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AngelakiJournal of the Theoretical Humanities

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Darkness in a Blink of an Eye

Suvi Alt

To cite this article: Suvi Alt (2016) Darkness in a Blink of an Eye, Angelaki, 21:2, 17-31, DOI:10.1080/0969725X.2016.1182721

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2016.1182721

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I n a square of light, she sits on a chair, motion-less. Slowly she bows her head and briefly

closes her eyes. When someone appears oppositeher, she raises her head and fixes her gaze onthem. They look at each other, and themoment appears to extend to infinity.

Marina Abramovic performed “The Artist IsPresent” in the Museum of Modern Art(MoMA) in New York for three months in2010. The performance consisted of Abramovic sitting on a chair across from an empty chair inthe atrium of the museum. Anyone could comein and sit on the empty chair for any length oftime. Abramovic and the person in front ofher simply sat and looked at each other.Although seemingly nothing more than thishappens in the performance, it captured boththe attention of the art world and the imagin-ation of many others: hundreds of thousandsof people sat in front of Abramovic in thecourse of the three months and many morehave seen the subsequent documentary filmMarina Abramovic the Artist Is Present thatdepicts the creation of the piece. The perform-ance is lauded for having ignited in thebroader public the idea that one can co-createa work of art, instead of passively experiencingan artwork created by the artist alone (Danto).“The Artist Is Present” became a greatsuccess, and people described participating init as a transformative moment. While many ofthem were unable to fully explicate what hap-pened during the performance, in differentways they described it as an opening onto atime and space beyond.

Spaces beyond are often the substance ofapocalyptic and eschatological visions thatdraw on originally religious themes, yet carry

secular and historical significance that gets rede-ployed in situations of socio-political oppres-sion, especially when a repressive regime isseen to be coming to an end (Ward 109). As aresult of the contemporary sense of the crisisof the economic, political, ecological and socialsituation, conventional conceptions of politicsare increasingly losing credence and there is acall for politics and theory that are capable ofengaging with the “beyond.” If by “beyond”we do not mean merely an overturning of a par-ticular government, a transition from one politi-cal or economic ideology to another, or even achange in relations of power–knowledge, itseems that any politics that wishes to attach

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ANGELAK Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 21 number 2 june 2016

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/16/020017-15 © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & FrancisGrouphttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2016.1182721

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DARKNESS IN A BLINKOF AN EYEaction and the onto-poeticsof a beyond

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itself to a “beyond” must take its bearings fromthe poetic, i.e., from the event that cannot bearticulated in terms of strategy. While the stra-tegic is “preoccupied with continuous capacityto intervene in the orchestration of the play ofobjectification and subjectification,” the poeticis “an event that takes place at the limits ofthe intelligible” (Dillon 14–18). Michael Dillonfollows Michel Foucault in arguing that thinkingpolitically must have a strategic aspect to it,meaning that it requires analysis of the speci-ficity of mechanisms of power, thereby develop-ing strategic knowledge appropriate for politicalstruggles. Yet Dillon recognizes that the politi-cal is not exhausted by this strategic dimensionbut also requires nurturing through poetics.

The realm of this article is this poetic, orrather onto-poetic, conception of the political.I understand onto-poetics as a site of transform-ation that draws attention to the relationsbetween poetics, life and the political. My useof the concept also emphasizes the ontologicalnature of poetics, and thus the ontological con-stitution of the beyond. Poetics, then, is notmerely “a strategy of living” or “an artful exist-ence” (cf. Soguk 381–82). Rather, poetics initself is a way in which Being happens. Suchan approach refuses the explanation of art interms of cultural, political, historical or socialcategories (Ziarek 175–76). While certainlyrelated to these categories, art and onto-poetics, as understood in this article, cannotbe interpreted through them.

A particular kind of onto-poetic moment ofthe “beyond” coming to presence can belocated in Martin Heidegger’s concept ofAugenblick, a blink of an eye.1 The Augenblickis a moment akin to that experienced by some ofthose who sat in front of Abramovic in MoMA.It is a momentous event – a site of transform-ation – that opens one to a different Being.Although often referred to in passing, in exam-inations of Heidegger’s oeuvre, the Augenblickhas remained a relatively neglected concept(McNeill ix). One of the reasons for thisneglect is perhaps the way in which, after hismid-1930s “turn” (Kehre), Heidegger explicitlymoves away from the concept of “action” whichwas central to his early notion of the

Augenblick. In his later work, Heidegger recog-nizes the problems implicit in “moments ofaction” and emphasizes the importance of shep-herding the openness of being. The moment ofvision (Augenblick) gives way to letting be(Gelassenheit).2

In nevertheless choosing to discuss theconcept of the Augenblick, I wish to retainand emphasize the connection between“action” and a “beyond,” even if action in theAugenblick does not necessarily conform toconventional conceptions of the term. My aimin this article is not to provide a systematicexamination of Heidegger’s conception of theAugenblick but to suggest that an engagementwith the idea of the Augenblick allows us toask critical questions about the nature ofaction and of those who act when it comes toconceiving of a beyond. Such questions are noless pertinent in the context of contemporarydesires for “end times” and “coming politics”than they are in relation to Heidegger’s own pol-itical engagements.3 I discuss in this article thepolitics of such onto-poetic moments as theAugenblick through a reading of Abramovic’sperformance piece and the notion of“darkness.”

