Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben, and the Corporeal

Abstract

Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. (Karl Marx) I On the first page of a 1978 essay entitled “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” Giorgio Agamben writes: The original task of a genuine revolution...is never merely to “change the world,” but also—and first of all—to “change time.” Modern political thought has concentrated its attention on history, and has not elaborated a corresponding conception of time. Even historical materialism has until now neglected to elaborate a concept of time that compares with its concept of history. Because of this omission it has been unwittingly compelled to have recourse to a concept of time dominant in Western culture for centuries, and so to harbor, side by side, a revolutionary concept of history and a traditional experience of time. The vulgar representation of time as a precise and homogeneous continuum has thus diluted the Marxist concept of history: it has become the hidden breach through which ideology has crept into the citadel of historical materialism.