Time Interrupted

The belief that societies are continually advancing through time has been a near constant imaginary of almost all liberal, socialist, and post-colonial regimes. It continues to inform many social movements to this day. Here you will find theoretical documents that disrupt this narrative of progress or offer alternate chronicles of ruptured, interrupted, or discontinuous time.   

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Time Interrupted
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Pre-Modern
1700-1830s
1840-1945
1946-1989
1990-2010
2011-Present

The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche (1887)

This book by Nietzsche consists of a preface and three treatises that trace the evolution of morality, specifically with a view towards Christianity and Judiasm.

Lets Spit on Hegel – Carla Lonzi (1970)

Carla Lonzi, leading member of the Italian feminist collective Rivolta Femminile, 1970 pamphlet against patriarchal thought, history, and time. In this text Lonzi attacks Hegel (and Marx’s) notions of antagonism, progres…

Radical Feminism as Social Arrest: A Kinetic Analysis – Audrey Love (2016)

Thesis examining U.S. radical feminism as the arrest of patriarchal order, gaze, and time

The Calendar – Report (1793)

This report, submitted in 1793, describes the arguments for replacing the Gregorian Calendar with the Republican Calendar. The change of the conceptualization of time was a disruption of society and everyday life.

Decree on the Republican Calendar (1793)

In October 1793, the French National Convention ordered the use of the Republican Calendar to replace the Gregorian Calendar. The Republican Calendar was made to depict agrarian imagery and dismantle the lies of the thro…

The Kinetics of Our Discontent – Mehmet Dosemeci (2020)

Why do we think of social struggles as movements? Has struggle been thought/practiced otherwise? Not as movement but as disruption, arrest, stasis? If so, what are struggles trying to stop?

Theses on the Philosophy of History – Walter Benjamin (1940)

A Storm and a Prophecy – Subcomandante Marcos (1992)

The first written essay by Subcomandante Marcos serving as “tour guide” to the state of Chiapas, desecrated by years of extractive neoliberalism. Written a year and a half before the Zapatista uprising, it outlines all…

The Coming Insurrection – The Invisible Committee (2009)

Now classic text by French collective – The Invisible Committee describing the present impasse through seven circles of hell and the way out through the insurrectionary commune

Simulations and Simulacra by Jean Baudrillard (1981)

Jean Baudrillard introduces the idea that reality and a constructed form of reality are unable to be distinguished from each other. He explains the ways images, culture and media work to define simulacra.