POLYRHYTHMS OF REVOLUTION: A COMMENT ON KEVIN OLSON’S “WHEN IS THE TIME OF REVOLUTION?” Andrew Daily ABSTRACT: Kevin Olson’s “When is the Time of Revolution” constructs a critical genealogy of revolutionary temporality and how it creates political normativity. This comment evaluates Olson’s discussion of revolutionary temporality against the empirical historical archive of modern revolutions in order to argue that we should also be sensitive to the multiple, overlapping, and competing temporalities that not only normativize revolution, but are in fact the terrain of revolutionary struggle. In the essay, “When is the Time of Revolution? Critical Reflections on Politi- cal Insurgency,” Kevin Olson expands on his recent work in Imagined Sover- eignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age to understand the relationship between temporality and normativity in the construction of modern sovereignties. Olson defines normatization, or “the process of form- ing political sovereignties,” as the “construction of shared normativities that take on real-world significance.” He suggests that while these normative prin- ciples are already present—in a messy way—in the social world, that insur- gent movements appropriate and shape heterogeneous norms into a shared political imaginary that institutes a new realm of political truth. In other words, to borrow the phrase from Derrida that Olson selected as an epi- graph: “There are different and sometimes antagonistic forms of sovereignty, and it is always in the name of one that one attacks another.” 1 Taking Andrew Daily is Assistant Professor of French and Global History at the University of Memphis. He is the author of the forthcoming After Negritude: the Cultural Politics of Place in Postwar France and the Caribbean and, with Emily Sahakian, History from the Abyss: A critical edition of Edouard Glissant’s ‘Histoire de Ne `gre.” His essays and reviews have been published in French Historical Studies, Karib, H-France, and Small Axe. 1 Kevin Olson, Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 55, Spindel Supplement (2017), 200–208. ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12231 200 The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 55, Spindel Supplement 2017