Abstract

Prolepsis is a rhetorical device in which an expected future event is presented as though it was already an accomplished fact. In the speed and instantaneity of current experience, our time is structured like a prolepsis. Through an analysis of the proleptic structure of some contemporary practices, I raise questions concerning the political nature of time's interval. In the proleptic organization of time, the interval between present and future is devalued as an obstacle to an anticipated event. However, with the help of Kant and Heidegger, I argue that time's interval consists of an act of temporalization which at once dissolves what has already presented itself and generates an absolutely new and singular event of time and being. The interval is an event in the process of being accomplished, and it is this properly political dimension of experience that is foreclosed in our contemporary organization of time.