Politics in an Untimely Fashion

Jeffrey Isaac lamented in 1995 that political theorists had missed an opportunity to respond to the revolutions of 1989. Untimely Politics calls into question the presumption of those like Isaac who believe that the job of political theory is to make sense of significant current events, like the fall of the Soviet Union or 9/11. However, this book is not a defense of universalist, ahistorical theory divorced from a concern with contemporary politics, nor of theory understood primarily as intellectual history, focused only on political events in the past. After all, in the final chapter, Chambers gives a theoretical response to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), signed into law in 1996.

At issue, then, is not whether theorists should use their craft to critique and make sense of current political events, but rather how we should do so. According to Chambers, theorists like Isaac view political theory primarily as a problem-solving enterprise accomplished through inquiry into the events themselves, unmediated by interpretive analysis of theoretical texts. (5) Chambers argues that this approach to theory is grounded in a particular conception of time, one which he calls “timely.” From a timely perspective, events occur sequentially. This view of time as linear makes it possible for the theorist to conceptualize each event as discrete and self-contained, thereby facilitating the belief that its attendant problems can be solved once and for all, and eliminating any need to consult history in the process.

In its place, Chambers defends an “untimely” approach to political theory. What is untimeliness? Frustratingly for the reader, he declines to give a definition at the beginning of the book, for fear that any such definition would be too readily assimilated into the dominant, timely paradigm. He promises instead that “[a] more complex and subtle understanding of what untimeliness in political theory might mean will only begin to emerge gradually within the project.” (3) However, even by the end of the book, the concept remains somewhat puzzling. In the final chapter, he refers to untimeliness as a “sophisticated historical/political understanding” (155) — yet even with this characterization it is still difficult to grasp his meaning.

Chambers does make clear what untimeliness is not — and this can be a helpful starting point for making sense of his argument. Untimely political theory is not timeless. (3) That is, it has no pretensions to being universally or ahistorically valid. Furthermore, it is not timely. It eschews a linear conception of time that figures the march of history as inevitable progress. (72–3) Consequently, an untimely theory must view history as important to understanding events in the present, yet not in teleological terms in which the past determines the course of the future. Rather, in untimely time, the past shapes the present in significant ways without guaranteeing that events will follow any particular path in the future.

Untimeliness, then, is a post-foundationalist account of time. As such, Chambers’ theory has much in common with Charles Taylor’s notion of secular time — a time that is not grounded by the authority of something (e.g. God) that lies prior to or outside of itself. Untimely Politics diverges from Taylor in that it shows that the present is not only ungrounded, but further it is haunted by the past. Drawing on Jacques Derrida, Chambers argues that the past reappears in the present; making sense of the present, therefore, requires an untimely, nonlinear conception of time that is open to the appearance of ghosts and specters from the past. (83) Yet, as this language of ghostliness implies, the past is never fully present: the past can never determine what follows. This is a crucial observation for Chambers, as it means that there is always the possibility of exercising political agency — of doing things differently. The past shapes our possibilities in the present, but it does not fully determine what course of action we may take. Untimely time reveals the nonlinear convergence of the past and the future in the moment of the present.

Yet are timeliness (understood...