Rhythm remains one of the most productive terms for critical enquiry into our social, political and cultural lives. References to temporality, flow, measure, pattern, variation and metre occur across a wide range of critical literatures concerned with the arts, philosophy, technology, critical theory and studies of the everyday. Yet, conceptually, rhythm is rarely made explicit, instead being perhaps more readily only in the service of critique. As Derrida put it: ‘Rhythm has always haunted our tradition, without ever reaching the centre of its concerns’ (Derrida 1989: 33). On the one hand the claim is made specifi-cally for the discipline of philosophy, in which rhythm is said to be present yet peripheral. Yet, as Lexi Eikelboom (2018) notes, a more general and arguably more important point is being made:

In the context of a haunting of rhythm, and with an attempt to work variously through the difficulties of communicating critically about/with rhythm, this book brings together a set of new essays that explore and challenge our understanding of the term. This introduction, which sets out the main parameters and themes, and which provides an overview of the book, is the first of three opening entries. The second is Pascal Michon's essay ‘Could Rhythm Become a New Scientific Paradigm for the Humanities?’, which is offered as a parallel introductory text.

Michon sets out succinctly how we can understand rhythm as presenting a new kind of paradigm, one that differs from the earlier unifying paradigmatic concepts of ‘structure’ and ‘system’. Crucially, he argues that these earlier, dominant paradigms, which span the first half of the twentieth century, no longer correspond well to the analysis required of our ‘neo-capitalist world’.