Firstly, I follow Giorgio Agamben in discuss-ing darkness as the colour of potentiality, as theirreducible that remains in each moment ofactualization. “Darkness in a blink of an eye”emphasizes that action in the Augenblick isalways only finite. Darkness as an ontologicalidea thus draws attention to the presence ofthe concealed in each moment of actualization.Furthermore, I argue that the Augenblickought not to be understood as the moment ofaction of a visionary individual, but as the cre-ation of a space where darkness invites nearnessto both other beings and to Being itself. In orderto argue this, I make use of Peter Sloterdijk’selaboration of a poetics of space to highlightthe way in which the beyond created in theAugenblick is both relational in itself andneeds relations in order to come about.Throughout the article I discuss Abramovic’sperformance as a moment and a site of suchaugenblicklich onto-poetics that conveys asense of what I call here “darkness in a blink

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of an eye.” Before turning to this discussion, afew words on ontology and art.

the ontological significance of the

artwork

Were you expecting to be transformed? –No,it was just when I sat there the first time, Icame and just wanted to experience it andthen, you know, everything happened.(Marina Abramovic)

When planning the performance, Abramovic andKlaus Biesenbach, the curator of MoMA,assumed that sometimes the chair in front ofher would be empty and she would be sittingby herself. However, as soon as the performancebegan, there was no shortage of people wishing tosit with Abramovic. Many of them describe themoment of sitting and looking as “magical,”“transformative” or “luminous” (Marina Abra-movic). According to Abramovic, the perform-ance is about addressing the question that hasfollowed her for over four decades: “Why isthis art?” (qtd in Marina Abramovic).

For Heidegger, art happens whenever Beingis carried into a different disposition of relations(“Origin” 131). Hence, much of what is gener-ally considered “art” would not be so for Hei-degger. And conversely, the poetic is aparticular kind of unfolding of a people’s his-torical existence rather than a cultural achieve-ment (Heidegger, Contributions 25–27, 58–61). This reflects the way in which Heidegger’sinvestigations into all kinds of entities,whether they are artworks or cultural artefacts,are always carried out in relation to the Seins-frage, the question of Being (D. Palmer 397).Barbara Bolt points out that “Heidegger is notconcerned with the artwork per se but ratherhow, through the work of art, the Being ofbeings is revealed” (5).

The distinction that Heidegger makesbetween particular artworks and art as such cor-responds to the “ontological difference” that heidentifies between beings and Being. Instead ofmerely examining “ontic” beings – the particu-lar characteristics of entities – Heidegger arguesthat we should inquire into Being as such, that

is: ontology (Being and Time 34 [13]). Ontol-ogy, however, does not refer here to somethingimmutable and essentialist but to a historicalway of revealing beings. The artwork thus per-forms an ontological function for Heidegger(Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s Ontology” 407). In dis-cussing “The Artist Is Present,” my emphasisis also on the revealing of Being that the per-formance can be argued to enact. I do notdiscuss the content of what may be revealed bythe performance. Rather, I am discussing themode of revealing. This distinction is importantbecause it shows the ontological process thatenables the artwork to function as an “event”without fixing the performance with a specificmeaning. Art, therefore, manifests a revealingthat lets come into the open not only a particularway of being but Being itself as everything thatit might yet be. This is also why poetic being isfundamentally a political mode of being.

Yet it is worth remembering that Heidegger iscritical of approaches to art that render theartwork superfluous by focusing on either theartist as a creator or the experiencing subject.Thus, Heidegger argues for turning our attentionback to the artwork itself (“Origin” 90). But what“the artwork itself” is is not as easy a question asit might appear to be. While Heidegger demandsthat the artwork be addressed on its own terms,he has also been criticized for his supposed lackof interest in the artworks that he discusses.“Just as poetry is nowhere to be found in Heideg-ger’s analysis of Holderlin, painting is nowhere tobe found in his analysis of Van Gogh,” Jean-Marie Schaeffer argues (272). Similarly, JulianYoung points out that Heidegger’s evocation ofVan Gogh’s painting in “The Origin of theWork of Art” is “largely irrelevant,” if examinedanalytically. Hence, its role within his overallargument should rather be understood poetically(Young 22). Within the arguments of this article,Abramovic’s performance has a similar, primar-ily poetic role.

In performance research, Laura Cull ident-ifies ontological commonality – a similar wayof conceiving of the real – as the rationale forconstructing a parallel between performanceand philosophy. She argues that “from this per-spective, the boundary between what counts as

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‘performance’ as distinct from ‘philosophy’becomes increasingly blurred, such that per-formance can be seen as a philosophical activityand philosophy as a score for performance”(“Attention Training” 80). By reading Abramo-vic’s performance in relation to the concept ofthe Augenblick, I discuss the ontological con-dition that is opened up by the performance,which enables any number of interpretationsand outcomes to emerge. According to Cull,performance should aim at “creating the con-ditions for experiments the results of whichremain unknown” (“Performance” 23). Like-wise, it is in the nature of the Augenblick thatit cannot be known, rationalized or represented.I argue that, when read together with an onto-poetic understanding of darkness, the idea ofthat which resists representation and captureis already within the concept of the Augenblick.Thus, in the following sections I discuss theontological commonality between Abramovic’sperformance and the kind of reading of theconcept of the Augenblick that is advancedhere. I begin below by introducing the conceptof the blink of an eye and its relation to action.

action in a blink of an eye

To conceive finitude and opening simul-taneously: that is the matter at hand. (Sloter-dijk, Neither 190)

As the performance flows forward with eachperson leaving the chair and giving way to thenext person, Abramovic blinks. The closing ofthe eyes enables the artist to establish a newrelation to whoever sits in front of her. Shecloses herself for a moment to be able tobecome open to another beyond. The way inwhich Abramovic closes her eyes, and herself,appears crucial to her ability to be present.However, after her initial closure, she isclearly outside herself, with and in the personin front of her. Abramovic notes that even inhindsight it is difficult to explicate whathappens in such moments, but one simplyknows that something is different (qtd in “TheArtist Was Here”).

