Event and Time 9780823291489

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Event and Time

Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn Kevin Hart Richard Kearney Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan Hent de Vries Merold Westphal Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, series editor

CLAUDE ROMANO

Event and Time

Translated by Stephen E. Lewis

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York

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2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Event and Time was first published in French under the title L’ événement et le temps by Presses Universitaires de France, © 1999 Presses Universitaires de France. It was reissued in 2012 with corrections and a new Preface by the author. The present English translation is based on the reissue, along with further additions from the author. Cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication, bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Ser vice Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux États-Unis. This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Ser vices of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program. Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut Français. This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14

54321

First edition

—For Martin αἱ συμφοραὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἄχουσι καὶ οὐκὶ ὥνθρωποι τῶν συμφορέων.

—Herodotus, Histories “Ich” “Subjekt” als Horizont-Linie. Umkehrung des perspektivischen Blicks. —Nietzsche, Nachlasse, 1885–1886

Contents

Preface to the Second French Edition Translator’s Note

xvii

Introduction P A R T 1. T H E M E TA P H Y S I C S

xi

1 OF

TIME

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§1. The Traditional Determinations of Time and Their Structural Dependence with Respect to the Phenomenon of Inner-Temporality 9 • §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides 18 • §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV 38 • §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time 67

P A R T 2. T I M E

95

§5. The Stakes for a Phenomenology of Time and Its Differentiation from the Metaphysics of Time 95

A. The Guiding Thread of the Subject

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§6. The Aporiae of the Constitution of Time 98 • §7. The Ambivalence of Temporality in Sein und Zeit 103

B. The Other Guiding Thread: Time and Change

109

§8. The Phenomenological Amplitude of the Concept of Change 109 • §9. The Inner-Temporality of Facts: First Approach to the Temporal Phenomenon 113 • §10. The Event as Guiding Thread 123 • §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time 128

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P A R T 3. T E M P O R A L I T Y

149

§12. From Time to Temporality 149 • §13. The Having-Taken-Place and Memory 155 • §14. The Future and Availability 171 • §15. The Present and Transformation 185 • §16. The Temporal Meaning of Self hood 192 • §17. The Mobility of the Adventure and Freedom 200 • §18. The Antithetic Phenomenon of Selfhood and Its Temporal Meaning. An Example: Traumatism 202 • §19. Recapitulation: The Articulation of Time and of Temporality 206 • §20. The Finitude of Temporality 213 • §21. The Unity of My Histories 227

Notes

241

Index

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Contents

Preface to the Second French Edition

When we are writing it, a book occupies our attention so much that it conceals everything else from our view; we need to be detached from it in order to begin to see it. This is what makes the gaze that we train on it so painful when time has passed, like the look upon a dear one with whom we have just begun to get acquainted at the very instant he is going away. We begin to discern all of its faults and limits. Whereas our love should be more severe, it becomes tainted with self-indulgence, if not with selfdelusion. Courage is necessary when publishing a book, but it is almost always out of weakness that one reissues it. Event and Time was the second panel of a dyptich, the first panel of which, Event and World, set out the main lines of an “evential hermeneutics,” an elucidation of the human being from the viewpoint of a hermeneutical phenomenology that considers the capacity to experience events— that is to say, critical upheavals of his life as a whole— as one of the ownmost features of this living being. The question that oriented my research in this work— complementary to that of the first part of this inquiry and completing the entire enterprise—was the following: what must the phenomenological characteristics of time be in order that something like a radical newness could come to light in it? How must we conceive the break in time and the time of the break? Supposing that an essential plot is knit between event and time, how should we account for time in order to render intelligible the occurring of events in it, and how should we account for the event in order to make visible in it the temporalization of time? xi

Indeed, the event is not accessorily or accidentally temporal: declaring itself after the fact as the event that it was in light of its subsequent destiny, of its future, it is only the movement of its own taking time/temporalization [temporisation/temporalisation] and only gives itself to a belated and retrospective experience. There is nothing gratuitous in the Levinassian paradox: “The great ‘experiences’ of our life have properly speaking never been lived.” They will only be lived after and according to the measure of the future that they open, of the fissure that they make in our own adventure. It is necessary, as a consequence, to rethink temporality itself in light of the event and of its phenomenality. This attempt is not without a relation to that undertaken by Bergson starting from an entirely different horizon of preoccupations and problems. The philosopher of duration had already isolated as characteristic of metaphysical approaches to time (and by “metaphysical” he meant a certain historical closure of what is thinkable for the Western mind) their complete failure to appreciate newness. The time of metaphysics is without any real surprise. But instead of accounting for this recovery of the very dimension of the new (of the radically new) by a “spatialization” of “duration” qua continuous bursting forth of unforeseeable newness, I gave a very different form to this intuition. That which determines the frame of thought in which the metaphysical approaches to time as a whole move is that time is apprehended there in light of concepts (change, passage, becoming, transition, flow, permanence) that only legitimately apply to inner-temporal phenomena. What metaphysics thus recovers is what one might call the “chronological difference,” that which must be established between the (inner-) temporal features of the phenomena subjected to becoming and the features of time itself. In other words, metaphysics conceives time as such by “projecting” it, so to speak, in time. Clearly this thesis is not identical to that defended by Heidegger when he was determining the “vulgar” concept of time—that is to say, the interpretation of time reigning from one end to the other of the history of metaphysics (or, as he called it at the time of Sein und Zeit, of “traditional ontology”), as “a sequence of ‘nows’ which are constantly ‘present-to-hand’ (vorhanden).” What distinguishes my thesis from Heidegger’s is not only, or even primarily, that such a concept of time is rather difficult to attribute to thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Husserl, or Bergson; it is, more fundamentally, that such a characterization of time— supposing that it can be historically attested—represents only a consequence of the more general specification that I put forward. In order that time may be “reduced” to a succession of nows, it is necessary that it be conceived in terms of succession—that is to say, that a concept be applied to it that posxii

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sesses pertinence only for describing phenomena that unfold in time. Moreover, the flaw in the Heideggerian thesis is that it authorizes maintaining in place the difference between an originally “subjective” time (that which is characterized by starting from three “temporalizing” attitudes: expectation, retention, and making-present or enpresenting) and a time of things, or “world-time”; now, one of the theses that follows instead from my analyses is that the spiritualization/subjectivization of time that is accomplished first in Augustine and reigns up to and through Husserl and Heidegger is only, in turn, a consequence of the failure to recognize the “chronological difference.” In order that time may be conceived as originally subjective, as identical to the movement of the expectation that changes itself into attention and of the attention that changes itself into retention, it is necessary that it be first understood and apprehended itself in light of inner-temporality. But all these indications remain formal for as long as we have not entered into the living detail of phenomenological analyses. The marking out of the main features of a metaphysics of time is, indeed, only the preliminary to an analysis of time as such, allowing us to give full consideration to the event and to its radical newness. How can we understand this newness? This problem is at the heart of the work that you will read, and it is impossible to resolve in a few words. It requires fi rst of all an understanding of the level at which the question itself is posed. Not that of an objective analysis of phenomena in the physical objective world, but that of an experience of the phenomena such that they can be described in the first person: the newness of a fact that occurs suddenly and “takes me by surprise” has meaning only at the level of what Husserl called Lebenswelt, the life-world. The adequate formulation of this problem demands next that we understand how the failure to recognize the newness is structurally bound up with the frame of thinking in which the different metaphysics of time are set forth. In reality the metaphysics of time not only conceives of time in light of that which is inner-temporal, it also conceives of innertemporality in an inadequate way. This point is probably not explicit enough in Event and Time, and it would call for a recasting of certain of its descriptions. Indeed, the newness is not only a feature of the event in the strong sense that I give to this term—the event in the evential sense—but also and already a feature of what I call the innerworldly fact. What is more, this newness does not contradict the foreseeable character of certain facts. We can expect their occurrence, and they will not be any the less new at the moment in which they are brought about, for there will always be something unexpected in them, even if it is only their unique qualitative imprint. It is not enough to Preface to the Second French Edition

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describe inner-temporality on the basis of two series of phenomena: a parte subjecti, an expectation that changes itself into attention and an attention that changes itself into memory, and a parte objecti, a change of temporal status by virtue of which a fact is first “to come,” then “present,” and finally “past”; for, before occurring, a fact possesses no kind of presence whatsoever, not even that of an ens diminutum, of a being in representation; its future is not of the present in suspense, and its occurring in no way signifies a mere change of temporal status that would affect an immutable quasi-subject; the fact anticipated as future does not become present for the simple reason that it does not become—rather, it advenes or occurs, in such a way that, when it happens, its newness is complete: what we are dealing with is a pure bursting forth, a pure genesis, a change from nothing into something. Inner-temporality can be described as the becoming-past of the future only if one adopts the viewpoint of the already happened or occurred fact and describes it from such a viewpoint, thereby denying the most important difference that there is: that which opposes the possible and the actual, the future and the present. It is precisely this difference that the metaphysics of time has the tendency to hide. If the time of metaphysics can be characterized, in a first approximation, as the becoming-present of the future and the becomingpast of the present, it is first of all because the dimensionals of time (the future, the past, the present) are identified with the features of that which occurs in time (“being present,” “being past”); but it is also, in the second place, because the very occurring of that which happens in time, its advent, is conceived as a mere change affecting something already there, already present or quasi-present, the future being thought of only as a present “in waiting.” The time of metaphysics is a time in which everything “passes away” because nothing truly happens there, or, what amounts to the same thing, because what happens there only becomes, is already there virtually before happening and, consequently, in no way happens. Of course, the newness of the fact, if it prefigures that of the event, is nevertheless not identical with it. There is the newness of that which does not match with our expectations, at least up to a certain point—the newness of that which, even when foreseeable, always announces itself in a way that is qualitatively unique and unanticipatable; but there is also the newness of that which does not so much thwart our expectations as strike our projects as such at their root—by overturning them. Because it is not reduced to an unmatched expectation, because it is one with the overturning of our best-laid projects, those which gave shape to our existence as permanent self-projection, the in-breaking of the event brings with it a surprise that does not end with its occurring and that signifies a rupture of xiv

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meaning in the cohesion of our lives and our histories. The great events of our life never entirely lose their surprising character, which is their most lasting mark. It is to such events, to such a surprise and to such a novation, that the analyses of this book are in the first place dedicated. In taking them as the guiding thread, the goal is not only to analyze the time of the event, its structurally deferred occurring, but also the temporality of our experience itself— an experience that is not interrupted with the cessation of the fact, but is one with the continuous movement of an appropriation of it and of a distantiation with respect to it. This movement belongs to memory in its evential sense, not as a mere faculty of recollection, but as a memory of the possible that is also, and at the same time, a faculty of self-renewal under the constraint of what happens to us. By deepening this point Event and Time allows us to take a further step in relation to Event and World. Its epicenter is a conception of selfhood and freedom—related notions, since to be oneself is to manifest one’s freedom, and inversely, to be free is to be fully oneself— as a capacity for self-transformation and transformation of one’s existence, or, as I say in the book, of one’s adventure. Since its first publication, some of these questions have been taken up and deepened in my book L’aventure temporelle (Paris: Quadrige, 2010). Let me add that this edition of Event and Time includes a number of corrections of and modifications to the text. If, for a book that is rather difficult, its reappearance in a portable format is an enviable chance, it is above all for me the opportunity to once again measure the scope of what remains to be done. November 10, 2011

Preface to the Second French Edition

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Translator’s Note

This book is a partner to Event and World and thus shares much of that book’s vocabulary. Whenever possible, I have used the same translations that Shane Mackinlay, the translator of Event and World, employed for key terms and concepts. The author, Claude Romano, was closely involved in the final preparation of this translation. He not only suggested corrections to each page of the translation but made many clarifications of and even corrections to the French text. In a sense this translation can be considered as something like a third edition of Event and Time. I would like to thank Claude Romano and the editors at Fordham University Press for the patience they showed during the long gestation of this translation.

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Event and Time

Introduction

In his Notebooks, Paul Valéry wrote, “The word time is only provisional.” It may still be so for us; but if this word is to resonate otherwise than as a mere incantation, it must be possible to submit it to an analysis that starts from the things themselves, from a phenomenon given to all and available for an interpretation. Does such a “phenomenon” exist? And, if so, is it separable from the history of its interpretation? Is there, in itself, independent of this history, “time” as such? Nothing is less certain. Valéry’s precaution is not in the least bit oratorical. There is no “question of time” that could be posed to us in a timeless manner. The question of what makes up the unity of the different phenomena generally grouped under the rubric of “time” cannot be resolved before it has even been posed. “Time” is first of all the chain of historically attested, successive interpretations of this “phenomenon.” There is nothing “given” or immediately evident in this. But that time appears, in the unity of its phenomenal determinations, first of all as a problem, in no way signifies that the questioning of it would lose itself here in purely verbal quibbles, in a “nominalism” of principle, without any phenomenon susceptible to bearing the weight of a conceptual analysis. As Heidegger liked to say, it is precisely to the extent that “we have eyes with which to see” that a philosophical hermeneutics can surmount both historical tautology and nominalist quibbling in order to establish itself in this decisive place, in the space between experience and history, holding in one hand the guiding thread of the latter and diving into the former in search of answers. By 1

establishing a circular back-and-forth movement between history and experience, hermeneutics unfolds as phenomenology. In this sense there is no hermeneutics that, if it wishes to be philosophical, is not also, at the same time, phenomenological. This affirmation has its counterpart: phenomenology, in its turn, is only possible as hermeneutics. But what does this expression, “hermeneutic phenomenology,” mean? “Phenomenology”: to begin with, the word does not merely signify an orientation toward the “things themselves.” It is true that this philosophical discipline is born from the precept of method according to which it is fitting to begin from phenomena, and from them alone, in order to furnish a description of them: “Don’t go looking for anything beyond phenomena,” wrote Goethe. “They are themselves [ . . . ] the doctrine.” Consequently, it is necessary to exclude, from the very beginning as nonpertinent, every consideration of a hypothetical order, which is to say, every explanation of what shows itself by means of assumed or alleged causes, every enterprise of “metaphysical” foundation of the phenomenal “given.” The phenomenological method takes as a fundamental presupposition that a good description not only takes the place of understanding, but is this understanding itself. To describe a phenomenon beginning from itself is to understand, with regard to it, all there is to understand. In this regard the positive sciences are situated on another plane than philosophy: in their enterprise of explanation and prediction, they always presuppose at least an implicit phenomenology of their object. They cannot, in any case, substitute themselves for this phenomenology. Regarding this presupposition, hermeneutics brings an essential counterpart, which is equivalent to a bending of method: there are never any phenomena that would be given as such to description—there is no immediacy of a givenness from which one might expect all the light to come: every access to phenomena is irremediably mediated. We should renounce the myth of a “pure given,” bound up with that myth (Cartesian and Husserlian) of a total absence of presuppositions of which description could avail itself. The transparency of an original contact with experience, which could be established through intuition, is here thoroughly discredited by the necessity of a historical detour and a historical course, only at the end of which the “phenomenon” will allow itself to be apprehended and “seen.” The affirmation of the necessity of a critique— or even a “destruction”— of the tradition here goes hand in hand with the impossibility of every definitive interpretation—that is to say, an interpretation freed from every presupposition. But relativism in no way follows if the word signifies a variant of skepticism, the objective impossibility of deciding between several exegeses. Philosophical hermeneutics has at its disposal two criteria for de2

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ciding between competing interpretations: namely, (1) their capacity to account for a more or less great number of phenomena (one interpretation is more powerful than another if it makes phenomena intelligible that the other interpretation, by virtue of its presuppositions, did not and could not take into consideration); and (2) their capacity to account for the same phenomena with more or less internal coherence. On one hand, power; on the other, coherence. These brief methodological considerations clarify the way of proceeding that this essay will follow. The attempt to elucidate the temporal phenomenon is preceded here because governed by two series of preliminary questions that bear on the history of the understanding of time and on its presuppositions. First: is there or is there not a nexus of common problems preordaining to the different doctrines of time their hermeneutic horizon, integrating them into an ensemble that one could qualify, in a very generic manner, with the label “metaphysics of time”? And, if so, in what do they consist? Second: how can we understand that time, from Augustine to Husserl and even to Heidegger, has been apprehended fundamentally as a “subjective” phenomenon, no matter how the subjectivity of the “subject” in question has been interpreted in each case? Is this “subjectivization” of time necessary? What phenomenal features of time confer on it its right and its justification? Is it even possible to give it a justification of any kind on the plane of phenomena? Isn’t another interpretation of time possible and legitimate, or even required, by the aporiae that result from the first? What criteria must such an interpretation of time outside the subject satisfy? In these conditions, what prescribes for such an interpretation its guiding thread? I will attempt to answer, at least in part, these considerable and probably excessive questions in the first part of this work. Let me emphasize that these questions could never have been posed without the unavoidable contribution of Heidegger, to which frequent reference will be made. He is the one who was the first to advance the thesis of a unitary constitution of metaphysics based on the primacy of the present and of presence for the understanding of the meaning of Being. Th is guiding interpretation, which governs the apprehension of the temporal phenomenon since Aristotle, is designated, in Sein und Zeit, by the name “ordinary concept of time (vulgären Zeitbegriff )”: “Thus for the ordinary understanding of time, time shows itself as a sequence of ‘nows’ which are constantly ‘present-at-hand,’ simultaneously passing away and coming along (eine Folge von ständig ‘vorhandenen,’ zugleich vergehenden und ankommenden Jetzt).” But this thesis of a unitary constitution of metaphysics rooted in a community of interpretation of the temporal phenomenon cannot be accepted without Introduction

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further scrutiny; it calls for a critical testing that will occupy the first part of this essay. To go straight to the point: it does not seem possible to me to define the common hermeneutical horizon within which the attempts of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, or Husserl take place in view of furnishing an elucidation of the “nature” of time, on the basis of the “ordinary concept of time” as Heidegger defined it. Even Aristotle, whose famous definition of time put forth in Physics, Book IV: τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν ὁ χρόνος, ἀριθμὸς κινήσεως κατὰ τὸ πρότερον καὶ ὕστερον (“For time is just this—number of motion in respect of anterior and posterior”) serves Heidegger as a paradigm to illustrate this ordinary understanding of time— even Aristotle in no way defines time as a succession of nows whose mode of being would be that of presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), since he excludes on principle that time is constituted of nows that would be its “parts.” Not only is the now not a part of time, but neither is it thinkable as a ὑποκείμενον; it is not, as opposed to the moving object that remains identical throughout change, the same as itself and other than others; it is both inseparably other and the same: other than itself, the same as every other. Only nows constituted in themselves as identical substrates could “succeed themselves” one after another in a time apprehended according to the scheme of passage. But for Aristotle, on the contrary, the now neither passes nor remains; it is not itself inner-temporal: it makes possible the transition of things in time according to modalities that remain to be described. In short, the understanding of time that Aristotle develops is not univocally inner-temporal. Rather, it oscillates according to an ambivalence that will be found again elsewhere and that appears structural of the metaphysics of time, between an understanding that forbids reducing the temporal phenomenon to the inner-temporality of what “passes” or “becomes” in time and an interpretation that tends to identify time itself with the inner-temporality of phenomena in general. But if the Heideggerian definition of the “ordinary concept of time” is insufficient for grasping the originality and determining the fundamental characteristics of the metaphysics of time, is there a way, despite everything, to capture a continuity between such seemingly different attempts as those of Plato and Husserl, to cite only them? Yes, perhaps. The very general problem that all these attempts must confront is that of the relations that unite the phenomenon of time to that of inner-temporality. First, time gives itself to be “seen,” in effect, through a multiplicity of changes: the biological phenomenon of aging, the cosmological phenomena of the alternation between day and night, of the seasons, and so on. At issue here, in each case, are changes that operate in time or in conformity 4

