Messianic Duration

From Paul’s Letter to the Romans:

Again I ask: Did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness bring! (Romans 11:11-12)

One must pause after reading this passage to ponder the question of salvation and its relationship to envy and transgression. Far from being a hinderance to salvation, envy (the NRSV translates this as jealousy) makes salvation for some possible. It rescues the Israelites from stumbling and brings them into Paul’s plan for salvation. Of course this is not quite the tenth commandment’s uncompromising prohibition of not coveting (envying) your neighbor’s possessions. In this passage, not only is envy not all bad, it drives a healthy mimetic cycle that draws Jews and Gentiles into salvation. In this meditation, I want to dive into the consequences of this reversal of our traditional understanding of envy and salvation. Traditionally, we would see envy as a stumbling block to salvation. That is emphatically not what is happening here. One could argue that envy is crucial to Paul’s soteriology and is intimately bound up with his reconfiguration of time.

I should like to dwell a bit on the temporal sequence that drives this relationship. One of Paul’s key innovations, according to E.P. Sanders, is his “reversal of sequence” where “God would first restore Israel, and then Gentiles would come in” (Paul: A Very Short Introduction, 3-4). Romans explicitly reverses the sequence by reversing the initial mimetic example of envy from Jews to Gentiles. In the traditional flow, the redemption of Israel would lead to envy on the part of Gentiles, which would create a desire for them to join in the soteriological schema. Of course the question at the time was what this joining-in entailed with respect to the law. Paul is not introducing envy into soteriology, he is merely reversing the object of envy and thus the sequential flow of how global salvation (and therefore Global History) is supposed to work. Israel as the chosen people have stumbled, but they do not recognize this. Recalling them to the calling will require Gentiles to be converted as an example — as something to imitate through a strong form of envy/jealousy. Mimetic desire, as envy, is essential to salvation.

Envy and Ressentiment

There is a delicate dance to be choreographed when one is trying to provoke envy in the Other. Envy and jealousy easily become a desire for revenge if things go wrong. We are, therefore, not very far from ressentiment as an outcome of Paul’s re-sequencing of soteriological time. I’m using ressentiment more as René Girard used it than as Nietzsche used it, but I’ll come back later in this essay to a rapprochement between them. For Girard, ressentiment is “an undifferentiated no-man’s-land between revenge and no revenge.” It stretches identity across a passage of time that seeks stability on the other side of the passage, but because the stability on the other side requires violence that is not willing or able to be realized, the subject finds him/herself in this undifferentiated no-man’s land where no actions can be taken. This is exactly what Girard found in Hamlet:

In that no-man’s-land it becomes impossible to define anything. All actions and motivations are their own opposites as well as themselves. When Hamlet does not seize the opportunity to kill Claudius during his prayer, it could be failure of the will or a supreme calculation; it could be instinctive humanness or a refinement of cruelty. Hamlet himself does not know. (A Theater of Envy, 285)

For Girard, Hamlet is the modern figure of ressentiment that resists embracing justice as revenge as his personal responsibility, and Shakespeare famously expresses this as a problem of time: “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.” Hamlet’s fundamental question has to do with the necessary connection between revenge, justice, and the smoothing out of time. The play unfolds as the inability for Hamlet to use revenge to re-establish justice as the re-smoothing of time. Thus the rottenness of Denmark is a temporal rottenness that signifies its disunity brought about by injustice — a regicide that is also fratricide. To envision justice as smoothed-out time will require an act of revenge that stabilizes time in the form of a new regime with a better claim to legitimacy. This requires Hamlet to stabilize himself as the hero who uses violence to set time right again. When does this cycle end? It doesn’t. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is resisting becoming the stable agent who perpetuates the cycle of justice-as-revenge.

This is the challenge of ressentiment as both Nietzsche and Girard formulated it. For both, it is bound up with the problem of time, justice, revenge, and identity. Girard’s ressentiment is different from Nietzsche’s for sure, and I would venture to say that it is far more nuanced. For the moment, however, it is enough to point out that ressentiment can unfold as a condition of the mimetic cycle anytime one feels the responsibility to set time right but for whatever reason cannot or will not take the action they believe is necessary. It arises within a mimetic cycle that is circumvented and cut off from its habituated conclusion. We should not essentialize the cycle around violent revenge. The mimetic cycle can yield ressentiment in any situation where one is unwilling or unable to set time right. The “undifferentiated no-man’s-land between revenge and no revenge” does not have to see revenge as physical violence. For some, harsh words and direct verbal conflict can be hard to do because they feel like violence. If you feel they are necessary, but you don’t do them, then ressentiment is structuring time.

