This essay perseveres with a concept of intermittency whose primary points of reference are (i) the event (as theorized above all by Alain Badiou); (ii) its remainder, the monde atone, a world without feature that the event arrives to interrupt, and (iii) the imperative of thinking justice. The essay counterposes the concept of intermittency to the contemporary culture of plenitude and the politics of jouissance. It articulates these through Lacan's Seminar VII. Intermittency is the condition of non-stakeholders, those deemed unworthy of (full) entry into the culture of plenitude. They bear witness to the effects of modernity in Franc, oise Proust's version of it as Benjamin's 'catastrophe in permanence', the most compelling articulation of the remainder presently available to us. The essay explicates Proust's account of the event and catastrophe as the two defining features of modernity through her work on Kant and Benjamin. The repudiation of plenitude and the appalled recognition of catastrophic modernity is exemplified in the work of the young Tennyson, and an unflagging, tenacious inquiry into the possibility of the event in the work of Mallarme. The thought of intermittency can never be less than acutely problematic, as Agamben's account of the 'pure nothing of revelation' and the sovereign decree abundantly demonstrates. Kafka's Der Prozess serves as the illustration par excellence of Agamben's cautionary tale. The rejection of the culture of plenitude, the assertion of catastrophe in permanence, the inquiry into the event and the problem of the sovereign decree constitute the significant field for writing today.