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with time—in other words, changes the description of which suppose the alternation of temporal predicates such as: “to come,” “present,” “past.” A same phenomenon appears first as “to come,” then as “present,” then as “past,” and it is solely with regard to the sequence of these changing temporal predicates that it can be said, precisely, to have changed. But is time itself a change of this sort? And consequently, is the alternation of temporal predicates, such that it appears necessarily implicated in the possibility of describing the inner-temporal phenomenon of change, time itself ? That would imply that one could conceive time as a change that, in order to be described, would in turn call for an alternation of temporal predicates: the description would be inevitably drawn into an infinite regression. Supposing, then, that one conceived time as a change, it would be necessary to suppose again a time in which such a change would be operated, which is to say a time in which time would unroll, and so on, ad infinitum. The paradox in which the description of time appears caught is thus that of the necessity and, at the same time, of the impossibility of an infinite regression. We cannot conceive time, analyze it, or describe it without conceiving it as something temporal; and yet reasons of principle appear to rule out thinking of it in this way. It is this problem, I believe, that fixes over the different attempts to analyze time since Plato their common hermeneutical horizon. These attempts are caught in the double, contradictory necessity: to seize and to describe time as a certain “phenomenon,” to conceive it as something temporal, and at the same time, so to speak, to maintain the difference of time and of change, to refuse every possibility of apprehending time in the light of the inner-temporality of what “passes” or unfolds in it. Parmenides’ aporiae relative to time are already grounded on this difficulty, which they attempt to make manifest and which they resolve, not without irony, in the paradoxical position of the ἐξαίφνης, neither temporal nor supratemporal. It is this same problematic horizon that fi xes its meaning on the analysis of time carried out by Aristotle in book IV of the Physics. It is only at the moment in which the edge of this aporia begins to be dulled, or, in other words, when the paradox of an inner-temporal grasp of time appears little by little hidden from view, and thus when it becomes possible to describe and analyze time without remainder like a certain change, or rather like change itself, that the question will undergo a decisive modification. The question will be that of what enables such a change—what, so to speak, “pours” the future into the past through the bottleneck of the present and, consequently, since time is itself a sort of “passage,” a “succession” or “flowing,” what gives it a permanent, unchanging structure. The “subjectivization” of time, or more precisely, its transfer to the mind operated Introduction

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in Augustine’s Confessions, responds quite precisely to this problem. The change that is in things, the change of things themselves, must here refer back to a change inherent in the mind—that of the expectation that changes into attention and of attention that changes into memory— as to the change that makes possible and conditions every other. Henceforth— and this is probably the decisive point—it is only when the ambivalence that I underscored above regarding Aristotle is dispelled in favor of a grasping of time itself in inner-temporal terms, when the paradox put forth by Plato in the Parmenides disappears entirely from the field of analysis, that time can take on a “subjective” status. Consequently, far from the transfer of time to subjectivity, such that it reigns without reserve in modern metaphysics since Kant, bringing a satisfying solution to the aporia of an analysis of time as such in inner-temporal terms, this transfer rests, on the contrary, on its forgetting. But what is forgotten, in this case, is not purely and simply lost: the aporia reappears, for example, in an exemplary manner in the Husserlian analysis of time. It haunts, as I will try to show, every enterprise aiming to search for the origin of “objective” time in the contrasting acts, behaviors, and modes of Being of a subjectivity that is allegedly originary. Henceforth, the question becomes the following: is it not best, so as to avoid the insurmountable difficulties in which a thinking of time in innertemporal terms becomes caught, to change horizon entirely, which is to say, to begin by removing the temporal phenomenon from the horizon in which its subjectivization took place, and then from the horizon of the subject itself? Is it not necessary to conceive of time as such hors-sujet, outside of the subject, so to speak? But to attempt to undo the slowly and patiently knotted tie between time and subjectivity is in no way to return to a purely “objective” understanding of becoming. This enterprise demands, more radically, the questioning of the presuppositions that govern the understanding of the human being as subject so as to put them as such to the test. It is precisely on this point that the project of this book joins up with that of a preceding work to complete it and lead it to its end. In Event and World the issue was to elaborate a hermeneutics of the human being according to the guiding thread of the event and thus to remove the understanding of the “advenant,” which is to say the one for whom the whole adventure consists in “advening” to himself [à advenir à soi] on the basis of what happens [advient] to him, from every possible understanding in terms of “subject.” Indeed, the subject is that to which nothing occurs, and to which nothing can ever occur; that which always holds itself “behind” or “under” its accidents, that which, by its deep-seated immunity with regard to every event, remains identical to itself even in its alterations. The “subject,” understood in this sense, still haunts the Husserlian transcen6

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dental ego, but also, to a large extent, the Heideggerian Dasein. This is why the “change of horizon” of which I was speaking, that which would eventually make possible an interpretation of time itself hors-sujet, can and must be accomplished on behalf of a phenomenology centered on the event. The analysis of temporality that will be carried out in the second and third parts of this book thus constitutes at the same time both a reprise and a deepening of the evential hermeneutics [l’ herméneutique événementiale] developed in Event and World. This essay thus appears as the second panel of a dyptich. I have tried, as much as was possible, to present a text the reading of which would not be hampered by too many heavy presuppositions; I have sometimes recalled, at the risk of repeating myself, some points already evoked in the preceding book if they conditioned the understanding of what follows. In most cases I was content to refer in footnotes to corresponding paragraphs in Event and World. Despite these artifices, an understanding of the present text and of the theses that it develops is more than facilitated by the reading of the essay whose counterpart it forms: reading Event and World is its indispensable complement. But because phenomenology never has at its disposal an immediate access to phenomena, because phenomena offer themselves to interpretation only through a chain of historical presuppositions from which they are rigorously inseparable, because, in other words, phenomenology is possible only as hermeneutic, throwing oneself immediately into an analysis of time without first interrogating the presuppositions that guide its understanding is rigorously ruled out. Thus it is fitting to begin with the “metaphysics of time,” or rather to inquire in order to know if and under what conditions some such thing indeed exists. The necessity of this “detour” will truly appear only at the end of the investigation. For no detour is ever a mere excursus when we are dealing with philosophy: as the Phaedrus reminds us, “[ . . . ] if the way round is long, don’t be astonished: we must make this detour for the sake of things that are very important.” Paris, 12 February 1998

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PA RT

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The Metaphysics of Time The Beginning that sits enshrined as a goddess among mortals is the Savior of all. —Plato, Laws VI.775e

Historically speaking, what has been understood under the designation “time”? How can we grasp the guiding lines of the interpretation of this phenomenon, insofar as they delineate the contours of the thought upon which we depend and that Heidegger, following Nietz sche, called “metaphysical”? Of course, this question presupposes two things: first, what in fact it will be my task to establish—namely, that the temporal problematic unfolds, historically, within a unitary horizon, or, in other words, that there is something like the one metaphysics; second, that what determines this metaphysics as such is indeed, among other things, a certain approach to the temporal phenomenon: a certain understanding of time that unfolds inside of a conceptual frame remaining unchanged from Aristotle to Bergson or to Husserl. But what, then, is this “frame”? How must we determine the “squaring” of this frame? In other words, what makes the unity of this horizon? §1. The Traditional Determinations of Time and Their Structural Dependence with Respect to the Phenomenon of Inner-Temporality The fundamental determinations that articulate the traditional understanding of “time” have their provenance in the fact that access to this phenomenon was mediated, from the origin, by the consideration of what is in time. Put otherwise, time has received its fundamental determinations from the exclusive consideration of the inner-temporality of temporal “objects.” Time has itself been conceived as “flowing,” as “remaining,” as “passing” from the future to the present and from the present to the past, the future “becoming” present and the present “becoming,” in turn, past: 9

the phenomenon of time has presented itself to phenomenological consideration as an inner-temporal phenomenon. Time has been conceived as being in time. But how should we account for such an affirmation and strip it of its possible abruptness and, perhaps, even its arbitrariness? How can we make its pertinence stand out for the rereading and the reinterpretation of the principal texts on time that follow one another throughout the history of metaphysics? It is necessary, first, to bring to light the intrinsic determinations of inner-temporality so as to show, second, in what manner these determinations could be, upon a transfer of meaning, attributed to time itself. (a) Inner-temporality, as the phenomenological character of what is “ in” time Every “thing” in the wide sense of the term—“object” from a theoretical consideration, tool, datum of sensation (as, for example, a sound that resounds), innerworldly fact, process, state of affairs— shows itself in time inasmuch as it appears with temporal determinations that belong, as such, to the very mode of this appearing. If we take up the example, analyzed at length by Husserl, of a sound that occurs as an innerworldly fact or of the articulation in sound of a melody, its temporal characters are thus the following: at first, the sound that has not yet resounded is awaited as a sound “to come,” which is to say as a sound that is “not yet present.” Next, the sound resounds in the present, it is heard as “present,” and immediately after, as “just past,” as a sound that has just resounded, but that is no longer grasped in the full actuality of consciousness, in the present tense: this sound “just past,” which has ceased to occur in a living manner, is thus retained or maintained under the gaze of consciousness, in a present “enlarged” to the immediate past, by an intentional modification of consciousness indissociable from a correlative modification of its “object,” that Husserl calls “retention” or “primary memory”; and thus, as new sounds are produced, as the present chases the past in renewing itself in its point of incidence with the future, the past, through ever-new retentions, through retentions of retention, constantly changes in itself, but nevertheless still maintains itself, with its sense of “modified present,” of present made-past [passéifié], in the light of consciousness. The primary memory thus designates the specific intentional modification that the primordial impression (Urimpression) of the sound undergoes, a modification by which it continuously fades away and yet does not truly disappear, since this very fading away is the mode of its persistence. 10

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Let us leave aside here the most “technical” aspects of the Husserlian description (which derive from the intentional analysis of consciousness and from its presuppositions); that is, let us simplify this description up to a point: I can be more specific about the above material by saying that the description of a sound that fades away necessarily puts into play the description of a continuous modification of the temporal characters of the “object-sound” (“to come,” then “present,” then “just passed”), which is inseparable from a continuous modification of its temporal modes of apprehension: expectation (protension), attention (making-present), and “primary memory,” as Husserl calls it (retention). But what is most remarkable in this description— carried out here, as much as possible, from an entirely “naive” standpoint, which presupposes no particular theory of consciousness, of its empirical or transcendental status, of its mode of Being, of the par ticu lar traits that defi ne expectation, making-present, retention— consists probably in the fact that it not only puts into play a double series of characterizations: on the one hand, those of the object that is modified continually in its temporal determinations, on the other, those of the modes of consciousness of this object that are modified in parallel; but also a series of temporal adverbs: “at first,” “next,” “then.” At first, the sound is aimed at in expectation as sound “to come”; next, it is brought about, under the gaze that makes-present, as “present” sound; then, it is retained, in the primary memory, as sound “just passed,” which haunts the consciousness, but without “occupying” it any longer; which resounds no longer than as the far-off echo of its abolished vibration; that is to say, which does not maintain itself except by rendering itself past [se passéifiant]. These three adverbs, in appearance without particular signification, perfectly negligible in the description, nevertheless play a decisive role in it: indeed, they indicate that the continuous modification of the temporal object and the correlative modification of its modes of consciousness always presuppose the time in which they both take place and, as a consequence, cannot of themselves account for its temporalization. Put otherwise: the temporal (or rather: the inner-temporal) modifications of the object and the correlative modifications of its modes of consciousness (expectation, making-present, recollection) do not account for the temporal phenomenon except on the condition of being themselves understood as being brought about “at first” or “next,” which is to say, as occurring themselves in time. But what does this teach us about time itself ? It is still too early to answer this question. For the moment, the description of the mode of temporalization of the inner-temporal object has at least allowed us to put into evidence the fact that the inner-temporality of this object does not refer back uniquely to the modes of its temporal apprehension, but, as these are §1. The Traditional Determinations of Time

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occurring in their turn in time, that they refer back, once again, to more fundamental determinations, whose status and meaning remain, for the present, indeterminate, but that are still themselves temporal determinations expressed by adverbs: “at first,” “next,” “then.” Now, if such is indeed the case, it then follows that no psychology, whether it be phenomenological and/or transcendental, can account for the phenomenality of time, for its mode of appearing, on the basis solely of the modes of the consciousness of time, without thereby presupposing the time in which these modes of the consciousness of time occur, and that this ultimate time—about which it is still necessary to keep in reserve the answer to the question of whether or not it still deserves to be called “time”—is no longer something that modifies itself while flowing out, in the manner of the object and of its modes of consciousness, but is only that without which it would be strictly impossible to describe such a flow. The manner in which this problem crops up in Husserl’s Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time matters little for the moment. For us, the essential lies in the following observation: the innertemporality of objects (innerworldy facts, processes, things, or states of affairs) here refers back to the inner-temporality of their modes of appearance (or of their modes of consciousness), without it ever being possible to grasp in the one or the other of these phenomena the origin of the time in which they are both possible, and that is expressed by the adverbs “at first,” “next,” “then.” But aren’t “at first” and “next,” in turn, inner-temporal determinations? Assuredly. I can affirm, for example, that “at first” there was lightning, and only “next” the rumbling of thunder. These two adverbs, in this context, refer to a specific situation within the temporal continuum. However, such a usage of these adverbs in order to mark specific “places” inside the irreversible sequence of objective time, or, in a different way, to designate the modes of the appearing duration of the object— supposing that by “temporal object” we no longer understand an isolated sound, but a melody articulating a multiplicity of sounds— differs from the preceding usage, where they were designating a “time” in which all the innertemporal changes— subjective as much as objective—were taking place. These adverbs thus do not only have an inner-temporal signification, but they may refer, moreover, more fundamentally to the time of every change, as far as this change occurs itself “in” time. Thus, what they indicate is that the inner-temporality of the temporal object cannot be apprehended itself as a continuous modification of its modes of consciousness (expectation, making-present, recollection), or as a continuous modification of its temporal predicates (“to come,” “present,” “just passed”), without the time of this double “modification” being, in its turn, coapprehended— a time that 12

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cannot itself be grasped by the measure of inner-temporal determinations without dragging us into an infinite regression. For time is in no way temporal. We can set out the results of these analyses synthetically, as follows. 1. The inner-temporality of the temporal “object” (fact, thing, state of affairs) can be described as the unitary phenomenon of a continuous modification of its temporal modes of appearance correlative to a continuous modification of its subjective modes of consciousness. However, neither the continuous modification of the object nor the correlative modification of its modes of appearance for a consciousness are sufficient to describe the phenomenon of inner-temporality, since this double series of modifications must, in turn, occur in time. 2. At every instant of this continuous modification of the temporal characters of the thing, as well as of the temporal modes of its apprehension (the expectation transforming itself into making-present, which in turn is changed into retention), nevertheless there will subsist something like an “at first” and a “next”: these adverbs, which are indispensable to every phenomenological description of inner-temporality and which remain, however, phenomenologically obscure, are not inner-temporal determinations of the thing or of its subjective modes of givenness, but refer back to time itself in which these modifications take place, yet without this time appearing here in a thematic manner. When I follow the temporal modifications of the object and of its modes of appearance, I am not turned toward the time itself in which they occur, but time is always co-given, coapprehended, if only in a fleeting and oblique mode, and expressed through these apparently insignificant determinations: “at first,” “then,” and “next.” 3. The time of “things” that are in time, inner-temporality, is thus not time itself; but the question remains entirely open as to whether it is possible to go back from the time of things to time tout court in order to raise the question of the temporal provenance of inner-temporality. It does not seem possible to identify psychological or phenomenological time (whatever status is accorded to the “subject,” empirical or transcendental), constituted by the modes of appearance of the inner-temporal object, with time itself; but, as the continuous modification of the expectation that changes itself into making-present and of the making-present that changes itself into memory, phenomenological time belongs, like the time of “things,” to the phenomenon of inner-temporality. 4. Finally, once we have illuminated the phenomenological features of inner-temporality that, assuredly, allow us to describe the manner according to which things, innerworldy facts, states of affairs, and even subjective lived experiences ceaselessly receive changing predicates (“to come,” “pres§1. The Traditional Determinations of Time

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ent,” “passed”), the question remains entirely open as to whether it is still possible— and how—to elucidate further the time itself in which these modifications appear, which flashes fleetingly through the use of these adverbs: “at first,” “next,” “then.” Is not this path of access to time, which tries to reach it beginning from inner-temporality, closed and as if obstructed in advance by its point of departure and by the very horizon in which its questioning unfolds? Before undertaking to answer such a question, it is nevertheless necessary to establish its legitimacy and pertinence. Now, these will only appear if, as we shall see, time was traditionally thought by metaphysics on the basis of the phenomenal features of what is in time— only if time itself was understood, fundamentally, by metaphysics within the horizon of inner-temporality. (b) The phenomenal features of time considered within the horizon of inner-temporality Before establishing our thesis more formally through a reading of some decisive texts from the history of metaphysics, we can undertake to furnish a brief sketch of the phenomenological meaning of this occultation of time to the advantage of inner-temporality. Time was generally conceived as defined, in its very essence, by the phenomenon of change. More precisely, it is a certain “passage” that is brought about from the future “toward” the present and from the present “toward” the past. At every new instant, the future, determined as that which is “not yet present,” becomes present, while the present becomes past, the past being determined, in turn, as a “present that is no longer (present).” It is this conception of a transition of times within one another that confers upon the traditional concept of time as “passage” its fundamental determinations. First, time envisaged on the horizon of inner-temporality is onedimensional: just as the inner-temporal determinations of the thing—“to come,” “present,” “past”—turn out to be modifications of its phenomenological way of appearing, which is to say, of its coming-into-presence for a consciousness, so too, the future, the present, the past, as fundamental dimensions of time in which the thing itself appears with its own innertemporal features, will turn out here to be modifications of a single dimension of time: the present. It follows, then, that the future as horizon of appearance of every thing or of every fact to come— of the “to come” as inner-temporal determination of the thing—will be conceived, in turn, as a present that is not yet (present), and the past as a present that is no longer (present). The result is that “time has only one dimension” to the extent that the future and the past, as temporal horizons, are nothing but modi14

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fications of the present and are defined entirely by their relation to it. Even in the “diagram of time” inserted by Husserl in division 10 of his Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, two-dimensional as it is, the time it represents is no less essentially determined as a modification of a single dimension: the present; for the past and the future, as Husserl repeatedly affirms, always constitute themselves from out of the present, insofar as they are intentional modifications of it: “All of the past gains its sense in the flowing present and indeed constitutes itself out of that flow; all of the objective past constitutes itself out of the objective present, and the objective present constitutes itself ultimately in the structure of the ‘living present.’ ” Insofar as it is defined entirely by its relation to the present of consciousness, the future is what will become present, that which “will pass into” the present, which is to say will be transferred through it in the continual movement of its own becoming-past; as for the past, it is determined as that which became such, by a modification of the present that it was: it is consequently nothing other than a rendered-past present. From this first feature of time there derives a second: its transitory character. Since the future and the past are thought of, indeed, as mere modifications of an inner-temporal present, since the future has been determined as that which is not yet (present) but is susceptible of becoming so, and the past as that which is no longer (present) to the extent that it has become such, by virtue of the phenomenon of “passage,” there follows that the three times can only be successive; they ceaselessly pass “into” one another. When Bergson, for example, defines duration, it is in the following terms: “Its essence being to flow, not one of its parts is still there when another part comes along. Superposition of one part on another with measurement in view is therefore impossible, unimaginable, inconceivable.” What Bergson here calls the “parts” of time (the future, the present, the past) are not contemporary; they do not coexist, they succeed one another. Now, the future, the present, and the past can thus “succeed one another” only at the price of a pure and simple identification of these horizontal dimensions of time with the inner-temporal modes of appearance of a fact or a thing. But if time is pure succession, how can something as succession exist? What makes possible the transition of the “parts” of the duration— that is to say, also, their maintenance and persistence, without which there would be no succession at all? Answer: memory. “There is no mood, however, no matter how simple, which does not change at every instant, since there is no consciousness without memory, no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. That is what duration consists of. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present. . . . Without that §1. The Traditional Determinations of Time

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survival of the past in the present there would be no duration but only instantaneity.” Since time is conceived as one-dimensional and successive, it becomes necessary to give to subjectivity the function of conserving the past in the present under the form of an overcome present [présent dépassé], and thus of “contracting” the different moments of time that “snowball” and engender the duration. But the various times had first to be conceived as “successive,” as “passing” into one another, so that the intervention of memory could, by contracting them, give birth to the duration. The one-dimensionality of time and its transitory character thus result in a third fundamental determination of time: its continuity. Like space, which is the “order of coexistences,” time, as the “order of successions,” is a continuum, and this is why it can be figured, analogically, by a line, on which the now would be a point. This analogy runs from Aristotle to Kant and from Bergson to Husserl, unifying these conceptions of time despite their deep differences. Thus, Kant writes in “The Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Time,” “Time is nothing but the form of inner sense. . . . [I]t has to do neither with shape nor position, but with the relation of representations in our inner state. And just because this inner intuition yields no shape, we endeavour to make up for this want by analogies. We represent the time-sequence by a line progressing to infinity, in which the manifold constitutes a series of one dimension only; and we reason from the properties of this line to all the properties of time, with this one exception, that while the parts of the line are simultaneous the parts of time are always successive.” Th is analogon of the “inner sense” in the “external sense” that is the line is only an imperfect figuration of time, but one that at least shares with it a fundamental character: its continuity. Now, it is not the analogical figuration by the line, common to Aristotle and Kant, and, in a certain manner, to Husserl as well, that leads them to a certain understanding of time as continuum; it is, instead, the understanding of time itself against the horizon of inner-temporality, by a transfer of meaning from inner-temporality to time itself, that makes possible its analogical figuration under the form of a line upon which the now would be a point. In these conditions it matters little that the line is here envisaged as already drawn, or in the very movement of its engendering, in the process of its being under way (Bergson): for from Aristotle to Kant, the representation of time by a line in no way signifies the identification of time and space, the confusion of the “made” or “complete” with the “happening” or “under way” [se faisant]. While for Aristotle time is the number of movement and not of the line, for Kant himself the analogy with the line only has validity if one considers the line in the drawing that engenders it, and 16

