The Time That Remains, Part I: On Contemporary Nihilism

Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes One and Two, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 73.

Also Rossi, "Introduction," Aldo Rossi in America: 1976 to 1979, ed. Kenneth Frampton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 38-39.

Peter Eisenman, "Presentness and the Being-Only-Once of Architecture": Written into the Void (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 46.

Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 393.

Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 62.

Agamben, ibid, 67.

Martin Heidegger, On Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Giorgos Xeropaides, O Heidegger kai to problema tes ontologias (Athens: Kritike, 1995) 86-88.

Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 20.

Agamben, ibid, 30.

Recently, Gerald Raunig has written an alternative art history depicting the revolutionary transgressions and tragic failures of the "long twentieth century," from the Paris Commune of 1871 and the beginning of modernité to the turbulent counter-globalization protests in Genoa in 2001. See Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

Boris Groys, "The Weak Universalism," e-flux journal no.19 (October 2010). Here Groys tends to identify messianic time with a Christological concept of a new spiritualism that is actually against Agamben's own thesis. See →.

Agamben, ibid, 63.

Jacques Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources and 'Religion' at the Limits of Reason Alone" in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) 13-14.

While chronos in ancient Greek refers to chronological or sequential time, kairos signifies a time in between, a moment of indeterminate time in which something special happens.

Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 27; see Martin Heidegger, 'The World of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead,' The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 62.

Agamben, ibid, 39.

Agamben, ibid, 19.

Agamben, ibid, 19.

We can also argue that, rather than simply denying commercialism and the industry of the spectacle, the ‘conceptualism of bad taste’ engaged—at least in the best-case scenario—with them in an attempt to avoid the alienation of working within a rotten system by actively occupying a place of negativity within the same system. To embrace the fascination that the commodity engenders doesn’t necessarily mean simply to be uncritically fascinated by this absolute fetish, ‘the idol of the marketplace,’ but rather to mirror the previously described dualism or polarity that roots modernity’s formative schism between bad and good taste: art as commodity versus art as critique of that commodity. Actually it was Karl Marx himself who claimed that commodity is something very like a work of art, contemplating on its mystical, enigmatic character and its transcendent being. Bad taste can expose the triviality and alienating nature of commodities, only if it takes seriously its mysterious life and aura. Bad taste has an investigative, almost hermeneutical character. Marx himself is a ‘man of taste,’ which claims for him the right to uncover the scintillating nuances of commodity between alienating fetishism and truth. See Karl Marx, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), I:71.

Agamben, ibid, 41.

Agamben refers to Rameau's Nephew, an imaginary philosophical conversation written by Denis Diderot, in which the figure of the protagonist functions as a man of extraordinary taste and at the same time “a despicable rascal.” Agamben, ibid, 26.

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1988), 65; Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation. Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), 21.

Schmitt, ibid., 5, 12.

Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 35. Talking with Derrida, within the entirety of the surrounds of the work of art (frame, title, signature, museum, archive, reproduction, discourse, market) the most significant one, the predominant “parergon,” remains the aesthetic judgment.

Agamben, ibid, 19.

Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art. Manifestos, Texts, Interviews, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again),(New York: Harvest, 1975), 92.

Indeed, it seems that Nietzsche’s take on composer Richard Wagner can be seen as a crucial critique of art’s condition today that links conceptually Wagner’s profile to the one of Warhol: “In his art all that the modern world requires most urgently is mixed in the most seductive manner: the three great ‘stimulantia’ of the exhausted – the brutal, the artificial, and the innocent (idiotic).” Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,”,in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 622..

The advent of nihilism with the man without content should be associated with what Jacques Lacan has called the fundamental tendency of the symbolic order to produce repetition, which has been terminologically fixated as modern society’s “death drive.” The death drive for Lacan doesn’t mean the same as it does for Sigmund Freud. It means the prolongation of the already existent and monetary accumulation is its symptom.

See →

Agamben, ibid, 56.

It founds its precursor in the reading of seventeenth-century Baroque as a critical moment in the eruption of modernity and its successor in the avant-garde artistic movements of the twentieth century. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (London: Sage, 1994), 4.