When: Friday, 10 March, 4:00pm-5:00pm (UTC+2/EET)
Where: The lecture will take place on Zoom at:
https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/67230008219?pwd=WC84dmNZQ0Q3aW10WGgxUTgzK1R4UT09
Meeting ID: 672 3000 8219
Passcode: 389577
Abstract:
The Instant and History in the 20th Century: the Emergence of Instantaneism as a Distinct Regime of Historicity.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, the notion of the instant – the shortest span in which time can be divided and experienced – migrated from philosophy and aesthetics into politics and became a conceptual framework for the interpretation of collective historical experience. Especially between 1914 and 1940 in Germany, a modern tradition of reflection on the instant interacted with a new experience of historical time based on rupture and abrupt discontinuity. German thinkers such as Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin formulated a language for the historical consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution in terms of the instantaneous and the sudden in order to intellectually represent an era marked by the dissolution between the extraordinary and the everyday. They produced an enduring constellation of figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of instantaneism, a distinct regime of historicity, or mode of experiencing time, based on the notion of a discontinuous present.