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not at all in its completed figuration: for, while the parts of time are successive, those of space are simultaneous. Bergson does not say otherwise. In this respect, the qualitative heterogeneity that is, for Bergson, the appanage of duration in no way contradicts his constantly renewed affirmation of the continuity of time. This is why, even in works in which time is essentially considered in its relation to consciousness—for example, in Husserl’s Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time—it is still defined as a continuum of phases that has the particular form of a “flux” or “flow.” But time can be understood as a continuum only if, in order to understand it, one takes as a paradigm the series of continuous modifications that an inner-temporal “object” undergoes. In the end, since time is essentially defined by its transition, since it “flows” as a whole, and this succession of moments— each of which follows another that always replaces it—forms a linear and successive time, the result is that time has only one single direction: the present arising [survenant] from the future becomes an accomplished past [un passé survenu], and the future, becoming through the present, is progressively changed into the concluded past; in a word, the future becomes present, and the present past. Time has a sense—a direction and a meaning—that is to say, an orientation: it is an irreversible phenomenon. But this alleged “irreversibility” of time contrasts with the reversibility of movement only to the extent that time has been itself conceived as a certain oriented movement in the first place, a movement that has only one sense, or one sole direction, from the future toward the past. Its irreversibility thus follows from time’s having been grasped and apprehended according to the scheme of an inner-temporal change, from its having been understood itself against the horizon of inner-temporality. Only the temporal modes of appearance of a fact or a thing can be qualified rightly as “irreversible”: the sound to come is no longer to come (and can no longer be so) once it has rung out in the present; the present sound is no longer present (and can no longer be so) once it has made itself past. But one cannot conclude from this that there is an “irreversibility” of time itself. This phenomenological sketch nevertheless reveals, right away, its limits: for it is not at all certain that throughout the course of metaphysics time has been understood in so univocal a manner as an inner-temporal phenomenon. Were the four characteristics that were brought to light—one-dimensionality, transition, continuity, and irreversibility—asserted uniformly for its characterization? Are there not, by contrast, thinkers who perceived the paradoxes that a determination of time in inner-temporal terms brings with it— moreover, who furnished an explicit thematization of these paradoxes? In order to attempt a response to these questions, it becomes necessary to enter §1. The Traditional Determinations of Time

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directly this time into the detail of the analyses of time of three major authors—Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine—so as to attempt to delineate precisely the horizon of problems within which they move. §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides That a phenomenological interpretation of time within the horizon of inner-temporality is impossible, and impossible on principle, is revealed admirably, with a rare precision in the details, by the paradoxes of the Parmenides. Indeed, what Plato was able to grasp with an acuity of attention unequaled elsewhere in the entire philosophical tradition is that the phenomenal determinations by means of which time is apprehended and leads to the concept are borrowed from things, states of affairs, or events that unfold their existence in time: that time is thought of as being in time, as “advancing” from “now” to the “next”—that is to say, as being each time itself something inner-temporal. Far from being that thinker who disparaged the sensible and scorned becoming, Plato is, on the contrary— on the condition of being read and interpreted according to the guiding thread of the complex argumentation of the Parmenides—the first and the only Greek thinker to have perceived, with incomparable penetration, the aporiae that result from a grasping of time in light of inner-temporal determinations. The most decisive passages for the approach of this question of time are located in the third hypothesis of the Parmenides: “If the One is and is not,” which itself furnishes an alternative to and a way out from the theoretical impasses where the contradictory character of the first two hypotheses wound up: (1) “If the One is One” (137c); and (2) “If the One is” (142b). These two hypotheses, of the One as One and of the One being, have shown, indeed, that the One was irreducible to the alternative of beingness and non-beingness (οὐσία/μὴ οὐσία); here, what is proper to the dialectic, as Plato had indicated ever since the Republic, is precisely to make appear the irreducibility of the Principle to the opposition of beingness and non-beingness, of Being and of Becoming, of Movement and of Rest so as to show its remarkable transcendence: “dialectic is the only inquiry that travels this road, doing away with hypotheses and proceeding to the first Principle (ἀρχή) itself,” to the unhypothetical. This progressive “doing away with” or destruction of hypotheses appears in the Parmenides as the only possible way of access to the One that transcends them all, opening the way to an apophatic theology that will take wing in “neoPlatonism.” What is thus revealed by the contradictory hypotheses relative to the Same and the Other, Rest and Movement, Being and Non18

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being, is the ungraspability of the Principle that holds itself “beyond” (ἐπέκεινα) these oppositions: the transcendence already evoked at the end of book VI of the Republic, where the One (that is to say, the idea of the Good: ἰδέα τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ) is designated as holding itself ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, beyond beingness, eliciting the astonishment of Glaucon: δαιμόνιας ὐπερϐολῆς: “What divine transcendence!” Now, it is in no way fortuitous that it is precisely within this framework, namely the framework of a “henology” and not at all of an “ontology”—a henology that nevertheless takes up point by point, and not without evident irony, the different moments of the Parmenidian ontology —that Plato states the most profound and decisive theses of his entire work on the subject of time. Nor is it fortuitous that it is precisely in this dialogue, where Parmenides is made the spokesman of Plato, and in that way moves beyond the scholastic positions of the Eleatic philosophers (in particular those of his disciple Zeno), going so far as to lead us into a vertiginous questioning of his own principles, that this meditation on time is developed, about which I will be eager to show that it is in no way “sophistical,” thus running contrary to the most widespread interpretations, but that it instead possesses an irreducible phenomenological core; Parmenides, indeed, who in expelling Becoming from Being in his Poem, argues that τὸ ἐόν, being, is immobile and eternal, unable in any way to be thought or said as non-being: “Never shall you bend the non-beings (μὴ ἐόντα) to being (εἶναι); hold your thought back from this route of inquiry”; consequently, being is non-engendered and imperishable, it is “always now (ἐπεὶ νῦν ἔστιν).” If being, indeed, is one and cannot be forcibly bent to nonbeing, we must not think or say of it that it “has been” or that it “will be”: being without any relation to non-being, to ne-ens, this being is without any relation whatsoever to time. By looking more closely at Parmenide’s thesis, the Platonic dialogue that bears his name shows its aporiae, turning the thesis against its author: beginning, this time, no longer from being in order to affirm that it is one (and thus unchangeable and eternal, the human doxa alone, as in a dream, thinking of it as being mobile, multiple, subject to birth and to death), but from the One itself, the hypotheses that compose the second part of the Parmenides will show both that being must be one in order to be, and that the One, as such, transcends all its “ontological” determinations, thus holding, by its very transcendence with regard to beingness, a paradoxical “relation” to time: in no way becoming, it is the enigmatic (ἄτοπον) outside-of-time [hors-temps] that neither changes nor remains the same, but also that that, under the figure of the ἐξαίφνης, the “sudden,” makes possible all inner-temporal becoming and change. §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

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The texts having to do with time are distributed, in the Parmenides, within each of the three opening hypotheses (141a and following; 152a sq.; 156b sq.); these three passages maintain among one another evident structural relations, and every effort at interpretation cannot fail to illuminate them, as far as possible, in relation to one another. The first hypothesis— “the One is One”—which refuses any plurality to the One, consequently also refuses its being a whole (πᾶν), since the whole supposes parts, by definition multiple, and consequently, supposes having limits, such or such form, being enveloping or enveloped, being in a place, being in itself or in other than itself. Without parts the One purely one is neither in movement nor at rest, since movement and rest cannot be said except of that which has within itself parts, limits, and a figure; it is thus neither the same nor other, since these determinations only belong to a being subject to movement and change, neither like nor unlike, neither equal nor unequal. To this extent it can be neither equal nor unequal to itself or to another in age—that is to say, older or younger: which amounts to claiming that it is not “in time” (ἐν χρόνῳ). The passage in which this last point is established calls for closer examination: “ ‘Therefore, the one could not be younger or older than, or the same age as, itself or another.’—‘Apparently not.’—‘So if it is like that, the one could not even be in time at all, could it? Or isn’t it necessary, if something is in time, that it always come to be older than itself ?’—‘Necessarily’ ” (141a; Plato: Complete Works, 375 [hereafter PCW ]). Here it is the problem of aging that prescribes its horizon to the questioning about time; this horizon is the very one that belongs to every innertemporal being: to be in time (ἐν χρόνῳ) is to become always older than oneself. Plato’s problem is whether the One who is One (the One of the first hypothesis) can satisfy this condition. But what precisely does it mean to satisfy this condition? Inner-temporality appears here as a comparative relation to oneself (yet, by hypothesis, the One qua One cannot be compared, neither to itself nor to another; it is neither like nor unlike, neither equal nor unequal: consequently, it will not be able to satisfy this condition). This becoming-older (than oneself ) thus supposes a change with regard to something: as a comparative relation, it supposes a comparandum, a second entity. Now, this comparandum is a comparative that Parmenides introduces right away, not without surprising his interlocutor: “ ‘Isn’t the older always older than a younger?’—‘To be sure.’—‘Therefore, that which comes to be older than itself comes to be, at the same time, younger than itself, if in fact it is to have something it comes to be older than’ ” (141a– c; PCW, 375). Some commentators, following the example of Diès, do not hesitate here to qualify the Platonic argumentation as “sophistical”: “The genre of this sophism is a misuse of language, which the 20

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Republic denounces in the expression ‘stronger than oneself’ (430e). But the Charmides (168a–169c) had already proclaimed, with regard to magnitudes and numbers, the evidence of the principle: there cannot be a relation where there is no real duality of the relata. Otherwise, indeed, what one deems to be heavier than oneself must at the same time be lighter, ‘the older will be younger, and so on.’ ” Before declaring the “evidence” of this principle, it is worth taking into account the context in which it applies: now the context here is not, as it was in the Charmides, one of magnitudes and numbers, but that of becoming. And how could there be, concerning the phenomenon of becoming, some such “duality of comparanda”? It is the One, in fact, that becomes at the same time older than itself and younger, and the comparison is a comparison with one sole comparandum, a relation that relates to itself at two different moments of becoming. In other terms, it is the attention to the phenomenon of time that imposes, in this singular context, the adoption of a “sophism” in order to account for the “thing itself” that Plato has in view. It could very well be, hereafter, that the same type of argument that could be taxed as “sophistic” in another context reveals itself as entirely appropriate to the elucidation of the phenomenon under consideration. But what, then, is this phenomenon that Plato has “in view”? It is the phenomenon of an oriented change: time, says Plato, “moves forward” (he also speaks of “progression,” προϊὸν: 152c2), “proceeding from the before to the after” (ἐκ τοῦ ποτὲ εἰς ἔπειτα) (152b5; PCW, 384, trans. modified) and, to this extent, the One that is in time “ages,” comes to be older than itself: thus, the One of the second hypothesis “always comes to be older than itself, if in fact it goes forward in step with time” (152a). But, at the same time in which it ages, the One also becomes younger than itself: Τὸ ἄρα πρεσϐύτερον ἑαυτοῦ γιγνόμενον ἀνάγκη καὶ νεώτερον ἅμα ἑαυτοῦ γίγνεσθαι: “ ‘That which comes to be older than itself must also, at the same time (ἄρα), come to be younger than itself’ ” (141c). The question that

necessarily arises at this point is the following: what is Plato speaking about when he speaks of the One that is in time? Is he speaking of a thing that becomes? Or is what he is speaking about in no way a thing? The answer will vary inside of each of the hypotheses. The One of the first hypothesis, the One that is One, has within itself no plurality of parts, no form, no figure; it is absolutely not a “thing” that becomes in time. Things will be otherwise for the One of the second hypothesis, intimately parceled out and fragmented into a multiplicity of beings. But what remains constant in all of these hypotheses are precisely the conditions that the One must satisfy in order to be able to be said and thought as being in time: these conditions are set forth from the first hypothesis and will not vary afterward; in §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

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order to be in time (ἐν χρόνῳ), or again, in order to come to be, the One must satisfy the apparently contradictory conditions of an aging and of a rejuvenation. But can a thing, in general, satisfy such conditions? Can Socrates become both older and younger at the same time? Not only is this affirmation not absurd, but Plato even argued for it expressly in a passage of the Symposium (207d), where, regarding a living thing, he affirms that it never ceases to become younger: νέος ἀεὶ γιγνόμενος. Here is the passage: “Even while each living thing is said to be alive and to be the same— as a person is said to be the same from childhood till he turns into an old man— even then he never consists of the same things, though he is called the same, but he is always becoming younger and in other respects passing away, in his hair and flesh and bones and blood and his entire body. And it’s not just in his body, but in his soul, too, for none of his manners, customs, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, or fears ever remains the same, but some are coming to be in him while others are passing away.” Nevertheless, we must take care against a difficulty: if Socrates becomes younger, here, at the same time that he ages, it is certainly not in the same respect. It is Socrates who ages, but it is parts of his body— as well as ways of being of his soul—that are renewed and become younger, so to speak. If, by contrast, it were Socrates as such who had to become younger, it would be necessary that the number of his years decrease progressively as his years grow. Or, at the least, it would be necessary that the number of his years diminish in comparison to the number of years of the same aging Socrates. It would be necessary, in sum, that there no longer be one, but two Socrates: the one who remains young and the one who ages, the first becoming, therefore, ever younger than the second. But isn’t such a conception of change sophistical? It presupposes, indeed, that to change is not, for a single thing, to acquire new properties, but instead to be fragmented into a plurality of things: old Socrates is another than young Socrates in the sense that they cannot each be called “Socrates” except by homonymy. We catch up here with a classic sophism criticized in the Euthydemus (283d): if you want Clinias to become wise, you do not want him any longer to be the Clinias that he is now (ignorant), and thus you want him no longer to be: you want his death. Such a conception of change is sophistic: like the universal mobilism of Heraclitus, it deprives the logos of its own resources. One can no longer say, then, either that Socrates becomes younger or that he ages, precisely because every permanent substrate to which the name “Socrates” could correspond has given way. Is it not then necessary to interpret this passage in a different way? Shouldn’t one understand that the only One that satisfies the stated requirements (becoming older than oneself, becoming younger than oneself 22

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while retaining the same age as oneself ) is the now (τὸ νῦν), which never ceases at once to grow older while moving from the past toward the future, and to grow younger while renewing itself constantly in its point of incidence with the future? If we understand the text in this way, we also understand that the comparison of the now with itself admits no other term of comparison than the now; that what was excluded as a sophism for every thing—namely, that it might be greater or smaller than itself without, as a consequence, the comparison taking place between two distinct comparanda—is valid for the now and for it alone, which is only relative to itself, since it is always the same and always other, and in being temporalized it temporalizes time without our ever being able to situate ourselves outside of the now (since the now is always now) in a position that supervises time, which would allow us, by exiting the now, to compare it to another now. Plato’s insistence on the fact that becoming older is not said with regard to a being younger, but rather with regard to a becoming younger, finds its clarification in the fact that time is a change relative to itself, where the now can be compared only to itself and does not have, outside of itself, an other now, the second distinct term of a comparison. If we admit that the conditions to which the One is subjected, in order to be able to be thought as being in time (or not), put into play an understanding of the now as such, we can also admit that the paradoxes of the Parmenides are in no way sophistical, but instead rest upon a rigorous, though implicit, phenomenological analysis of time. This appears more clearly in the second hypothesis. This new hypothesis, “If the One is,” brings with it consequences just as absurd as the preceding hypothesis: indeed, if we affirm that the One is, we affirm on the one hand the One, and on the other its beingness (οὐσία), which amounts to saying that the One-being is a whole of which unity and beingness are the parts. But thus to introduce a duality into the One is to be brought along into a chain of untenable consequences: for the One will be fragmented as many times as it will be affirmed to be; to say that the One and the being are the same, according to the thesis of Parmenides, is to admit that only the One is being and that only the being is One: but since each being is both one and being, the One is itself henceforward distributed, as beingness, between all the beings. There are as many ἕνα as ὄντα, as many “ones” as beings. The One is necessarily split up and scattered into a multiplicity: “the One itself, chopped up by beingness, is many and infinite multiplicity” (144e, trans. modified). This One that is both one and multiple is neither one nor multiple: “Unlimited by its parts, the One as all will have limits and form. Thus, it will have inclusion in itself and in the other, movement and immobility, identity and difference, likeness and unlikeness, contact and §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

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non-contact with itself as with others, equality and inequality.” Receiving all the determinations opposed to those of the One as One of the first hypothesis, the One-being or the “One-Many” (ἕν πολλά) of the second hypothesis will thus be and will become, to itself and to what is other than itself, equal and superior and inferior in age; it thus will be in time, as opposed to the One as One: “ ‘So the One partakes of time, if in fact it partakes of being (μετέχει μὲν ἄρα χρόνου, εἴπερ καὶ τοῦ εἶναι).’— ‘Certainly.’—‘Of time advancing (πορευομένου τοῦ χρόνου)?’—‘Yes.’—‘So the One always comes to be older than itself, if in fact it goes forward in step with time’ ” (152a; PCW, 384). If the One is, it must participate in time: now, the task will be to show right away that the temporality of the One is impossible and leads to new contradictions. Once again it is on the basis of the phenomenon of aging that the Beingin-time of the One is here determined, as this will be the case each time in the Parmenides when time is at issue. Thus, the entire problem here comes to this: what does Plato understand by “aging”? In a first stage we started with the hypothesis according to which Plato had in view the phenomenon of aging as an inner-temporal change happening to a thing, and conceived of it as an oriented change; but, immediately we wondered if what satisfies the requirements of participation in time, and thus the simultaneity of an aging and of a rejuvenation, was really a thing that becomes, or if it was not instead the now that alone can become at the same time older than itself and younger than itself, while retaining the same age as itself. Indeed, of the now it can be said that it advances, “proceeding from the before to the after” (152b5; PCW, 384, trans. modified), and in this sense that it ages: for aging is nothing other than “advancing in age,” progressing from the past toward the future “as time advances.” But of this same now, it can also be very well said that it rejuvenates ceaselessly if this time we no longer consider time according to the scheme of a movement oriented from the before toward the after, but if we instead think of it as flowing from the future toward the past: time is then no longer that which “advances” and grows at each instant from the instant that passed, “snow-balling,” according to Bergson’s image, but that which flows from the future toward the past, according to the image of a river that empties itself and sinks more and more into the past, to the extent that the past sinks more and more into itself. If time thus “steps back,” “drawing back” so to speak, instead of advancing, then the now becomes constantly “younger than itself,” since it is renewed and rejuvenated ceaselessly at the point where the present springs out from the future. At the same time, whatever is the direction of time, according to whatever directional scheme its movement is to be conceived, the now that ceaselessly becomes older and younger than itself, 24

