Untimely politics avant la lettre : The temporality of social formations

Abstract

A number of contemporary political theorists have recently called for a turn toward a more radical thinking of temporality that would prove more appropriate to, and more robust in thinking through, contemporary politics. This work marks an important turn in contemporary theory. However, in order to advance the very enterprise on radical temporality and politics to which these works are committed requires viewing them from a perspective that reveals a set of commonalities, commonalities which may also mark the limits of this project as currently formulated. In particular, contemporary theorists try to reconceptualize temporality in a manner more suitable to politics by starting with different experiences of temporality. Here I argue for a thinking of time that goes beyond experience. I start to make sense of this claim, first, by suggesting that the recent turn toward untimeliness might itself be considered untimely in the sense of arriving on the scene late, since contained within Louis Althusser’s project of rereading Marx we can find both a theory of untimeliness prior to the coining of the term and a thoroughgoing rejection of linear and everyday time. Althusser thinks time differently and more deeply precisely because he makes the crucial move of linking temporality to the social formation. Rather than conceive of temporal alternatives (duration vs clock time, for example) that human subjects might experience or invoke, we must grasp temporality as emanating from society, and a theory of time must therefore be linked to a theory of the social formation.