The Invisible Committee, also taking inspiration from Benjamin, applies this concept to resistance generally: “Every attempt to block the global system, every movement, every revolt, every uprising should be seen as a vertical attempt to stop time.” Here we might remember those rebels who spent the first evening of the July revolution of 1830 shooting out clock towers in Paris, or the (semi-mythical) anarchist Biofilo Panclasta who, in the final days of his life, is said to have escaped from an old folks’ home and climbed to the top of a clock tower where he “arrested the movement of the clock’s hands, which so carefully marked the passage of time.” When the monotonous rhythms of society’s clocks have ceased and the death march of progress has been brought to a halt, messianic time is the space where new forms of life can be birthed.

--Blessed is the Flame