On the Temper of Multiple Times

Abstract

Juxtaposing two distinct points in time – the inauguration of Performance Research (PR) at the Old Operating Theatre Museum in London and the political present haunted by the imminence of terror – this essay works against the grain of nostalgia to indicate how the temporalities of the present, past and future are enmeshed in volatile immediacies. While the first part of the essay deconstructs the deceptive conviviality of the early 1990s with premonitions of new forms of social disintegration in the post-Cold War, the second part focuses on the specific emotional register of fury to capture the temper of the times. Instead of a generalized reflection on fury, the essay opts to exhume the specters of terror in Elfriede Jelinek’s Wut (Fury) which responds tangentially to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, catalyzing different states of fury at personal, political and performative levels. How the ‘moment of fury’ gets ‘exhibited’ in Jelinek’s visceral, superfast, computerized act of writing counters any ‘reflection’ on ‘our times’ in a more philosophical register. The author’s response to Jelinek’s uninterrogated reflexes to terror takes the form of excerpts from a letter, written to Jelinek from Calcutta, which, in its own way, encapsulates another ‘moment of fury’ in a different space but which is nonetheless connected in time through the volatility of shared vulnerabilities.