Power, exercised by central authorities, establishes itself over space and over time. Territorially established rule was followed by the temporal kind. The early big empires used both forms to consolidate their rule, but first it was more urgent to control the space, the territory. There were spatial strategies for this – the exercise of physical force, and taxation – and incipient temporal ones, which particularly included the introduction of writing and written documents by the bureaucracies.27 For now it could be established what was and ought to be the case. The temporal aspect of the exercise of power is openly revealed in dictatorships even today. Regimes founded on terror also use temporal strategies. Terror is exercised through the unforeseeability, the temporal arbitrariness, with which victims are taken away and turned into victims. In military dictatorships, moreover, Montesquieu's separation of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary is abolished by denying their temporal connections. For jurisdiction stands for what happened in the past. The past is judged, and decisions are made about right and wrong in retrospect. The legislature, however, points to the future. Laws are made in order to establish norms of behaviour and situations which are only those set. The executive, however, executes sheer present; it establishes and determines what is, and has to prevail, now. In military dictatorships, past and future are simultaneously denied with the abolition of an independent jurisdiction and an independent parliament. All power is granted to the executive, which alone has to determine what has to prevail in the present that rules over the other times.28
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The Longing for the Moment