Such a state easily becomes Gnostic in the sense of hardening into a denigration of the world and one’s position in it. Nietzsche didn’t use the term Gnosticism, but his version of decádence as an end (as opposed to a means) captures it pretty well. It amounts to the same thing: either an indifference to this world or an outright denigration of it as a stable state of being. In either case, decádence-as-Gnosticism becomes a morally justified disconnection from this world and the concerns of the here and now. It is tempting to see the temporality of envy and ressentiment as essential emotional states that stretch over chronological time. That is not how we should see it. I would rather lean on the other Greek term for time, kairos. In understanding kairos, I’m going to further lean on Giorgio Agamben’s definition of it in relation to its usual opposite, chronos. For Agamben, they are not absolutely different concepts of time. Rather, kairos is “a contracted and abridged chronos” (The Time that Remains, 69). Contraction is the operative term here, and it is central to his reading of Paul’s overhaul of messianic time. Before coming back to Paul, however, this contraction can be seen in Girard’s reading of Hamlet, which is one of his most compelling explications of ressentiment.

The play is bookended by the appearance of the ghost of the Old Hamlet and the somewhat messy and chaotic execution of revenge. The in-between of these bookends is structured by ressentiment as the concentration of Old Hamlet’s demand that his son avenge his death and Hamlet’s active hesitation to delay the completion of the cycle. The concentration is not uniform, however. This is not the harmonious tension of Stoic physics that holds the universe together by pushing and pulling in both directions simultaneously. This is a dysfunctional tension that is time out of joint, and Hamlet does not act to set it right.

In ancient Greek, kairos was the time for action. We see this in Aristotle’s Book Three of Nicomachean Ethics. Courage as the mean between the extremes of rashness and cowardice is not an essential point separate from the kairos that drives choice of action. In other words, the middle ground between extremes can only be determined through phronesis as the practical discernment of how the virtue of courage should be activated to achieve the goal demanded by kairos:

… for, in an unqualified sense, no one voluntarily jettisons cargo, but when one’s own preservation and that of the rest are at issue, everyone who has sense [nous, intellect, discernment] would do it. These sorts of actions, then, are mixed, though they are more voluntary [than involuntary], for they are choiceworthy at the time they are done and the end of the action accords with what is opportune at the moment [kairos]. (III.1 1110a 10-12, emphasis added)

There are technical terms in this passage that I will defer going into for the purposes of this essay (i.e., “unqualified sense” and the difference between voluntary and involuntary actions). What is sufficient for my purpose is that sense (nous) of the need to jettison the cargo depends upon the captain’s proper discernment of the kairos, translated here and throughout by Bartlett and Collins as variations of the phrase “opportune moment.” It also depends on the understanding of one’s role in the situation. The crew should not jettison cargo of their own accord. They must wait for the captain to whom the crew has turned over its own nous. For Aristotle, the morally correct action should be automatic based on the habituation (ethos) of the captain’s nous as a captain. Once the captain determines that the boat should be lightened to avoid whatever danger it is in, deliberation (proairesis) shouldn’t last very long in most situations because the captain has been habituated to recognize the goal to quickly lighten the ship. All of these parenthetical Greek terms are technical terms for Aristotle’s ethics, and none of them can be understood separate from their activation in an opportune moment.

This is not how Hamlet discerns his kairos. It is the opposite of the habituation of automatic reactions. Habituation is exactly what he is struggling against. He fully understands the demand of the kairos as defined for him by Old Hamlet’s ghost, but his hesitation creates a tension that makes chronos excruciating — it is a four-hour play that Shakespeare apparently kept revising and extending. This is how we should understand the temporal tension that unfolds in the play: the past is showing up as a summary judgment that compresses all the moments of Hamlet’s past into this one demand. There is a concentrated urgency to the demand, and Hamlet is hesitating to bring about the end — the setting right of out-of-joint-time by activating the vengeance of the mimetic cycle. The kairos that concentrates chronos into a hesitation to act according to mimetic requirements ends up re-emphasizing chronos as the excruciating delay of setting time right again.

