The ‘moment’, Momentum, movere, that which moves, that which irrefutably vanishes. Clin d’œil, en un clin d'oeil, en un temps très court, an ‘infinitely short space of time’, Augenblick, the ‘blink of an eye’, glance, eye, the eyelid, a steady, unperceivable rhythm of opening and closing, the infinitely short interruption of seeing that only allows to see. And, at the same time, an opening glance, by which we are being seen, an open eye that lets the glance abide.

The ‘moment’, this is a word which addresses particular relations to time and temporality; a word that questions the empty continuity of an infinite linear time in which one moment devours the other one like Chronos devoured his children; a word that asks for fine rifts, sudden fractures and interruptions in such permanence. This is also a double word, since philosophical and scientific traditions linked the eyesight, the glance, the faculty of vision to cognition, knowledge and theoria; they have posed an original relation of curiosity, of seeing and knowing, of looking and cognising, of sighting and conceptualising, and have endowed these relations with a specific reference to time.

The ‘Moment’, therefore, is a word that has become a central concept in all attempts at questioning the idea of empty, homogeneous and continuous time. The social sciences, in the form in which they emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century, commonly declared time to be a function of structure, continuity and eternity, not least with a view to postulating an ontological stability and a lawlike regularity of social life. Philosophy, in some contrast, avails itself of an old – even if manifold – heritage in thinking the moment, a concept the elaboration of which, within different strands of modern philosophy, reaches from romanticism to Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche to Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger or Walter Benjamin.