CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Kayvan Tahmasebian Living in the Time of the End: The Biopolitics of Awaiting
One aspect of biopolitics concerns how states produce and regulate collective perceptions of time. Political power operates through interventions in everyday rhythms, crafting specific temporal regimes. Living in the Time of the End explores the biopolitics of awaiting: How the deeply personal, embodied experience of waiting becomes politicized in messianic states, where doctrines of end times regulate the profane order of life. This project traces how apocalyptic temporality is produced and embodied, revealing its psychosomatic imprint in the lived experience of anxious waiting.
Drawing on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between “the end of time” and “the time of the end,” this project explores the peculiar politicization of apocalyptic expectation, where the society is organized around preparation for the messianic event that promises ultimate justice at history’s close. In these contexts, time is experienced primarily as delay and contraction, an apocalyptic temporality that Agamben describes as “not the instant in which time ends, but the time that contracts itself and begins to end.” Over the course of the research, this project will study bios at the threshold of the final encounter. Through cross-temporal and cross-spatial comparisons of Iranian and non-Iranian cultural productions, from premodern texts to contemporary literature, cinema, and art, it seeks to illuminate how politics choreographs the experience of waiting at the edge of time.