Messianic Time Research Articles

Crossing Boundaries: Shock Effect, Optical Unconscious and Messianic Time in Theo Angelopoulos’s Cinematic Language

The films of Theo Angelopoulos narrate a poetic “new humanism,” and this genius director of the 20th century has left an enduring artistic ‘aura’ in Walter Benjamin’s era of mechanical reproduction through his unique use of long-take narration and internal montage. This paper explores the dialectical relationship between long takes and internal montage in Angelopoulos’ films, as well as how the conflicting arrangement of mise en scène affects the audience’s psyche. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theories of Shock Effect, Optical Unconscious, and Messianic Time, the analysis focuses on Landscape in the Mist, one of Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Silence, to examine his “boundary-crossing” cinematic language. Benjamin’s shock effect is evident as Angelopoulos breaks the logical constraints using iconic and impactful images, delivering a disruptive shock to an audience accustomed to the anesthesia of art reproductions, prompting critical contemplation. Angelopoulos’ lens possesses a unique magic, consistently influencing the audience’s optical unconscious and prompting reflections on the past and self. Landscape in the Mist tells a story of searching for the father, with the protagonist transcending allegorical boundaries. Angelopoulos’ transcendent cinematography, beyond time and space, inherits the imagery of Greek culture, revealing the anticipation of the past and future in messianic time. The paper concludes with the reflection that on the desire for redemption through a messianic promise, asserting that the present time is the optimal moment for crossing boundaries, no matter how much we yearn to await redemption.

The infinite unleashed: Benjamin revisited in the context of the mechanical philosophy

ABSTRACT This essay examines Walter Benjamin’s politico-theological conception of time (the messianic time) against the background of the mechanical philosophy which the Copernican turn brought about. My argument is that the messianic time which intervenes in the mechanical, ‘homogenous, empty time’ shares the formal logic of the divine which intervenes in the Newtonian mathematical space–time via the differential as the non-all (not universal). Newton formulated the mathematical space as ontologically closed by ‘the dominion of One’. But, as George Berkeley’s critique of Newton’s differential shows, the differential comes to reveal the non-all in it. The divine in fact cannot be ontologically closed, leaving the universe divided into the merely mechanical (secular science) and the infinite (the divine as the non-all which does not fit the mechanical). Quentin Meillassoux formulates the mathematical space–time as simultaneously All and non-all too, but with no theological project for interpretation. By contrast, Benjamin’s use of the term the differential shows that he conceives the non-all left from the mechanical as a differential point within the mathematical space–time which enables manifold translations of the divine as the All beyond the mechanical space–time.

The concept of messianic time by Walter Benjamin and its political implications

Despite Benjamin’s “renaissance” in contemporary research literature, the meaning of the concept of Jetztzeit(“Now-time”), one of his key political and philosophical concepts, remains vague, largely due to the tendency of researchers to follow Benjamin‘s narrative and metaphorical style. The author of this article purposely uses a strict analytical approach to capture the key characteristics of the concept and their relationship to each other. To do this, the concept is analyzed in the first part of the article through the prism of the related concepts of “messianic time” and “kairos time”. In the second part, the author traces the possible political implications of different interpretations of the concept itself and its connection with Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence”, showing that different interpretations lead to diametrically-opposite perceptions of Benjamin’s position, from a supporter of “pure criticism” to an activist of “direct actions”. In conclusion, the significant role of the Benjamin project as an alternative to the “mainstream” of the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) is pointed out in the context of today’s prospects for the revival of the Marxist political utopia.

Language, Time, and Death. An Ethico-Philosophical Perspective Following Hegel, Heidegger, Lévinas, and Blanchot

Our daily existence is affected by how we perceive death, be it our own’s death tocome or others’ death. The intimidating nature of death has the potential to affect our daily ethical existence in relation to the other, as is seen in various crises in human history. In such a context, since expansive literature in various approaches such as biological, sociological, psychological, and political addressing the question of death is already available, this essay presents an ethico-philosophical perspective on death and argues if death should be seen as the worst event that is to be experienced by being. In this essay, I correlate language, time, and death, contrasting popular analogies, i.e., death is possibility of impossibility (Hegel and Heidegger), and death is impossibility of possibility (Lévinas and Blanchot). Firstly, the essay stages the discussion with contrasting synchronic and diachronic perspectives of language, i.e., historical understanding of language and time in Hegelian terms and the messianic time in Lévinasian terms, to see how sensibility, i.e., universal meaning, is expressed through concept. Secondly, the essay sees how sensibility is expressed through a concept beyond dialectic opposition and negativity while acknowledging that the question of ethics arises only after the end of philosophy, for something is always inexpressible through expression; there is always remnant beyond philosophical significance. This essay not only argues language, time, and death as the ethical responsibility of the self towards the other, but also contributes to the understanding of language as ethics beyond philosophy, and death as passivity beyond ontology following Lévinas’s idea of messianic time and Blanchot’s views on literature and death.