Nevertheless, the performance does not func-tion here as a mere visualization of the conceptof the Augenblick simply because Abramovic blinks. Rather, thinking the Augenblick inrelation to Abramovic closing her eyes in theperformance helps us to consider the idea ofontological difference: the relation of the onto-logical to the ontic. The closure enacted byAbramovic in the performance happens withinthe ontic realm of the artwork. It is differentfrom, yet crucially connected to, the event thattakes place when the performance becomes artin the ontological sense. That is, when the per-formance constitutes an opening onto some-thing that goes beyond the ontic conditions ofthe artwork.

The notion of a “beyond” is thus central toboth the Augenblick and “The Artist IsPresent.” There is, however, a necessary ambigu-ity in the concept of the “beyond” (Caputo andScanlon 2). If we knew to begin with what thebeyond consists of and how it comes about, itwould no longer be a beyond. For the purposesof this article, I understand a “beyond” as some-thing that is constituted by a disruption in thehappening of Being. Heidegger describes such abreak in the unfolding of Being with theconcept of the Augenblick. Yet the Augenblickdoes not refer to the end of the world in any con-ventional sense, or to the end of history as such.The eschaton that is seen in the Augenblickexposes the limitations of contemporary modesof being and opens a being to its possibilities.What is revealed in the Augenblick is thereforenot any particular “end” but a field of possibili-ties that is opened up by the suspension of theexisting order of things.

While for Heidegger the Augenblick is “themoment of vision of genuine action” (Funda-mental Concepts 295), the presence and actionimplied by the Augenblick ought not to beunderstood in terms of completeness but as away of being that is responsive to the factical –spatial and temporal – situation. Hence, in theAugenblick, action in the present is the con-dition of possibility of the opening of abeyond; a beyond that is created from withinthe conditions of the present, yet “undoing”the present. Although the literal meaning of

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the Augenblick implies something sudden, dra-matic, quick and momentary, Heidegger notesthat it is “a phenomenon which in principlecan not be clarified in terms of the ‘now’ [… ]the moment of vision permits us to encounterfor the first time what can be” (Being andTime 387–88 [338]). While the Augenblick isauthentic present, it also transcends andundoes the present. It draws attention to andbrings about that which is not.

In “The Artist Is Present,” the present hasboth temporal and spatial significance. Biesen-bach describes Abramovic as “an artist whovisionizes time” (qtd in Marina Abramovic).He explains that what you see in the perform-ance is the way in which time is not somethingephemeral merely rushing by. Rather, youcome to feel time as a weight in space(Marina Abramovic). Many of Abramovic’sperformance pieces engage with the notion oftime, yet “The Artist Is Present” is particularin that it invites the public to co-create themoment that transcends chronological time.Abramovic notes: “I don’t want an audience tospend time with me looking at my work; Iwant them to be with me and forget abouttime. Open up the space and just that momentof here and now, of nothing [… ] In that wayyou can extend eternity” (“Marina Abramovic”211). Similarly, for the eschatological conquer-ing of time to occur, eternity must enter thetemporal zone of history (Taubes 4). The escha-ton that opens up other possibilities of being isencountered in the moment where the presentand eternity co-exist. The performance capturesthis temporal sense of the Augenblick as thatwhich connects the present to infinity, resultingin a moment of transformation. Considering theexposure and popularity of “The Artist IsPresent,” it is of course possible that peoplelearn to partake in a discourse of transformationthat comes to reproduce itself. However, it isnot for me to determine whether someone hasbeen “really” transformed by the performance.What is central to the Augenblick is not thatit changes a being in any clearly visible or explic-able sense. Rather, it is a moment that opensBeing itself so that beings may becomeaugenblicklich.

But how is one to arrive at such a moment oftransformation? In Heidegger’s reading ofNietzsche, the Augenblick comes to he or shewho questions critically. It is a commonelement of various eschatologies that knowledgeof the ways in which the world errs is a precon-dition for the revelation of truth (Taubes 6). YetHeidegger argues that “only individual actionitself can dislodge us from [the] brink of possi-bility into actuality, and this is the moment ofvision” (Fundamental Concepts 173). Whilequestioning is necessary in leading us to thebrink of our possibilities, in the Augenblickthose possibilities are actualized. To inhabitthe Augenblick means to assume a stance inthe situation one is in. “Stance,” however,does not refer to some fixed position but tothe coming into being of a finite response(McNeill 233). If instead of being open andresponsive to the situation one encounters theartwork armed with preconceptions, intentionsand existing modes of interpretation, one willnot be able to move from the ontic circum-stances of the artwork into the openness ofBeing (Bolt 110). Some of the people whocame to sit with Abramovic attempted to turnthe performance into one of their own, forexample by undressing themselves after step-ping into the performance space. While provid-ing the drama of unpredictability to thosewatching the performance from the outside, itseems that such pre-scripted encountersremained far from allowing for the openness ofBeing.

