The Moment of Rupture

Historical Consciousness in Interwar German Thought

Humberto Beck

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780812251593, 9780812251593
• eBook ISBN: 9780812296440
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

An instant is the shortest span in which time can be divided and experienced. In an instant, there is no duration: it is an interruption that happens in the blink of an eye. For the ancient Greeks, kairos, the time in which exceptional, unrepeatable events occurred, was opposed to chronos, measurable, quantitative, and uniform time. In The Moment of Rupture, Humberto Beck argues that during the years of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism in Germany, the notion of the instant migrated from philosophy and aesthetics into politics and became a conceptual framework for the interpretation of collective historical experience that, in turn, transformed the subjective perception of time.According to Beck, a significant juncture occurred in Germany between 1914 and 1940, when a modern tradition of reflection on the instant—spanning the poetry of Goethe, the historical self-understanding of the French Revolution, the aesthetics of early Romanticism, the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the artistic and literary practices of Charles Baudelaire and the avant gardes—interacted with a new experience of historical time based on rupture and abrupt discontinuity. Beck locates in this juncture three German thinkers—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—who fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with the literary and philosophical formulations of the instantaneous and the sudden in order to intellectually represent an era marked by the dissolution between the extraordinary and the everyday. The Moment of Rupture demonstrates how Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin produced a constellation of figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of what Beck calls a distinct "regime of historicity, " a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.

CHAPTER 1
The Instant from Goethe to Nietzsche

The Modern Beginnings of a Concept

The first modern expressions of instantaneity as a form of time consciousness in European thought can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. During this time, the motif of the instant played a significant role in the formation of concepts for the understanding of subjective perception and historical consciousness. This chapter focuses on three specific early modern formulations: Goethe’s literary treatment of the motif of the intense moment; the French Revolution’s historical self-fashioning as radical rupture; and the German Romantics’ elaboration of the aesthetic category of suddenness. The distinct tradition of reflection on instantaneous temporality that these formulations put into motion would crucially influence the instantaneist regime in the twentieth century. Although each deploys the instant in its own way, they all anticipate important features of the instantaneity chronotope, such as the distinction between subjective and the collective perceptions of temporality and the possible interactions between them.

Each formulation addresses instantaneity differently. Goethe’s poetry introduced instantaneity as a category of everyday (but also exceptional) perception. French revolutionaries saw themselves as instigators of a tabula rasa, initiating a form of ahistorical political consciousness. The German Romantics, in turn, drew upon the German poetic tradition and the political influence of the French Revolution to elaborate an aesthetics of suddenness and the fragmentary. Later in the nineteenth century, three authors emerged who presented—under diverse guises and with differing purposes—the first modern theoretical elaborations of instantaneity as a form of time consciousness: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Baudelaire (I discuss Baudelaire in Chapter 2). These authors primarily involved themselves with the subjective dimension of temporality, but they also interwove an epochal consciousness into their thought. Their visions of instantaneous time—especially ahistorical forms of consciousness—would become consequential for the later deployments of the instant motif.

Two Forms of Instantaneity: Goethe and the French Revolution

Although the modern history of the instant could be traced back to René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that unarguably marks the beginning of a distinctive era in the conception of the instant as a category for the perception of time. Goethe was the first modern author to develop a consistent discourse of instantaneity both as a theme and as a formal feature of his writing. It left an imprint on the modern conceptions of poetry and the perception of temporality, and it initiated a discussion of the instant that would shape nineteenth-century treatments of the topic up to Nietzsche. By introducing a secular understanding of the term, Goethe’s instant laid the foundations for suddenness as a philosophical and aesthetic category and for the later development of forms of historical consciousness predicated on timelessness, untimeliness, and ahistoricity.

