Turns and Revolutions: On the Convulsive Present

Abstract:In this essay I consider the ubiquitous figure of thinking’s turn and a historical time in which turns happen beside, inside, or astride other turns like a complex series of epicycles, each vying for historiographical primacy. I argue that the age of the turn forces intellectual historians not simply to choose one turn that would successfully stand in for contemporary inquiry tout court but to think the turn itself, to try to understand what generates and sustains the figure or shape of thinking as turning. I hypothesize that the time in which thinking takes place is also figured and traced out, by the manifestos and representatives of individual turns, as a local convulsion rather than a global rotation or revolutionary breach. In what follows I turn to and fro to glance at several possible starting points for an adequate theorization of the turn and our “convulsive” present, moving from an investigation into thinking and turning in the work of Martin Heidegger to our contemporary moment, in which theorists attempt to suture the particular concepts and objects they wish to “take seriously” to the movements inherent in thought itself. I end speculatively, offering a reading of “the turn” shot through with social and (even) erotic implications.