While the Augenblick is an existentialmoment that concerns one’s very being, it isnot disconnected from the historical situation.Abramovic argues, likewise, that when art isgood it changes the way in which the societythinks. According to her, different societiesneed different kinds of artworks (Abramovic qtd in Barnthaler). Similarly, for Heidegger,for an artwork to become art in the ontologicalsense it needs to be an “absolute need”(Nietzsche: Volume 1 84). A person takingpart in the performance also describes it thus:“This is a need for me. I have to be here”(Marina Abramovic). But no matter howbadly needed, the Augenblick cannot be

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achieved through strategization, calculation orany intentionalistic activity. While calculationproceeds step by step in order to establish some-thing known from what is unknown, in theAugenblick one takes a leap without guidelines,and this leap is “a journey into truth” (Heideg-ger, Nietzsche: Volume 2 37). Abramovic main-tains that in art one must be “ready to fall off theearth” (qtd in Barnthaler), to let go of the worldthat one has known so far. It is common tovarious eschatologies that the beyond requiresa “leap.” Whereas for Marx this is a leap fromthe realm of necessity to the realm of freedom,and for Kierkegaard it is a leap towards God,the leap – and thus the action – in the Augen-blick does not operate on the basis of the protec-tion of a truth that pre-exists it. As the action inquestion cannot be deliberated or calculated, itmust be something that does not conform toexisting logos. The Augenblick functions asthe limit of reason.

Abramovic’s performance captures Heideg-ger’s assertion that although nothing as suchhappens in the Augenblick, it lets one encoun-ter what can be. Abramovic’s remark that“the hardest thing to do is something which isclose to nothing” (qtd in Marina Abramovic)could be followed by Agamben’s observationthat “the hardest thing is being capable of anni-hilating this Nothing and letting something,from Nothing, be” (Potentialities 253). Whenit comes to the moment of transformation,Abramovic emphasizes that “there is no storyor objects. Just pure presence [… ] stillnessin the middle of hell” (qtd in Marina Abra-movic). Yet, it is this seeming nothing thatbrings about the transformation. The work ofart is not the artwork itself but the revelation,the movement in understanding that happensthrough one’s encounter with it (Bolt 41, 48).The performance is thus an onto-poetic sitewhere – although the material space remainsthe same – a beyond opens up on an ontologicallevel.

Yet the way in which the beyond translatesinto the materiality of “this” world cannot beknown by examining the performance. Theresoluteness arising from the Augenblick doesnot culminate in the release of energy in activity

in the moment. Rather, resoluteness is “thedecisive inception of action that reaches aheadof and through all action” (Heidegger, Introduc-tion 22). The action of the Augenblick does nothappen in a fleeting moment but is rather anongoing responsiveness to the situation one isin. This means not attempting to see thatwhich is to come nor ascribing content to thebeyond – that is to be decided in each facticalsituation. Following this, the presence of “TheArtist Is Present” is also something that, ifaugenblicklich, is carried far beyond thefactual site and moment of sitting and looking.Yet if the Augenblick is “a moment ofvision,” with all the connotations of light,clarity and brightness that implies, there mustalways also be that which is left unseen.

to see darkness

Various renditions of theAugenblick give a sug-gestion of vision related to brightness and light.Apocalypticism in general associates this worldwith darkness and the beyond with light, envisa-ging a move from the former to the latter(Taubes 29). More broadly, the dualismbetween light and darkness is the foundingmetaphor of Western philosophy and metaphy-sics. Whether in ancient Greek thought, Chris-tian imagery, or the ideals of theEnlightenment, light has been prioritizedthroughout the Western tradition, standing asa metaphor for truth, reason, purity and salva-tion (Vasseleu; Blumenberg). Heideggerhimself refers to the forgetting of the questionof Being as “the darkening of the world” (Intro-duction 47) and Hannah Arendt famously posesthe question of the possibility of politics in“dark times” (Men in Dark Times).

Yet the negativity associated with darknesshas never been universal but rather related toculturally and historically specific sensibilitiesas well as economic, practical and political inter-ests related to, for example, the rise of capital-ism and liberal governance (B. Palmer 13–20,209–56). Writing in 1933, the Japanese novelistJunichiro Tanizaki pointed out that whereasWestern houses are built so as to expose theinterior to as much light as possible, people in

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the East “find beauty not in the thing itself butin the patterns of shadows, the light and thedarkness, that one thing against anothercreates” (29, 46). In a similar vein, yet in avery different context, Sloterdijk points outthat Heidegger “incites us not only to see thatwhich we find in the light, but also to reflecton the way in which the light and things encoun-ter one another – in other terms: we must med-itate on the clearing as such” (Neither 113).Clearing (Lichtung) refers to an open spacewhere one can encounter things that “show upin the light of our understanding of being”(Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World 163).4 TheAugenblick is a kind of clearing where Beingis illuminated in a new way. While HubertL. Dreyfus claims that the idea of clearingplaces Heidegger within the tradition that,from Plato to the Enlightenment and further,equates intelligibility with illumination (ibid.),William McNeill argues that “clearing as suchis neither dependent upon, nor to be thoughtstarting from, visibility or light” (335). Whatis most proper to presence is not grasped begin-ning from its visibility.

