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The Process and the Moment. A Note on Terry Eagleton and Alain Badiou’s Notions of Time and History, and Their Idea of the Good Life

Commenting on Alain Badiou’s Ethics, Terry Eagleton states that Badiou is “as much caught in a sort of antithesis between the ordinary and epiphanic as Derrida” (Figures of Dissent 250). The opposition between process and moment is inherent to various key oppositions in the Western tradition: ascesis vs. ecstasy, works vs faith, observation vs contemplation, perception vs. vision, reason vs. imagination, discourse and calculation vs. intuition, finitude vs infinity, time vs. eternity, life vs. death, ordinary vs. authentic life. This essay focuses on Eagleton’s and Badiou’s dialectic treatment of these oppositions and its bearing on their notions of time and history and on their proposal of a good life on a materialist basis that overcomes those oppositions. 
In the first part of the essay, I will briefly look at the question in the Western tradition. In a first step, I will consider various aspects of the relation between the process and the moment as they appear in a few well-known poems in English; in a second step, I will examine Peter Osborne’s approach, particularly regarding the relevance of the moment for the temporalization of (chronological) time and history, in his book The Politics of Time. In the second part of the essay, I will contrast Eagleton’s and Badiou’s competing solutions to the problem by analysing their points of convergence and divergence and examining their causes.