Moment
ELI5
A "moment" in this tradition doesn't just mean a second in time—it means a necessary building block or stage in a bigger process, one that only makes sense as part of a whole and that the process itself must pass through and leave behind.
Definition
Across the corpus, "moment" (German: Moment, Latin: momentum) operates as a technically overdetermined term with several distinct but interrelated usages. In its primary Hegelian sense—dominant in Hegel, Sartre, Zupančič, Žižek, and the theory-keywords entry—a moment is not a temporal instant but a determinate, structurally necessary phase or element within a dialectical totality. Each moment is self-positing (it "gives itself this determinateness" and "bestows on itself the status of being a moment"), gains its meaning only in relation to the whole, and is constitutively non-self-subsistent (unselbständig). The moment must be sublated—preserved-and-cancelled—in order for the dialectical process to advance. In this sense, the language of elements and the language of moments converge: to think an element is already to think a relation, and "the element is the Hegelian moment."
A second register draws on Kant's "momenta" as the irreducible structural articulations within a systematic analytic: the four heads of the table of judgements each contain three momenta; the proof of causality rests on momenta of argument. Here momentum designates a logical factor or structural hinge rather than a temporal unit—a usage Lacan explicitly invokes when he notes the "historical misunderstanding" of Bismarck's psychologische Moment (factor, not instant), thereby distinguishing the drive's constant force from any "momentane Stosskraft." A third register is phenomenological-temporal: Sartre treats past, present, and future as structured moments of an original synthetic totality; Lacan's logical time stages an initial "moment of seeing" against the terminal "moment of arrest"; and Zupančič's reading of Kant's sublime identifies a two-moment dialectical structure (displeasure → negative pleasure). A fourth, Kierkegaardian register—operative in Zupančič, McCormick, and Rollins—treats the Moment as the miraculous collision of the eternal and the temporal, the unrepeatable singularity that escapes all law and grounds the religious sphere. This Kierkegaardian sense is precisely what the Levinasian/Ruti passage mobilizes negatively: singularity is what prevents the subject from becoming a mere "moment" of impersonal (Hegelian-totalizing) discourse.
Evolution
In Kant, momenta are the sub-divisions of the understanding's activity—the irreducible structural articulations of judgement and proof that compose a complete a priori system. The term carries no temporal weight; it is purely logical and architectonic (kant-immanuel-critique-of-pure-reason, occurrences 9–11). This usage already establishes the basic feature that will persist: a moment is a determinate structural factor, not a contingent temporal event.
Hegel inherits and radicalizes this structure. In the Phenomenology (theory-keywords, occurrence 21), the moment becomes the unit of dialectical life: content gives itself its own determinateness, becomes a moment by negating its abstract immediacy, and thereby takes its place in the whole through an immanent movement. Sartre's reading of Hegel (jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness, occurrences 6–7) preserves this technical sense while subjecting it to critique: "the road of interiority passes through the Other" precisely because being-for-the-Other is a necessary dialectical moment, yet Sartre resists the Hegelian conclusion that individual consciousnesses are merely unselbständig moments absorbed by an Absolute totality. Ruda (provocations-ruda-frank, occurrence 12) pushes the Hegelian moment to its limit: even the process of concrete vanishings must itself vanish, so that the "moment when there must be a vanishing even of the process of concrete vanishings" marks the extreme of dialectical negativity as absolute fatalism. The subject-lessons passage (occurrence 19) consolidates the point by identifying the Hegelian element with the Hegelian moment as nodes of relational identity.
Lacan takes the concept in at least two directions. In Seminar XI (occurrences 2–3), he uses moment to articulate the asymmetry within the scopic field: the "moment of seeing" (logical time's first beat) and the "terminal moment of arrest" (the gaze's freeze) overlap structurally but are not identical—one is initial, one terminal. In the same seminar (occurrence 4), he introduces the philological point about Bismarck's psychologische Moment to insist that Freud's Moment means factor/force, not temporal instant, thereby distinguishing the drive's constant pressure from any punctual shock. These are complementary moves: both resist reducing the concept to mere clock-time.