More recently, Agamben has sought toreclaim darkness as the “colour” of potentiality.“When we do not see (that is, when our vision ispotential), we nevertheless distinguish darknessfrom light; we see darkness,” Agamben explains(Potentialities 180–81). In darkness, vision isboth potential and impossible, and that is whyit marks the experience of pure potentiality.Although actuality is that which is visible,potentiality is not simply a lack of vision butthe relation between vision and darkness, a capa-bility to see darkness. In associating darknesswith potentiality and light with actuality,Agamben appears to be doing nothing to chal-lenge the dualisms that abound in the historyof light and darkness. Yet this is not the casebecause he emphasizes that darkness, too, is aform of actualization. By engaging with theconcept of darkness, Agamben attempts toshow why his ontology of potentiality does notrefute action and lead to passivity, as is oftensuggested. Rather, seeing darkness is an activevision of the “that which is not” of the currentorder of things.

This becomes clear in Agamben’s essay“What Is the Contemporary?” where hedefines the contemporary, the poet, as one“who firmly holds his gaze on his own time soas to perceive not its light, but rather its dark-ness” (What Is 44). The seeing involved is anactivity and a singular ability: “To perceivethis darkness is not a form of inertia or of passiv-ity,” Agamben proclaims (45). Rather, contem-poraries consider the darkness of their time assomething that ceaselessly concerns andengages them. Contemporaries are those whoperceive and grasp their own time but whonevertheless (or perhaps because of this)refuse to adjust themselves to its demands(40). The contemporary attempts always toexamine that which is left in the dark bypeople who are blinded by light. In this vein,Abramovic’s performance is an examinationand an exploration of the kind of actualizationthat can happen in and through immobility,inaction and silence.

Thus, Agamben’s engagement with darknesshelps to give a more nuanced account of the rolewe can ascribe to vision, light and action in theAugenblick. It highlights the idea, prominent inHeidegger’s later work, that each revelation,each revealing of Being, is always also a conceal-ing. Even if in Being and Time the Augenblickrefers to Dasein’s ecstatic, authentic presence inthe moment (376 [328]; 387 [338]), the insis-tence on authentic presence should not betaken to mean that Heidegger was oblivious tothe significance of absence. Rather, the presenceof the Augenblick should be understood as “thepresence of an absence,” as Agamben would say(Potentialities 179). Similarly, the present inAbramovic’s performance is not the same asactuality but a connecting to that which isabsent.5 Perhaps paradoxically, it is by attend-ing to the present that one can gain access tothe beyond. Hence, absence carries political rel-evance that goes far beyond the contestation ofparticular absence–presence relations and thesocial positions that they create. Absence,rather, is always already part of everythingthat is (seen), and recognition of such consti-tution of presence is the condition of possibilityof the political in the first place.

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Henri Michaux points out that “any progress,every new observation, every thought, every cre-ation, seems to create (at the same time as light)a zone of darkness” (78). Instead of seeking toeradicate this darkness, and that which mayyet come out of it, we should aim to preserveit as best we can. What the ontological elabor-ation of darkness thus highlights is that eachvision, action and space beyond creates its owndarkness. And the challenge, both to beingand to thinking the political, is how to standin the moment, to be the Augenblick, while atthe same time not closing off permanently theunderlying darkness that ultimately is thatfrom which the moment emerges. Darkness,then, is neither a negation of being nor whatHeidegger calls the oblivion of Being. On thecontrary, an onto-poetic attention to darknessis recognition of the presence of that which isnot, but which may yet be. Although arguingthat darkness implies not passivity but a differ-ent kind of actualization, Agamben is neverthe-less content with conceiving of the seeing ofdarkness as the singular activity of the poet.In the following section I use Heidegger’sengagement with the concepts of the look andthe Ungeheure, the extraordinary,6 to bridgethe problematization of the poet’s singularability to see darkness with a further discussionof an onto-poetics of space that allows for arelation to both beings and Being.

the look of the augenblick

In both Agamben’s “contemporariness” andHeidegger’s Augenblick one is concerned withthe acquisition of a genuine understanding ofone’s time that is available, at least implicitly,only to the very few. Whether it is Agamben’scontemporary who sees darkness or Heidegger’sbeing of the Augenblick, the “beyond” seems torequire the presence of an exceptional, visionaryindividual. Koral Ward argues that in Heideg-ger’s Augenblick “the eschatological momentwhich comes at the culmination point of astate of crisis must give way to change and theinstigation of a new order, brought about bythe right man in the right time” (xii).

Ward also identifies aspects of the Augen-blick in the ways in which artists have soughtto express and see beyond the Zeitgeist ofcertain epochs. She argues that the task ofartists is to be “the right ‘man’ of themoment” and to “seize the moment of changeand respond to it in their works” (Ward 177–78). Yet, as I pointed out in the beginning ofthe article, this is not the sense in which Heideg-ger understands art. While Abramovic’s per-formance can be read as an augenblicklichmoment, I do not think that it is an expressionof her being “the right man of the moment”capable of representing her subjective experi-ence that connects with the “beyond.” Rather,it seems that the beyond in question is inti-mately related to the space that Abramovic creates with each new person who sits in frontof her, and the Augenblick – instead of beinga subjective vision – is the site that gatherstogether the elements of the performance intoa moment of transformation. As opposed to con-ceiving of theAugenblick as beginning from theextraordinariness of the being that experiencesit, the performance makes tangible the rela-tional character of the transformative moment.The “extraordinary” in the Augenblick can befurther dislocated through a reading of Heideg-ger’s engagement with the concepts of theUnge-heure and the look.

