Achille Mbembe:
Time on the Move
Lecture | ICI Lecture Series ERRANS, in Time | ICI – Institute for Cultural Inquiry | Berlin | 8.4.2017
Our world is going through a peculiar moment, one for which there doesn’t seem to be a proper name yet. Since naming our time is part of what is at stake, Achille Mbembe will suggest that in the midst of the current dread and confusion, one thing at least is clear: ours is a time of planetary entanglement. But entanglement is not all that characterizes the now. As it happens, times of planetary entanglement are propitious for all kinds of escalations, the renewed production of things, forms, and events both baroque and dystopian, if only because such events generally strive to generate their own actuality through sheer excess and stupefaction.
The lecture focusses on one such modality of the now, negative messianism, and its relation to the politics of pure violence.