The essay entitled
“In the Time of Fascist Desire,” written during my first semester of graduate study, was not only significant as the first time the problematic of
kairos took center stage in my work. Rather, the task of “the constructing a secular concept of
kairos” answered to the exigency of proposing an answer to the following question posed by Deleuze & Guattari in
A Thousand Plateaus:
What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power…only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? ...It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.[1]
Thus, from the outset,
kairos had to be thought in connection to desire –
eros – a conceptual linkage for which there is much support – for the answer was to claim that the experience of time toward which all desire tends is the interruption of indifferent, chronological time, by a qualitatively distinct moment,
kairos. Furthermore, in Eric Michaud's “Nazi Architecture as an Acceleration of Time” (1993) and
The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (published in French as:
Un Art de l'Eternité: L'image et le temps du nationale-socialisme: 1996; English translation: 2004), and in Klaus Theweileit's
Male Fantasies (Volume 1: 1977; English translation 1987), there was much to be found that suggested a linkage to the domain of aesthetics – art, architecture, photography and film appeared to be instrumental in evoking such an experience of time and in providing some amount of satisfaction to desire. According to the logic of
kairos, first presented in the essay in question, this evocation can only ape
kairos, for the architecture of Nazi Germany, for example,“ made the monument as messiah for an impatient community, the heralded new man who came when summoned to liberate the community from time, who came to put an end to its waiting.” [2] If, however, a moment worthy of the name
kairos cannot be objectively distinguished from any other time, how then can it be distinguished with certainty from pseudo
-kairos? The true from false messiahs? Furthermore, this indicates that
kairos is not only emergent but effective in history and in politics, as Paul Tillich writes:
Kairos ...was used not only by the religious socialist movement in obedience to the great kairos... but also by the nationalist movement, which, through the voice of Nazism, attacked the great kairos and everything for which it stands. The latter use was a demonically distorted experience of a kairos [3] and led inescapably to self-destruction. [4]
