Toward an Archaeogenealogy of Time

Foucault, Agamben, and the Ethical Biopotency of Kairos

Abstract

This article proposes an archaeogenealogy of time drawing on Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. It begins with Foucault’s analysis of writing and of knowledge dispositifs as forms of temporal organization, arguing that historical time is not a neutral or linear continuum, but a politically and epistemologically constructed regime. Writing and disciplinary systems thus articulate time as a technology of power and as a production of spatialized forms of experience.

Within this framework, the paper explores the tension between Chronos, Kairós, and Aión in dialogue with Agamben and Deleuze, proposing a conception of time as discontinuous, situated, and traversed by the event. Kairós is interpreted as an interruption of chronological order that opens non-instrumental ethical and political possibilities, while Aión introduces a surface temporality defined by the multiplicity of events.

Archaeogenealogy of time enables a critique of biopolitical regimes of temporality and the formulation of a biopotency of Kairós as an ethical mode of inhabiting time otherwise.