Sense of an Ending and the Imagination of the End: Apocalypse, Disaster and Messianic Time

Apocalyptic visions go beyond Christian eschatology and permeate our present imagination. Not so much with already bygone symbolism or the terror of bloody carnage, as with the vague sense of an ending, fuelled by historical conditions – the Holocaust, the nuclear crisis, or the more contemporary global threats of a viral pandemic or climate change. The 11th issue of Colloquia Humanistica is devoted to various understandings of the end, introduced by the topics of apocalypse, disaster and messianic time. The articles gathered in the volume may be read separately as examples of analysis of several end-time-directed narratives, but they also constitute a whole that may indicate the specific features of thinking about the end.

What Time Is It? Climate Change and the Temporality of a Paradigm Shift

How we think about time shapes the way we live. In a world facing imminent climate change, our actions need to change, but it is both all too easy to continue to pursue business as usual and all too difficult not to. What we need is a transformation of how we conceive of time in order to have a transformation in our actions. We review three ways that have been proposed to do this: (1) the use of different clocks to connect us more broadly to the environment, (2) interacting directly with the environment, and (3) cultivating imagination for ways things could be other than they are. We then propose conceptualizing the change needed as a paradigm shift—that indeed there is a new way of understanding our reality that is dawning, and that this is both challenging and eventually replacing our current conceptualizations and praxis. In particular we draw on messianic time to point to the transformation of time that takes place in a paradigm shift, and that with that transformation, a new way of living becomes available to us.

Современность как время для утопии

The article is devoted to the question of the relationship between Modernity and utopia. Modernity is viewed as a special time regime (i.e., a set of socially significant forms of perception of time by people and social groups), which constitutes a number of conditions that open up opportunities and create obstacles for the utopian thinking and the policies it directs, struggle practices, etc. The author identifies three important from the perspective for the existence of utopia conditions. The first condition is the tension between the openness of Modernity to qualitative changes and its desire for self-closure and reduction towards one of its features (rationalization, global capitalism, etc.). The possibilities of utopian thinking in a particular historical situation depend on the predominance of one of these impulses. The second condition is the problematization of any specific utopia against the background of the general process of reflexive self-renewal of modern societies, the appropriation of criticism to oneself and its recoding into the elements of routine management. The third condition is the colonization of time due to the subjectively perceived acceleration of time and loss of control over time, which complicates any thinking outside the everyday facts, including utopian thinking. According to the author’s conclusion, these three conditions are interrelated: it is the openness of Modernity to change that causes both the problematization of a specific utopia and the colonization of accelerating time, every moment of which should be spent on changes for the better. In its turn, the colonization of time undermines the possibility of “stopping” it, transferring it into the so-called “messianic time”, a time of eventfulness and concreteness.

МЕССИАНИЗМ В ТЕКСТАХ ВАЛЬТЕРА БЕНЬЯМИНА И ЖАКА ДЕРРИДА

Secular messianism, placed in the center of the article’s topic, isn’t a consistent religious or philosophical tradition. However, though it doesn’t have a consistent philosophical genealogy, and tears ties with religious tradition, “weak” messianism could be considered as a unite discourse, which unites authors of heterogenous philosophical and religious traditions. At the core of the messianic discourse, placed in the article’s focus, lies the critic of a positive exclusivist cult as a system of power, and construction of a negative cult on a basis of a critical discourse. In the article with the help of conceptual apparatus, developed by Michele Foucault, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Bruno Latour’s version ANT’s elements, Walter Benjamin’s “messianic” texts and Jacques Derrida later texts, in which he turns to “messianic” problematic, are discussed. As a result of the deconstruction of a subject– oriented metaphysics, against which stands “weak” messianism’s discourse, modern linear temporality of an assymmetric ontology changes into messianic time of an onto–epistemologically symmetric hauntology (hontologie). In hauntology there is no room for economy of violence, based on the practice of exclusion and systemic production of violence upon those who are excluded.

