Writing of the Formless ─ Jose Lezama Lima and the End of Time

Religion, Revolution, and the End of Time proposes the "formless," as it can be traced in the work of Lezama Lima and the Cuban Revolution, as a point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time. The book explores the link between abstract symbolic procedures and various political experiments that have sought to give form to a principle of sovereignty based on the category of representation. It advances the notion of the formless as the limit of modern and contemporary reflections on the meaning of politics and explores the philosophical consequences of a formless concept of temporality (also understood in the book as the end of both a single hegemonic Time and the end of multiple temporalities, or times) for the critique of metaphysics. Rodríguez Matos takes the writing and thought of José Lezama Lima as the guiding thread in exploring the possibility of a politicity in which time is imagined beyond the disciplining functions it has had throughout the metaphysical tradition. This temporality would be Lezama's writing of the formless occupying a fractured now: the difference between linear and multiple temporalities, an-archically at odds with the theologico-political distribution of time into hell, purgatory and paradise. This would be the time of the absence of time, in which the absence of time no longer means the eternity.

Jaime Rodriguez Matos is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan.