On what is approaching
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, August 30, 2023
As an exergue in one of his first poems, Cavafy transcribed a sentence from Philostratus which reads: “For the gods perceive future things, ordinary people things in the present, but the wise perceive things about to happen”. The wise leave to gods — or to experts — the prediction of the future, which is always distant and manipulable, and to journalists the knowledge — generally very confused — of the present: only what is approaching, only what is imminent concerns and touches them.
The decisive instant, the one that truly interests and moves us, is not the one in which we foresee a future event, situated at a certain point of chronological time, however serious it may be (even if it were the end of the world, which mankind has done and does nothing but announce and even date) — but rather is when we perceive that something is approaching.
“The kingdom has approached (eggiken)”, the Baptist announces regarding the coming of the messiah. The Greek verb eggizo derives from the ancient name for the hand (eggye) and therefore indicates something that is within reach, that you can almost touch. It belongs to the essence of the kingdom (and of the end that coincides with it) of being near. All that moves and touches us has the form of approaching, of getting close.
The closeness here in question is not, however, objectively measurable; it is not simply less distant in chronological time. If this were the case, it would still be a form of the future, which the wise do not want or cannot feel. Close is rather something that we have undistanced, which has got close to us. Thought is this faculty to undistance; thinking about something — no matter whether little or much distant in time — means making it near, bringing it closer. The closeness is not a measure of time, but its transformation; it does not have to do with centuries or days, but with an alterity and a change in the experience of duration.
Such an incommensurable and yet always close time was called by Greeks kairos, so as to distinguish it from chronos — the time that can be calculated and numbered — and they depicted it as a young boy who comes running towards us with wings on his feet and who you can grasp only by the tuft hanging over his forehead. That’s why Latins called it occasio, “the brief occasion of things: if you seize it, you keep it, but once it has escaped, not even Jupiter could catch it again”. And to the Pharisees who ask Jesus for a “sign from heaven”, he caustically replies, “you know to judge the signs of rain or serene weather, but you are not able to see the signs of kairoi, of near times”. And when Paul wants to define the transformation of messianic life, he writes: “Time, kairos has grown short, it has contracted” (the verb he uses designates both the tangle of sails and the contraction of an animal’s limbs before taking the leap).
Because this is precisely what it is ultimately about, in life, as in thought and politics: being able to perceive the signs of what is approaching, what is no longer time as such, but by now only occasion, perception of an urgency and imminence that demands a decided gesture or an action. True politics is the sphere of this concern and particular closeness, and in this way we have to look at the war in Ukraine or in Nagorno Karabakh: it is not a question of a greater or lesser distance, but of something that is approaching, which does not stop getting close. Of a kairos — that is, according to a saying of Hippocrates, of something “in which there is little chronos, little measurable time”: but it is just this small parcel of time that we must be able to grab.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, August 30, 2023
As an exergue in one of his first poems, Cavafy transcribed a sentence from Philostratus which reads: “For the gods perceive future things, ordinary people things in the present, but the wise perceive things about to happen”. The wise leave to gods — or to experts — the prediction of the future, which is always distant and manipulable, and to journalists the knowledge — generally very confused — of the present: only what is approaching, only what is imminent concerns and touches them.
The decisive instant, the one that truly interests and moves us, is not the one in which we foresee a future event, situated at a certain point of chronological time, however serious it may be (even if it were the end of the world, which mankind has done and does nothing but announce and even date) — but rather is when we perceive that something is approaching.
“The kingdom has approached (eggiken)”, the Baptist announces regarding the coming of the messiah. The Greek verb eggizo derives from the ancient name for the hand (eggye) and therefore indicates something that is within reach, that you can almost touch. It belongs to the essence of the kingdom (and of the end that coincides with it) of being near. All that moves and touches us has the form of approaching, of getting close.
The closeness here in question is not, however, objectively measurable; it is not simply less distant in chronological time. If this were the case, it would still be a form of the future, which the wise do not want or cannot feel. Close is rather something that we have undistanced, which has got close to us. Thought is this faculty to undistance; thinking about something — no matter whether little or much distant in time — means making it near, bringing it closer. The closeness is not a measure of time, but its transformation; it does not have to do with centuries or days, but with an alterity and a change in the experience of duration.
Such an incommensurable and yet always close time was called by Greeks kairos, so as to distinguish it from chronos — the time that can be calculated and numbered — and they depicted it as a young boy who comes running towards us with wings on his feet and who you can grasp only by the tuft hanging over his forehead. That’s why Latins called it occasio, “the brief occasion of things: if you seize it, you keep it, but once it has escaped, not even Jupiter could catch it again”. And to the Pharisees who ask Jesus for a “sign from heaven”, he caustically replies, “you know to judge the signs of rain or serene weather, but you are not able to see the signs of kairoi, of near times”. And when Paul wants to define the transformation of messianic life, he writes: “Time, kairos has grown short, it has contracted” (the verb he uses designates both the tangle of sails and the contraction of an animal’s limbs before taking the leap).
Because this is precisely what it is ultimately about, in life, as in thought and politics: being able to perceive the signs of what is approaching, what is no longer time as such, but by now only occasion, perception of an urgency and imminence that demands a decided gesture or an action. True politics is the sphere of this concern and particular closeness, and in this way we have to look at the war in Ukraine or in Nagorno Karabakh: it is not a question of a greater or lesser distance, but of something that is approaching, which does not stop getting close. Of a kairos — that is, according to a saying of Hippocrates, of something “in which there is little chronos, little measurable time”: but it is just this small parcel of time that we must be able to grab.
(English translation by I, Robot)
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René Magritte, Time transfixed, 1938. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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