Walter Benjamin and the Weak Messianic Power

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German intellectual of Jewish descent, a well-known literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator and essayist, and a key figure in continental philosophy. His works on topics such as historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism have had a marked influence on contemporary aesthetic theories and the development of Western Marxism, including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. These articles will focus on the analysis of the concept of messianism, which Benjamin develops in his work “On the concept of history” or “Theses on the philosophy of history” (1940). Messianism here is neither a theological dogma nor a modern figure of the utopian. Benjamin’s messianic time does not refer to the future, but to the urgency of the “now.” The author contrasts the “weak messianic force” of the tradition of the oppressed, which demands the past with the realization of happiness and liberation in the present, and Jetztzeit – a model of messianic time, open and nonlinear time of rupture, based on modern (contemporary) forms of collective experience past and liberation memory (Eingedenken).

The Concept of “Community” in the Social Ontology of J.-L.Nancy and J. Agamben

The article discusses new ontological approaches to the concept of “community” that appeared after the “ontological turn”. If ontotheology (metaphysics) in search of the foundation of the existing (society) takes the existing beyond the limits of the existing, then the new ontology (ontoheterology) based on new methodological premises asserts the difference of being, its multiplicity due to which the being is affirmed in its being. On the basis of new theoretical prerequisites, Nancy and Agamben create new concepts of “community” which are discussed in this article. For Nancy, “community” is, first of all, a shared coexistence of being, where each individual being is manifested in multiplicity. The unitary is singular and displayed in the display to the Other. In co-existence, individuals share the meaning of finite existence, but finiteness (death) is not completeness, it is an immeasurable responsibility for existence constituting a community. In constructing the ontology of the “community”, J. Agamben uses the concepts of dispositive, homo sacer, naked life, state of emergency, and messianic time. According to Agamben, modern society is in a state of emergency, where the rule and law are suspended. In this suspension, a person turns into a homo sacer, and his life turns into a vita sacra (naked life), the city becomes a camp. At the foundation of the coming community, Agamben believes that non-activity is rooted in the Messianic time, which overcoming violence and totality opens the way to a new form-life. Thus, the new concepts of the “community”, overcoming the traditional notions of society, eliminate any form of theoretical (and practical) totality, since they carry the multiple redundancy of social being. Keywords: community, being-together, singularity, dispositive, homo sacer, state of emergency

Tiempo mesiánico y narración Para una interpretación teológica de las prácticas narrativas de las víctimas

This article proposes elements for an interdisciplinary debate on the theological idea of messianic time secularized by modern political philosophy of the 20th century and how it distorts and erases the sense of kairological temporality as a contraction of messianic time and kairological anticipation. We also discuss how the acts of donation of just persons enable the original experience of human-divine redemption in the heart of history. By taking key ideas of western thinkers critical of enlightened modernity in its secularizing aspect, we propose elements for a theology of the messianic time in a postmodern and decolonial sense. These elements serve as hermeneutic keys to understand the experiences, symbolic practices and narratives of peoples and communities who are survivors of systemic violence amid the current civilizational crisis, who subvert violence through acts of memory, justice, and selfless love.

The novel reconsidered: Emotions and anti‐realism in mid‐19th‐century Scandinavian literature

AbstractThe aim of the present article is to investigate the novel as remediation of nationalist pedagogy: how was the pedagogical, nationalist project charged with emotions? How did elements from non‐realist genres make emotions ‘stick’? And what are, in return, the implications of the use of non‐realist elements for the nationalist project, more specifically for nationalist temporalities? The hybrid novel form allowed for incorporating different kinds of archives, constructing a national heritage, such as material from collections of oral tradition, records from witchcraft trials, medieval manuscripts and geographical accounts including cartography. The novel added emotions to the nationalist pedagogical project by means of elements from decidedly non‐realist genres such as melodrama, the Gothic novel and allegory. I argue, contrary to Benedict Anderson, that ‘Messianic time’ was in fact essential in the novel's contribution to nationalism; a temporality of prefiguration and fulfilment made emotions stick.

Is (it) time to leave eternity behind? Rethinking Bildung's implicit temporality

Abstract Motivated by Gadamer's identification of Bildung's ‘Vorbild-Bildung-Nachbild’ (model-process-result) structure, a historical tracing of the Christian messianic heritage in Bildung is conducted. As Bildung grows into an educational concept with global aspirations, this heritage might prove a substantial theoretical obstacle. As an alternative to the Christian messianic conception of time, Crockett and Malabou's concept ‘plastic time’ is presented. Whereas Christian messianic time collects its drive from the eternal which is (not) to come, plastic time collects its drive from the ‘synaptic gap’ instead, the creative and constructive space located and organised in the human body. Crockett and Malabou argue that plastic time might allow the deconstruction of Christianity, and, this article suggests, consequently also of Bildung. A formulation of Bildung that can go beyond Western thinking would be a shift that might have consequences for education generally.