In his lectures on Parmenides in 1942, Hei-degger points out that “we moderns, or, tospeak more broadly, all post-Greek humanity,have for a long time been so deflected that weunderstand looking exclusively as man’s rep-resentational self-direction toward beings”(103). The look of the modern subject is thelook that advances by calculating (108).However, for Heidegger, the Ungeheure issomething “ungraspable by the fangs of thewill, withdrawing itself from all artifices of cal-culation, because it surpasses all planning”(101). Instead of understanding looking as aself-accomplished activity, Heidegger pointsout how in the Greek thea looking is not anactivity of a “subject” but the emergence ofthe “object” in its coming to our encounter(103). Action, then, refers to an ongoing respon-siveness to the approach of the Ungeheure, and

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to that which may yet await us (McNeill 313).Following this, the blink of an eye, too, shouldbe understood as starting not from “the rightman of the moment” but from that which heor she encounters. What is “seen” in theAugen-blick is the Ungeheure: i.e., that which onecannot grasp as an object or order through thewill.

Entering the Augenblick opens one to thepossibilities that are available to, yet not realizedby, one’s being. Similarly, the present, forAgamben, is “an unlived element in everythingthat is lived,” and attention to this “unlived” isthe life of the contemporary (What Is 51). Abra-movic undoubtedly exhibits many of the charac-teristics that Agamben ascribes to thecontemporary, the poet. But what is remarkableabout her contemporariness is that her presencein the performance is not the “unlived” of herown life but that of the person sitting in frontof her. According to Abramovic, in themoment of the look it is not about heranymore, but she becomes something like amirror to the other. Yet one of the visitorsalso describes the moment by saying that it isnot about him, that it goes beyond who he isas a person (Marina Abramovic). In discussingthe Greek thea, Heidegger argues that

looking is self-showing and indeed that self-showing in which the essence of the encoun-tering person has gathered itself and inwhich the encountering person “emerges”in the double sense that his essence is col-lected in the look, as the sum of his existence,and that this collectedness and simple totalityof his essence opens itself to the look – opensitself at any rate in order to let come intopresence in the unconcealed at the sametime the concealment and the abyss of hisessence. (Parmenides 103–04)

In other words, the look is the opening of a sitewhere one encounters the concealment of being– darkness as the “that which is not” of one’sbeing – as well as the abyss (Abgrund) ofone’s being as “the Nothing from which all cre-ation derives” (Agamben, Potentialities 253).The look between Abramovic and the personopposite her in the performance both gathers

the person’s existence and opens it to abeyond. Such a look is not human as such butbelongs to Being itself (Heidegger, Parmenides104), perhaps explaining Abramovic’s descrip-tion of it as “holy.”

augenblicke, darkness, nearness

In a world of chance is there a better and aworse? We yield to a stranger’s embrace orgive ourselves to the waves; for the blink ofan eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we areasleep; and when we awake we have lost thedirection of our lives. What are these blinksof an eyelid, against which the only defenceis an eternal and inhuman wakefulness?Might they not be cracks and chinksthrough which another voice, other voices,speak in our lives? By what right do weclose our ears to them? (Coetzee 30)

The meaning of the Augenblick evolvesthroughout Heidegger’s thinking from theearly Sophist lectures through Being andTime to his later engagement with Nietzsche’swork, changing from being an ecstatic presen-cing of a situation to being a presencing inresponse to the call of a world. Yet even in hislater work Heidegger follows Nietzsche’s formu-lation of the Augenblick as “the vision of themost solitary man,” where being becomesvisible “in our loneliest loneliness” (Nietzsche176; Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume 2 37). Slo-terdijk argues – somewhat polemically – thatHeidegger is ultimately left with “a lonely andweak hysteric-heroic subject that alwaysbelieves itself to be the first to die and thatremains miserably ignorant concerning itsembeddedness within relations of intimacy andsolidarity” (“Nearness” 40). For Sloterdijk, Hei-degger is an expression of the kind of solitaryheroism that he identifies with twentieth-century thinking.

Although Sloterdijk’s critique disregards,perhaps wilfully, the relationality of the Heideg-gerian being-in-the-world, his explicit emphasison the nearness to other beings, alongside Hei-degger’s focus on the nearness of Being, isnevertheless worth considering.7 For Sloterdijk,positive subjectification presupposes invasions

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by what he calls “life-enriching intruders”(Bubbles 96). Yet, such passings-through arenot something that comes from the outside assuch. Subjects are always already created byand involved in them. At the core of Sloterdijk’s“political poetics of space” is the concept of asphere as “a relational space with intimate tonal-ity” (Neither 144). Humans come into the worldnever as individuals but always as a part of suchspheres. Sloterdijk’s ideas concerning poeticspace are indebted to Gaston Bachelard, whoemphasizes that even though ontologies arealways also implicit geometries, inhabitedspace transcends geometrical space. Whereasthe geometrician is interested in surfaces,leaving the sphere essentially empty, thepoetic sphere is attached to impressions ofimmensity that are not subject to geometricaldelimitation (Bachelard 184, 235). Such spacein itself is poetry. Yet while Bachelard’stheory is an ontology of human depth, heemphasizes that the poetic space does notsimply enclose us in affectivity – a discoursethat has become popular in recent years.Rather, a poetic space concerns the expansionof Being (201). Likewise, for Heidegger, itwould be banal to conceive of the Ungeheure,the extraordinary, as something “impressive”or “moving” that brings about this or that affec-tive or psychic state. What comes from theUngeheure towards beings is Being itself (Hei-degger, Parmenides 106).