This in-between time is rarely if ever a chronological passage between poles that exist outside of the kairos. Hamlet’s kairos summarizes and concentrates the memory of the past while demanding the present seek to set it right — this is the function of Old Hamlet’s ghost. We have to be careful in formulating the “in-between.” It is too easy to assume that the in-between is a passage from one stable state to another. This is modern evangelical Christianity — you go from damned to saved in the blink of an eye once you “accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior.” On the contrary, we are not required to think about the in-between as a passage from a here to a there. Kairos necessarily creates the poles that make time appear to be out of joint. Kairos manifests itself as a passage across poles, or thresholds, that ideally rejoins them through the heroic action. Kairos, in other words, seeks to re-establish chronos as the normal experience of time. It is, if you like, the ironing out of Serres’ crumpled handkerchief of time, and it is exactly the dynamic of Hamlet’s ressentiment that hesitates in the midst of an Aristotelian ethos. This creates the temporal no-man’s-land of revenge or no revenge.

Chronos Is Not Objective. Kairos Is Not Subjective

The important point that I want to dwell on here is that kairos is not simply the subjective experience of objective chronos. Time is not only the steady and measurable forward-moving passage from the present to the past and the present into the future. If we say this is what time really and only is, then we have to label any other experience of that steadiness as subjective. Even further, we’d have to label it as false consciousness. We would be forced to see Modernity’s introduction of the clock as a neutral invention that reveals Time as a transcendent reality, much like Robert Boyle argued that his air pump revealed a law of physics that Nature does not abhor a vacuum. This is the trick of Modernity as Latour showed us in We Have Never Been Modern: hybrid technologies like air pumps, roads, clocks, train schedules, printing presses, et cetera all reveal something more than themselves as they hide their agency in the revelation. From the perspective of Modernity, a clock simply reveals that Time is a transcendent reality and that it marches along steadily; we’ve just figured out how to measure it and represent that measurement in the form of a clock. But that is not only what clocks do. They coordinate various durations under a regime of Time that must appear Natural and Eternal rather than the technological invention that it is. The question “What time is it?” has no meaning before the existence of a clock and a shared understanding that a clock measures a common understanding of the steadiness of Time between the person who asks and the person who responds.

One cannot make a hard separation of kairos (as subjective) from chronos (as objective) in Hamlet, and that is its genius as a play, as it is with all tragedy. Hamlet’s hesitation within the kairos infuses chronos with an emotional tension that collapses any ability to definitively separate subjective from objective temporality. Something else is happening here that we should understand. Agamben found the same thing in Paul’s temporality of parousia, and we could equally well understand this using Bergsonism’s method of intuition to understand this. For the sake of this essay, I’ll focus on Agamben’s reading because it keeps us closer to Paul, to whom I will return.

Agamben’s reading of parousia in Paul follows from his elaboration of kairos and chronos, which I have been cribbing in the preceding paragraphs. His reading of Paul’s parousia is the intentional stretching out of the kairos so as to make something graspable — something other than what seems to be immediately called for in the kairos. This is not a deferral for its own sake, but a deferral that hesitates because the end is either problematic or out of one’s grasp. Parousia is the Greek term for presence, but it is not the presence of an instant. It is the stretched out presence of this deferral that either hopes for or actively seeks alternatives to the knee-jerk prescriptions available to us either through law or custom: “the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time, which stretches its parousia, not in order to defer it, but to make it graspable” (71). What is being grasped? Parousia itself as out-of-joint time hesitating within the habituated choice of action dictated by culture and law. This is Hamlet’s hesitation that ultimately fails, and it is also Paul’s improvisational practices in his mission to the Gentiles that ultimately succeeds in finding an alternative.

We can say, however, that we should seek to grasp the out-of-jointness of time as the opportunity for creative evolution, to borrow a phrase from Bergson. We open the possibility of thinking about time as malleable, configurable, and not at all given to us. This is not necessarily a knee-jerk Buddhist’s Nirvana as an emotionless state of detachment. As Girard’s reading of Hamlet shows, this parousia can be excruciating, structured by ressentiment, and leaving us wanting for acceptable solutions. For Paul, this parousia orients oneself to one’s place in the here and now (hos non kairos is his phrase) in relation to an eschaton that no one but God controls.