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has always strictly the same age as itself, since it is constantly and each time now. That this triple temporal determination—(1) becoming older than itself; (2) becoming younger than itself; (3) keeping the same age as itself—is fitting to the One as participant in time only if it is interpreted as the “now” is what a phenomenological interpretation can bring to light. Only the now, indeed, can satisfy this triple requirement, and not the things that come to be in time: for man, for instance, to become older than himself is never to become younger; if, by contrast, we are speaking of the now, the contradiction is only apparent. Indeed, what these remarkably difficult passages are showing is that time can be thought of according to two inverse directional schemes that henceforward cancel out one another. The stake of the paradoxes raised by Plato consists in showing, as a consequence, that time is in no way an oriented change if, by “oriented change,” we must understand every change unfolding according to a unique and irreversible direction, from the “before” to the “next,” which are already in themselves temporal determinations. If in fact every oriented change unfolds in time, time is not itself an oriented change: such is the conclusion to which Plato wants to lead us. Only the becoming of an inner-temporal being can be legitimately thought of as an oriented change— an inner-temporal being that, in aging, sees its days, its weeks, and its years grow. By thus underscoring this paradox according to which time, oriented according to two inverse directions, has no “direction” at all, as opposed to a becoming or an inner-temporal change that always unfolds from the “before” toward the “next,” because the anterior determinations of the becoming entity cannot be exchanged with its ulterior ones, Plato intends to show that time, in itself, is in no way temporal. Thus, while the time of the thing, its coming to be from the “before” to the “next,” is a continuous succession of modifications that take place according to an immutable (directional) sense and consequently can be thought of as an oriented change, the One that “falls” into time, the now, “at the same time” (ἅμα) rejuvenates and ages, all the while retaining the same age as itself. Time is not in itself oriented; it has absolutely no direction: this is what results from the Platonic irony, whose triumph is consecrated by the reciprocal ruin of these opposed representations of time. Or rather time can be thought of as having a (directional) sense only if one confuses it with what is temporal, only if one thinks time itself within the horizon of inner-temporality. By showing that time, because it can be indifferently thought of as a “change” according to two inverse directional schemes, has no “direction” at all, since there is no “direction” for a change except in time, from the formerly to the next, Plato ironically denounces §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

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every attempt to think of time itself as flowing in time, by advancing from the past toward the future, or by flowing, instead, from the future toward the past. Indeed, to affirm that time has a “direction” is nothing other than to maintain either that the past “precedes” the present, because the latter grows unceasingly from time past while progressing in the direction of the future, or inversely that the future “precedes” the past to the extent that it is “not yet” past, but will be “next” (time goes from the future toward the past by passing through the present). But all “precedence” and all “anteriority,” as inner-temporal determinations, have sense precisely only when we are speaking of that which takes place or happens in time—for example, in order to describe the temporality proper to an inner-temporal change such as “aging”: “at first” the man is young, “next” he becomes old. Now, it is through an unacceptable metabasis that these inner-temporal determinations are transferred to the horizontal dimensions of time (past, present, and future), and that time is thought of as a directional change: the future, as horizon for the appearance of every fact “to come,” is neither “before” the past nor “after” it, neither precedes nor succeeds it, for the “before” and the “after” can serve only to date inner-temporal events, and what is more, from the point of view of the past (one can determine the phases or the moments of a change, for example, only if it is already accomplished, by ordering them according to a linear schema, as a sequence of temporal situations governed by the difference between the before and the after: “first” this, “afterward” that). By “before” and “next,” one thus cannot designate the relation that is established between temporal horizons, but only the relation that is set up in the past tense between the inner-temporal phases of a change, of a process or of an action that lasts. The result is that time is not at all a “change” and has none of the features of a change, being oriented or, again, stretching itself between a “before” toward a “next.” But doesn’t this interpretation of the Parmenides make Plato say more things than he actually says? Certainly. The question for us, however, is whether it can be made consistent with all the passages that this dialogue devotes to time; it must, then, pass the test of being confronted with the subsequent passage: “Do we recall that the older comes to be older than something that comes to be younger?”—“We do.”—“So, since the One comes to be older than itself, wouldn’t it come to be older than a self that comes to be younger?”—“Necessarily.”— “Thus it indeed comes to be both younger and older than itself.”—“Yes.” 26

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“But it is older, isn’t it, whenever, in coming to be, it is at the now time (τὸ νῦν), between was and will be (τὸν μεταξὐ τοῦ ἦν τε καὶ ἔσται)? For as it proceeds from the past [the before] to the future [the next], it certainly won’t jump over (ὑπερϐήσεται) the now.”—“No, it won’t.”—“Doesn’t it stop coming to be older when it encounters the now? It doesn’t come to be, but is then already older, isn’t it? For if it were going forward, it could never be grasped by the now. A thing going forward is able to lay hold of both the now and the later [or next] (ἔπειτα)—releasing the now and reaching for the later [or next] (τοῦ μὲν νῦν ἀφιέμενον, τοῦ δ’ἔπειτα ἐπιλαμϐανόμενον), while coming to be between the two (μεταξὺ), the later [or next] and the now.”—“True.”—“But if nothing that comes to be can sidestep the now, whenever a thing is at this point, it always stops its comingto-be (ἐπίσχει ἀεὶ τοῦ γίγνεσθαι) and then is whatever it may have come to be.” (152a– d; PCW, 384– 85, trans. modified) After having recalled the conditions that the One must satisfy in order to be in time, Plato proceeds to a systematic destruction of his own hypothesis by putting in relief the contradictions that every conception of the One-being that conceives of it as plunged into time inevitably falls into. The entire argument rests here on the notion of μεταξὺ: middle, intermediary, interval, the space between. In what sense can the now be defined as an interval or a middle between the past and the future? Plato, for one, is content to say, “between was and will be”: for, strictly speaking, the now can be said “to be” only in the present tense—its being cannot be conjugated either in the past or in the future tense. Of the now, only one thing can be said: that it is now. While in the first hypothesis the conditions the One had to satisfy led us to conceive of time as a change without a stable substratum, a sort of antilogistic or hetero-logical Heraclitean flux, this time the now can be the occasion only for a tautological discourse, of the sort: “the now is now.” The now under consideration is the now of Parmenides, from which all becoming is excluded, since it is present without remainder: οὐδέ ποτ’ ἦν οὐδ’ ἔσται ἐπεὶ νῦν ἔστιν ὁμοῦ πᾶν, ἕν, συνεχές: “Nor was it [the being] ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, continuous.” The critique of the hypothesis of the One participating in time here rests against arguments of Eleatic origin. It seems that Plato applied to the One in time the paradoxes of Zeno relative to movement. Indeed, Zeno showed that movement was unthinkable by relying on a concept of space as constituted of indivisible parts and thus discontinuous. If movement is divisible in actuality, as Aristotle will say, Achilles will never catch up with the tortoise, even if he runs twice as fast, because, at the moment §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

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when he finds himself at the place previously occupied by the tortoise, the tortoise, who moves half as fast, will yet have traveled a distance equal to half of that covered by his competitor. In short, Zeno denied the reality of movement by thinking of the line on which the trajectory unwinds as a collection of indivisible and contiguous points. Now, Plato seems to take up here an analogous argument in order to attack not the reality of movement, but rather that of time. If all that comes to be in time could not “avoid the now,” and if the now designates an interval (μεταξὺ) between past and future—that is to say, a part of time—then all that passes through the now must have its becoming “stopped” there, just as Achilles’s movement is itself stopped by the discontinuous character of the Zenonian line. Henceforward the conclusion of the aporia can only be the following: the now is not a part or an interval of time, just as the line is not a juxtaposition of points. Neither is the point a part of the line nor the now a part of time, but only a limit (in the mathematical sense) in an infinite process of division: this is why, just as the point is in no place (ἄτοπον), so the now is in no time: this is distinctive of the ἐξαίφνης (the sudden) of the third hypothesis. The passage quoted from the Parmenides thus seems clarified, thanks to this comparison. And yet, not so! Indeed, the type of interpretation we have just put forward meets up against an objection of principle: Plato, who quite often employs the analogy of the line, doesn’t do so in this passage in order to conceive the phenomenon of time. What’s the reason? Precisely because time, as I have tried to establish, is strictly unthinkable in terms of oriented change. Time, put otherwise, is not in the image of Achilles’s race. What Plato wants to show, in sum, through the reciprocal ruin of the first two hypotheses, is that time is in no way thinkable according to the scheme of an inner-temporal change. This is why the argument of the stop or the suspension of becoming in the now is Zenonean only in appearance: we should take it up and deepen its meaning by leaving entirely aside the perceptual analogies that would allow us to figure time in the form of a movement of some sort. What, then, are the sense and the bearing of this argument? Its bearing is indicated to us in the conclusion that Plato draws from it: since the now constitutes the stasis of becoming, its stopping point, then in the now the One does not become at once both older and younger than itself; it is older and younger than itself: consequently, “the One always both is and comes to be older and younger than itself” (152e; PCW, 385, modified). This passage contradicts the text found in 141c, upon which I have already commented, and the general sense of which was that becoming cannot be said in relation to a being, but only with relation to a becoming, to the extent that the now does not possess outside of itself a second now to which it 28

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could be compared, but is always now, insofar as it becomes it endlessly, and thus can be compared only to itself at a different moment of time: the becoming is a relation relating to itself, without another comparandum than itself. While in 141c Plato refused to mix the determinations that issued from Being [l’ être] with those issued from becoming—“Regarding a thing in the course of becoming different, it must not have come to be, be going to be, or be different from what comes to be different; it must become different, and nothing else” (PCW, 375, modified)—in this passage, on the contrary, what could be affirmed only of the “becoming older” is true presently also of the “being older,” to the extent that the One, progressing in time, encounters the now and has its progression “stopped” there. But what are these dialectical subtleties aiming to explain? In order to answer this question, it is not enough to do philological exegesis; it is necessary to correctly orient one’s gaze not only on the phenomena that Plato describes, but on those that, ironically, he does not describe, and toward which the dialectical contradictions that progressively reveal themselves have the task of leading us. The contradiction that Plato underscores, apropos of the “now” (τὸ νῦν), which is mentioned here for the first time (even if, as I have insisted, it was already underlying, but in another sense, the developments on time of the first hypothesis), is that, in the now, becoming is itself in some way stopped, the “flux” of time frozen and petrified, so that it can’t be said of the One that is in the now that it becomes, but only that it is. On this subject Damascius will speak of a “suspension” (ἐπίσχεσις) of time in the now. The questions that are addressed to the interpreter are the following: (1) What sort of now did Plato have in view when he defined it as the stasis of becoming, since every becoming is in itself ek-static, in the sense in which it is, as we shall see, a “going out” (τὸ ἐκστάν) of itself toward itself, happening suddenly and, so to speak, “by a leap,” as the passages devoted to the sudden (τὸ ἐξαίφνης, where the prefix ἐξ- is present: “outside of”) attest? Put otherwise, what differentiates the now (τὸ νῦν) that Plato speaks of here from the sudden to which he will have recourse later in his dialectical argumentation? (2) Regarding this contradiction between the now and the becoming and, more generally, this conception of the now as a “stop”: does Plato assume it as his own, or does it rather have an ironic and critical function, indicating to us how not to think of time, rather than how time must be conceived? (3) Finally, is the conception that Plato develops here compatible or not with my interpretation of the preceding passages, according to which only the now can satisfy the triple requirement: becoming older than oneself; becoming younger than oneself; retaining the same age as oneself? §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

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To answer this last question first, it is clear that what I have called the “now,” and that satisfied these three requirements, is not the now that Plato presently speaks of, and of which one can rightly say only one thing: that it is older, younger, and contemporaneous to itself. Now, it is precisely the aporiae into which this latter concept of “now,” as suspension and stopping of becoming, drags us, that will lead us to its “overcoming” in the third hypothesis and to the “doctrine” of the ἐξαίφνης. But exactly which aporiae are at issue? In order to get the answer to this question, it will work best to begin not so much from Platonic texts as from things themselves. The fundamental contradiction against which every understanding of the “now” owes itself to be measured is, indeed, the following: on the one hand, the now is that which, because it becomes continuously, is always other: aging, it rejuvenates by bursting forth anew from the future; on the other hand, the now is that “in” which everything takes place and becomes: it is perpetually now, unmoving in the becoming, and thus it is that in which everything stops by ceasing to become; it is that which is perpetuated through time by being always again, perpetually, itself; the ever-now of which Georges Braque could write, “We will never have repose. The present is perpetual.” It is this latter “now” that is aimed at in the second hypothesis of the Parmenides. Now, it is from this contradiction itself between these two senses of now that there bursts forth, at each instant, time: time is nothing other than this realized contradiction. To put it in other terms, the fundamental constitution of time includes this contradiction itself as the condition of possibility of the phenomenon of passage: in order to be able to think a “passage” of time, one must, indeed, necessarily distinguish between two senses of now: the now-ever-new that bursts forth in the present and flows out from the future toward the past, and the ever-now that advances like time advances, from the formerly to the next, the “perpetual” now that, in itself, does not elapse. This contradiction is at the heart of the second hypothesis and makes possible its “overcoming” in the third, with the introduction of the concept of the “sudden.” The analysis of time in terms of “passage” is thus possible only if the conciliation of these two senses of the “now” (what the third hypothesis will attempt, as we shall see) is possible. But let’s first try to grasp the stake of such a conciliation: (1) The first concept of now, for which “becoming older than oneself ” is “to rejuvenate” by bursting forth ceaselessly anew from the future, obliges us to think time as a continual change, as a flux where each now does not cease to become and never is (neither older, nor younger than itself, nor contemporary): the now can be compared only to itself in the course of becoming, without there ever being given a stable point, 30

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outside of this becoming, with regard to which the now could be either “older” or “younger”; if everything becomes continuously, after the manner of the now, at once younger and older than itself, if time is only this becoming and this continual flow, then time is nothing other than the “river” of Heraclitus, where nothing remains stable and identical, and where “everything flows” (πάντα ῥεῖ): it becomes, as a consequence, unthinkable, as suggested by the aporiae of the first hypothesis. (2) If we turn, then, to the second concept of the now, to the now that always is (now) and never changes into the past nor bursts forth from the future, then time can be conceived as constituted by an immutable series of temporal positions, ordered according to the polarity of the “formerly” and of the “next,” only the now, always identical, moving from the past to the future, in such a way that the past “moves away” and the future “moves closer” endlessly: it is no longer the Heraclitean image of the river that could illustrate this second conception of time, but that of the moving thing that remains identical through the continual change of its positions. But the paradoxical consequence of this second conception is that time “is suspended” in the now; for if the now remains in this way (forever now), nothing more comes to be in it: time is immobilized and is as if eternalized in this immutable now. How can we resolve the contradiction between these two different concepts of the now? Which will be the Platonic solution to this at once unbearable and unsustainable contradiction that is time? Does Plato truly sketch something like a “solution” to the problem of time, or rather, does he not content himself with ironically indicating, in the Parmenides, why no solution can be found, in conformity with the position of the problem such as I have just indicated it? The two theses concerning the now are: (1) self-contradictory; (2) contradictory with regard to one another. And these contradictions are a consequence of the fact that the now is defined, in each case, in inner-temporal terms. 1. Each of these theses is self-contradictory. It is easy to see, indeed, that: first, if the now is what becomes at the same time older and younger than itself (first hypothesis), then becoming is dissolved in a series of relations (“younger,” “older,” “equal to self in age”) without any stable substratum underlying these relations: the oldest is said with regard to a youngest, the comparison is established only between comparatives, so that the One could be said to be “older” only in relation to the “younger” that it has become: nothing remains, in time, not even the now, which does not stop renewing itself; becoming is nothing more than this Heraclitean “stream” of a future that flows endlessly into the past, and of a past that is only the §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

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present made-past, a past become such through the “passage” in it of the now. Second, if, according to the second hypothesis, the now is what remains stable and identical to itself, in the sense of an ever-present, and if it never becomes, but is at the same time older and younger than itself and others, then the whole becoming is immobilized, and there is no more than a single and vast present, the presence of which is perpetual: time finds its “suspension” in the now, for, in such a now, it abolishes itself as such. 2. These two theses are contradictory with regard to one another. According to the first one, time is that change which happens to the various times and which makes the future become present and the present, past, by virtue of the continual renewal of the present; and, according to the second, time is the multiplicity of temporal situations, ruled by the opposition of the “before” and the “next,” and occupied successively by a unique now, which does not become other than itself, is not renewed by bursting forth endlessly anew from the future, but maintains itself always present, is an evernow, a perpetual now. But couldn’t we resolve such contradictions between a time that is only “passage,” without anything that passes, and a time that does not “pass,” since every becoming is suspended there in the stasis of the now? Couldn’t we reconcile these two concepts of the now, the ever new now that never ceases to become what it is (that never ceases to change into itself ) and the perpetual now that does not cease to be what it becomes, that is, always and again, now? Such a conciliation is not simply motivated by a desire for dialectical prowess, but is indispensable in order to apprehend phenomenologically the phenomenon of “passage,” which puts into play the two concepts of now: indeed, in order for the phenomenon of the “passage” of time to be graspable, it is necessary that the now splits into a now-just-past and yet is retained by the memory (what Husserl would call the “primary memory”), and a now-that-does-not-elapse (the ever-current present of the Urimpression), in relation to which it can be said that the first now “has elapsed,” and eventually measure this passage by taking as frame of reference the uniform movement of a clock. Without this splitting of the present as past-present and present-still-present, it would be impossible to apprehend the phenomenon of passage as inner-temporal determination of time. But, if it is necessary to think at the same time of the present as that which remains one and identical and as that which does not cease to be altered, endlessly other in its emergence, then only two solutions seem possible. The first one would be to distinguish levels (as Husserl will do) in temporality, separating (1) the various immutable temporal positions (Zeitstelle) that form the texture of objective time; (2) the present of the Urim32

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pression as temporal “phase” in continuous flow, which is modified in retention, then in retention of retention, and belongs to the “flow” of consciousness; and (3) the “Living Present,” in which this flow has its source, that is to say, the absolute “nunc stans,” which is the perennial form in which the phases endlessly pass away and the “present” changes itself into the immediate past, and in which henceforward the immutable form of time itself as “passage” resides. Proper to this “Living Present” is that it tries to conciliate dialectically the opposed determinations of a flux and of a present that does not flow and that is a perpetual now. It is the contradiction in terms of an “originary persistent flow (urtümliche stehende Strömen).” The second possibility would be to adopt Plato’s ironic “solution”—that is, to try to find a way out of the aporia raised by the duality of the now by recurring to the ἐξαίφνης, the sudden, and, by posing it outside of becoming, no longer to think of time itself as a change that develops, as a flow or a “passage.” What is proper to the two concepts of the now that we have contrasted is that they cannot be formulated without borrowing their determinations from inner-temporality: passing, staying, changing, aging, becoming younger are modifications that occur to a being that occupies a certain fringe of duration and unfolds its existence in time. Thus, whether one apprehends temporality as a Heraclitean flux, a multiplicity of relations without a stable reference point, where the now becomes at each instant both older and younger than itself, or as a series of immutable positions of an identical now that is only older and younger than itself, but does not become so, and where the becoming is as “in suspension”—in both cases, the nows present themselves, each time, under a double horizon of anteriority and posteriority: they succeed a now that is not yet and change themselves into a now that is no longer: the now, as Plato puts it, is always the “middle” between a “was” and a “will be” (τὸν μεταξὺ τοῦ ἦν τε καὶ ἔσται: 152b), between a “before” and a “next,” for the One that is in time progresses only by “letting go” of the now, in order to “catch” the next. Things are entirely different for the sudden, which withdraws from every horizon of anteriority and of posteriority, and is not “in” time, on the same level as the other nows, nor “outside” of time, on a level superior to them, but opens its own “horizon of originariness,” and indicates that beginning from which time endlessly happens to itself, the living source of time that rises (orior, origo) only with it. While the now (τὸ νῦν) for Plato has essentially the figure of the between-time and is always the in-between of the before and the next, the sudden, by contrast, is not a between-time of time; it follows nothing and precedes nothing, for it does not proceed from the time that, inversely, proceeds from it. Thus, it is in order to find §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

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a way out of the aporiae of the first two hypotheses, which both mobilize, without saying so directly, concepts of the now borrowed from innertemporality, that Plato has recourse to this paradoxical, atypical, and atopical (ἄτοπον) “instant,” which finds its place nowhere in becoming and “is in no time”: μηδ’ ἐν ἑνὶ χρόνῳ εἶναι (156c2). Neither in time nor outside of time, neither changing nor at rest, the sudden has its place neither within the now, from which it differs, nor in the transition from the now to the next: it has no place in the “order of succession.” Its situation is analogous to that of the One from the third hypothesis, which is and is not— that is to say, which participates in both beingness and nonbeingness, but does not reduce to one or the other: it is outside of the alternative of being [l’ étant] and of no-thing [né-ant] that prescribes to Parmenidean ontology its horizon. The third hypothesis of the Parmenides indeed strives to reconcile the antithetical positions of the first two hypotheses. The One-being, or the “One-Many,” was participating in time to the extent that it was participating in beingness; the One as One refused this double participation; the third hypothesis, by affirming of the One both that it is and that it is not, will have to accord it a certain relation to time: the One that is and is not participates in time without being in time. Not being in time, while nevertheless participating in it, signifies something other than being purely and simply outside of time, in the immobile eternity of Parmenidean being: between the inner-temporality of the now and immobile eternity, there is the ἐξαίφνης that, without being in time—neither “now” nor between two nows—nevertheless allows the passage of one now to the other and makes possible the becoming. In a first phase the sudden is presented as that in which the passage from rest to movement and from movement to rest is accomplished: “And whenever, being in motion, it [the One] comes to a rest, and whenever, being at rest, it changes to moving, it must itself, presumably, be in no time at all (μηδ’ ἐν ἑνὶ χρόνῳ εἶναι).”—“How is that?”—“It won’t be able to undergo being previously (πρότερον) at rest and later (ὕστερον) in motion or being previously in motion and later at rest without changing.”—“Obviously not.”—“Yet there is no time in which something (τι) can, simultaneously (ἅμα), be neither in motion nor at rest.”—“Yes, you’re quite right.”—“Yet surely it also doesn’t change without changing.”—“Hardly.”—“So when does it change? For it does not change while it is at rest or in motion, or while it is in time.”—“Yes, you’re quite right.”