In the secondary literature, the Kierkegaardian Moment gains prominence as a counter-concept: for Zupančič (short-circuits-alenka-zupancic, occurrences 17 and 20) the Kierkegaardian Moment is the miraculous, transcendent singularity that Deleuze's immanentist ontology cannot accommodate. McCormick (occurrence 16) reads Kierkegaard's Moment as the site of genuine religious experience—the dreadful tension of eternal and temporal collision—against which Adler's impatient chatter measures its failure. Boothby (occurrence 14) introduces a related paradox: Monet's "instantaneity" reveals that the absolutely momentary is only disclosed retroactively through contrast, anticipating the Lacanian logic of après-coup. Ruti (psychoanalytic-interventions-lacan, occurrence 13) draws on Levinas to mobilize the term negatively: singularity is what prevents the subject from becoming a mere "moment" of necrological, totalizing discourse.
Key formulations
Theory Keywords (page unknown)
it makes itself into a moment, and it simplifies itself into determinateness... the content gives itself this determinateness, it bestows on itself the status of being a moment, and it gives itself a place in the whole.
This is the canonical Hegelian definition of moment as self-positing determination within a dialectical totality—the foundation for almost every other usage in the corpus.
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (p.132)
The two overlap, but they are certainly not identical, since one is initial and the other is terminal.
Lacan uses the asymmetry of two moments (seeing vs. arrest) to map the non-coincidence internal to scopic experience, anchoring the concept of moment in the structure of logical time and the gaze.
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (p.179)
What is meant by momentane Stosskraft? About this word Moment, we already have the example of a historical misunderstanding.
Lacan's philological aside on Bismarck's psychologische Moment establishes the conceptual distinction between moment-as-factor and moment-as-temporal-instant, directly bearing on how the drive's constant force is theorised.
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (p.105)
the three so-called 'elements' of time… should… be considered… as the structured moments of an original synthesis.
Sartre's reformulation of past, present, and future as moments of a synthetic totality rather than discrete nows is a key phenomenological redeployment of the Hegelian concept.
The Odd One In: On Comedy (p.166)
There is hope for the repetition of the Moment (in its uniqueness, singularity, exceptionality), and this hope belongs to the third of the Kierkegaardian circles of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.
Zupančič deploys the Kierkegaardian Moment as a transcendent singular that resists immanentist repetition, marking the theological-political stakes of the concept against Deleuze.
Cited examples
Kant's two-moment structure of the sublime: initial anxiety/powerlessness before overwhelming nature, inverting into awareness of supersensible superiority (social_theory)
Cited by Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p.162). Zupančič analyses Kant's account of the sublime as a paradigm case of a two-moment dialectical structure. The first moment of displeasure/anxiety is the necessary precondition for the second moment of negative pleasure, demonstrating that dialectical moments are structurally interdependent and that meaning is generated through their passage rather than in either alone.
Monet's Series paintings and his pursuit of 'instantaneity' / 'enveloppe' (art)
Cited by Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (p.20). Boothby uses Monet's practice of painting the same subject at different times to illustrate that the singular moment is only accessible retroactively, through contrast with other moments—a paradox that prefigures the Lacanian après-coup and the unconscious as a deferred truth.
Bismarck's 'psychologische Moment' during the siege of Paris (1870) and French ridicule of the phrase (history)
Cited by Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (p.179). Lacan invokes this historical anecdote to illustrate the semantic slippage between Moment as 'factor/force' (German) and 'temporal instant' (French), using it as a philological lever to separate Freud's drive-theory from any momentary shock-force model.
Adler's premature publication of his claimed divine revelation, diagnosed by Kierkegaard as 'trembling impatience' (case_study)
Cited by The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk (p.106). McCormick uses Kierkegaard's critique of Adler to illustrate the Kierkegaardian Moment as a site of dreadful tension (eternal colliding with temporal) that demands silent dwelling; Adler's compulsive rush to publication is evidence of an inability to sustain the moment, reducing genuine revelation to scholarly chatter.