Sloterdijk’s political poetics, with its con-ception of the sphere as a relational spaceattached to impressions of immensity, echoesthe way in which dark space is conceptualizedin work on the phenomenologies of darkness.Various accounts of the sensory apprehensionof darkness emphasize the ways in which dark-ness blurs the distinction between the insideand the outside, between the boundaries of thebody and that which lies beyond it (Edensor451; Morris 316; Daniel 29; Dean Moore 12;Vidler 175). Darkness sensitizes one to the pres-ence of the other, creating both a heightenedawareness of that which is outside oneself anddifficulty in distinguishing oneself from theoutside (Edensor 451). Those who are con-cerned about the way in which darkness is

increasingly being banished from our immedi-ate lived environments are often, if not primar-ily, concerned about the way in which thedisappearance of darkness entails also a disap-pearance of a sense of mystery about Being(see Bogard). Tanizaki had already suggestedalmost a hundred years ago that it is in theworld of the arts that we must look to find thedarkness and the shadows that have been ban-ished from our immediate lived space (63).

But where, then, is darkness in Abramovic’sperformance? She sits in a square of whitelight and, at first glance, it would seem thatthere is no darkness to be found, not even ona metaphorical level. “The Artist Is Present”is distinctly different from much of Abramo-vic’s work that – due to the recurring themesof violence, pain and sexuality – has for thepast four decades often been labelled as“dark.” Yet, despite its seeming calm and seren-ity, Abramovic describes “The Artist IsPresent” as the culmination of everything shehas been striving for her whole life (qtd inMarina Abramovic). Seeing the strong reac-tions of both Abramovic and the people sittingin front of her, it is clear that, despite appear-ances, the performance is very much aboutpain. The pain may not be inflicted with razorblades, but it is all the more penetrating for it.However, my point is not to make a metaphori-cal association between darkness and pain.Rather, the darkness of the performance is thesense that another Being lies beyond, and inthe time-space of the Augenblick, created inthe look, one may have access to that beyond.

In “The Artist Is Present” the time-space ofthe performance enables an openness to some-thing that resists rationalization and capture:the happening of Being. For contemporarypeople, immersed as we are in a sea of strategiesand calculation enabled by all-penetrating light,such an openness may be as painful as it is rare.Yet, of course, there is no guarantee that anygiven person sitting across from Abramovic would have experienced the present, let alonethe beyond, in the terms I have discussedabove. Certainly not everyone was transformedby the experience. Some dismissed the perform-ance as “a staring contest” or “a circus”

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(Marina Abramovic). What is relevant for thepurposes of this article, however, is the way inwhich the performance apparently lets at leastsome beings open, even if fleetingly, to whatHeidegger would call “nearness of Being”(“Letter” 167). Whether the look becomesaugenblicklich or merely a staring contestcannot be determined beforehand. It dependson both beings and Being, and, crucially, thetime-space of the moment.

However, the augenblicklich moment oftransformation in the performance is not a pri-vative event but comes about through the for-mation of a sphere between Abramovic andthe person sitting in front of her. The perform-ance, and the centrality of the look in it, allowsus to grasp more fully and tangibly the impor-tance of relationality in the Augenblick. ForHeidegger, it is the work of art – rather thanan individual human being – that opens up aworld. Yet, as far as human beings participatein that opening, Sloterdijk emphasizes the cre-ation of space as always having the characterof being-with. New worlds are producedneither by solitary beings with visions of thebeyond nor by beings that are open to anythingand everything all the time. They are producedby the interplay between blinking and intrusion,between the resoluteness of being and the excessof what that being cannot capture. The truth oftheAugenblick emerges out of such encounters.To think of a better and a worse in a world ofchance is the task of a being who is capable oftaking a stance within the current order ofthings while simultaneously creating a differenttruth by taking a leap in the dark towards beingsand Being that are different from one’s own.

conclusion

In apocalypticism life is understood as a state ofexile in the world, waiting for the homecomingthat is to follow: “the beyond is beyond theworld in its entirety” (Taubes 27). Butwhereas religious apocalypticism often gives anaccount of the “homeland” where the beyondawaits – envisaging a move from darkness tolight – for Heidegger, homecoming is thehome. Homecoming, then, implies “dwelling

in the sites of finitude,” whereby a beingremains open to the abyss that dislocates itfrom dominant world disclosures and providesthe “ground” for being otherwise without,however, determining any final ground(Joronen 1147). The beyond – rather than exist-ing as some discernible telos – must be thoughtof in terms of nearness to Being, in terms ofasking the question of the truth of Being.Instead of a move from darkness to light, sucheschatology implies inhabiting the darkness ofthe blink of an eye.

The beyond cannot, however, be willed intoexistence. But neither should recognition ofthe limits of human action be taken to renouncesuch action altogether. Arendt identifies in Hei-degger the danger of an “existential culpability”inspired by Goethe’s “one who acts alwaysbecomes guilty” (Life 184). In order not to fallprey to the potentially paralysing effects ofsuch existential culpability, engagements withthe idea of a beyond need to take actionseriously. In the site and moment of the Augen-blick, action is the condition of possibility forthe opening of a beyond. Yet I have arguedthat action in the blink of an eye does notrefer to the protection of a pre-existing truthbut to assuming a stance in each finite situation.Through an onto-poetic elaboration of darknessI have also sought to draw attention to the pres-ence of the concealed in each moment of actua-lization. Darkness reminds us that action in theAugenblick is always only finite. Such finitude,however, is not privation but the ontologicalcondition of possibility for being otherwiseand, indeed, the condition of possibility forthe political.

