Within the philosophical and broader cultural discourse of modernism, ‘the moment’ occupies a position of elevated significance. This valorisation of the moment is by itself not new. Traditionally, a certain self-conscious, emphatic concern with the moment is predominantly associated with two contexts, both of which broadly speaking are religious ones: first, the context of conversion and, second, the context of eschatology, more specifically, the moment of vision. ‘On the day of the Lord I was taken by the Spirit and I heard behind me a voice loud as a trumpet’, we read at the beginning of the Revelation of St John (1:10). Perhaps most famous of all, the first letter to the Corinthians (15:52) prophesies that at the end of history ‘we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye’. Luther's translation of the expression which the King James Bible then translates as ‘twinkling of an eye’ is Augenblick, and this has remained the standard German expression for the moment or instant. In the Gnostic traditions, the moment also takes on a special significance as the sudden, violent irruption of the wholly other which breaks up or ruptures the context of worldly illusion and frees the self in the rapturous vision from its imprisonment in the material world: ‘My spirit … tore me away … taking me to the summit of the world which is in proximity to the light … And my spirit separated itself from the body of darkness as if it had fallen into a trance.’ This is how the moment of vision is described in a hermetic tract from the Library of Nag Hammadi.

Even in these traditional contexts of conversion and revelatory vision, the moment is thus the mode of temporality in which a radical break is effected.