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“Is there, then, this queer thing, this non-place (ἄτοπον τοῦτο), in which it might be, just when it changes?”—“What queer thing or non-place?”—“The sudden (τὸ ἐξαίφνης). The sudden seems to signify something such that changing occurs from it to each of two states (ὡς ἐξ ἐκεινου μεταϐάλλον εἰς ἑκάτερον).” (156c– d) [PCW, trans. modified, 388] The sudden (τὸ ἐξαίφνης) is thus that beginning from which (ἐξ) two inverse changes can be accomplished—from movement to rest and from rest to movement—this non-place (ἄτοπον), this strange in-between, that is neither change, nor rest, but allows the passage from the one to the other. How should it be interpreted? As Diès rightly stresses, since to change is to go out of one’s state, the sudden is nothing other than this going out itself, expressed by the particle ἐξ-, a “going out” that is accomplished not in the now, since in the now something either changes or is at rest, but completely “outside of time.” Henceforward, what does this paradoxical “outside-time” mean? Following Damascius, it could be understood by putting the text from the Parmenides in relation to the passage from Physics VI, where Aristotle asserts (235 and following) that there is no first moment of a change, by virtue of the continuity of movement and of time, which is to say, by virtue of their infinite divisibility in power: “Aristotle has shown clearly,” comments Damascius, “that nothing moves or changes in the now (οὐδὲν ἐν τῷ νῦν κινεῖται οὐδὲ μεταϐάλλεται) but that in it movement is accomplished (κεκίνηται) and change achieved (μεταϐέϐληται), while it is necessarily in time that change and movement are being accomplished (μεταϐάλλεται δὲ καὶ κινεῖται ἐν χρόνῳ). What is sure is that, the leap (ἅλμα) of movement being a part of movement, the part that is moving (τὸ ἐν τῳ κινεῖσθαι) will not be moving in the now (οὐκ ἐν τῷ κινεῖσθαι).” The “leap” of the change thus would not take place in the now, by virtue of its infinite divisibility in power, which allows the continuity of time in action, but outside of time, in the sudden. Such an interpretation is surely right— and yet, it is not sufficient, to the extent that it takes as a reference point the Aristotelian concept of the now and does not account for the specificity of the analyses of the Parmenides. It presupposes the analogy of time with the line, which never appears in this dialogue. The timelessness of the sudden here signifies in principle something other than the non-spatiality of the point : it refers, as I have tried to establish, to the fact that the present is not what occurs “between” the past and the future, that the present is neither “now” nor “later,” to the extent that it escapes all inner-temporal determinations; in short, it refers to the

§2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

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fact that time is not itself in time. If one adopts this lectio difficilior, it is necessary to conclude that the definition of the ἐξαίφνης as “something such that changing occurs from it to each of two states” perhaps does not refer only to these changes that are the transition from movement to rest and from rest to movement, but equally to the two changes beginning from which time was conceived in the first two hypotheses—namely, aging and growing younger. To participate in time means, for the One, as we recall, to become at the same time (ἅμα) older than itself and younger than itself, or put another way, to take on these two inverse changes. Now, then, it is not in the now that the One may take on these two changes, since the now designates rather the stopping of the becoming (the second hypothesis): the ek-stasis of change, its exit outside of itself, cannot take place in the stasis of the now. Thus, it is necessary that “the two inverse changes,” the aging and the rejuvenation, that fall to the One to the extent that it is in time, have their starting point in the sudden, and that the ἐξαίφνης be that-beginning-from-which (ἐξ) the two changes constitutive of time occur simultaneously— or rather, the two changes constitutive of the One, insofar as it participates in time, the coming to be older than itself and the coming to be younger than itself. As the “something such that changing occurs from it to each of two states,” the sudden appears as the ironic but in no way arbitrary “solution” to this realized contradiction that is the phenomenon of passage: this phenomenon, as we have seen, supposes a splitting of the now in itself, a splitting between a now that is endlessly made-past by springing forth ever anew from the future and an ever-now in relation to which the first now can be said to be “past,” and in the perenniality of which resides the very possibility of something like a “passage.” Neither one of these two senses of now, by itself, allows us to account for the passage of time, the first to the extent where it dissolves the becoming into a plurality of relations, the second to the extent where becoming is itself, as it were, “suspended” in it. While according to the first sense of now time appears as an oriented movement from the future toward the past, according to the second sense time progresses toward the future, as the immutable now ceaselessly progresses. These two meanings of now, at once indissociable and contradictory, nevertheless have in common the fact of being both understood on the basis of the inner-temporal phenomenon of change: a change oriented according to two opposite directions. The ἐξαίφνης, on the contrary, is not situated on the same plane as the nows, for it is fundamentally of another nature than them. It eludes the alternative of rest and change, just as the One eludes the alternative of beingness and non-beingness. It is what enables the passage from the now to the next, insofar as what allows this 36

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passage is not itself in time in the manner of the now, apprehended itself within the horizon of inner-temporal determinations, as “proceeding from the before to the next,” or flowing from the future toward the past. It neither lasts nor passes away, for it cannot receive any of the determinations that fall to what is in time; it cannot be thought itself against the mea sure of inner-temporal concepts. Neither single nor double, neither identical nor diff erent, neither in time in the manner of an innertemporal thing or process that lasts by modifying itself nor outside of time, neither mobile nor at rest, but this “non-place” of time, this “outside time” of time, which is that through which and in which, that through the event of which time, unceasingly and without weakness, is constantly born to itself. Thus, the now appears always hand in hand with an understanding of time within the horizon of inner-temporality, in terms of oriented change, of which Plato himself denounced the insufficiency, and announces itself in time only under the condition of an anteriority and of a posteriority, as “succeeding” to the preceding now that it was and “preceding” the next now that it “will be,” succeeding the past that it was and preceding the future that it has to be, as the “between was and will be” (152b). But the sudden, on the contrary, is as if in advance freed from every condition of anteriority and of posteriority, ab-solute in its arising, in no way subordinated to a prior temporal horizon; in its bursting forth from and in itself, it brings with itself its own horizon: the horizon of a present-origin, which neither succeeds nor proceeds from any previous present and does not inherit from itself under the form of a past-present. By arising in its absoluteness as incommensurable with respect to a prior past (a present that was) or to a prior future (a present to come), it makes time itself arise in the split between its radically heterogeneous and nonsynchronizable times: it forbids every apprehension of time according to the mea sure of the now as a phenomenon that is through and through temporal—that is to say, every understanding of time as a certain change occurring to the now, a change unwinding itself in time and receiving from time its direction and meaning. What the paradoxical dialectic of the Parmenides thus allows to be brought to light is that time is not a change occurring to the now nor, consequently, a phenomenon taking place in time. Only that which changes in time can change, elapse, remain, age, or grow young, but these determinations in no way can fall to time itself or to the now, conceived in its phenomenological rigor, as the ἐξαίφνης, the sudden. This is the sole affirmative conclusion that emerges in this respect from this dialogue of unequaled depth, which throws an intense, yet furtive because soon darkened, light on the major difficulty that the principal thoughts on time will articulate, §2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

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throughout metaphysics: time is not in time, and is in no way thinkable when measured against inner-temporal determinations. Perhaps this is nothing other than what Plato had in view in this enigmatic formula, delivered up to so many exegeses, from the Timaeus, where time is defi ned as “a moving image of eternity” (37d5; PCW, 1241). Time changes continually into time from immobile eternity; it is not its own mea sure, but has its mea sure in that which transcends it. Could not the sentence from the Timaeus therefore be understood in this mythical cosmology as having an ironic sense, which is to say, above all, a negative one, leading back to a fundamental aporia? Plato, that thinker who allegedly “scorned” the becoming and substituted for it the immutable Forms, on the contrary grasped it so deeply that he freed it from the fundamental aporiae that will obscure its understanding after him, from Aristotle to Husserl. These aporiae and difficulties concentrate, first and foremost, around the status of the present, as it is revealed by Aristotle’s endeavor.

§3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV Why do we say that time passes away, when we do not say with just as much emphasis that it is born? Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 425 There is no equivalent in Aristotle’s Physics for the ἐξαίφνης, this originpresent that, unlike the now (τὸ νῦν), does not announce itself against a horizon of anteriority and posteriority, but bursts forth ab-solutely from itself—freed from any relation to a prior past that, so to speak, it would relieve [relève] or to a future that would succeed it—rising up outside of the time of succession. On the contrary, instead of denouncing, as Plato did through his paradoxes, the impossibility of a temporal description of time, Aristotle limits himself to conceiving time without restriction in the light of the inner-temporal now. Far from having in view, beyond the contradictory hypotheses that mutually destroy one another, a truth of time that transcends them, he begins from the contradictions inherent in the now in order to think of it as the focal point where they come together. Far from moving beyond a conception of time centered on the now by posing an “outside-time,” the sudden, his conception of time is instead held entirely within the limits of a thought centered on the now and on its antagonistic determinations: at once the same and other, at once simple and double, limit and number, end and beginning, ensuring the division of time in power and its continuity in actuality. Like the two concepts of 38

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now that appeared to us in the course of the analysis of the Parmenides and that Plato criticized as insufficient, Aristotle’s now, despite its internal tensions and contradictions, holds itself entirely within the horizon of anteriority and posteriority that is assigned to it by its specific status: it is what articulates—that is, both distinguishes and maintains united—the innertemporal before and after; it is what ensures “the continuity of time (συνέχεια χρόνου)” by putting time past and time future in relation to one another (222a10–11); in short, it is what unifies the temporal continuum as a limit (πέρας) within that continuum. However, should we conclude from this that time as defined by Aristotle could be equated to the “ordinary” or “vulgar concept of time,” defined by Heidegger as a “course of nows which is present-at-hand”?  Does each now follow from another now, which, in a sense, it “relieves” or, instead, does it succeed itself by both renewing itself and bequeathing itself to itself as a now-past, all the while remaining, at every moment, now? Is it such a phenomenon that Aristotle has in view when he defines time as “the number of movement with respect to anterior and posterior”? Probably not. Such will be, in any case, the questions that will here serve as a guiding thread in our reading. Moreover, is the Aristotelian interpretation of time bound up, as Heidegger thinks, with an understanding of the meaning of Being in the exclusive horizon of the Vorhandenheit? Should we not instead assert that this interpretation of time is not so much the consequence of its connection with a specific interpretation of Being, but of a thoroughly temporal understanding of time, which at once— and contradictorily— apprehends time itself as being in time and refuses to conceive of it starting from innertemporal determinations? In a sense, then, it would be through a dramatics inherent in time itself that time would thus come to be covered over and obscured to the advantage of inner-temporality. The Aristotelian treatise on time, in any case, starts, in its exoteric part, with a series of aporiae concerning the being of time, or rather its beingness (οὐσία) (218a2). Must time be situated on the side of beings, or of non-beings? Notice that Aristotle does not answer this question in the Physics or anywhere else in his works, and the aporiae that he raises regarding the beingness of time are abandoned as soon as they have been articulated, to the point that Simplicius, at the end of his commentary on Book IV, proposes to take them up and reconsider them anew in the appendix entitled Corollarium de tempore. These aporiae regarding the beingness of time are more particularly centered on the now, since, alone, it appears as that which, of time, truly is: “Again, the ‘now’ which seems to bound the past and the future— does §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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it always remain one and the same or is it always other and other (ιἢ ἂλλο καὶ ἂλλο)?” (218a8–10; Basic Works of Aristotle, 289). All the questions about the beingness or non-beingness of time gather around this fundamental aporia: indeed, if the now is thought of as being one and the same, facts ten thousand years old would be contemporary to those of today and would coexist with them in a single present: there would be only one eternal now (218a28–29); put otherwise, the now would no longer announce itself within an horizon of anteriority and posteriority; it would succeed nothing, and no time would succeed it, for “nothing would be anterior or posterior to anything else” (218a30; Basic Works, 290, modified). But if coexistence cannot be extended to several nows on pain of ruining every succession, then, inversely, to assert that the now is always other is to assert that it sinks and is reduced to nothing at each instant: the previous now will then necessarily be destroyed by the following now. But at which moment will the now be destroyed? Not in the moment where it is—that is to say, where it is now; but neither in the moment where it no longer is, for then it will have been destroyed; nor, again, in the intervening moment between these two moments, for such an interval is infinitely divisible. Thus, the now can be neither reduced to nothing “in itself” (ἐν ἑαυτῷ), nor destroyed “in another (ἐν ἂλλῳ)” (218a16–17; Basic Works, 289), nor again in the interval that separates it from this other now: for, since this interval is infinitely divisible, which is to say it includes within itself an infinity of nows, this would amount to saying that the now would coexist with this infinity of other nows. Of the now, it can be said neither that it remains ever the same nor that it continually changes into an other, but only, eventually, that it “changes into itself,” which is to say that it renews itself while remaining (now)—which is all the more the indication of a difficulty, or even the formulation of a riddle, than the outline of a solution. In any case, the now is the crucial point where all the problems bearing on the thinking of time are wound and unwound in Aristotle’s Physics. Indeed, it is the whole analogy of time with change and movement, whose interpretation rests in the final instance on the analysis of the now. Aristotle gives three arguments that forbid equating time with movement, the third of which is probably the most decisive: (1) “the change and movement (μεταϐολὴ καὶ κίνησις) of each thing are only in the thing which changes or where the thing itself which moves or changes may chance to be; but time is present equally everywhere and with all things” (218b10– 12; Basic Works, 290, modified). (2) “Again, change is always faster or slower, whereas time is not: for ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ are defined by time—‘fast’ is what moves much in a short time, ‘slow’ what moves little in a long time; 40

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but time is not defined by time, by being either a certain amount or a certain kind of it” (218b14–18; Basic Works, 290). In other terms, since the speed of a movement brings in the temporal parameter (speed is the distance traveled divided by the travel time: v = d/t), time cannot be a movement itself having a certain speed. Or again, since change always has a certain speed, and since speed is defined as a ratio where time plays the role of denominator, time cannot be defined as a change, because a change must take place in time: its definition would thus be circular. These first two arguments lead Aristotle to conclude right away that time “is not movement” (218b19; Basic Works, 290), even while it is not “without change” (οὐδ᾽ ἂνευ γε μεταϐολῆς: 218b21). (3) But this conclusion itself rests, finally, on a deeper analysis of the now in its contrast with the substratum (ὑποκείμενον) of change or the moving object of movement. Assuredly, the now is not “in the thing that changes” in the way in which movement is in the moved; it is this irreducibility of the now to any kinetic model that is expressed in the apparently sybilline formula according to which the now “is identical as for its ‘subject’ (ὃ ποτε ὄν), but as for its definition (λόγος), it is other” (219b19); or, by translating more literally, it is “the same as for that which, being, it is [quant à ce qu’ étant il est], but as for its definition it is other.” The aim of this obscure definition is actually nothing other than to show the distance that separates the now in its relation with time from the moving thing in its relation to movement or from the changing subject (ὑποκείμενον) in its relation to change. Indeed, as Rémi Brague has emphasized, the formula ὃ ποτε ὄν is used by Aristotle, in rare occurrences, when he wants to avoid speaking of a “subject”: ὑποκείμενον. The translation frequently adopted by “subject” thus lacks the specificity of this formula, which is endowed with philosophical significance, since it aims to keep separated as far as possible the analysis of the now from the physical model of change. What makes possible the unity of movement is the identity of the moving thing across the modification of its successive locations during its translation from one place to another. As Simplicius remarks in his Commentary, “the anterior and posterior were different things” —for example, the series of the spatial positions occupied by the moving object, while what is the same, in this movement, is the moving object: the latter is, for that reason, the unmoveable substratum of movement. But things are totally otherwise for the now that, even if it is analogous to the moving object, should not be confused with it: for if the now were purely and simply the same, in the sense of a permanent substratum of becoming, time would be “paused” in it, as it is in the second hypothesis of the Parmenides. §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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This is what legitimates Aristotle’s adoption, regarding the now, of a discursive model of analysis borrowed from sophistics; in order to make the status of the now— at once identical and different—intelligible, the Stagirite compares it to the transported object, the moving object, that to a certain extent is different, and to another extent is not, by thinking the moving object according to a well-known sophism: Coriscos in the Lyceum is, in his definition, different from Coriscos in the Agora, because he is now here, and now there (219b16–21): “But the ‘now’ corresponds to the body that is carried along, as time corresponds to the motion. For it is by means of the body that is carried along that we become aware of the ‘anterior and posterior’ in the motion, and if we regard these as countable we get the ‘now.’ Hence in these also the ‘now’ as that which, being, it is, remains the same (ὅ μέν ποτε ὄν νῦν, ἔστι τὸ αὐτό) (for it is what is anterior and posterior in movement), but it is different as for its being (τὸ δ᾽ εἶναι ἕτερον); for it is insofar as the ‘anterior and posterior’ is numerable that we get the ‘now’ ” (219b21–27; Basic Works 292–93, trans. modified). While in the case of movement the substratum is identical and only its positions differ, the case of time is more complex: the now can be thought as the analogon of the moving object only on the condition that the moving object be analyzed exceptionally (and probably in a manner unique in the whole of Aristotle’s works) according to a discursive model borrowed from the sophists: as being the same according to that which, being, it is (ὃ ποτε ὄν), but different as to its being or its definition. The surprising freedom that Aristotle takes here can be explained only by his attention to the specificity of the phenomenon in question. In sum, how can we speak of the now? As Hegel had already noted in the chapter devoted to “sensecertainty” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, to say “Now is noon” is not to attribute to an unchangeable “subject” a changing predicate (“Now is midnight,” and so on), for this type of statement does not have, properly speaking, a logical subject; as Brague points out, “the term ‘now’ occupies the place of the subject only for a certain grammar, and not at all with regard to the meaning. This is why the two elements of the sentence can occupy the stated place and are interchangeable: one can just as well say, ‘now is noon’ as, ‘noon is now.’ There is no genuine subject; beyond the verb ‘to be,’ it is as if these sentences contained only predicates.”  This mode of being of the now explains the recourse to the formula ὃ ποτε ὄν as preferred over that of ὑποκείμενον and the surprising adoption of a logical model of analysis of movement borrowed from sophistics: to affirm that the now is at once the same according to that which, being, it is (ὃ ποτε ὄν), and other according to its definition, really amounts to saying that it is only a “quasi-subject,” the being of which exhausts itself in its definition 42

