Kairos

Both kairos and human time perception are inextricably bound up with the present, which – as Saint Augustine commented – is scattered into tiny fragments. Kairos may well be the temporal concept we need for productively grasping the slender and shifting possibilities of the present. In classical and Renaissance rhetoric, kairos comprises both the opportunity for speaking and the speaker’s sense of right timing. Kairos can also be seen as the tipping point of an increasingly precarious situation, as with a momentous social or political uprising. The work of Jean-Luc Nancy or Catherine Malabou is also relevant to understanding kairos more broadly as a concept that can open up to more discussions of the temporal relations between predictability and unpredictability, by calling attention to the “imminence of existence” that allows for random accidents, events, and encounters to happen.