Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology

Historiographical Project

Historiographical Project Giorgio Agamben has argued that “Marx did not elaborate a theory of time adequate to his [revolutionary] idea of history,” which “clearly cannot be reconciled with the Aristotelian and Hegelian concept of time as a continuous and infinite succession of precise instants” (1993, 99–100). An aspiration of the present work is to show that Marx’s ontology entails a theory of temporality that offers a radical alternative to the centuriesold tradition of a historiography that is based on the conception of time as continuity of instants. Agamben’s remark instigates us rather to differentiate between Marxist historiography and Marx’s own work. As Cesare Casarino writes: [Marx] is a thinker who found it indispensable to grapple explicitly and directly with the possibility of another temporality that would be qualitatively different from as well as antagonistic to that homogeneous temporality of quantifiable and measurable units. . . . There is a Marx who understood well what Agamben accurately claims that many—perhaps most—Marxists have never understood, namely, the necessity to change time. (189) A fortiori, time has already changed since being-in-itself-for-itself obtained its modulation as surplus-value, and it is this change that enabled the emergence of several of the theoretical models referenced here, which however implicitly or explicitly presuppose this new time. At stake in this change is the shift from the feudal theocratic paradigm, which was organized around the divine organic link between signs (semantic and economic) and things, to the pantheism of the secular capitalist paradigm , with its arbitrary binary signs and exchange-values. In terms of 49 50 / Being, Time, Bios temporality, this is a shift from the theocratic division between the linear, finite time of earthly life and heavenly eternity to the secular overlap of infinity and finitude or synchrony and diachrony within the domain of earthly life—which, as we shall see in part 2, also entails an unforeseen reconfiguration of eternity. It is, therefore, against the matrix of this new time that also a temporality adequate to a revolutionary history must be thought of. The widely spread assumption that the revolutionary moment involves an interruption of the linear continuum of homogeneous instants only perpetuates the Aristotelian and Hegelian concepts of time, since it presupposes it. The amply praised Event—in all its recyclings, from the kairós of the Stoics, through Heidegger’s Ereignis and Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, back to Agamben’s reprised kairological time—“the abrupt and sudden conjunction where decision grasps opportunity and life is fulfilled in the moment”—has no revolutionary potential within secular capitalist modernity, unless not only the “past” but all history be “blasted out of the continuum of history” (Agamben 1993, 101; Benjamin, 261). One might think that, because linear time, invariably cast in terms of progress, nevertheless continues to provide a central ideological veil for capital’s internal and external legitimization, the Event’s eruption should challenge capitalism insofar as it would blast one of its fundamental ideologies , progressivism. But, as Antonio Negri remarks: “Jetzt-Zeit, innovative precision, utopia: capital considers them as its own. Progress is the eternal return lit-up by a flash of a now-time (Jetzt-Zeit). Administration is illuminated by charisma” (108). In Casarino’s more emphatic commentary: Negri seems to be saying—since when have not epiphanies and illuminations of all sorts been ultimately useful for oppressive and exploitative systems of command? Since when has capital not been able to learn and bounce back from revolutionary impulse thus conceived? (191) Nothing revolutionary emerges out of the attempt to blast the continuum of history through the eruption of a moment, an innovative momentary Now that is nevertheless just a part of that very continuum of history on whose outbursts and crises capitalist history has been thriving all along. Rather, if one persists on a conception of time as a continuum, then capitalist history itself will have to be understood as a continuum punctuated by flashes of illumination and revolutionary innovation. Historiographical Project / 51 However, it is not necessary, arguably not really accurate, to read Benjamin’s Jetztzeit as an interruption of a historical continuum understood as linear time. This is particularly indicated in the first appendix following the last of the eighteen theses on the philosophy of history, where Benjamin writes: “Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very...