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and has no proper consistency outside of its temporal location fixed by the logos that states: “Now is noon,” “now is midnight.” There is a double consequence to this analysis of the now: on the one hand, it clarifies all the passages in which Aristotle affirms that time is not movement, even if time can appear only if it accompanies movement, or if it walks hand in hand (ἀκολουθεῖ) with it; for “we have sensation (αἰσθανόμεθα) of movement and time together (ἅμα)” (219a3– 4; Basic Works, 291, trans. modified): from whence it follows that time is not movement (κίνησις), but “something that belongs to movement” (κινήσεώς τι: 219a9–10). These passages are comprehensible only if one grasps both the phenomenological proximity of the now to the moved thing and their irreducible difference, which lies in the now being neither substratum in the physical sense nor “subject” in the logical sense, but only a quasisubject that has a proper being only to the extent that it receives it from its definition—for example, when I say, “Now, it is noon, one o’clock, etc.” Indeed, the now is a quasi-subject because it always plays the role of a predicate, referring back to the subject whose dating it allows. Insofar as it arises from an accidental category of being—that is to say, of being apprehended in the sense of the “when” (ποτέ), the νῦν qua ὃ ποτε ὄν is not a now-subject (neither an ὑποκείμενον nor, a fortiori, an οὐσία), but always a now-predicate, which is to say the now-of-this or -of-that. All the being of the now is concentrated, as a consequence, in its capacity to receive a dating, in its datability. But, on the other hand— and this second consequence is at least as important as the first—it follows from this fundamental distinction between time and movement, between the now and the moved thing, that the now can in no way be thought, in its mode of being, as a “being” whose beingness (οὐσία) would reside entirely in its substratum function; in a word, it follows that time is never thought of by Aristotle as a “sequence of nows” having the mode of Being of Vorhandenheit. However, in his long commentary dedicated, in the Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, to the Aristotelian treatise on time, Heidegger concludes without hesitating: “Our interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of time showed that Aristotle characterizes time primarily as a sequence of nows (Folge von Jetzt), where it should be noted that the nows are not parts from which time is pieced together into a whole.”  To be sure, Heidegger makes quite clear that the now, for Aristotle, is not a “part” (μέρος) of time. But to assert that time is characterized essentially, in Physics Bk. IV, as a “sequence of nows,” is to link implicitly this characterization with what Heidegger himself qualifies as the “vulgar concept of time”—namely, “a free-floating sequence of nows [that is] simply there, and that it is enough to acknowledge in its being-given §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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(Gegebensein).” Moreover, in Sein und Zeit, this link is established in an explicit manner, since in paragraph 81, entitled “Within-timeness [Innertemporality] and the genesis of the vulgar concept of time,” Heidegger quotes Aristotle’s famous definition: τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν ὁ χρόνος, ἀριθμὸς κινήσεως κατὰ τὸ πρότερον καὶ ὕστερον (219b1–2) as testimony for an “interpretation of time [that] moves . . . in the direction of the ‘natural’ way of understanding Being”—that is to say, in the horizon of Being understood in the sense of presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). “And thus,” Heidegger concludes, “for the vulgar understanding of time, time shows itself as a sequence of ‘nows’ which are constantly ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden), simultaneously passing away and coming along.” Now, this link established between the Aristotelian definition of time and the “vulgar” concept of time as “sequence of present-at-hand ‘nows’ ” appears all the more fragile and aporetic, since Heidegger, in his attentive and detailed commentary in the Grundprobleme . . . , has made every effort precisely to mark out the differences between the two. Thus, he writes, for Aristotle, “time is not thrust together and summed up out of nows,” but the now constitutes time itself. Hence is it not contradictory to emphasize, on the one hand, “this talk of time as a sequence of nows,” and to say, on the other, that “the now [note here the use of the singular] is in itself passage, transition,” so that the now is nothing other than time in the plenitude and richness of its phenomenal determinations? This hesitation could be understood not so much as a Heideggerian contradiction in the interpretation of Aristotle, but as a real difficulty that seizes us when we attempt to account for the phenomenon of passage on the basis of the now. But the fact is that the Heideggerian determination of vulgar or ordinary time as “a sequence of nows present-at-hand” cannot apply to Aristotle. Indeed, in order for the nows to “follow one another” and “succeed one another,” it would be necessary for them to be themselves genuine subjects, at once the same as themselves and other than the others; now, not only does Aristotle make every effort to tear the understanding of the now from the horizon of subjecthood by denying it the status of ὑποκείμενον, but he refuses to assert that each now is the same as itself and other than the others, so that nows individuated as subjects could succeed one another; on the contrary, he declares that the now (in the singular) qua single, is at once same and other, inasmuch as it neither remains identical to itself nor changes into another, but changes constantly in itself by rendering itself past. Indeed, it is this determination of the now and it alone that makes possible the phenomenon of “passage.” Passage presupposes that the now is, contradictorily and yet inseparably, same and other, one and double, beginning (ἀρχή) and end (τέλος); it presupposes, according to a paradoxical logic to which the 44

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phenomena constrain the “physicist,” that the now is neither the same as itself (in which case there would no longer be time), nor continuously other than itself (in which case it would no more be “now”). Simplicius states it forcefully in his Commentary: “If, then, it [the now] is not the same nor one after another, it is clear that it does not exist. So first he proves that there is not one after another as follows: if there is one ‘now’ after another, the earlier must have ceased to be; but the ‘now’ cannot have ceased to be; therefore ‘nows’ are not one after another [cannot succeed themselves].” There is no sense whatsoever in saying that the nows succeed one another— and, a fortiori, that time is a “sequence of nows”—for the simple reason that there is, each time, only a single now that is precisely ‘now’; that which is not one now is not one now either; and, at the same time, the now, if its self-succession is excluded, also cannot coexist with itself: time is only on the strict condition that there is not a single now. This twofold phenomenological evidence leads Aristotle to refuse to affirm, in the exoteric part of his treatise (which Simplicius is commenting on here), that the now is either always the same or always other and, in the esoteric part, to dismiss attributing to it a substrate-function by rejecting every pure and simple identification of the now with the moving object. Considered in itself, the now escapes necessarily the horizon of presence-at-hand: perhaps it is not from a certain understanding of Being in the sense of presence-at-hand that the Aristotelian characterization of time results, in all its complexity and subtlety; conversely, a thorough study of this determination of time would lead perhaps to relativizing the one-sidedness of the Aristotelian understanding of being. How can we account for the phenomenon of “passage”? This is the difficulty around which the Aristotelian position of the problem of time is elaborated. And it is on this point that the Heideggerian position stumbles. In the Grundprobleme, the “central problem” around which the analysis is entirely built, is qualified as the problem of “the origin of the now” in the original ecstatic temporality of Dasein, articulated according to the three “comportments” according to which the exemplary being gives itself time—namely, expecting, retaining, and enpresenting (or making-present) in their indissoluble cohesion: “Time is therefore originally this expectance, retention, and making-present (Gewärtigen, Behalten, Gegenwärtigen)” that are not, as Husserl thought, “modes of the consciousness of time,” modalities of the temporal grasp of the “then,” of the “formerly,” and of the “now” (Dann, Damals, und Jetzt), but are original temporality itself— that is to say, the modes of its temporalization. Now, isn’t the attempt to derive the “now” in the Aristotelian sense (τὸ νῦν) from original ecstatic temporality in conflict with the irreducible—that is to say, underivable §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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character of the phenomenon of passage— a phenomenon that Heidegger actually had in view when he stressed that “the now is in itself passage, transition”? How is the very enterprise of deriving the “now,” with its character of transition, from the original ecstatic temporality possible if, as Heidegger writes, original time “vergeht weder noch steht sie, sondern sie zeitigt sich. Zeitigung ist das Urphänomen der ‘Bewegung’ ”? How is it possible to conceive the origin of the now as transition and passage if original time “neither passes nor remains, but temporalizes itself ”? How can we conceive the inherent “mobility” in the now if the temporalization of time is in no way thinkable in terms of “mobility,” even while it represents— and Heidegger never furnished the least clarification on this last point— “the original phenomenon of movement”? The impossibility of such a derivation appears even more clearly in the 1927 course, where its meaning is made clear starting from the structuration of the time of every-dayness that Heidegger names “world-time,” defined as the “ forgetful-enpresentingexpectance,” and in which it is no longer the ecstasy of the future, as in temporality proper, that is directive for the temporalization of time, but the making-present (or enpresenting) that dominates within each ecstasy: “If I am expecting something, I always see it into a present. Similarly, if I am retaining something, I retain it for a present, so that all expecting and retaining are enpresenting.” Thus, with an enpresenting being implicated in each expecting and in each retention, the internal cohesion of ecstases in the improper temporalization of temporality is enabled by the primacy of one among them and of its horizontal schema: presence. This worldtime, articulated by means of temporal markers— the “formerly,” the “soon,” the “now”—is the sole time that proximally we know, that of watches, of clocks, and of sundials, that which marks out our daily tasks, and in which the “They” moves all the more easily in that, so to speak, it is at home there, when it is concerned with time, has or has not the time, wastes its time or, more generally, “uses” time. The possibility of reading time from a watch is grounded in a “taking time” (Sich-Zeit-nehmen) or, again, in a “using-time”; this “using,” however, does not have the meaning of a pure and simple numeration or quantification of time, but of a “taking into account of time” that takes hold of it in view of a concernful dealing; when informing myself of what time it is, I do not so much inquire as to a numerical determination as I seek to grasp what time there remains for me to complete such or such a task: the time of concern is thus essentially time for. . . . When we look at the time on a watch in our concerned commerce with beings and we say “now,” this now is not merely a now, but signifies “now, it is time for . . .”; when reading time we are not turned toward the now as something present-at-hand, but toward the task to com46

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plete, that for which it is now time, toward the affair that occupies us. This character of the now already belongs as such to the Being of equipment as its “finality,” its in-order-to (Um-zu); when concernful Dasein counts with time and makes usage of its time, the expression “now” draws back behind its reference and its constitutive referral: Dasein is not alongside the watch where it reads the time; instead, it is alongside what it is time for, and that for which it decides that it is now time. This referential structure of the now, according to which time can be appropriate or inappropriate, opportune or inopportune to a given affair, is that by which the now refers finally to the world as totality of relations of the for . . . and of the inorder-to: time, as opportune time, thus, has the character of significance (Bedeutsamkeit)—that is to say, this trait that belongs to the environing world in general: “It is for this reason that we call the time with which we reckon, which we leave for ourselves, world-time. . . . We give time the name of world-time because it has the character of significance, which is overlooked in the Aristotelian definition of time and everywhere in the traditional determination of time.” Beyond significance, world-time is essentially structured by three other determinations: datability, spannedness (Gespanntheit), and publicness. Now, Heidegger intends to derive the transitionary character of the Aristotelian now precisely from the spannedness character of the time of everydayness: “Aristotle assigns transitionary character to the now; . . . time manifests itself [for him] as a sequence of nows”; but this “transitionary character (Übergangscharakter) of each now is nothing but what we described as the spannedness of time.” Is this interpretation phenomenologically tenable? Can Heidegger derive the transitionary character of the now from spannedness as the character of world-time? And what is to be understood by this “spannedness” of time? Spannedness is a phenomenal trait that belongs to each now considered in itself: “The now does not acquire a breadth and range by my collecting together a number of nows, but just the reverse: each now already has this spannedness within itself in a primary way.” This very spannedness arises from an ecstatic character of original temporality—namely, its stretchedness (Erstrecktheit). If, indeed, temporality is “the ἐκστατικόν pure and simple,” “the primordial ‘outsideof-itself ’ in and for itself,” it must be, in that very way, “intrinsically stretched (in sich selbst erstreckt),” in such a way that “temporality, as the primary outside-itself, is stretch itself.” Thus, it is from stretchedness, as original character of ecstatic temporality, that the spannedness (Gespanntheit) of the now is derived: “Every now, next, and formerly not only has, each, a date but is spanned and stretched within itself: ‘now, during the lecture,’ ‘now, during the recess.’ No now and no time-moment can be §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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punctualized. Every time-moment is spanned intrinsically, the span’s breadth (Spannweite) being variable.” But this phenomenon has properly nothing in common with the transitionary character (Übergangscharakter) of the now, from which it is a question of “deriving” it: the transitionary character does not signify the temporal stretchedness of the now—the Aristotelian comparison of the now to the point relativizes, in any case, the pertinence of the concept of spannedness—but instead the very fact that, changing, the now remains the same, and that, remaining, it never ceases to be modified. Now, there cannot be any derivation where the phenomenon to derive presents no community of essence and no common “ground” with the phenomenon from which it must be derived. The problem of the “origin” of the now, as it is formulated in the Grundprobleme . . . and indirectly in Sein und Zeit, cannot receive the least solution, as long as the phenomenon to which we must do justice is not taken into account, a phenomenon that constitutes the problematic kernel around which the intrigue of time is wound in Aristotle’s Physics: that of the passage of time. It is hard to see how, beginning from the formal structure of the three ecstases of original time, which are expecting, retention, and enpresenting (making-present), an account of the “mobility” inherent in the now, and of its own paradoxes, could be given: for no matter how I might be stretched toward . . . , in expecting, and retain the immediate past while being turned (oriented) toward the present, if the present were not unceasingly springing forth anew, if it were not continually modifying itself in itself, the transitory character of time could never, in any manner whatsoever, appear. The insufficiency of the Heideggerian interpretation can be surmounted only by a return to the analysis of the now in Aristotle’s Physics and the deepening of its meaning. What will be at stake in such an attempt is no longer the search for the “origin” of the now in the ecstatic temporality of Dasein, but instead the understanding of the “originating-now” that concentrates in itself all the being of time and all of its aporiae. The preceding analyses have brought out: (1) that the now differs fundamentally from the moving thing in that it is not a “subject” (ὑποκείμενον) but, identical as for that which, being, it is (namely, always “now”: ὅ ποτε ὄν), it is nevertheless different as for its definition, which is to say, it receives a dating that is always changing—“now is noon,” “now is midnight,” etc.— so that its being vanishes entirely in a predication deprived of a genuine subject; (2) that the aporia uncovered at the beginning of the exoteric part of the treatise—is the now always the same, or continuously other?— only received the beginning of a solution, in the esoteric part, by the refusal to confer on the now this status of a ὑποκείμενον: being at once both same 48

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and other, the now is neither the same as itself nor other than every other; it is not even comparable to itself, so that the nows cannot be one-after-theother, or, put otherwise, cannot “succeed” one another. For Aristotle, time is not the “sequence of [present-at-hand] nows” by which Heidegger defines the “vulgar” conception of time. But under what conditions is the now— which, in its transition, is nothing other than time itself— capable of furnishing a measure of the movement or, as Aristotle puts it, of being the number (ἀριθμὸς) of movement, in the horizon of the “earlier” and of the “later,” of the formerly and of the next, of the anterior and of the posterior? Every number is, of course, a measure (μέτρον), but every measure is not a number. Number, Aristotle indicates, is said in two senses (διχῶς), numbering number (ἀριθμὸς ἀριθμοῦμεν) and numbered number (ἀριθμὸς ἀριθμούμενος): while numbering number is, for example, ten taken in itself, the numbered number is ten as it is applied to a given quantity (of horses, of men), in such a way that it always and necessarily occupies the predicate position in the proposition that expresses it: “The horses are ten,” and so on—while the numbering number very often occupies the subject position: “Ten is an even number,” and so on. Morever, the specificity of the numbered number resides in the fact that it applies to heterogeneous entities (men, horses), but cannot measure them unless these elements have first been rendered homogeneous, which is to say, if the unit of measure proper to them has been fi xed: “the number of a hundred horses and a hundred men is the same, but the things numbered are different—the horses from the men” (220b10–12; Basic Works, 294). Heterogeneous beings cannot be measured unless the homogeneous unit of measure that is common to them has been defined: the horse, for example. While number, in general, is a synthesis of units, numbered number is the comprehensive articulation of a multiplicity to the extent that this multiplicity has first been brought into a common unit of measure. Now, time, says Aristotle, is number not in the sense of a numbering number, which is instead eternal, or supra-temporal, but in the sense of numbered number (ὁ δὴ χρόνος ἐστὶν τὸ ἀριθμούμενον καὶ οὐχ ᾧ ἀριθμοῦμεν: 219b7– 8). But, since numbered number is always defined in relation to a content that it allows to measure (men, horses), which plays the role of subject, and in relation to which it necessarily occupies the predicate position, what does time qua numbered number number here? Put otherwise, the question raised is, what is the unit of measure proper to time, if every (numbered) number presupposes such a unit of measure? For number is “a measured plurality and a plurality of mea sures”: πλῆθος μεμετρημένον καὶ πλῆθος μέτρων. This question is more difficult than one might first believe: indeed, most commentators §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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affirm that this unit of measure is the now, but this solution seems to be excluded for the following reason: every mea sure, Aristotle constantly points out, must bring to bear two nows, the before and the after, or rather the now taken as double—that is to say, as beginning and as end. To number time is never to add nows taken themselves as the unit of measure: for the unit of measure must be a subject (ὑποκείμενον), and the now, as we have seen, is in no way a subject in this sense. Moreover, it is strictly impossible to add up nows, since they do not coexist and are deprived of all duration. Thus, since every number, as numbered number, is referred to a content of which it allows the measure and to a “subject” in relation to which it only figures in the predicate position (for example, “The horses are ten”), the unit of measure that allows measurement of time itself and, through time, of movement, can be found only in the moved thing itself, precisely insofar as it is moved; this is why “it is only when we have perceived ‘anterior’ and ‘posterior’ in motion that we say that time has elapsed” (Physics 219a23–25; Basic Works, 291, modified). And since it is local movement that furnishes the best unit of measure (that is to say, the most manifest: the movement of the celestial spheres, of the shadow on a sundial, or of water in a water-clock), Aristotle can affirm that “the distinction of ‘anterior’ and ‘posterior’ holds primarily then, in place” (219a14–15; Basic Works, 291, modified). This is why for Aristotle the unit of measure is not primarily in the soul, even if the soul indeed possesses a sort of interior movement (κίνησις δέ τις ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ: 219a5– 6); rather, it is in the exterior movement of things. In other words, it is not the soul that “gives” the time to clocks, insofar as it counts the nows, in the horizon of the formerly and the next, as Heidegger will affirm, interpreting the apparently tautological character of the definition of time as “something counted in connection with motion as encountered in the horizon of earlier and later,” but rather it is the other way around: the soul can measure time only because the unit of measure is primarily in things, insofar as they are moved, in the body that is carried along (φερόμενον), which alone “allows us to be aware of the motion and of the ‘anterior’ and ‘posterior’ involved in it (τὸ φερόμενον, ᾦ τὴν κίνησιν γνωρίζομεν καὶ τὸ πρότερον ἐν αὐτῇ καὶ τὸ ὒστερον)” (219b17–18; trans. modified). The unit of measure, consequently, is not in the soul, even if measure (and thus, too, the numbered number, time itself ) is not without the soul: the soul is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition, for the measurement of time (223a22–29). Thus, it is not in conformity with Aristotelian thought to affirm that the soul “assigns” time to the watch; the soul receives, rather, from the uniform movement of the hands of a watch— or from the movement of the shadow on a 50

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sundial—the unit of measure that allows it to count out time, since this unit of measure resides in the movement alone. One could perhaps go so far as to assert that it is the watch that “assigns” time to the soul, to the extent that it furnishes it with the unit of mea sure common to all the movements in the world, that alone allows the soul to count time, and as a consequence, too, to understand it as “the number of movement in connection with motion as encountered in the horizon of anterior and posterior.” For there is a reciprocity of measurement between time and movement, despite their already amply underlined phenomenological difference: “we measure the movement by the time and vice versa (τῷ μὲν γὰρ χρόνῳ τὴν κίνησιν, τῇ δὲ κινήσει τὸν χρόνον μετροῦμεν)” (220b23–24). To assert that the anterior and the posterior are primordially in place is to maintain that local movement bears within itself the privileged unit of measure of time, to the extent that it results from the translation of a same moving thing (for example, the sun or the watch hand), and that the anterior and the posterior in movement are defined first of all in relation to the unit of movement, as various states (positions) of this moving thing. This turns out to be particularly important when the issue is understanding more precisely the status of the now: the now, which would seem to be “most familiar (γνώριμον μάλιστα: 219b29),” is, rather, “not cognitively understood,” to take up the famous Hegelian formula. For if the unit of measure belongs primarily to movement as such— and actually, to all movements, insofar as they are commensurable—that is to say, insofar as they can be compared under the supposition of a constant speed, measured times and travelled spaces being identical, and the movement of reference, consequently, uniform—the question becomes, what makes all these movements commensurable? Where can we find this constant speed that is their common mea sure, and that makes it so that I can either mea sure the movement of the sun with the movement of the hands on a watch or the other way around? In other words, is there a privileged movement? Wouldn’t it be necessary to posit a sort of arch-movement that would furnish the mea sure for all others, and to locate this movement primordially in the soul, thus making the soul the standard for every mea sure? Nothing in Aristotle’s treatise allows us to rally to such a conclusion. If the Stagirite points out a single uniform movement that, eventually, would have a greater right than the others to serve as the universal standard, it is the movement of the sphere of the fixed stars (223b21 and following). It remains that the measurement and the counting of time are essentially spatial operations, which join the (constant) speed and the space traveled; nothing is further from Aristotle’s meditation than to consider that all the movements of the universe, some faster, others slower, are referred ultimately §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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to the “flow” of the soul —whether the individual soul or the world’s soul—that flows neither “faster” nor “slower,” and would furnish, to this extent, the standard of every measure: for this would amount to falling, necessarily, into an infinite regression—which neither Augustine, nor Bergson, nor Husserl were able to avoid entirely—by considering the time of the soul as a quasi-movement (the “flow” of the inner consciousness of time, the duration, or the distensio animi), which, in turn, presupposes time, and thus must flow “at a certain speed,” at the speed of a second per second, of a minute per minute, and so on. But time is not, for Aristotle, a sort of inner-psychic arch-movement; it doesn’t itself flow, and can have no “speed” whatsoever, since every speed rather presupposes time, measuring the space traveled in a specific time period: time can be only “longer” or “shorter” according to the interval that separates two nows. Actually, a change— and the “flow” of the soul is no exception—can measure only another change, and both changes take place in time, which is the numbered number of change (and, more precisely of local change), but is not itself a change. The soul’s activity of measurement is here nothing other than the setting in relation of several movements and the comparison between them, at least one of which must possess a constant speed, furnishing to the others their unit of measure— and this uniform movement can be found anywhere, and in any case elsewhere than in the soul itself. As a result, it is not only time that mea sures movement, but movement that mea sures time, without the one having primacy, ontologically, over the other. “To measure movement by time is to measure its speed, by comparing the spaces traveled, which are directly measurable, with the travel time assumed to be uniform. To measure time by movement is to measure the travel time by comparing the spaces traveled, under the supposition of a constant speed.” Time measures the speed or velocity of a movement according to the distance travelled (v = d/t), and the speed or velocity of the movement (assuming it is constant) measures the time spent in traveling this distance (t = d/v). In these conditions time, defined as “number,” is nothing other than what allows us to determine such or such measure (of time) for (and through) a movement: it has no reality outside of this measure, just as the number, according to Aristotle, possesses no other reality than that of a predicate for beingnesses, since it derives from the accidental category of the “how many” (ποσόν). If, as a consequence, time is measured by movement insofar as movement possesses its unity in the thing moved, it is clearly not identical to movement, but is nothing other than movement insofar as it has a number: οὐκ ἄρα κίνησις ὁ χρόνος ἀλλ᾽ ᾖ ἀριθμὸν ἔχει ἡ κίνησις (219b2–3). The unit of measure of time is thus not the now, but rather the movement that ex52

