]? I will answer in a willfully drastic way: it is, when looking closely, the same as the Unheimlich, as that disorientating or familiar stranger that is the core of Freuds work. . . . It is the site of the metaxy, introduced by diotimus oration, which is reported by Socrates in Platos Symposium: [It is] something in between wisdom and ignorance (ti metaxy sophias kai amathias), between mortal and immortal (metaxy thnetou kai athanatou), between human not-knowing and divine sophia. (35)

departing from this apprehension of philosophys relation to an original division, marramao proposes and performs what he describes as a philosophie cla6. See, for example, the magisterial treatment of this topic in reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New york: columbia University Press, 200).

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te, in which the historico-philosophical continuum that stretches from aristotle to Heidegger would be abandoned, or more precisely, exploded, in the interest of establishing an unexpected, untimely link between Platos conception of time and einsteins. In a prime example of what psychoanalytic theory would term nachtrglichkeit, einsteins discovery of relativity reaches back across the intervening millennia to enhance or restore the legibility of Platos Timaeus. When Marramao returns to Plato in the wake of Einstein, what he finds is that, contrary to what more than two millennia of philosophical reflection on the Zeitfrage have told us, time is not divided between the linear continuum and the instant; between the objective and the subjective; between the quantitative and the qualitative: it is one.7 marramao explicates Platos famous formulation that chronos is the moving image of ain thoroughly and precisely, to show that chronos and ain must be thought together, in a kind of principle of complementarity reminiscent of the treatment of light as particle and wave in quantum mechanics. However, Marramao argues that to recognize the uni-duality of time, and to expose the conventional, pacifying character of the subject/object, interior/exterior, authentic/inauthentic distinctions, is not equivalent to an understanding of time in itself. What marramao calls the cosmic disorientation provoked or reflected by this conception of timewhich is recalled by, but not equivalent to, the disorientation provoked by the theory of relativitymeans that we have to abandon the common sense that suggests that we can have a direct or immediate experience of time conceived in this manner. time is one, but it is not our time. What it is, is not something that we can grasp, it is a figure of the limits of our understanding. to approach it, marramao suggests, we have to move beyond the anthropocentric and familiarizing doxa of the philosophical tradition, and grapple with it as a perturbation: an intrusion of the other that is both unsettling and wondrous. of course, the unexpected tie that marramao establishes between Plato and einstein is itself an example of what might be called kairological thinking. marramao does not present this move as a future-oriented revision, but as a return to an original or fundamental situation that has been obscured by an intervening tradition. Marramao argues that his reconceptualization of the problem of time through the thinking-together of Plato and Einstein is not just a reconfiguration of the history of the philosophy of timeit demands or provokes a rethinking of the goal of philosophy tout court. For marramao, philosophy is only at home in the unheimlich space or interlude between our understandingor more precisely, our
7. Marramao summarizes the philosophical doxa to which he is opposed as follows: according to a theme that is dominant in the twentieth-century philosophy of time (suffice it to refer to the already mentioned examples of bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger), our experience of time would be bound by the juxtaposition between an authentic, yet ineffable, time, which expresses the subjective and inner feel of duration; and an inauthentic, but measurable, time, which manifests itself in its objective and spatialized representation. In the first case, we would be dealing with the qualitative and incommensurable dimension of vitality; in the second, with the quantitative and measurable dimension of exteriority, which is homogeneous and indifferent to contents (0). If, despite marramaos reservations, readers retain an interest in the continuities and metamorphoses of the modern and postmodern philosophical conceptions of time, they would be well served by a reading of david Hoys The Time of Our Lives (cambridge, ma: mIt Press, 2009). Hoys critical genealogy offers a more positive (and more thorough) treatment of the philosophical line that marramao urges his readers to abandon.