Messianic Duration

This in-between flow of temporality is what I’m arguing that we need to come to terms with in order to undo modern Gnosticism. Paradoxically, I am also going to argue that we need envy and ressentiment at some level in order to activate stretched-out parousia. I’m going to call this messianic duration: the deliberate practice of emptying time of any essence so that discernment, attention, and awareness can make time to grasp other possibilities. The result is to seek newly graspable solutions that don’t rely on knee-jerk, reified truisms. Why are envy and ressentiment necessary in this parousia? Because they both acknowledge the positive power of mimetic desire, even in its purportedly negative forms of envy and ressentiment, while simultaneously enabling us to acknowledge and manage their dangers. Any time that we are intervening into the mimetic cycle to break its habitual need to first disjoint and then to set time right, we are going to activate ressentiment. How we deal with it becomes the challenge.

We need not see Hamlet’s ressentiment as Nietzschean decádence, i.e, an intentional state of being as an end point or goal of the self. Shakespeare is not telling us to be like Hamlet and embrace a permanent state of weakened vengeance that really wants to still be vengeance. He is telling us quite the reverse: that there is a healthy ressentiment as a skepticism toward knee-jerk solutions given to us by custom and law. This healthy ressentiment turns to decadence if we don’t recognize that holding open the kairos long enough to create graspable alternatives is the moral danger. Hamlet’s problem is that he never authentically seeks the alternative. Rather, he finds envy on the other side of ressentiment and completes the mimetic cycle when he finally finds his imitative example in Laertes:

‘Swounds, show me what thou’lt do.
Woo’t weep? Woo’t fight? Woo’t fast? Woo’t tear thyself?
Woo’t drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile?
I’ll do’t. Dost thou come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I.” (V.i. 274-279)

Girard’s point in quoting these lines is that Shakespeare remains within the genre of the revenge play while exposing the mechanisms by which it reifies and naturalizes the desire for revenge as necessary for justice. Hamlet’s ressentiment is resolved in envy as the restored impetus to revenge.

The resolution of ressentiment in envy is the problem that Shakespeare wants the audience to see. Ressentiment as the negation of reified habits is therefore morally necessary and not inherently evil, but neither is it inherently good. It is just not desirable as a permanent state. This is where Nietzsche and Girard coincide on ressentiment. It may very well be necessary as a momentary outcome of seeking alternatives beyond the knee-jerk habituations, but it becomes dangerous in two ways. First, as Hamlet shows, when ressentiment is embraced as simply the delay of revenge rather than the undoing of the desire for revenge, envy will re-emerge: a Laertes will emerge as an example that allows Hamlet to act through imitation. Second, if ressentiment can only be activated as negation rather than the positive creation of alternatives, ressentiment folds back on itself, and decádence becomes a desirable state of being. Gnostic indifference or contempt toward the world are the only alternatives because all that this temporality of ressentiment can do is negate its negations in an endless turning back on itself.

Girardian Ressentiment versus Nietzschean Ressentiment

Before unpacking the relationship between Gnosticism and ressentiment, I need to spend some time elaborating the conflicts and rapprochement between Girard’s notion of ressentiment and Nietzsche’s. Ressentiment in the Genealogy of Morals is far less nuanced than in the later Anti-Christ, and Nietzsche seems to acknowledge this in Aphorisms 24 and 25, which I will quote from at length in a moment. Nietzsche’s argument is complex, but it is absolutely crucial to understand because he is reworking ressentiment and complicating its relationship to time.

We should start by understanding the crucial difference that Nietzsche introduces between ressentiment as means and as ends. As means, ressentiment is exactly what we see in Agamben’s reading of Paul, and it is what we’ve seen in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, at least at the beginning of the play. Hamlet follows the trajectory of ressentiment moving from decádence as means to ends, while Agamben’s Paul stays within decádence as means. Of course this is a fundamental difference between Agamben’s and Nietzsche’s vastly different understandings of Paul, but I don’t want to get hung up on who was right. The purpose here is to stay focused on the difference between decádence as means versus ends. The specific difference can be understood as the difference between a practice that involves negation as a means and the negating practice that becomes an end toward which we strive. For Nietzsche, Judaism (and Buddhism, which he will get to in subsequent aphorisms) used ressentiment as a means to the end of “denaturalization” of all values that had come before them:

They defined themselves against all conditions under which a people had hitherto been able to live, or been allowed to live, they create in themselves a counter concept to natural conditions — one by one they irredeemably turned religion, cult worship, morality, history, psychology into the contrary of their natural values. (Anti-Christ 24, page 154 in Volume 9 of the Stanford UP edition, which I will be quoting from throughout)

Ressentiment here is not the Christian version that became a desirable state of being — an end. Rather, it is a means to a negation of knee-jerk adoption of habituated moral values. The problem for Nietzsche was twofold. First, both Judaism and Christianity went from negation as means to negation as end. Second, and this is most important for understanding why Girard departed from Nietzsche’s ressentiment, what Judaism and Christianity negated were the values that Nietzsche thought were truly valuable:

Morality no longer the expression of conditions for the life and growth of a people, no longer its most basic instinct for life, but instead turned abstract, turned into antithesis to life — morality as a fundamental degradation of the imagination, as the “evil eye” for all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? chance robbed of its innocence; misfortune besmirched with the concept of “sin”; well-being as danger, as “temptations”; physiological indisposition poisoned by the worm of conscience… (Aphorism 25, 156)

There is a vast difference in the temporality of ressentiment between 24 and 25 in The Anti-Christ. Aphorism 24 is about the positive act of negation as denaturalization of habituated values. Aphorism 25 is about the transition from decádence as means to ends. The subsequent temporal flow of the history of ressentiment from a powerful means (even more powerful than Yes-saying) to ends became the embrace of decádence and the path to European nihilism.

With Girard, I can accept Nietzsche’s first move — ressentiment results from a negation of habituated values — but I can also pull back from the necessity of the second move as being the Judeo-Christian rejection of noble morality that results in the necessary embrace of decádence as the opposite of those values. This is the sin that he lays at Nietzsche’s doorstep: “As modern culture turned to science and philosophy, as the Greek side of our inheritance became dominant, to the point when mythology proper, with disciplines like psychoanalysis, made a kind of intellectual reappearance, the Judeo-Christian text was rejected to the outer fringes of our intellectual life; it is now entirely excluded” (A Theater of Envy, 289).

To be clear, both Nietzsche and Girard see an intimate connection between ressentiment and Christianity. The difference is one of direct cause and indirect effect. For Girard, ressentiment is an indirect effect of Christian practices of defusing violence and revenge. But it doesn’t cause those effects directly because Girard puts the emphasis on a weakened desire for vengeance, not a sublimation of vengeance that continues as a repressed desire. In other words, Christianity’s practices negate the desire for violence — “thou shalt not covet…” — which leaves open the possibility that the desire will re-emerge later — as it did for Hamlet.

Nietzsche’s ressentiment, according to Girard, starts from impotent vengeance and therefore remains a desire for vengeance nonetheless. This is negation in the name of something else — vengeance. This negation, in other words, has content and is therefore not messianic negation as Agamben (following Walter Benjamin) argued for it in his reading of Paul. There is a vast difference between negated vengeance that remains a repressed desire and seeing a cycle of violence as something to be negated even if you’re not sure what the alternative actions should be. Christianity’s problem has always been what the replacement is. Jesus’s only commandment in John is “Love each other as I have loved you.” But he does not give us a definition of love — only his example, “as I have loved you.” The temporality of the commandment stops us in our tracks and tells us that the only way we will understand love is to turn back the pages of the codex to find and re-read the examples that came before that moment. Our movement forward in time will become a looking back — literally flipping back the pages of the Gospel — to see what we can glean by re-reading the examples.

This is tough to do, especially for a Modern culture that thrives on prescriptions and certainties that can be summed up in neat statements of absolute clarity. As we turn back the pages of the Gospel, do we seek the essence of this love that unifies all of the examples? Do we assume that the answer we are looking for exists outside of time in an eternal definition of love? Are we training ourselves to not look at the examples themselves but to look beyond them for an external the transcendent truth outside of what we see happening in the scene itself? In the process, love (and God as its creator) will become reified artifacts sitting outside history. We will be like Socrates pushing for the clarity of a definition only to incessantly “start over again” when each definition fails to encompass all examples. Will we, like the Socrates of the early Plato, finally show that that the starting over again exhausts itself and that all we are left with is the with the intention of living according to the virtue though we can’t define?

