ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin, never given to the trappings of nostalgia wishing to revive the traditions of the past, saw in this light the lyric poetry of Baudelaire, the detective-fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, and the utopian fantasies of Fourier, Saint-Simon and others. The techno-human principle derived from Benjamin's conception of time and transformative action can be distilled into one word: interruption. The Paulinian concept of time as kairos, which the Jewish founder of Christianism uses at least eight times in his Letter to the Romans to refer to "now-time," also lurks behind these photo-electric reflections on time, risk, and action. This chapter considers the messianic notion of the return of the ghostly and the dead (advent, parousía), which immediately evokes images of final judgment and the interruption of history from the perspective of the poor and the fallen as both denunciation and utopia: the times and things to come.