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wisdomand what resists it absolutely. If philosophy abandons its position at the frontiers of our wisdom for the consolations of paradox, if it cedes its desire for what it can never possess, then it abdicates the original mission that is still legible in its name. marramao suggests that the true philosopher who resides in these borderlands will encounter not his professional colleagues, but other searchers, like einstein and Freud, who derive their ability to reshape our vision of the world from their attunement to what lies beyond our understanding. one of the most fascinating aspects of marramaos book is his enlistment of einsteins discussion, in his letters, of the role of thauma, or wonder, in his discovery of the theory of relativity.8 through his reading of einstein and Freud, Marramao emphasizes the role of the unconscious and the uncanny, of dreams and wonder, in the construction of scientific and philosophical theories alike. The attribution of qualitative or paradigmatic shiftsradical discontinuitiesin our apprehension of the world to a sort of active passivity, or openness, to the unexpected, the fortuitous, the uncanny is relatively uncontroversial when what is at issue is largely aesthetic or poetic. However, when what is at issue is a scientific or philosophical discipline, the decisive contribution of an unconscious, unplanned, even oneiric creativity is often understated or covered over by a rhetoric of rigor and control. To summarize Marramaos approach in this text, we could say that he wants to treat cosmic disorientationwhich might be considered an ek-static (pace Koselleck) dwelling, an active passivity, or a state of being-at-home in the unheimlichnot as an experience to be mastered or overcome, but as a special condition that is amenable to kairological moments of inspiration and insight that would not otherwise be available. He opposes and critiques any attempt to master or recuperate this experience of de-centering through an anthropomorphic or familiarizing discourse. If Marramaos approach is not wholly novel, his books combination of polemical vigor with a willingness to perform the type of thinking that it extols is highly persuasive.
II. meSSIaNISm aNd KAIROS: tHe tIme tHat remaINS

the readership of History and Theory may be convinced, at this point, of the philosophical interest of this work, but could nevertheless be wondering whether marramaos book contains anything for the historian. after all, the benjaminian approach to kairs bears directly on history, and marramao, at least so far, seems to have something else in his sights. What significance does Marramaos intervention in the philosophy of time have for the conceptualization of history? Does marramaos text have anything to add to our understanding of messianic time? In short, does marramaos Kairs have anything to do with benjamins kairs (or Jetztzeit)? the fact that Kairs does not explicitly address benjamin or messianic time should not be taken as an indication that marramao is unfamiliar with benjamins work or a messianic conception of kairsquite the contrary is the case. marramao states in the preface that Kairs forms a triptych on time with two
8. this discussion appears in chapter 3 of marramaos book, entitled einsteins dream, particularly pp. 18-21.

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of marramaos prior works: Potere e secolarizzazione and Minima temporalia. It appears that a discussion of the putative secularization of theological concepts (among which is messianic time) constitutes the focus of the former work, which unfortunately remains to be translated.9 Fortunately, readers of Kairs without Italian, but with an interest in how marramao would treat the theological-political issues that are explicitly set aside in this book, can consult his essay messianism without delay: on the Post-religious Political theology of Walter benjamin.10 this essay is of particular interest for the precision with which marramao distinguishes the Jetztzeit, which he understands as the unexpected joining of a particular past to the present in a constellation charged with opportunity, from the Augenblick, an instant of decision in which the action that explodes the continuum of history is taken; this distinction should be familiar from the passage from agamben that appeared earlier in this essay. the method and practice of historical materialism can cause the Jetztzeit to appear, but the Augenblickthe messianic moment of decision or actionis supplementary and contingent; the Augenblick is a possibility or potential that the Jetztzeit contains, but it is only rarely seized or realized.11 marramao makes the argument, which I have not seen presented elsewhere in a comparably compelling manner, that benjamin demands us to reverse our common understanding of the waiting or delay involved in messianic time. In marramaos reading of benjamin, it is not we who wait in the present for the messiah to come and redeem us at some unspecified future point, but the oppressed of the pastour enslaved ancestorsthat await the decisive instant of our redemptive action:
[benjamins messianism] is placed at the intersection between the moment (Augenblick) and the past (Vergangenheit), outside of the future-oriented symbolism of waiting. every instant carries within it the energeia, the power (potenza) or virtuality of the messianic: on the condition that it be conceptualizedbegriffen, literally: caught, ensnaredin its singular, unrepeatable specificity. It is only when political action can be recognized as messianic action that Jetztzeit is converted into Augenblick. but there is more to it. the constellations of the now-time are converted into the moment not by virtue of a utopian tension in the direction of the future, but because of the fact that memory (Erinnerung) of the past of the oppressedas indicated in thesis VIflashes up at a moment of peril (im Augenblick einer Gefahr aufblitz). It is in the image of the past therefore and not in some projection of the future that one finds the key to reciprocal conversion of messianism and historical materialism: Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past [Bild der Vergangenheit] which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. It is in that unpredictable and unexpected flash that revolutionary
9. giacomo marramao, Potere e secolarizzazione: Le categorie del tempo (Power and Secularization: the categories of time) (rome: editori riuniti, 1983), and Minima Temporalia: Tempo, spazio, esperienza (minima temporalia: time, Space, experience) (milan: Il Saggiatore, 1990). 10. giacomo marramao, messianism without delay: on the Post-religious Political theology of Walter benjamin, Constellations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 15, no. 3 (2008), 397-05. 11. yet if the messianic is not in the proper sense the time of waiting, it is also not mere Jetztzeit. the monadic density of Nunc, of the present, of the now, is the subject of the interpreter, of the historian capable of seizing the constellation determined by the present in its Darstellung. messianic time is rather a time of action, because only through acting do we become revolutionary subjects, subjects capable of effecting a conversion from the political into the messianic. Ibid., 00.

