Abstract:

Whether historical time is conceptualized as progressive, cyclical, or discontinuous, the concept of revolution is pivotal for our understanding of history. Revolution became the concept through which Europe came to terms with radical historical transformation after 1789. Such an understanding of revolution differed greatly from its earlier conceptions. Revolution in the cyclical sense provided the discursive framework for conservative ideologies. In an interdisciplinary approach, I analyze the specific temporality of this concept that traveled between the fields of politics, science, and culture. Revolution emerges as a dialectical concept that describes contradictory events at the core of history.

Introduction . Beginning with Vergniaud's dictum according to which "the revolution devours its children," I establish the contradictory discourse on time and revolution as evidenced in Hesiod, Goya, and Walter Benjamin.

Chapter I . Even though revolutionary change on the political level is generally thought impossible in the current historical situation, I utilize Benjamin's reading of Nietzsche and Auguste Blanqui to uncover the cyclical aspects of postmodern culture that indicate revolutionary potential.

Chapter II . I track the development of the term from its Greek and Latin roots (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Capella, Polybius, Virgil) to the present with the aid of Freud and Eliade. The dialectic between self-perpetuating cyclical time and its rupture surfaces in my analysis of revolution in Augustine's eschatology and in medieval calendar culture after Leo (Benedict, Dionysius Exiguus). Revolutions by Copernicus, mechanical clocks, and the French calendar demonstrate the intimate connections between technology, ideology and time condensed in one term. Derrida's reading of the graveyard-revolution in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" concludes this chapter.

Chapter III+IV . Right after 1789, theories of revolution emerged in Friedrich Schlegel's and Novalis's fragments, in essays by Burke and Fichte, and in Hoelderlin's novel "Hyperion". These writings benefit from their authors' remoteness from the events in France. While some of their works develop rich and complex theories of revolution, others foreshadow the normalization of revolution in subsequent political theory.

Chapter V. I conclude the thesis with a reading of Hegel, Marx, Luxemburg and the novel "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, developing a theory of the "invisibility" and "seriality" of revolutionary events.