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.
