Zsuzsa Baross - On Contemporaneity, after Agamben

The Concept and its Times
is the first of a two-volume publication.
The second volume, Art in the time that remains
(ISBN 978-1-84519-992-0), is forthcoming

Copyright Zsuzsa Baross, 2020.

Published in the Sussex Academic e-Library, 2019.

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Contents

We can be certain that we must run faster

than people did in earlier times,

even faster than the course of time itself;

so that we overtake the course of time

and secure its place in tomorrow

before time itself arrives at tomorrow.

G NTHER A NDERS

If...

If today it is necessary to assume, not as a hypothesis but as the burden of (our) responsibility impossible to evade, that our futureless future has already begun, that we are not living through a change of the epoch (Blanchot), a mutation in historical time (Nancy) or in a new geological time (the Anthropocene)...

If the collapse (a term we often hear nowadays) of the coordinates holding up the world does not take place in historical time; if in fact, it does not take place at all in time, but is the mutation / convulsion of the order of time itself; if the historical, despite, or rather, by virtue of its incessant mutations, interruptions, crises, change of epochs see Nietzsches and Foucaults genealogies has continued until recently to (re)invent itself without end, whereas today (heute, dieser Zeit to borrow the words of Paul Celan, who also asked how to speak of our time) is the time of ending, the ending of time; if ours is the time that remains, le temp qui reste not as Agamben reimaged Pauls messianic time, a time suspended, holding its breath in an unending Now, but a catastrophe without redemption, an apocalypse without kingdom (Gnther Anders)...

If today is not the time of another end, either of the world or of history, both subject to a long history of speculations theological, teleological, theologico-philosophical, Nietzsches, Hegels, Batailles, or Anderss but the time when reality crushes against all these ends returning them to us as fictions... ; if the new order of mortality about to encounter us is incommensurable with the death of the Ego, the subject, the Self or Dasein, or of the each time unique end of the whole world that Derrida mourned with every death; if it is irreducible to the end of man, Mensch, Dasein, homme, the Hungarian ember, genderless, or the Russian chelovek, neither man nor woman; if it is not the mortality of our species, or of all living species, or even of the earth itself that is becoming a dead planet, like Venus, as Stephen Hawking predicted... if it is the mortality of what hitherto has been immortal, indestructible (and for this very reason relentlessly, incessantly destroyed), if it is the ending of what since forever has been renewing, reinventing, recreating, resurrecting itself, without end that is, life itself, at least by hypothesis, in the universe itself...

If it is this new impossible possible / possible impossible (Blanchot) that is necessary to assume philosophically, then the question today, which cannot but paralyze thought by its immense weight and yet is impossible to evade, is no longer the old interrogative what is to be done? that still looked toward (making) the future. It regards instead this new finitude: what remains for thought and art in the time that remains?

Preface

It is perhaps Jean-Luc Nancy (On the Collection as Such, in Birth to Presence) who provides the best justification, my alibi, for collecting into this first volume on contemporaneity what are discrete and discontinuous writings: essays, fragments, incomplete reflections, often in different styles, composed for different occasions. The justification being: insistence and obsession. The obsession may appear to be that of the author or of the writing, which keeps returning, now breaching, now following different and often interrupted paths in the direction of the same question, the same massive problematic; namely, of contemporaneity today, of writing (thought) becoming (rather than being) contemporaneous with the time of the world today when even this today is in question (the Anthropocene? or the time of collapse? or extinction? or the geocide?). Yet this obsession is not mine, nor does it issue from the writing itself as its sole source. The latter only mirrors an insistence arriving from the outside and reflects the force with which the intractable question of contemporaneity insists on being recognized today, in the words of Agamben, as an ethico-philosophical exigence one cannot not respond to.

The proper name Agamben serves as an important index and pointer throughout these obstinate deliberations. Still, the pathbreaking essay What is the Contemporary? as the qualifier after following the main title as an afterthought in both volumes indicates is not the subject nor is at the center of the discussion. Instead, the name stands in for a critical event in the history of the concept; it demarcates an intervention (Agambens) as the starting point for returning to contemporaneity as an unsurpassable concern today. After thus dates the writing, not in calendar or historical time, but with regard to this intervention in / reinvention of the concept. At the same time, the sense of the adverb redoubles to also designate the point where the writing itself pivots, situates itself on the other side of the interval that already separates us from the epoch of Agambens interrogations. It thus also comes after the epochal time when the question, the questioner, and its questioning were still sheltered from the possibility of the foreknowledge of a futureless future to come, or perhaps, already, interminably, on course.

The a posteriori partitioning of the flow of writing, which is en route, searching for its path, into different parts, sections, or units is necessarily imprecise, to some extent arbitrary. One can only say what is at stake. In , Questions, it is precisely the route: in search of a starting point, the writing is at work toward reaching, breaching a path to Agambens turning point, his reinvention of the concept as a non-chronological order of time, heterogenous with, yet opened up in, the flow of historical time.