Whereas specific, ontic political strugglesrequire the kind of strategic knowledge calledfor by Foucault and those working in hiswake, a politics that aspires beyond cannot belimited to strategy. Instead it must attachitself to the poetic: to the possibility of amoment that surpasses all strategy. I have dis-cussed the Augenblick here as one suchmoment. But what neither Heidegger’s Augen-blick nor Agamben’s contemporariness suffi-ciently acknowledges is that an affirmative wayof formulating such a politics will need to

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recognize the central role of relationality inactualizing the beyond.

Abramovic’s performance is a culminationand an explication of the themes that I havewished to emphasize in considering the notionof the Augenblick. Whereas others have inter-preted artists as “the men of the Augenblick”capable of representing their subjective experi-ence that connects with the “beyond,” I haveargued here that the transformative moment inAbramovic’s performance comes aboutthrough the creation of a poetic space betweenher and the people who sit in front of her. Theinhabitation of such a space may enable arelation to that which is not immediatelyobvious within one’s own terms of intelligibilityor which may even be inexplicable. The look inthe performance and the look of the Augenblickare not those of visionary individuals seeing thebeyond. The look, rather, is the opening of a sitewhere one encounters both other beings andBeing itself as everything that it may yet be.The problematic created by the onto-poetics ofa beyond – and, therefore, the challenge of apolitics of the Augenblick – is how to inhabitthe site of the moment, and to act according toits insight, while recognizingthat such a politics will alwaysbe finite, opening as it doesonto another Being that can nolonger be grasped within itsorder.

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported bythe author.

notes

I would like to thank Gideon Baker, Tim Edensor,

Mikko Joronen and Luis Lobo-Guerrero for their

insightful and encouraging comments on earlier

versions of this article. Title page image: Carnival

Nights 4 (oil on board) by Salah el Moncef.

1 Augenblick is variably translated into English as

“moment,” “moment of vision,” “moment of trans-

formation,” “decisive moment,” “instant,” “glance

of an eye,” “twinkling of an eye” or “blink of an

eye.” The concept and its various translations can

be traced from interpretations of Søren Kierke-

gaard’s øieblik, Friedrich Nietzsche’s gateway

“Moment,” Karl Jaspers’ “pure eye” and Heideg-

ger’s Augenblick. See Ward xi–xv; McNeill ix.

2 A detailed examination of the relationship

between these concepts is beyond the scope of

this article. I follow here William McNeill, who

argues that although Heidegger’s later work

focused on Ereignis and Gelassenheit, this should

not be read as a move away from the Augenblick.

The shift in emphasis regarding the Augenblick per-

tains to the originating power of Dasein, which in

Heidegger’s later work becomes more and more

decentred in relation to other worldly beings.

Instead of being conceived of as Dasein’s own, the

event of origination comes to belong to the strife

between earth and world. Yet, for Dasein, the

site of this strife is still the Augenblick. See

McNeill 289–301.

3 Following the recent German publication of the

first three volumes of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte

[Black Notebooks], the diaries that he kept from

1931 to 1941, the relationship between his philos-

ophy and involvement in Nazi politics has again

become a subject of debate. I follow here those

who argue that while Heidegger’s politics can

neither be simply explained away nor neatly separ-

ated from his philosophy, it is possible to make use

of his thought for more progressive political pur-

poses than those of his own. Although there are

aspects of Heidegger’s thought that are proble-

matic and need to be condemned, this does not

mean that the whole logic through which he ana-

lysed the question of the meaning of Being needs

to be abandoned. See Elden 170–80; Nancy, “Hei-

degger’s ‘Originary Ethics,’” 65–86. On the Black

Notebooks, see Gordon; Fried.

4 On the etymological connection between Augen-

blick, Ereignis and Lichtung, see Sheehan 196–99.

5 Debates on “presence” and the (im)possibility of

immediacy and authenticity thereof have been at

the core of performance theory and practice

since the late 1950s. Whereas the 1960s and

1970s emphasized the presence of the live body

in performance, the rising popularity of decon-

struction since the late 1980s has explicitly

rejected the valorization of presence. More

recent performance art has re-focused on prac-

tices of presence, creating a resurgence of interest

in the ways in which presence may be experienced,

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produced and performed. See Giannachi, Kaye, and

Shanks. The highly staged and modulated presence

in “The Artist Is Present” can be interpreted in the

light of this reaction to deconstruction. Further

discussion of this aspect of the performance is,

however, beyond the scope of this article.

6 Ungeheure is variably translated into English as

“monstrous,” “daimonic,” “uncanny,” “enormous,”

“immense,” “colossal,” “tremendous,” “extraordi-

nary” or “infinite.” See translator’s note in Sloter-

dijk, Bubbles 663; McNeill 306; Sloterdijk,

“Geometry” 29.

7 Being-with as an essential trait of Dasein has also

been emphasized by others. See, most notably,

Nancy, Being Singular Plural.

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Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

Ziarek, Krzysztof. “Art, Power, and Politics:

Heidegger on Machenschaft and Poiesis.”

Contretemps 3 (2002): 175–86. Print.

Suvi AltFaculty of Social SciencesUniversity of LaplandPO Box 12296101 RovaniemiFinlandE-mail: suvi.alt@ulapland.fi

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