Chiara COLLAMATI | New Times at Work: Rethinking History and Politics through Delay and Anticipation (NeT-HiDeA)

Laureate of an MSCA IF grant for her NeT-HiDeA, Chiara Collamati carries out her research in the TRAVERSES Research unit.

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he action of her research will be conducted together with two Research Center on Political Theory: the MAP (Matérialités de la Politique) at University of Liège, and the HistCon (Department of History of Consciousness) at University of California, Santa Cruz. My project aims to produce conceptual instruments to understand the complex temporal structures of late capitalism, clarifying their relation with contemporary labour and social movements. Nowadays, social hierarchy is primarily determined by the subjects’ capacities to synchronise with the dominant temporality: under which conditions is it possible to gain a critical intelligibility of historical processes? Can the condition of delay experienced by many subjects be transformed into a condition for anticipating forms of non-capitalistic sociality? Which conception of historical time does avoid to reduce the past to a simple object of commemoration? To answer to these questions, I propose two main moves: 1) to map contemporary socio-political experiences which attempt a reconfiguration of their relationship with time as collective phenomena of resistance to capitalist temporalization (e.g. the Zapatistas’ revolt in Chiapas, the ZAD in France); 2) to reactivate the French thought of the ‘50s-‘70s (J.-P. Sartre) and the heretical side of 20th century German Marxism (E. Bloch). Using together the concepts of hysteresis and non-synchronicity, I will propose a new articulation of the categories of delay and anticipation, released from the linear reference to a normative time. Moreover, I will put this new conceptual device in friction with the experiences of time in the contemporary world of work: considering the history of the industrial decline of the Walloon region as a specific case study, I will collaborate with the non-profit association D’une certaine Gaité focused on the structural instability produced on the workers by the capitalist system.