The moment: Time and rupture in Modern Thought

Constructions of time in social theory have tended to emphasize structure, continuity, and eternity not least with a view to detect ontological stability and regularity in social life. Modern philosophical thought, in contrast, has a tradition of emphasizing the moment, a notion which reaches from Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche to Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin and beyond. The moment demands questioning all-too-common notions of time, uniqueness and repetition, suddeness and duration, rupture and continuity. Addressing the moment - its inaccessibility and unattainability - entails engagement with issues of perception, cogitation, and memory. In its complexity, the moment places demands not just upon the thinking of presence and representation, of temporality and historicity but can open up the questions of the relation of action and decision, of event and duration, of the closure or incompleteness of history. This volume addresses from differnet perspectives the key questions posed by the moment and thereby elucidates the connections between social theory, philosophy, literary theory and history that are opened by the moment.