‘Retailed to all posterity’: Post-truth, oral tradition, and the popular voice in Richard III

This article proposes a presentist reading of Richard III, a play that can be used to reflect on – and critique – our perversely post-truth historical moment. While the powerful distort the past for political purposes, the play dramatises the way abiding truths about history are nevertheless passed down through time by a popular culture of oral tradition. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, I also relate a timeless, oral tradition to proverbial wisdoms and to the concept of redemptive, Messianic time.

History and the Lesser Death

History and the Lesser Death

The Mystery of Return: Agamben and Bloch on St. Paul’s Parousia and Messianic Temporality

During the last two decades, a sharp re-reading of St. Paul’s letters allowed several thinkers to embed a messianic element in their political philosophy. In these readings, the messianic refusal of the world and its laws is understood through the suspensive act of “subtraction” – a movement of withdrawal which nonetheless too often proved ineffective when translated into political practice. After analysing Agamben’s interpretation of subtraction in terms of “inoperativity”, this article focuses on the notion of Parousia as a key element to understanding his anti-utopian account of messianic time. In contrast to Agamben’s reading,Bloch’s interpretation of the Pauline Parousia envisages the messianic event as infra-historical, but at the same time opened to ultimate (meta-historical) purposes. Bloch’s messianic call – I argue – takes the form of mediation, a correction of subtraction towards the direction of a more committed political engagement. I conclude by suggesting that the concrete implementations of this mediation perform their emancipatory function in so far as they assume the character of practical ethics, with the attention directed to the underprivileged and marginalised.

Messianic time, settler colonial technology and the elision of Palestinian presence in Jerusalem's historic basin

Advancing the settler colonial paradigm through a temporal perspective on territoriality, this article argues that the Jewish messianic idea is a distinctive feature of Israeli settler colonialism and an important element of Zionist territorial production. Specifically, the article contends that messianic time constitutes a specific settler colonial technology of domination which finds place-based expression in the ‘historic basin’ of occupied East Jerusalem. This is illustrated through two sites: the City of David archaeological park in the Palestinian village of Silwan and the Temple Mount/Haram al-Shariff, current home of the Dome of the Rock and prophesised location of the Third Jewish Temple. Both are at the frontier of settlement in the historic basin and the messianic conception of a mythical past and redemptive future aids claims to territorial exclusivity by ‘disappearing’ Palestinians in the present. The article concludes by reflecting on the value of an analytical focus on time for settler colonial scholarship on Israel-Palestine and in political geography more broadly.

Anility and time. Beyond the self-realisation

The philosophy of age is mostly an inquiry into the temporal parameters of human existence. The aim of this article is to review the senile temporality as qualitatively different in time production (chronopoesy) from the temporality of youth and maturity. To achieve this I have considered different types of senile chronopoesy, especially its most radical version (eschatologic time), which correlates with chronoaesthetics of the decrepit and Christian Messianic time. As a result, I managed to identify the main conditions of transformation of time production while aging. I considered the problem, using comparative analysis, in the perspective of the methodological horizon of hermeneutics phenomenology (analytics of Dasein). The results of the study can be reduced to several points. The reduction of ‘age’ and ‘inner age’ future that requires an answer from Dasein determines a shift in the human temporality and configures the particular senile temporality. Changes are the most significant if man accepts his life as meaningfully completed, and the will to Other (that is good on its own) replaces the will for particular achievements (i. e., self-realisation). Goal-setting and the production of over situational temporality persist in eschatologic senility, while ‘heroic’, ‘finishing’ and petty senilities have no big goals and only situational temporality, uncompensated by the verticalization of temporality (by the orientation to the Other). The period between the substantial and physical eschatons is kindred to the time or the aesthesis of the decrepit and the Messianic time of Christian historiosophy as they all are forms of the present (end time). End time is an intransitive present, free from the past and future, correlated with the Other (that is timeless). Once started, it never ends and never become past until the end of the life.