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tends itself between two nows, inasmuch as it belongs to a single moving thing and conserves, from one end to the other of its traveled space, a constant speed. This is why the now accompanies the moving thing, in the same way that time accompanies movement (219b22): for if the now allows numbering movement precisely to the extent that it is both one and multiple—just like number, which is a unit of units—that is to say, an articulation of the one and of the multiple— one because multiple, and multiple because one, then it receives its unit of measure from the movement itself and from what unifies the latter, that whose identity makes possible the unity of the movement and also confers to certain privileged movements (the world’s clock, the sphere of the fi xed stars) their uniformity: the moved thing. It follows from this that the unit of measure of time is a movement with a constant speed limited by two nows. The now is thus not the unit of measure of time, but only the “limit” (πέρας: 218a24) starting from which a measurement of movement is possible, a limit in itself deprived of temporal extension, just as the point in itself is deprived of all spatial extension: and it is only when the soul poses limits to movement by distinguishing the now where movement began from the now in which it is completed that one can count movement by saying that time has elapsed; to measure time is to assign limits to movement according to the anterior and posterior in it: “We apprehend time only when we have marked motion, marking it by ‘anterior’ and ‘posterior’; and it is only when we have perceived ‘anterior’ and ‘posterior’ in motion that we say that time has elapsed. Now, we mark them by judging that A and B are different, and that some third thing is intermediate to them. When we distinguish by thought (νοήσωμεν) the extremes as different from the middle and the soul pronounces that the ‘nows’ are two, one anterior and one posterior, it is then that we say that there is time, and this that we say is time. For what is bounded by the ‘now’ is thought to be time” (219a22–29; Basic Works, 291–92, modified). By contrast, when we perceive the now as one, “and neither as anterior and posterior in a motion nor as an identity but in relation to an ‘anterior’ and a ‘posterior,’ no time is thought to have elapsed, because there has been no motion either” (219a30 and following; Basic Works, 292, modified). Whence the famous definition: τοῦτο γάρ ὲστιν ὁ χρόνος, ἀριθμὸς κινήσεως κατὰ πρότερον καὶ ὓστερον. Indeed, if time is not itself movement, but is movement insofar as it is considered within the horizon of anteriority and posteriority—that is to say, insofar as it is numbered, this number can be assigned (measured, numbered) only to the extent that the soul is capable of distinguishing the two “extremes” of movement, its beginning and its end, and, as a consequence, of considering the now as double. Therefore, the anteriority and §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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the posteriority in movement have a meaning that is temporal from the outset, for they are said in relation to the now: πρότερον γὰρ καὶ ὓστερον λέγομεν κατὰ τὴν πρὸς τὸ νῦν ἀπόστασιν (223a5– 6; Basic Works, 298, modified): “for we say ‘anterior’ and ‘posterior’ with reference to the distance from the ‘now.’ ” But we must be more specific: to claim that the πρότερον and the ὓστερον have from the outset a temporal sense does not amount to affirming that they only have a temporal sense. If this were the case, it would indeed be necessary to object, according to a tradition that extends from Plotinus to Heidegger, that Aristotle’s definition of time is circular. But the anterior and the posterior have a much wider sense: they are first and above all (πρῶτόν) in place (ἐν τόπῳ: 219a14), to the extent that they can designate the order of locations or of places that can be occupied by a moving thing; they are, next, in movement (ἐν τῇ κινήσει: 219a24–25), and in that case, they signify these same positions insofar as a translation takes place from the one toward the other, the dynamic order according to which each one can be the starting point and the end point for movement. Last, the anterior and posterior are also said according to time: in this last case we are dealing once again with the local or kinetic anterior-posterior, but insofar as it is numerable—that is to say, insofar as the soul is capable of making a numeric mea sure correspond to the gap between the starting point and the end point of a movement by making a different now correspond to them. In the case of the spatial continuum, as in that of the kinetic continuum, “before” and “after” thus designate an order prior to every properly temporal determination: in every movement, for example, one can name the starting position “anterior” and the final position “posterior,” without, however, bringing into play considerations about time. Of course, one could object that this distinction is factitious: after all, in order for real movement to take place, from a starting point to an end point, it is necessary that the end point follows temporally the starting point. But this objection misses the essential issue: the essentially relative (or relational) character of the Aristotelian definition of time. Indeed, it presupposes what Aristotle refuses—namely, that time can be conceived as an independent “factor.” For time is nothing other, for Aristotle, than the anterior-posterior of movement insofar as it is numerable; it has no other “reality” outside of the act through which the soul determines it by making correspond to each position of the moving object a numeric value by taking into consideration a uniform movement selected as movement of reference. That the kinetic and spatial anterior and posterior are always also numerable and consequently are always also tied to the temporal before and after in power in no way implies that they cannot— and should not—be distinguished 54

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from them. Rather, this distinction is necessary in order that a relation of analogy might hold between them: the anterior and the posterior are in place according to position (τῇ θέσει: 219a14), but they are in time according to number. To put it another way, it is precisely to the extent that time is essentially relative to movement and has no consistency of its own and no being outside of its reference to the movement that it allows us to number, and, consequently, to the extent that its “being” is relational through and through and its unit of measure kinetic, that we must maintain a strict analogy (ἀνάλογον: 219a17–18)—and avoid all identification—between the temporal anterior/posterior and the anterior/posterior according to place: it is solely because the latter exists that the former can exist in turn, and not the other way around. The grounding relation here goes from movement to time: it is because movement takes place that time is phenomenalized on its basis, since time is nothing independently of movement. This is why Aristotle can conclude, according to a definition whose “circularity” is not at all obvious, “[But] the anterior and posterior are attributes of movement, and time is these qua numerable” (223a28–29; Basic Works, 299, modified). We have a perfect illustration of this definition in what Einstein considered to be the definition of time in physics: “[W]e understand by the ‘time’ of an event the reading (position of the hands) of that one of these clocks which is in the immediate vicinity (in space) of the event,” assuming, of course, that all the clocks are of the same construction and “go at the same rate”: time, is, then, only the numerical measurement associated with a uniform movement chosen in a conventional manner as the frame of reference. Einstein’s decisive addition consists here uniquely in the taking into account of the position of the clock, which becomes determinant in the relativist understanding of space-time. The sole radical conceptual difference— but it is an important one—would reside here in the few words that Aristotle adds at 220b5: καὶ ὁ αὐτὸς δὴ πανταχοῦ ἃμα: “Further, there is the same time everywhere at once” (Basic Works, 294). But let us return to the analysis of the now. Aristotle said that distinguishing by thought the extremes and the middle, the beginning and the end of a movement allows us to “perceive” the now as double and thus to perceive (αἲσθησιν λαμϐάνειν) that some time has elapsed: for the first now is grasped as being “anterior” and the second as being “posterior.” We should probably insist here on the fact that, while distinction and numeration are noetic acts, time belongs at least in part, for Aristotle, to sensibility, inaugurating a tradition that continues up to Kant and to Husserl. In any case, we find again, with regard to the now, difficulties analogous to those that rose up in the course of our analyses of the Parmenides: it is both §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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the same as for that which, being, it is (ὅ ποτε ὄν) and different regarding its definition; it is what unifies time in actuality and divides it in power (220a4 and following): “The ‘now’ is the link of time, as has been said (for it connects past and future time), and it is a limit of time (πέρας χρόνου ἐστίν) (for it is the beginning of the one and the end of the other [ἒστι γὰρ τοῦ μὲν ἀρχή τοῦ δὲ τελευτή]). . . . It divides potentially, and insofar as it is dividing the ‘now’ is always different, but insofar as it connects it is always the same, as it is with mathematical lines” (222a10 and following; Basic Works, 296). The division (ἡ διαίρεσις) here is the act of thought that takes the now as double and that operates on the temporal continuum, but this division is possible only in power; otherwise, there would be a duality of nows in actuality, and time itself would be “paused”: “when you take it in this way, using the one point as two, a pause is inevitable (ἀνάγκη ἳστασθαι)” (220a13; Basic Works, 293, modified)— and the continuity of time would be broken by the contiguity of the two nows. Yet this passage so apparently clear on the now harbors a difficulty in principle: Aristotle never says that the now is that which “elapses,” that which changes, in the same manner as time elapses, and that upon which, consequently, the being of time as “passage” rests; rather, the now in itself does not pass away, does not flow, but it is only by distinguishing in thought the nows as first and last limits of a movement, as beginning and end, that we feel that time “has elapsed” (γεγονέναι: 219a34). Now, if Aristotle never defines the now in itself as changing (but always only as limit and as number, as beginning and as end), if he resists saying both that it is the same and that it is not the same (τὸ δὲ νῦν ἔστι μὲν ὡς τὸ αὐτό, ἔστι δ᾽ ὡς οὐ τὸ αὐτό: 219b11–12), this is because the determinations affecting things that change in time could in no way fit the now. The now is indeed said to be “in” time; τὰ νῦν ἐν χρόνῳ: “ ‘nows’ are in time” (223a7; Basic Works, 298); but, of course, to say that the now is “in time” does not mean here that it is a “part” of time, nor that it changes “in” time. Instead, Aristotle strictly distinguishes between several meanings of this “in”: for if, regarding movement, to be “in” time is to be measured by time (221a3), for other things “ ‘to be in time’ means that their being should be measured by time. ‘To be in time’ is one of two things: (1) to exist when time exists, (2) to exist as we say of some things that they are ‘in number.’ . . . Now, since time is number, the ‘now’ and the ‘anterior’ and the like are in time, just as ‘unit’ and ‘odd’ and ‘even’ are in number. . . . But according to the other meaning, things are in time as they are in number. If this is so, they are contained by number, as things in place are contained by place” (221a7 and following; Basic Writings, 295, modified). The inner-temporality of things means their being contained by number, which is to say by time 56

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(περιέχεται ὑπ᾽ ἀριθμοῦ: 221a18); by contrast, to be “in” time, for the now, is to be itself that which numbers and allows numbering, to participate in number, in the sense in which odd and even “participate” in number. This Aristotelian distinction between different ways of being in time is of great importance for understanding the sense in which the now can be conceived as the support and the entwining of contradictory properties: at no moment does Aristotle conceive of the now in the manner of a thing that would change or would remain identical in time; at no moment does he understand the now against the horizon of the inner-temporality of the things that become and are modified. The now, in itself, does not flow or change, and, to this extent, it is nothing (inner)-temporal. On the contrary, the place where Aristotle conceives most deeply the relation between the now and time is in the enigmatic sentence in which he says that, “Insofar then as the ‘now’ is a boundary [of time], it is not time, but an attribute of it (ᾗ μὲν οὗν πέρας τὸ νῦν, οὐ χρόνος, ἀλλὰ συμϐέϐηκεν); insofar as it numbers, it is number; for boundaries belong only to that which they bound, but number (e.g., ten) is the number of these horses, and belongs also elsewhere” (220a21 and following; Basic Works, 293). But what does “attribute” mean here? It translates συμϐέϐηκεν, the perfect of συμϐαίνειν— literally: “to accompany,” “to go along with.” The now accompanies time in the sense that it occurs in it, or rather, with it, but it accompanies time only to the extent that time accompanies the movement of things; it is an attribute of time to the extent that it is boundary and number: and boundaries and number are referred here essentially to the thing that they bound or number, to the thing that changes and becomes in time. Thus, the now can be determined as an “attribute of time” to the extent that it has no subsistence in itself, has no beingness (οὐσία) or definition (λόγος) of its own outside of its intrinsic reference to that which it numbers or bounds, to the thing and the movement of which it is the beginning and the end. Just as the numbered number is necessarily a predicate of that which it numbers— unlike the numbering number that is most often a subject—likewise for the now: it is a predicate that befalls time and accompanies it (συμϐαίνει), and as such it is an attribute (συμϐέϐηκεν), insofar as it befalls first that which, in time, becomes, which is to say is measured by the now. To the extent that it is not beingness, οὐσία, but “attribute,” the now is always referred to something other than itself; it is the “now” of this or of that, the “now of getting up,” or the “now of going to bed.” It is defined, in its structure, by this character of referral to . . . something other, which we might call, following Heidegger, its “datability.” This is why the now, as such, neither “passes away” nor changes; it is not “extended” in the sense of a certain temporal extension, for it occupies no interval of duration: it §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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itself does not have limits, but is limit, in the sense in which the limit belongs entirely to what it delimits. Being ever the now of something, it exists only in relation to the inner-temporal without itself being inner-temporal, in the sense of that which remains or changes in time. And of the now itself it should be said that it “either does not exist at all or barely, and in an obscure way” (217b34; Basic Works, 289): for the now, as pure limit distinguished by thought and referred to the movement that it determines, is nothing by itself, so that in it nothing can come forth—that is to say, nothing originates, but all is in transition, all passes away as time “elapses” (χρόνος γεγονέναι: 219a34). In this regard the now (τό νῦν) stands plainly in opposition to the sudden (τὸ εξαίφνης). For Aristotle, what essentially defines time is its continuity: the now is “in” time itself as a limit within a continuum. Indeed, magnitude, in itself, is already continuous; the movement follows the order of the magnitude, “accompanies” it (ἀκολουθεῖ), so to speak: ἀκολουθεῖ τῷ μεγέθει ἡ κίνησις (219a12–13); thus it, too, is continuous. And to the extent that time is in a phenomenological relation of grounding with regard to movement and accompanies it (ἀκολουθεῖ) in each of its phases, as a consequence time is also continuous, not only by the movement that it numbers, but in itself  (219a10 and following; 220a24 and following). We have said that the now is the boundary or limit of this temporal continuum. What, then, of the “sudden,” of this present-origin in which, according to Plato, time itself originates, but that is not in time? Aristotle’s answer is disappointing because time is thought exclusively by him within the horizon of movement, as its number, and, in his view, as a consequence, the present can assume no character of originariness [originarité]: “ ‘Suddenly’ (ἐξαίφνης) refers to what has departed from its former condition in a time imperceptible because of its smallness” (222b14; Basic Works 297–98). The sudden is not the upwelling source of time according to the verticality of a presentorigin, freed from any inner-temporal relation of succession, from any horizon of anteriority and posteriority: it is an infinitesimal part of duration, understood in the light of a time that has been reduced first to a unidimensional continuum. This is why, for Aristotle, the now is never the inaugural present of the beginning that would ab-solve itself of every prior duration, be the springing forth of itself in itself, and in which time would be opened to itself in the measureless opening of its three radically heterogeneous dimensions by coming to itself from the future and by thus being born to itself: the now is not thought here, as in the Parmenides, on the basis of the ἐξαίφνης, but rather, the ἐξαίφνης on the basis of the now; a now that is a limit of time understood as a continuum, where each now is the meantime between a 58

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“formerly” and a “next” and is entirely exhausted in its reference to what it numbers (its datability): “now is noon,” “now is midnight,” and so on. Thus, the now is only understood through the interplay of interdependent concepts: that of movement, at once measuring and measured, which time “accompanies” as its shadow; that of an inner-temporal limit of time; that of a continuum that alone makes us understand what it is for time to “pass,” not within the now—for the now, deprived of temporal thickness, is only a “limit” of time— but through it: indeed, “within” the now, no numerable movement at all occurs (Physics VI.239b1), and consequently, no time. This calm continuity of Aristotelian time stands therefore in opposition to the fruitful rupture of the ἐξαίφνης and the radical discontinuity of a time that ever presents itself in the Parmenides as, so to speak, nascent. Indeed, if, on the one hand, Aristotle says that in the now “[time] is always at a beginning (ἀεὶ γὰρ ἐν ἀρχῇ: 222b7),” this affirmation is only the counterpart and the the other side of this other, according to which time is also always at the end of its course, literally exhausted in each now, insofar as the now is necessarily at once both beginning and end or, more exactly, end and beginning, “the end of that which is past and the beginning of that which is to come (τοῦ μὲν παρήκοντος τελευτή, ἀρχὴ δὲ τοῦ μέλλοντος)” (222b1–2; Basic Works, 297). The order of the words is not indifferent: the implicit directional schema of time here is not that of a present endlessly beginning because it springs forth originally from the future, but that of a now “that belongs to both the times” (VI.234a34; Basic Works, 323), past and future, and that thus can be the “end” of the one only by being the “beginning” of the other. Time, a one-dimensional continuum, “begins” with the past and “ends up” with the future: the primacy of the past follows, in this conception, from the impossibility of thinking a present-origin. Indeed, time is “the mea sure of motion, and of motion under way” (221a1; Basic Works, 294, modified); by contrast, the movement “in” the now is always already accomplished, for “in the now it is not possible for anything to be either in motion or at rest” (VI.239b1; Basic Works, 335, modified). This thesis, of considerable importance for the interpretation of the Aristotelian concept of time, is developed at greater length in a central passage of Book VI of the Physics, in which the author sets forth the impossibility of thinking a primary when of change: “[T]here are two senses of the expression ‘the primary when in which something has changed.’ On the one hand it may mean the primary when containing the completion (τέλος) of the process of change—the moment when it is correct to say ‘it has changed’; on the other hand it may mean the primary when containing §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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the beginning of the process of change. Now, the primary when that has reference to the end of the change is something really existent (ὑπάρχει τε καὶ ἔστιν): for a change may really be completed, and there is such a thing as an end of change, which we have in fact shown to be indivisible because it is a limit. But that which has reference to the beginning is not existent at all: for there is no such thing as a beginning of a process of change, and the time occupied by the change does not contain any primary when in which the change began” (VI.236a7–15; Basic Works, 327). Aristotle here remains entirely captive to the aporiae that Plato raised with regard to the now in the Parmenides: if change does not occur in the now, it can no longer be accomplished as change, but if it occurs in the now, it undergoes an eternal pause and suspension, for the now is ever now, the now is perpetual. These aporiae, which followed from the fact that the now itself was understood within the horizon of inner-temporality, were surmounted by Plato through the position of the ἐξαίφνης, the intemporal origin of time, in which time is endlessly nascent and change is always beginning, in the perpetual youth of a “first time” that is not on the same plane as the other times, but is, as such, of all times. Nevertheless, the refusal to conceive of the now as being “outside” of time, in the manner of the ἐξαίφνης— and the reduction of the sudden to a limit, in the mathematical sense of the term, within the temporal continuum—leads Aristotle to an entirely different solution, which consists in simply refusing to affirm that in the now there could be a genuine beginning— a beginning that does not follow from or relay what has already begun, a beginning that is not already at its endpoint, possessing in advance its telos; thus, in Aristotle’s view, when change occurs, it has, so to speak, “already” occurred: it “ is” and it “ has been” at the same time, its nature resides in its end (τέλος), for it only exists in the state of perfection. Change only takes place as accomplished: when it is accomplished, it has already taken place. Between the change under way and the fully achieved change, between the present and the past perfect tenses, Aristotle maintains the difference of aspect that separates durative from perfective tenses: the change tends toward its own achievement, it is under way only when it is already completed; the action of moving (κίνησις) has its innermost essence in the completed movement (κίνημα). In the now, nothing moves, for there is no time in which the movement would be at its beginning (time is not composed of nows, for the now, which is not a “part” of time, is without temporal extension); in order that movement be, it is necessary that it always already have achieved moving. This is why motion, in the now, is never ἐν ἀρχῇ, but always already in possession of its τέλος: it is a certain “entelechy,” “the entelechy of what exists potentially, insofar as it exists potentially” (Physics 60

