Darkness in a Blink of an Eye: action and the onto-poetics of a beyond

AbstractEschatologies often associate this world with darkness and the beyond with light, seeking a move from the former to the latter. This article rethinks the importance of darkness through a reading of Heidegger’s concept of Augenblick, a blink of an eye, which exhibits a moment and site of a “beyond” coming to presence. Thus, the article contributes to approaches that seek to explore the ontological and poetic dimensions of politics. An onto-poetics of darkness draws attention to the presence of the concealed in each moment of actualization and it highlights the way in which the beyond created in the Augenblick involves relation both to other beings and to Being itself. The conceptual problematic of a “beyond” is further explicated through an engagement with Marina Abramovic’s performance “The Artist Is Present.” Instead of a move from darkness to light, such eschatology implies inhabiting the darkness of the blink of an eye.