Time for Revolution by Negri Antonio

Author:Negri, Antonio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The immeasurable

1.1 That kairòs releases an arrow and that its trajectory is given irreversibly (that is to say that time is traced by the tip of the arrow), everyone seems to admit. But transcendental philosophy denies that the common name also follows the arrow of time. While on the contrary, this is precisely what we lay claim to. But if time, as ontological power, is an arrow, how is the common name articulated with it? What does it mean to say that the act of naming corresponds to the thing named in accordance with the direction of the arrow of time and in relation to its irreversibility?

1.2 The preceding argumentation, in positing the common name as the product of kairòs, insisted on the instant that made of the common name the act of a specific production of being. However, one cannot forget (and we have frequently underlined it) that in the production of an always-new reality there reverberates a sort of restlessness in the power of temporality. Even when the common name appears as a survey and a search (as we have seen in the analysis of common becoming in knowledge), when it is the product of the imagination, the restless vacillation of its production continues to make itself felt. Restlessness cannot be placated.

1.3 The restless state that the creation of the common name displays through kairòs is still more evident if we look at this production from the psychological standpoint. Here, restlessness presents itself as the impossibility of discerning the instants of consciousness one from the other. It follows from this that temporality, broken and rendered creative by kairòs in accordance with the arrow of time, appears instead to present itself as the duration between a past and a future. The common name, even as it achieves its reality in kairòs, is brought back to testify to a sort of continuous fabric of the before and after, and not to the creativity of Kairòs-time and of its irreversible power.

1.4 But if the common name was not shown to be the tip of the arrow of time; if then (with its power left intact) we were to consider the instant of kairòs in a kind of continuity with the before and the after, and made of it the restless bridge of duration, then there would be no possibility of determining the singularity of the common name; and together with the common name, time also would be conceived of as flux and not as power, that is to say, it would be reconstituted as destiny outside the arrow of power. But this definition is refuted by the experience of kairòs.

1.5 On the other hand if—as occurs in classical thought—the instant is removed from the definition of time and considered as an element definable only by the ephemeral intuition of a vacillation of becoming (between being and nothingness), all experience determined by the adequation of the act of naming and the thing named would be rendered inadequate and inconclusive.

1.6 If we wish

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