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action comes to the fore, and it is precisely in that moment that we find ourselves in time properly called messianic.12

the Jetztzeit, then, is the backdrop forthe precondition or potentiality of the Augenblick. the Jetztzeit varies, but it is not scarce: historical materialism can make it appear. How are we to understand, then, the scarcity and contingency of the Augenblick? marramao argues that as an initial step, we need to follow benjamin in setting aside the anthropocentric roots common to all traditional forms of messianism and the ideological variants (whether progressivist or revolutionary) that have secularized it.13 benjamin and marramao suggest that anthropocentric approaches to time fail to recognize that cosmic time is not our time, or even a distinctively human time, and are as such unable to grapple with the strangeness and disorientation that surrounds and relativizes, the events of History and Civilization. Because time is not ours, an essential and irreducible element of contingency suffuses our experience of it. What separates the messianic moment of action from other moments is very little, almost nothing, beyond an awareness of the Jetztzeit and of the possibility of action. this is where we rejoin marramaos treatment of kairs as the thin residue that is both our time of awareness and our awareness of time:
this theme brings us, moving towards a conclusion, to a further motif: taking this cosmic disorientation as a starting point, how does one identify the space or opening produced by the convergence of messianism and historical materialism? We know that such an opening is very narrow, what benjamin calls a strait gate (kleine Pforte) through which the messiah might enter. the strait gate represents the precariousness of a dangerously minimal margin. the messiah does not arrive as the grand representation of roman catholicism, as Schmitt thought, but appears in a moment of danger, when a small opening seems to reveal itself: the entryway for the messianic is also the entrance point of contingency, of transience. the entrance point is a contingency that is kairological and that coincides with a sort of interlude between being and nothingness, fullness and emptiness, desperation and hope.1
III. coNclUSIoN

So, what can the historian or theorist of history take away from marramaos plea to reject familiarizing, anthropomorphic conceptions of time, in favor of cosmic disorientation and contingency? marramaos work has the merit of calling the readers attention to the positive potential to be found in the liminal, mixed spaces where attunement to contingency can lead to a transformative insight or a decisive action; disorientation, antifoundationalism, antihumanism have a reputation for a negativity or nihilism that are nowhere to be found here. While it is well-known that historians need not take a position on the Zeitfrage, or on the distinction between our time and the conception of cosmic time that is suggested by modern physics, it may nevertheless be comforting to some to know that they can contributemost notably through the practice of historical mate12. Ibid., 01. 13. Ibid., 02. 1. Ibid., 03.

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rialismto bringing about the Jetztzeit in which unexpected and transformative moments are possible. Because Marramaos text is not specifically addressed to historians, I want to return briefly in conclusion to a recent essay by Giorgio Agamben that suggests where the historical activity might fit into the kairological constellation arrayed in marramaos work. In his essay entitled What is the contemporary?, agamben follows Nietzsche in defining contemporariness as a singular relationship with ones own time, which adheres to it, and at the same time keeps a distance from it 15 the contemporary, then, is someone who is not at home in his or her own time. For agamben, this relationship of adherence and disjunction is productive, insofar as it allows the contemporary to see the present better than those who are immersed in it, and to see connections between their time and the past that are otherwise invisible. this condition of contemporariness could describe the position of the historian; it is also reminiscent of the situation of disorientation so prized by Marramao. agamben goes on to write that:
the contemporary is not only the one who, perceiving the darkness of the present, grasps a light that can never reach its destiny; he is also one who, dividing and interpolating time, is capable of transforming it and putting it into relation with other times. He is able to read history in unforeseen ways, to cite it according to a necessity that does not arise in any way from his will, but from an exigency to which he cannot not respond. It is as if this invisible light that is the darkness of the present cast its shadow on the past, so that the past, touched by this shadow, acquired the ability to respond to the darkness of the now.16

So we have in Agambens figure of the contemporary the resident of an indeterminate borderland characterized by a fracture and mixing of time, and by the unexpected or contingent appearance of an exigency that demands action. agambens contemporary is a figure of Marramaos kairs, and contemporary history is an activity that can promote the Jetztzeit that will hopefully find not only the historian, but his or her readers as well, and encourage them to grasp the opportunities to stop and remake time that, benjamin tells us, are presented to us at every moment by the past that is awaiting our redemptive action. Springfield, MO

15. giorgio agamben, What is an Apparatus? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1. 16. Ibid., 53.