Sadism as the moment within sexuality when the incarnated For-itself surpasses its own incarnation to appropriate the Other's incarnation (social_theory)
Cited by Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (page unknown). Sartre identifies sadism as a specific dialectical moment within the structure of desire—not an external perversion but a necessary stage produced when the reciprocity of incarnation collapses, demonstrating how 'moment' functions as a precise structural-temporal marker in phenomenological analysis.
Tensions
Within the corpus
Whether 'moment' designates a necessary, internally self-positing element of a totalising dialectical Whole, or whether the claim to totality must be resisted in favour of the irreducible singularity of individual consciousness.
Hegel (via theory-keywords and subject-lessons): Each moment is unselbständig—non-self-subsistent—and gains its meaning only by being sublated into the Whole. The totality is not an external imposition but what each moment gives itself by internalising its own negation. — cite: theory-keywords p.null; subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit p.98
Sartre (jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness): Individual consciousnesses cannot be treated as mere unselbständig moments without Hegel 'forgetting his own consciousness.' The plurality of consciousnesses is on principle unsurpassable, so the totalising move that absorbs them into moments of an Absolute Whole is ontologically illegitimate. — cite: jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological p.null
This is the central fault line of the corpus on 'moment': the Hegelian insistence on relational self-constitution through sublation versus the Sartrean-Levinasian insistence on irreducible singularity that resists reduction to a mere moment of a totality.
Whether 'moment' is best understood as a temporal-structural factor (Freudian/Lacanian sense) or as a miraculous, transcendent singularity that escapes all structural law (Kierkegaardian sense).
Lacan (Seminar XI, p.179): Moment means psychological factor/force (psychologische Moment), explicitly opposed to temporal instantaneity. The drive is a constant force, not a momentary shock, and the two moments of logical time (seeing/arrest) are structural positions, not lived instants. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11 p.179
Zupančič/Kierkegaard (short-circuits-alenka-zupancic-the-odd-one-in-on-comedy-the-mit-press-2008, p.166): The Moment is precisely the unrepeatable, transcendent collision of the eternal and temporal—a singularity that belongs to the register of miracle and exceeds all structural law or representation. — cite: short-circuits-alenka-zupancic-the-odd-one-in-on-comedy-the-mit-press-2008 p.166
The tension reveals a productive ambiguity in how psychoanalytic and theological-existentialist traditions appropriate the concept: one demystifies the 'moment' into a structural factor, the other preserves its miraculous excess.
Across frameworks
vs Object Oriented Ontology
Lacanian: In the Lacanian-Hegelian framework, a moment has no independent being: it is constitutively relational and non-self-subsistent (unselbständig), gaining its determinateness only through its place in a dialectical whole and its passage through negation. A moment that tried to withdraw from its relations would dissolve into abstract indeterminacy.
Object Oriented Ontology: Object-Oriented Ontology insists that objects always withdraw from their relations and cannot be exhausted by any relational context or dialectical position. For OOO, each object (including any 'moment') possesses a dark, inexhaustible interior that no whole can capture; relations are secondary and never constitutive of the object's being.
Fault line: The deepest disagreement is over whether relational constitution is ontologically primary (Hegel-Lacan: moments only are what they are through their dialectical relata) or whether objects have a withdrawn, non-relational surplus that precedes and exceeds any totality (OOO).
vs Frankfurt School
Lacanian: For Lacan and the Hegelian tradition in this corpus, the moment of dialectical sublation is an immanent movement: negation is internal to the content, and the passage through moments is the self-movement of the concept/subject. The whole is not externally imposed but emerges from within the process of moments negating themselves.
Frankfurt School: The Frankfurt School (especially Adorno's negative dialectics) resists the claim that dialectical moments can be fully sublated into a reconciled totality. For Adorno, the non-identical remainder—what cannot be absorbed into the concept—persists as a critical residue; the moment of particularity is not fully redeemed by its place in the whole but registers the violence of conceptual subsumption.
Fault line: The fault line is between sublation as genuine reconciliation (Hegelian corpus position) and sublation as ideological closure that suppresses the non-identical—the question of whether the dialectical moment leaves a remainder that the whole cannot assimilate.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (17)
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#01
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.162
Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The sublime and the logic of the superego
Theoretical move: Zupančič reconstructs Kant's account of the sublime as a two-moment dialectical structure—an initial anxiety/powerlessness that inverts into an awareness of the subject's supersensible superiority—and uses this to set up the analogy between the logic of the sublime and the logic of the superego.
