The History of Consciousness department invites you to the next talk in their Winter 2026 Research Colloquium series.

This talk examines Tomba’s Revolution and Restoration as an expression of his philosophy of political time. Tomba argues that modernity consists of dynamic and overlapping temporal layers and that revolutionary change occurs when oppressed groups draw on forgotten or suppressed forms within these layers—commons, councils, sanctuary—to move beyond prevailing institutions. For Tomba, every social form is an open totality, shot through with contradictions and tensions, and therefore subject to radical change from within. The political horizon of revolutionary practice is, then, a form of relative transcendence that activates resources of justice already sedimented in the historical field. Understanding this method as revolutionary stratigraphy illuminates how concepts such as democratic excess and insurgent universality arise from the layered morphology of political life and how the past becomes a source of practical intervention in the present.

This event is both in-person and virtual. Register above to attend virtually.

Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His publications include Marx’s Temporalities (Brill, 2012; Haymarket, 2013), Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (Oxford, 2019; paperback 2021), and Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism (Fordham, 2025).

Ariella Patchen is a PhD student in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz. Her work engages primarily with political theology, affect theory, archival research, and histories of the construct of race and ethnicity.

Shaun Terry is a PhD student in History of Consciousness and a communication scholar and political theorist.