Revolution as Kairos: From Classical Theory to Digital Temporalities

This seminar invites participants to rethink the ancient Greek concept of kairos, the opportune or decisive moment, as a lens for understanding revolutions and radical events across the 20th and 21st centuries. We are especially interested in how such moments of rupture have been experienced, theorized, and represented across diverse historical and cultural contexts, and how they are narrated, contested, or reimagined through literature, film, speculative fiction, and digital cultures.

We ask: How have political actors, thinkers, and communities conceived revolutionary time as kairotic rupture rather than chronological flow? How do today’s digital technologies, algorithmic cultures, and global media reshape what counts as a timely or transformative moment for political, cultural, or social intervention?

We also welcome explorations of non-Western conceptions of time, crisis, and transformation. In early Chinese thought, for instance, cyclical cosmology and dynastic legitimacy were tied to temporal rupture and renewal (ge ming 革命, “to alter the Mandate”). How do such models of historical timing and moral transition compare with kairos in Greek and modern European thought? What alternative visions of critical or opportune moments emerge from such cross-cultural readings?

Papers may engage with, but are not limited to, the following approaches:

Classical Roots and Modern Theory: The rhetorical and philosophical origins of kairos in Greek thought (Isocrates, Aristotle) and its modern re-articulations (e.g. Ricoeur’s narrative time, Badiou’s event, Foucault’s genealogies of rupture). Comparative readings with early Chinese frameworks, such as cosmic time, dynastic cycles, or the Mandate of Heaven, are especially welcome.

Comparative Revolutionary Temporalities: Revolutionary time in Marxist and post-Marxist traditions; comparative readings of 20th-century revolutions such as the Russian Revolution, the May Fourth Movement, the Cultural Revolution, the 1968 uprisings, and recent movements like global climate activism.

Literary and Cultural Narratives: How literature (novels, poetry, drama) and film represent kairotic moments of collective action, crisis, or emergence. How modernist and postcolonial texts negotiate historical turning points or ruptures in time.

Media, Technology, and Sci-Fi Temporalities: How digital media and global crises shape experiences of time and rupture. How platforms and algorithms produce viral kairos through networked publics, meme cultures, or speculative imaginaries of climate and pandemic time.

We welcome 300-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations, along with a short biographical note. Case studies engaging non-Western contexts, such as China’s revolutionary modernity, early cosmologies of historical change, or the Arab Spring, in dialogue with Western or global frameworks are warmly encouraged.