From his lyric poetry to Faust, the instant (Augenblick) is the temporal notion most emphatically related to Goethe’s literary production. In the German author’s work, the instant designates “an experience whose intensity and significance greatly exceeds the elusiveness of its measurable duration.”¹ Augenblick functions as the key word to indicate those episodes when “in the flash of the now” (im Blitzes Nu) the eternal is revealed in time.² Karl Löwith points out that Goethe sublated Christianity into “humanity” (Humanität) and created a “humanized” version of Lutheran theology.³ One could accordingly consider Goethe’s Augenblick as a profane version of theophany (the appearance of the divine to humans), or as the worldly equivalent of the nunc stans of medieval theology, which perceived time from God’s point of view.⁴ Goethe’s Augenblick thus constitutes the first distinct episode in the history of the modern conceptualizations of the subjective experience of instantaneous temporality. It also stands at the beginning of a modern tradition of writing on secular epiphanies and “profane illuminations.” This tradition, which found its high points in German Romanticism, the philosophy of Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, features a common search for the extraordinary experience of the irruption of the eternal within the secular realm of art or the everyday.

In his great dramatic works, such as Egmont and Tasso, Goethe presents a literary embodiment of what could be termed his personal theory of moments. The theory comprises the following premises: (1) truth and fulfillment can only exist as momentary realities; (2) these short-lived experiences of fleeting gratification are, nevertheless, the most important aspect of existence; (3) given their exceptional quality, these moments or instants fall outside the regularity of life and history.⁵ Johann Gottfried Herder’s work God: Some Conversations was of especial importance for the development of Goethe’s outlook on the instant. After having read Herder, Goethe concluded “that the moment is everything and that the merit of a rational human being consists only in so conducting himself that his life … contains the greatest possible quantity of rational, beautiful moments.”⁶

Goethe’s theory of moments was also reflected in the poet’s understanding of literature as the occasion for the production of such exceptional experiences. As David E. Wellbery has analyzed, in Goethe’s early lyric a “new possibility of poetic enunciation” opens up, a possibility that inaugurates a new type of temporality for literature. This new mode is based on the establishment of a phenomenological link between the poem and the now of reading. The “time of the lyric” is a “time of the now” (Jetztzeit)—the “temporal actuality of the reader” in the moment of his or her encounter with the text. This lyrical experience aims at reproducing, in its very occurrence, the structure of instantaneity. In Wellbery’s words, poetry “presupposes an abruptly discontinuous temporality; the lyric inevitably has an ecstatic character, standing out from the rest of time.” The “paradox of the lyric” is, then, identical to the “paradox of the instant.” The fragile brevity of a moment is, nevertheless, related to eternity as “it seems to efface all linear time.” Goethe would, accordingly, have a significant influence on Romantic poetry, an influence that would express itself in the tendency to isolate a single moment “in such a manner that it stands out—ecstatically—from all time.”⁷

In Faust, his drama published in two parts in 1808 and 1832, Goethe delivers his most significant treatment of the instant. The core of this treatment is Faust’s bet that he will never be satisfied with anything that Mephistopheles has to offer and that, if he is, Mephistopheles can take his life. Faust seals the wager with a renowned formulation on the instant: “If I ever say to the moment ‘Linger on, you are so beautiful’ … Then I will gladly perish…. Let time then be over for me.”⁸ Faust here condemns himself to permanent dissatisfaction and the unending striving for the next moment. He makes this wager, however, because he already knows that these temporary images—Augenblicke, “moments of vision” in which the absolute can be transitorily glimpsed—are the only guise under which transcendence can be experienced in the world. The search for a fulfilling moment amounts to a tantalizing quest because any satisfaction must vanish at the moment of its appearance. Goethe’s stance in Faust is a lament over, and a salutation to, the evanescence of fulfilled moments. It acknowledges the double, contradictory nature of such moments, since they are simultaneously glimpses of the absolute and confirmations that discontent is the default state of the human condition.

The Faustian instant stands for the recognition of the sudden arrival of a secular eternity into time and for an acknowledgment of the fleetingness of any form of intense or accomplished experience. Faust’s conclusion will introduce yet another connotation. At the moment of his death, the protagonist pronounces the forbidden words: “Linger on, you are so beautiful.” He does not lose the bet, however, because he is speaking only in anticipation of the time when his dream of a community of “free people on free soil” will be fulfilled. The moment of permanence that Faust experiences is, then, nothing but a dream or, as Mephistopheles calls it, “the last, lousy, empty moment.”⁹ These verses present the modern ethos, later elaborated by Romantic authors such as Friedrich Schlegel, of a permanent (and permanently unfulfilled) striving for newness, the everlasting frustration with the now, and the belief that this endless pursuit is, in itself, the only kind of attainable completion.¹⁰ In the final scene, the Faustian Augenblick mutates into an image of a continuous anticipation without achievement or resolution. The concept of the instant now expresses a tension between the longing for an image of coherence and the temporal principle that disrupts that very ambition.¹¹

