THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERNITY

There is a concept of modernity implicit and sometimes explicit in both this book and most of the philosophers at the centre of it. It is sufficiently important to warrant early introduction and explication. Thus, where Chapter 1 was very much about the general concept of intermittency, Chapter 2 will adopt a more historical perspective, understanding the occasional emergences of historical reason as definitive of modernity. It focuses on the work of the quite undeservedly neglected Françoise Proust. For of our five philosophers, though doing so is not her principal aim, it is Proust who thinks the relationship between intermittency and the onset of modernity most cogently and effectively. More than any other, she thinks the question of historical intermittency as intrinsic to the modern Stimmung (Proust 1985), to the emergence of modernity itself, what moderns are, what we remain today. This interpretation admittedly ignores certain key themes of the later Proust in particular (resistance, counter-Being; though I shall come back to resistance in my conclusion). It also ignores the late Proust's efforts to distance herself from Badiou and Rancière (Proust 1997c; 2000a). For they are part of a late tendency effectively to downplay the concepts of intermittency and rarity evident in her thought (see Proust 1995a; 1997d: 109; 1998e: 71). I shall first pursue her thought in its Kantian dimension, then, in two phases, explore its Benjaminian aspect, placing Kant and Benjamin as the two poles of the Proustian conception of modernity.