On the Impossibility of Saying "I": Epistemological paradigms and poetic paradigms in the work of Furio Jesi

On the Impossibility of Saying "I":Epistemological paradigms and poetic paradigms in the work of Furio Jesi Giorgio Agamben (bio) Translated by Kevin Attell Inversive Waw I have before me a translation of the Haggadah read during the Jewish seder, the ritual meal celebrated in the first two evenings of Pesach. Every gesture and every word of the participants, just like every element of the meal—from the matzot, the unleavened bread that recalls the sudden flight that left no time for the bread to rise, to the maror, the bitter herbs symbolizing slavery—in some way evoke an aspect, detail, or event from the day that Yahweh freed the chosen people from Egypt, the fourteenth day of Nissan, exactly 400 years after the birth of Isaac. But the festival of Pesach does not only look back to the past. According to rabbinic teaching "in Nissan they were redeemed and in Nissan they will be redeemed"; the festival also looks forward to the messianic redemption. And if it is true that for the Jews messianic time always means a conversion of past and future (which Scholem, playing upon a category of the Hebrew verb, will speak of as the "time of the inversive waw"), then the time of this festival—of every festival—entails a transformation of time in which complete and incomplete, past and future exchange roles. This is perhaps why, in April 1922, Walter Benjamin—who did not have a religious upbringing but for his whole life worked on an interpretation of messianic time—told Scholem of his desire to attend, in the home of Moses Marx, a seder "celebrated according to strict Jewish ritual." The Anthropological Machine Even though Jesi, for reasons we can perhaps guess, dealt with Jewish materials only marginally in his work on mythology, the question of the festival—of the time of the festival—is nevertheless of absolutely central importance to him. Indeed, in the two essays that introduce and conclude the collection La festa (1977) the festival is presented as the preeminent question for anthropology: specifically, the question of the possibility—or impossibility—of the festival, of its knowability or unknowability. Here, in a survey of the anti-festive tradition of the [End Page 1047] modern period, from Proust to Musil, not only does the festival appear as something to which we no longer have access—in Keréyni's words, something "dead, grotesque even, like the movements of dancers for those who have gone deaf and can no longer hear music"—but in the end it emerges unexpectedly in the ethnographic observation of the festival of "others" as the ethnologist's "need for a gnoseological insight into one's own "I" and its relationship with one's peers." The festive is here no longer something real, something that from its proper place—among primitives, others—comes to meet the ethnologist halfway so that he may recognize himself in them; it is, rather, the situation into which the ethnologist places the others so that he may find in them a solidarity with his peers and, at the same time, free himself from his own "I." It is not by chance that these are precisely the two texts in which Jesi fully elaborates his most characteristic epistemological paradigm: the "mythological machine." Just as there cannot be, for the scholar of myth, a substance of myth but only a machine that produces mythologies and generates the tenacious illusion of hiding myth within its own opaque walls, neither is there for the anthropologist a "universal man" who is true and real in and for himself—beyond or before the "I" of others, peers, or strangers—who would find in the festival his privileged epiphany, where "at its maximum concentration, humanness paradoxically coincides with the peak of otherness." On Writing Novels For Jesi, the mythological and anthropological machines are not merely epistemological paradigms. Two plans for the preface to the collection La macchina mitologica (1979) that were recovered among Jesi's unpublished papers tell us about the particular way in which he thought of his model and about the vital significance it had for him. Indeed, the machine is not a neutral paradigm situated between the...

Hybrids, Chimeras, Aberrant Nuptials:

The essay examines different cases of bioart, which, by combining biological materials and technological processes, present new forms of biological assemblages. For example, such collectives as Tissue Culture and Art Project and Art Orienté Objet, artists Eduardo Kac, ORLAN, Maja Smrekar and Robertina Šebjanič invent new forms of hybridization and symbiotic forms of cohabitation. The essay will question what is so specific in bioart and in what respect does it differ from scientific research conducted in laboratories, or fromsome biological phenomena found in the natural world. My hypothesis is that bioart introduces a specific mode of bio-performativity and creates a unique moment of bio-presence: it does not represent but presents and produces new material bodies, which are living and decaying in our presence. The essay will seek to discuss the specific time in which these Semi-Living objects perform their existence: this time, which is “the time of the now”, can be called (in Giorgio Agamben’s terms) kairos and contrasted with our habitual chronological time.Kairos is a messianic time, a contraction of time (similar to time in specific laboratory conditions), which helps to imagine new ways of organizing living materials. In this sense, bio-presence and bio-performativity can be seen as a resistance to the habitual arrangement of space and time and its biopolitical implications