The ultimate question remains: will the temporality of the unfolding of examples stop once we have nailed them all down with an eternal definition that we can write down and capture in the space of language? Will we have reduced time to space as Bergson might have asked? This all stops when we stop treating time as space — when we restore time as fully relational and lacking any essence whatsoever. To say that time lacks essence is not to say that it is not real. Time is real, but it never exists only as a single thing, and it certainly is not reducible to the ticking of a clock though that is one of its configurations. When we take time seriously by looking at how the multiple flows of duration collide, collude, collapse, cooperate, and conflict, we can begin to deliberately intervene into this simultaneity of durations to interrupt them, slow them down, and make time for the newly graspable answers.

Ressentiment and Gnosticism

Here we’ve arrived at Gnosticism, which is the real object of critique in Girard’s and Nietzsche’s separate but related diagnoses of ressentiment. As I argued above, ressentiment can arise from any situation where you feel the responsibility to set time right but you can’t or won’t. Let me offer a simple example that has little to do with revenge. We all know people who like to fix things. They see time out of joint as a responsibility to set it straight. Setting it straight may not require anything like violence or revenge. It might require some action that is just a bit beyond what they can do or are willing to do. Maybe a rule needs to be bent, but they are rule followers. Maybe a conflict needs to be had, but they shy away from conflict because they’ve never been trained in how to deal with it productively. Ressentiment is a possibility in these situations though violence and revenge are nowhere to be found in any essential or traditional sense.

The Gnostic danger is that you detach from the responsibility and find a permanent justification in your certainty that the world is fallen. You condemn the situation as irredeemable as a way of justifying avoiding the conflict. On a grand scale, climate change is such a situation and empowers and rewards Gnosticism as a disinhibition to do anything. But we experience this in the smaller scale kairos of our daily lives as well.

Ressentiment is the interruption of habituated time though it is not the only way that we can interrupt ourselves. The challenge that ressentiment issues to us is how to create enough time within the interruption of habituation to grasp another way of acting. We cannot be bothered necessarily by time being out of joint. Time is aways out of joint because it isn’t one thing. The simple act of an interruption should signal to us that time is the simultaneity of multiple durations. This insight is crucial to putting messianic duration into practice as the ability to interrupt time without yielding to Gnosticism. It requires us to see ressentiment as necessary while recognizing that Gnostic temporality surrounds it.

Religious Speech and Messianic Duration

In 2002, Bruno Latour published a wonderful book called Jubiler, translated as Rejoicing in 2013. This is his attempt to reimagine the possibility of “the torments of religious speech.” It is far more personal than his other works because it runs up against the prohibitions against academics speaking fondly and authentically of religion. It is also one of his most profound engagements of temporality. By seeing time as lacking essence, religious speech pushes transcendence back into the things around us, but not as their exteriority or their “purpose.”

The world is not low enough for us to need to raise it. It’s riddled with enough transcendencies for us not to add anything whatever to ennoble it; quite full enough for us not to need to fill it up; quite aired enough for us not to need to empty it. (What is the religious if it doesn’t lead to the hearafter anymore?) Happily, by depriving ourselves of the other world, we don’t in fact deprive ourselves of much, since all that it amounted to was confusion about the possibility of going further, faster, higher than the patient, meticulous and positive work of reference….

There is no other world, but there are several ways of living in this one and several ways, too, of knowing it. (Rejoicing, 34)

In this sense, we shouldn’t need to see ressentiment purely as negation. This spatializes and essentializes ressentiment in a way that is not helpful. Negation carries with it the connotation of emptying out space rather than interrupting the flow of a duration. I prefer interruption as the better term because there is no way to mistake interruption as purely spatial. When a colleague or a loved one interrupts us from a train of thought or a state of flow to ask us a question, shouldn’t that be the very simple experience that time is always kairos and chronos simultaneously and that any one kairos is always operating within and among others that may interrupt it. Is chronos just the concept of time that allows us to envision a collision of multiple kairos? I’m not sure, but we need not embrace annoyance as a permanent judgement of the interruption. Perhaps we should just recognize that time is always out of joint and shift our attention to what the other needs from us in her own duration. This is the power of interruption as a temporal practice. It has a close relationship to ressentiment, but it does not need to results in Gnosticism.