Kant in fact distinguishes two moments comprising the feeling of the sublime. The first is the moment of anxiety and of discomfiting fascination... This is an anxiety from which the subject can escape only by transforming it into the second moment
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#02
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.132
WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?
Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a structural overlap—but non-identity—between the 'terminal arrest of the gesture' in scopic creation and the 'moment of seeing' in logical time, arguing that the gaze as terminal act freezes movement and anchors the subject's identificatory haste, thereby linking the scopic drive to the temporality of logical time via the concept of suture.
The two overlap, but they are certainly not identical, since one is initial and the other is terminal.
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#03
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.132
WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?
Theoretical move: Lacan draws a structural parallel between the "terminal arrest" of the gesture in painting/dance and the "moment of seeing" in his logical time, linking both to the gaze's freezing power—culminating in the concept of the evil eye—and arguing that scopic creation is constitutively a succession of "small dirty deposits" rather than pure expression.
one is initial and the other is terminal. [...] the time of terminal arrest of the gesture and what [...] I put as the first time, namely, the moment of seeing. The two overlap, but they are certainly not identical
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#04
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.179
THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's Trieb (drive) is categorically distinct from biological need (hunger, thirst) and from momentary impulse-force; it is a constant force (konstante Kraft) operating on a topological surface field anchored in the nervous system (Real-Ich), not in the organism as a whole—a move that separates the drive from any naturalistic or organismic reading.
What is meant by momentane Stosskraft? About this word Moment, we already have the example of a historical misunderstanding.
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#05
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > CHAPTER I. Of the Transcendental Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Conceptions of the Understanding.
Theoretical move: Kant argues that the understanding, as a purely discursive (non-intuitive) faculty, operates exclusively through judgements, and that by systematically cataloguing the logical functions of unity in judgements (quantity, quality, relation, modality), one can derive a complete and principled table of the pure conceptions of the understanding—establishing a transcendental logic that goes beyond formal logic by attending to the content/worth of cognition, not merely its form.
the function of thought in a judgement can be brought under four heads, of which each contains three momenta.
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#06
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > SS 7.
Theoretical move: Kant argues that the table of categories—organized into mathematical and dynamical classes of triads—is not merely a logical taxonomy but a generative system for a priori science, where each third category arises from a synthesis of the first two that requires a distinct act of understanding, not mere deduction.
it contains all the elementary conceptions of the understanding, nay, even the form of a system of these in the understanding itself, and consequently indicates all the momenta, and also the internal arrangement of a projected speculative science
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#07
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II.
Theoretical move: Kant distinguishes the faculty of judgement as an irreducible, unteachable talent for subsumption under rules, and argues that transcendental logic—unlike general logic—can provide a priori guidance to this faculty by specifying both the rule and the conditions under which it applies, thereby grounding the "Analytic of Principles."
can be discovered a priori, by the simple analysis of the action of reason into its momenta
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#08
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > B. SECOND ANALOGY. > PROOF.
Theoretical move: Kant argues that the principle of causality—that every event necessarily follows from a preceding state according to a rule—is not merely a feature of subjective apprehension but is the very condition of the possibility of objective empirical experience, with the understanding's application of causal order to phenomena being what first constitutes the representation of an object in time.
The proof of this fundamental proposition rests entirely on the following momenta of argument.
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#09
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda
Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > To Philosophical . . .
Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Hegel's philosophy radicalizes finitude to the point of its own dissolution, thereby grounding a genuinely 'absolute fatalism' that is more subtractive than any prior philosophical rationalism—one that reveals nothing to reveal, and identifies freedom not with capacity but with the vanishing of all grounds, including finitude itself.
Hegel's absolute fatalism therefore identifies the moment when there must be a vanishing even of the process of concrete vanishings.