By stressing the fleeting nature of any semblance of totality, this last incarnation of the Goethean instant represents an early articulation of what critics ranging from Walter Benjamin to Jürgen Habermas have identified as modernity’s temporal mode—the experience of time as a mania for the new. This mode is in tension with the understanding of the instant as a form of worldly fulfillment (even if only fleeting). This contrast represents the origin of two distinct and opposed styles of thinking about instantaneous temporality. In the first, the instant is conceived as the experience of an extreme, albeit ephemeral, experience; in the second, the instant is seen as the semblance of this experience that, given its never-ending repetition, becomes the substance of modern time itself.

If Goethe’s literary production presented the subjective aspect of modern instantaneity, the French Revolution’s historical consciousness articulated its collective dimension. From the early days of the Revolution, the French revolutionaries interpreted their own political action as the enactment of a new beginning. Accordingly, in their account of events, the protagonists of the Revolution emphasized rupture and total discontinuity with the past. They construed the Revolution as the founding event of an entirely new era with no connections to the bygone time of monarchies and feudal estates. Among them prevailed the expectation that the Revolution would “deliver happiness, not when it is due but at once.”¹² They conceived of the revolutionary event as a distinct one-step process of instantaneous transition from a social reality anchored in tradition to a utopian normativity. The year 1789 was thought to be the moment of an abrupt, almost “miraculous”¹³ transformation of the body politic. Consequently, a political rhetoric of the mythic present animated the revolutionaries’ determination to break with the past. In the revolutionary imagination, key episodes (such as the Estates General, the Tennis Court Oath, or the storming of the Bastille) were simultaneously “historical and existing outside of time,”¹⁴ thus establishing a sense of temporal dislocation for which an exclusively historicist framework could not account.

Republican revolutionaries gave to this idea of radical beginning a vivid form with their revolutionary calendar. With novel names for the months and days of the year, the calendar proclaimed a new consciousness of time.¹⁵ The Republican calendar—in use from 1793 to 1805—was, according to Sanja Perovic, “a statement of the Jacobins’ utopian instincts and regenerative desires.”¹⁶ The revolutionaries presented the calendar, which followed the decimal system and was based on the precise measurements of the earth, as the most rational way possible to calculate dates and to organize time. The calendar’s abstract but also “natural” time helped constitute a new secular and egalitarian era—“a modern present, separated from the past.”¹⁷ “Thanks to the new calendar,” Perovic writes, “the Revolution’s rupture with the past was to be transformed into a wholly new experience of time, one made according to the joint dictates of nature and reason.”¹⁸

Walter Benjamin provides an instantaneist interpretation of the revolutionary calendar in his “On the Concept of History.” There he identifies the introduction of the calendar as a powerful sign that the French revolutionaries knew that they were about “to make the continuum of history explode.”¹⁹ The Republican calendar provides for Benjamin a formidable historical example of the phenomenon of “revolutionary interruption,” the moment when radical political action suddenly introduces a “standstill” in the flow of time:²⁰ “What characterizes revolutionary classes at their moment [Augenblick] of action is the awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar presents history in time-lapse [Zeitraffer] mode. And basically it is this same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance [Tage des Eingedenkens].”²¹

If for Reinhart Koselleck experience and expectation are the two categories of historical time, and what we call modernity is the historical condition characterized by the increasing differentiation between the two,²² then the French revolutionary consciousness could be interpreted as the radical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Instant from Goethe to Nietzsche: The Modern Beginnings of a Concept
• Chapter 2. The Instant of the Avant-Garde
• Chapter 3. Ernst Jünger and the Instant of Crisis
• Chapter 4. Ernst Bloch and the Temporality of the Not-Yet
• Chapter 5. Walter Benjamin and the Now-Time of History
• Conclusion. Instantaneism as a Regime of Historicity
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments