Theatre of Countertime

Abstract

This article takes into account contemporary discourses on the end of (anthropocentric) time in the wake of colonial extraction and environmental destruction and asks for other ways of representing time beyond the dominant Western representational paradigm of human-centric time. Is another representation of time, or at least of its rupture even possible without reaffirming the self-referential dialectic it aims to overcome? Is there a way out of or beyond its known representation? In order to tackle this question, the article draws on a conversation between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem in the summer of 1916 in which the problem of the (im)possibility of imagining time other than in its metaphysical representation is addressed and time is imagined as a cycloid. Taking up this experimental scene of thought this contribution discusses the potentiality of a radically different, other shape of time or temporality and introduces countertime as a temporality of suspension that has been rejected from philosophy as the unthinkable because it eventuates in time as something untimely, belonging to another or something other than time. As such countertime points us towards representation itself, its premises, its form, its politics and last but not least it is the temporality that inaugurates theatre. The article proposes to think of a theatre of countertime as something that introduces a temporality of rupture while taking into account the ‘position of the unthought’ of the Western time paradigm and its consequences for representation.

Notes

1 In numerous discourses about the so-called Anthropocene the rhetoric of the end of Man often tends to re-essentialize ‘Man’ as global agent and as one universal humanity in order to conjure the possibility of a rescue from its self-inflicted destruction. The price for this re-universalization of humanity as a whole is an erasure of decades of critical theory deconstructing and de-naturalizing the very conception of the human. Claire Colebrook therefore states, ‘Man has returned … It is as though only with the impending end of humanity does something like “the human” become visible’ (2016: 86). On the embedded racial logic of the concept of Posthumanism see Jackson (2020) and Schneider (2018, 2020).

2 For a detailed analysis of Benjamin’s and Scholem’s afternoon conversation and its context see Fenves (2011: 106–12).

3 Scholem’s and Benjamin’s thoughts on the shape of time developed in this conversation are of course to be considered in relation to the problem of historical time and the critique of a homogenous empty time (Benjamin 1974, I.2: 691–706).

4 For Kant time is a ‘Vorstellungsverhältnis’: It is always bound to the question of representation (Vorstellung) (Hamacher 2020).

5 In the fifteenth of Benjamin’s Theses it is the time of political representation and of historical continuity in the shape of public clocks that get shot at in the moment of revolutionary uprising (1974, I.2: 701–2).