ABSTRACT

Time is inextricably bound up with notions of progress, growth and development. By contrast, in a state of crisis defined as a temporary, critical turning point, the past is experienced through a sense of nostalgia, the present is experienced as loss, and the future is precarious. This chapter explores the changing notions of time and historicity and its socio-political effects in a moment of crisis. As the dictum goes, time is money, and in an era of austerity, dwindling financial resources are translating into a disappearance of time. The analysis considers this sense of ‘loss’ as a critical turning point, with no clear direction or outline for a future set of circumstances. What is important here is that loss is not (only) predicated on material deprivation, but on the vacuum of history experienced by what commentators (Douzinas, 2012; Lowe, 2016; Papanagnou, 2010; Zeitchik, 2015) have called a ‘lost generation’. Time is conceived of as representing hope, opportunities and vision – all of which are acutely challenged by crisis. From two opposing perspectives, from Francis Fukuyama (1992a) The End of History and the Last Man and Alain Badiou’s Rebirth of History (2012), crisis is seen as a frame-breaking moment that breaks the contract of time. For Fukuyama, the ‘end’ of history relates to the triumph of capitalism; while by contrast, Badiou positions the global uprisings of 2011 as events that signal a newly politicised series of populations asserting themselves against austerity, crisis and oppressive regimes. This chapter harnesses these opposing arguments by Fukuyama and Badiou in relation to Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of history, in order to map the sensibility of time within the milieu of crisis. In particular, the conceptual framing and the images that accompany the text are heavily influenced by Benjamin’s fifth thesis on the philosophy of history (1968), which dictates that:

[t]he true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’ – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact point where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.