Waking at 5 a.m.: Irrelevance and the look of the foreigner as practices of resistance in contemporary times

This article discusses practices that aim to resist the 'projected temporality' of contemporary times, as Bojana Kunst has described it. Resisting to prevailing contemporary conditions of thinking and working, seen merely as a series of 'projects' that continuously move 'forwards', to what is to come, to an innovative, radical and always to-be anticipated future, this text draws on the operation of the 'foreigner' in Derrida and Dimitriadis and the notion of 'irrelevance' in Agamben, in order to offer an alternative understanding of the 'project' as an 'intention' able to return to pasts and presents so that it stays 'together with' different times, people and places (as implied in the term 'synchronous', the corresponding term of the Latin-derived 'contemporary' in Greek), instead of anxiously struggling to control and schedule the unforeseen.