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#10
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.15
*Introduction* > *The "Perseverance in Being"*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity—understood as the "perseverance in being" that resists conceptual/social capture—must be located at the level of the Lacanian real (drive energies), and that the dominant post-Lacanian reading of singularity as "subjective destitution" (radical break with the symbolic) is theoretically insufficient because it universalises alienation and cannot distinguish constitutive from circumstantial forms of it.
man can become a 'moment' of his own discourse... this 'perseverance in being' is what prevents the subject from becoming a mere 'moment' of discourse
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#11
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.20
<span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > <span id="ch1.xhtml_p18" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 18. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Monet's Pursuit of the “Enveloppe”
Theoretical move: By analysing Monet's Series paintings and his pursuit of the 'enveloppe' — the invisible illuminative medium that conditions all appearance — Boothby constructs a philosophical prologue to psychoanalytic theory: the claim that the true subject of any scene is not the object itself but the imperceptible conditions that bring it to presence, establishing an ontological relativity that will underwrite the Lacanian account of the unconscious as an unthought ground of thought.
Absolutely momentary, a function of what Monet called 'instantaneity,' the environing enveloppe becomes perceptible only by means of the contrasting of different times.
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#12
The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Theodrama
Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic Christian faith requires a perpetual self-overcoming—a "faithful betrayal"—whereby any religious system birthed from the originary Event must be continuously subverted and overturned, not as an external correction but as a constitutive feature of faith itself, enacted through "transformance art" gatherings that suspend identity, refuse pastoral hierarchy, and point toward an unspeakable Happening beyond objectification.
In philosophical terms this formation of a suspended position can be called the moment of epoche
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#13
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.106
Fuzzy Math > **Trembling Impatience**
Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's critique of Adler diagnoses "trembling impatience" — the compulsive rush from inner experience to public expression — as a structural failure rooted in the confusion of religious authority with scholarly (Hegelian) genius, positioning silence/quietude (Ro, in pausa) as the necessary mediation between revelation and utterance.
Any 'collision of the eternal and temporal in the moment, in the present, is a dreadful tension that can all too easily become sleeplessness, and all too easily insanity.'
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#14
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.166
Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan
Theoretical move: Zupančič maps Deleuze's three-fold temporal structure of repetition (mechanical/comic, metamorphic/tragic, and unconditional/eternal-return) against Lacan's framework, arguing that Deleuze's attempt to ground selectivity and difference in a purely asubjective force (the eternal return) ultimately reinstates an absolute law that undermines the very subjective edge his political-philosophical predicates require.
There is hope for the repetition of the Moment (in its uniqueness, singularity, exceptionality), and this hope belongs to the third of the Kierkegaardian circles of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.
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#15
Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.98
Naturally Hegel
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's 'elemental materialism'—visible in the Philosophy of Nature's treatment of elements, dissolution, and dialectical relationality—constitutes the materialist substructure shared by both Hegel's natural and political philosophy, and that Marx inherits this very idiom rather than breaking from it, thereby undermining Althusser's epistemological break thesis.
the language of the elements is at points indistinguishable from the language of dialectics, so much so that the 'element' is the Hegelian 'moment.'
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#16
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.166
Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan
Theoretical move: Zupančič contrasts Deleuze's ontology of difference-as-repetition (three temporal modes, eternal return as selective force) with an implied Lacanian counter-position, arguing that Deleuze's asubjective account of repetition ultimately installs an absolute law that undermines the very predicates (excess, difference, nomadism) it claims to champion — thereby setting up the conceptual stakes for a Lacanian re-articulation of repetition central to comedy.
There is hope for the repetition of the Moment (in its uniqueness, singularity, exceptionality).
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#17
Theory Keywords · Various
**Mirror Stage**
Theoretical move: The passage works through two parallel conceptual pivots: first, how the Mirror Stage structures the subject as constitutively dependent on and rivalrous with the other through the mediating gaze; and second, how Hegel's dialectical concept of the Moment dissolves oppositional thinking by showing that determinations are self-bestowed and mutually constitutive rather than externally imposed.
it makes itself into a moment, and it simplifies itself into determinateness... the content gives itself this determinateness, it bestows on itself the status of being a moment, and it gives itself a place in the whole.