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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 106 By untimely I mean out of sync with the corresponding historical period. Such actions and events are the kind of phenomena that Ernst Bloch refers to as “non- synchronous” and Kosellek as “the contemporaneity of the non-contemporane- ous.”7 This is not only a matter of something being outmoded or ahead of its time, of merely moving against the historical current. Nor do I use the term to refer only to the phenomenon of uneven historical development. Rather, untimely here indexes processes and practices of temporal refraction whereby people act “as if” they inhabit a different historical moment, whether intentionally, as part of a political strategy, or unconsciously, as symptom of a syndrome. Untimeliness here also refers to instances when conventional distinctions among past, present, and future become blurred, when disparate times are condensed within reified objects.8 Departmentalization as Decolonization In the historical opening that followed France’s liberation from Nazi occupation, Césaire served in the French National Assembly as a Communist Party deputy from Martinique. There he participated in constitutional debates over the form of the French Union, the Fourth Republic’s new imperial order. He quickly became to recuperate utopia as either the human capacity to imagine a radically alternative social totality (Adorno) or the valorization of political fantasy as such (Fredric Jameson). It also differs from Jacques Derrida’s conception of messianic waiting without expectation for a democracy to come that denigrates politics (as necessarily instrumental) and deifies ethics (transhistorically). Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Conversation between Ernst Bloch and The- odor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964),” in Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 1 – 17; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (Lon- don: Routledge, 1994); Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review, no. 25 (2004): 35 – 54. 7. Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” New German Critique, no. 11 (1977): 22 – 38; Kosellek, Futures Past, 95, 237 – 46, 266. 8. Benjamin invites us to listen carefully for “a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete” (“Some Reflections on Kafka,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1969], 144). Jameson points to the inverse pro- cess: “Utopias in fact come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being” (“The Politics of Utopia,” 54). Adorno writes that “our thinking heeds a potential that waits in the object” and also that “the interpretive eye . . . sees more in a phenomenon than what it is — and solely because of what it is.” His negative dialectics therefore entail “the penetration of . . . hardened objects” by means of “the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is none- theless visible in each one.” For Adorno, “cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object.” In this way, “the history locked in the object . . . is delivered” (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1983], 19, 28, 52, 163).