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III.201a10; Basic Works, 254, modified), a definition whose meaning we will soon deepen. This question of the ἐν ᾧ πρώτῳ μεταϐέϐληκε (236a7) is not a merely regional question, having to do with movement and change as such: it also reveals essential features of the Aristotelian understanding of time. For if every change has always already changed, if every beginning has always already begun, if all that happens only happens as already accomplished—in other words, if every change is understood primordially in reference to its τέλος, and not at all in reference to its ἀρχή—it follows that the privileged dimension of time will be that of the accomplished, of the past, as two fundamental passages from Book IV attest: “A thing, then, will be affected by time, just as we are accustomed to say that time wastes things away, and that all things grow old through time, and that there is oblivion owing to the lapse of time, but we do not say the same of getting to know or of becoming young or fair. For time is by its nature the cause rather of decay, since it is the number of change, and change removes what is” (221a30–221b2; Basic Works, 295). “It is clear then that time must be in itself, as we said before, the condition of destruction rather than of generation (for change, in itself, makes things depart from their former condition), and only incidentally of generation, and of being” (222b19–23; Basic Works, 298, modified). Consequently, what characterizes the essence of time is that it is endlessly accomplished, and in that very way pours the unaccomplished into the accomplished: a factor of ruin and destruction, rather than a creator of unforeseeable newness. If time is always “at a beginning” (ἀεὶ ἐν ἀρχῇ: 222b4; Basic Works, 297), that is because, likewise, it is always “at an end” (ἀεὶ ἐν . . . τελευτῇ), and this is why time doesn’t pause (οὐχ ὐπολείψει) and the present is endless; “time will not fail; for it is always at a beginning” (222b7; Basic Works, 297), and this “beginning” itself has no end, for it is inseparable from its end, and it can never cease from always ending. A time that does not burst forth, at each instant, from the unforeseeable future, unexpectedly (ἐξαίφνης), but that is endlessly accomplished, and whose beginning has no end, is perpetual, perpetuates itself unceasingly, repeating itself in every now, perpetuates itself in the perpetuity of a perpetual present without any true beginning. In this constantly lapsing time, where the past dominates, where the now, in contrast to the ἐξαίφνης, establishes no fruitful rupture in the continuity of becoming, only a present in decay is possible, a definitive present in which all is accomplished, a present of the fait accompli closed in on itself: it is only in such a present that the identification of what is changing with what has changed is possible. An enigmatic identification, which, far from being obvious, has baffled many exegetes, beginning with the commentators of §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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antiquity; thus, as Simplicius puts it in his Commentary, there is no primary moment of a change, because time is continuous and infinitely divisible. The beginning of a change, in fact, is itself already a change, and since such a change takes place in time, of which the now is not a part but a limit, it is not possible to conceive of the least “time,” however minute it may be, in which the thing would begin to change without having already changed. Aristotle’s thesis thus would mean nothing other than: “ ‘There is no beginning of a beginning,’ since whatever is hypothesized as the beginning of the time will be discovered to have another beginning [in time].” But Simplicius is not unaware of the weakness of this argument, for if time is in fact a continuum that is not “composed” of indivisible nows, then what is true for the ἀρχή of change must be true just as well for its τέλος: in order to be coherent with his premises, Aristotle should also insist that there is no final moment in which a movement would be at its end, and in which it could “have changed.” How can we explain, then, that he doesn’t do so, and that what Aristotle refuses precisely to the ἀρχή of change he grants to its τέλος, so that, if change has no beginning in time (in the now qua indivisible), it is rather in time that it has its end? Simplicius, who struggles with this difficulty, proposes a clever solution: if the beginning of a change cannot take place in an indivisible now because, in the indivisible, nothing changes, its τέλος, by contrast, can take place in an indivisible now, because, in the end where the change is accomplished, the thing does not change, but has changed. But to tell the truth, this alleged solution rests on a sophism: isn’t to have changed to be at rest? But Aristotle affirms that neither change nor rest are possible in the indivisible (Physics VI.234a31, 239b1). Whence comes, then, this dissymmetry between the ἀρχή and the τέλος? Must we not search for the origin in the conception of time itself that underlies the Aristotelian analyses of change? Indeed, isn’t conceiving change starting from its τέλος also and inseparably to think of time on the basis of what is accomplished within it, by confering a primacy on the past? The famous definition of motion as “the entelechy of what exists potentially, insofar as it exists potentially (ἡ τοῦ δυνάμει ὄντος ἐντελέχεια, ᾗ τοιοῦτον)” (Physics III.201a10; Basic Works, 254, modified) follows, indeed, entirely, from this understanding of time. The Greek word ἐντελέχεια, which is not translated but is simply transposed in the English “entelechy,” is formed out of two locutions: ἐντελὲς ἔχειν; ἔχειν means “to be in a certain state,” and has given the word ἕξις: disposition, habit; ἐν τέλει means: “to be in possession of its end,” “to be achieved.” In addition, Aristotle accentuates the active significance of the suffi x— εια. To be in movement, for a thing or a being, thus consists in being in possession 62

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of the end in potential of which the thing or being is, insofar as this end resides in potential in the thing or being. The nature of movement appears, consequently, as paradoxical, affected by an inner tension, or even a contradiction: as Henri Maldiney points out, “to be moved is to be at its end in such a way that the fact of being there coincides with the possibility of straining toward it: which is paradoxical. The paradox is expressed in a contradiction in (the) term(s): Aristotle says of movement, which is an entelecheia (in possession of its end), that it is, in actuality, a-teles (deprived of its end, incomplete)”; for “motion is . . . a sort of actuality, but incomplete (ἥ κίνησις ἐνέργεια μέν τις εἶναι δοκεῖ, ἀτελὴς δέ)” (III.201b31–32; Basic Works, 255). Ἐνέργεια here means, literally, “a putting-into-operation of its end,” and ἀτελὴς, “that which has not reached its end,” so that this definition could be translated more precisely as “motion is a certain putting into operation of its term or end that has not, as such, reached its term.” The issue here is a kind of paradox “in (the) term(s),” as Maldiney notes, which bursts in the oxymoron found at Physics VIII.257b8: ἐντελέχεια ἀτελὴς. Thus, rigorously understood, motion is the being-in-possession-of-itsend (ἐν-τελ-έχ-εια), or the bringing-into-operation-of-its-end (ἐν-έργ-εια, from: ἔργον: an “opus”) insofar as this end (τέλος) is not yet attained, and consequently remains in potential in the thing. But to affirm that movement is a certain “being-in-possession-of-its-end,” an “en-tel-ech-y,” of the thing, insofar as it harbors a power, is to understand motion itself as a certain actuality—though incomplete— and not as a simple potential: if movement is, it can be so only in actuality (that is to say, in operation), as the actuality of what exists potentially as such, and it is thus never itself in potential, never beginning, never in statu nascendi. It is “at the same time” that a moving thing moves and that it is moved; it does not move first, to be moved after; at every moment, movement is accomplished, and the present is definitive: it always already coincides with itself in the synchrony of time as continuum. Thus, from this classic definition of motion, it follows that what is true for the Prime Mover is actually true for every movement in general: of the divine, it is said, indeed, ἅμα κινεῖ καὶ κεκίνηκεν: “At the same time it moves and it has completed moving” (Physics VII.249b29; Basic Works, 353, modified). For motion is fully this actuality— even incomplete—that it is by definition only when it moves in actuality, when it amounts to the same to say, of the thing, that it moves and that it has moved, that it is in the process of moving and that it has completed its course. Motion truly is (in conformity with its definition) only when it is completed. We find this characteristic even in the soul’s movements, since sensation itself is a movement, and so is thought: ἑώρακε δὲ καὶ ὁρᾷ ἅμα τὸ αὐτό, καὶ νοεῖ καὶ §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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νενόηκεν: “It is at the same time (ἅμα) that one has seen and is seeing,

or is thinking and has thought.” This is why, since motion is always in actuality, and more precisely, is the actuality or entelechy of a certain power, there cannot be a first when of sensation, either: ἅπαν ἅμα ἀκούει καὶ ἀκήκοε καὶ ὅλως αἰσθάνεται καὶ ᾔσθηται: “The acts of hearing and having heard, and, in general, of perceiving and having perceived, happen contemporaneously (ἅμα)” (De Sensu 6.446b2 and following). This is also why there is not, properly speaking, a beginning or a genesis of sensation: μή ἐστι γένεσις αὐτῶν, ἀλλ᾽ εἰσὶν ἄνευ τοῦ γίγνεσθαι (De Sensu 446b3). It is all one to perceive and to have perceived, to see and to have seen, to hear and to have heard, for each sensation is, at every moment, completed in itself. This is what the Nicomachean Ethics, in relation to the doctrine of pleasure, emphasizes with regard to vision: οὐδὲ γὰρ ὁράσεώς ἐστι γένεσις (K.3.1174b12): with vision, no more than with pleasure, there is no beginning or genesis; endlessly, we are born at the heart of vision, without having reached it, for it is only beginning from and spreading around it that the realm of visibility lays itself out. We open our eyes and, in seeing, we only make continue a visibility that is always in operation, completed in itself and without beginning, in which we enter in turn, and we reengage with it, after having interrupted it for a moment: this is what is expressed each time by these formulas in which an ἅμα unites the present and the perfect tenses of the same verb. The thing moves and is moved at the same time, just as, in a same, indivisible now, without beginning or end, I see and I have seen, I perceive and I have perceived. Now, what is true for movement is obviously true also for the time that is its number: time truly is (in the present) only when it is completed (in the past): the present has being only insofar as it is past. It is only to the extent that it endlessly renders itself past and, in so rendering itself, is raised to the positivity of what is fully and irrevocably (the past), that time is not a pure nothing (μὴ ὄν), as the beginning of Physics IV suggested. Indeed, only the past is fully, since it is, in itself, immutable: all of the argumentation directed against the Megarics in chapter 9 of De Interpretatione rests on this premise, according to which, if the future is contingent (which is to be demonstrated), the past alone is necessary, a premise shared by Aristotle and his opponents; now, only that which is necessarily, is in the full sense. The beingness of time resides entirely where the present has raised itself to necessity by becoming past, where it is sheltered from change by sheltering itself from the future. Aristotle thus quotes, on several occasions, the adage of Solon, according to which one can say that a man is happy only when he was happy, which is to say, at his death. On this point, Pierre Aubenque remarks, “In the case of a man, there is essential 64

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attribution only in the imperfect tense, which is to say, bearing on a subject that is what he is only because he no longer is. On this point, one could oppose essential speech to tragic speech, which, because it believes in the unforeseeability of time, marked by events, only uses verbs of action, and ignores the essential function, that is to say, the predicative function of the verb to be.” In these conditions it is not a dubious hypothesis to understand the usage of the perfect of the verb εἶναι in the way proposed by this commentator, in this formula practically untranslatable in English, which is often substituted for beingness (οὐσία) in order to say what is of something, or rather, what was: τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι; literally: “the-being-what-it-was.” This usage of the perfect tense— or of the imperfect in English—is justified by the consideration according to which what is properly of the thing is what it has become, to the extent that what truly is of time is the past, what is completed in it, and that by which it is completed—that is to say, perfected in itself. So if the Aristotelian doctrine of time, in the Physics, carefully avoids every inner-temporal determination of the now according to which it would pass away or, on the contrary, endure in time, in the manner in which inner-temporal beings pass away or endure, it nevertheless remains that Aristotle opens the way to a conception of time that sees time as such in the horizon of inner-temporality. By dismissing a conception of the ἐξαίφνης as this opening-present of the beginning where time springs forth, through the “drama” proper to the instant, in the triple-form of its dimensionals— by admitting a beginning only in time, as the end of a preceding time and the beginning of an ulterior time—Aristotle thinks of time not as “nascent,” as endless origin, as originating in the excess of the future over the present, which is to say, as opening of a possible happening, as the dimension of the appearing of events in their newness, but instead as passage from the present to the past that grants a primacy to the latter in the temporalization of time. The future and the true present appear closed there; time arises in the present only as already accomplished, that is to say, already past; it is nothing other than its passing away. Time is the opportunity given to all that which is, to be fully (to accede to beingness: οὐσία, or to being-what-it-was: τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) by being what it no longer is. Essentially transitory, the now truly is only when it no longer is: “the Now [Jetzt] is just this: to be no more just when it is.” The present presents itself only as past: in it there can no longer arise any radical newness. Thus, Schelling is perfectly justified in affirming in The Ages of the World that “The concept of time that prevails today is completely ignorant of time,” for “this false time of pure appearance always repeats itself in a sad uniformity.” What fundamentally characterizes this time that §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics IV

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Schelling calls “mechanical” is that it is a linear time, continually flowing, unfolding according to a unique continuum, a unique di-mension (consequently available to measure), “going to the infinite, in one direction as in another,” an eternal present following upon itself, without any real differentiation of times, that illustrates the ancient formula from Ecclesiastes: “Nothing new under the sun.” The present is here born already “old,” which is to say, already completed; it is not fundamentally distinct from the future that it “has been,” or from the past that it “will be”: “In general, most seem to know no other past than that which, at each moment that flows by, finds itself increased by this moment that has disappeared, this past that, manifestly, is not itself yet past, or divided from the present.” In such a time, “nowhere is there something original to be found,” which is to say, a real beginning. The present presents itself in it only by taking the relay from a preceding moment; it inherits from itself by making itself past. Everything “passes away” in the present, but nothing happens there: in it no authentic event can occur. If, then, Aristotle makes every effort to avoid, on the one hand, the paradoxes inherent in the now, as formulated by Plato in the Parmenides (and which led him to their paradoxical “resolution” under the figure of the ἐξαίφνης), by thinking of the now neither as that which remains, nor as what “elapses”—that is to say, by refusing to conceive it as being “in” time; if Aristotle never asserts, on the other hand, that the future becomes present and the present past, because he does not understand the dimensions of time themselves within the horizon of inner-temporality; if, finally, the Stagirite avoids every “subjectivization” of time by never leading the multiple movements of the world back to an arch-movement internal to the soul itself, which would furnish its measure—it nevertheless remains the case that the Aristotelian treatise opens a horizon of intelligibility for time that will not be closed after him: it opens the way to the subjectivizing of time that, from Plotinus to Augustine, from Bergson to Husserl, and, to a certain extent, on to Heidegger, will be identified with the thought of time as such. To think of a time of the soul “in” which the “time” of things flows is necessarily to think of this time itself (original because subjective) as being a certain “flow,” a certain “flux,” a continuous change, and is therefore to postulate a time for this change, thus being exposed to the risk of an infinite regression. As I have stressed, it follows that the present only presents itself against the horizon of an anteriority and a posteriority, “following” from a previous present and leaving room to an ulterior present, and that the totality of time is thought of as a onedimensional and measurable continuum flowing from the “formerly” toward the “next—that is to say, in time and according to time, and having a fixed 66

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direction: being thus “irreversible.” It is then the inner-temporal (metaphysical) concept of time that is announced, in outline, in Aristotle’s Physics. If there is indeed a “circularity” in the Aristotelian definition of time (219b1), stressed by the ancient as well as the modern commentators, ought we not, as a consequence, see in it neither the indication of a “flow of being” itself (Damascius), according to a neo-Platonic perspective, nor the indication of an original temporality that would belong to Dasein alone, the “ forgetful-enpresenting-expectance”—and we have shown what there is in the Aristotelian conception of time that by principle resists such interpretations— but rather the mark of a certain orientation of regard, according to which it is by starting from inner-temporal phenomena—and they alone—that time can be progressively led to the concept? Consequently, don’t we have to see, in the tautological character of Aristotle’s definition: τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν ὁ χρόνος, ἀριθμὸς κινήσεως κατὰ τὸ πρότερον καὶ ὕστερον (219b1), what will give the tone, after him, to the whole metaphysical conception of time, which understands time fundamentally within the horizon of inner-temporality? Doesn’t this circular definition consisting of defining time as being in time presage the understanding of time that will rule, after Aristotle, throughout metaphysics, once Plato’s problem has been completely lost sight of? §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time (a) The presuppositions of the definition of time as distensio animi The full realization of this possibility first opened by Aristotle’s analysis is found, of course, in Book XI of the Confessions, in this decisive text that conditions, in more ways than one, the modern understanding of the temporal phenomenon. The philosophical interpretation unfolds there in a neo-Platonic context in which the influence of Plotinus is preponderant. When he defines time as a certain distensio of the mind itself, Augustine is probably remembering, even if through indirect sources, its Plotinian determination as διάστασις: “So the spreading out [distension] of life (διάστασις ζωῆς) [of the Soul] involves time; life’s continual progress involves continuity of time, and life which is past involves past time. So would it be sense to say that time is the life of the soul (ψυχῆς ζωὴν) in a movement of passage (κινήσει μεταβατικῇ) from one way of life to another?” Indeed, Plotinus attributes time explicitly to the soul itself, which was not the case either for Aristotle or for Plato: χρόνος δὲ περὶ ψυχήν; he conceives time as the spontaneous (αὐτοργοῦ) movement by which the soul, turning away from the Noûs and the intelligible, engenders §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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its own acts one after another, thus producing their succession (ἐφεξῆς) and the passage (μεταβάσις) from one to the other. In this perspective, time is, in its essence, a distension (διάστασις), an elongation or an extension (μῆκος) of the soul’s life, a movement (κίνησις) inherent in it “from which anterior and posterior first (πρώτως) came into existence.” The soul is the origin of the temporalization of time: Plotinus employs, probably for the first time, the verb χρονοῦν, “to temporalize,” in order to describe this process. The movement of the soul, which for Plotinus is the very movement of discursive thought, is not a movement that would take place in time, for in its very nature, which is to say in its provenance from the Noûs, the World Soul is eternal; it is the intemporal foundation of time that gives birth to time (γεννᾶν χρόνον) and thus temporalizes it. The characterization of time as distensio, however, is reached by Augustine through an entirely different approach, with entirely different presuppositions. It is true that, like Plotinus, Augustine begins his analysis of time with a meditation on eternity, defined as an intemporal present, with neither past nor future. But the eternity from which time wells up is no longer that of the Noûs as “place of Ideas”; it becomes instead the fundamental attribute of the biblical God: “In the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present, you are before all things past” (XI.13.16). Time no longer emerges from eternity by means of a procession in which each reality, in descending a degree in the ontological hierarchy, is changed in character and falls, engendering the hypostasis below, all the while reproducing on the level of this hypostasis something of the principle from which it emanates; eternity and time no longer maintain an iconic relation of resemblance— according to the famous definition in the Timaeus — but instead the latter comes forth from the former by the efficacy of a creation. In the end, even if Augustine and Plotinus fight on the same front against Aristotelianism, since, for each of them, time is neither movement nor something that belongs to movement, time’s psychic essence nevertheless receives in each case a different characterization: the soul (anima) or the mind (animus) in which time has its location according to Augustine is no longer Plotinus’s World Soul, but the individual soul of each particular man. The spiritualization of time is here rigorously inseparable from its “anthropologization” and from its “subjectification” in the modern sense— even if we must hold in reserve, for the moment, the question of what essentially characterizes such a “subjectivity.” The disputed question of the “subjectification” of time by Augustine nevertheless remains an entirely formal one, without true philosophical bearing and stake, as long as we do not try to understand how this subjec-

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tification takes place, and above all what fundamental motives govern it. It is here that a phenomenological approach to Book XI of the Confessions is required, going, so to speak, beyond the fact of the definition of time as distensio animi in order to question its right, starting from the things themselves. The path by which Augustine progressively reaches his definition of time is without a doubt phenomenological: the issue is to learn to see and to discern that which is the most manifest, but which becomes obscure because it is too clear, without letting oneself be blinded by its excess of evidence: manifestissima et usitatissima sunt, et eadem rursus nimis latent et nova est inventio eorum (IX.22, 28): “These usages are utterly commonplace and everyday. Yet they are deeply obscure and the discovery of the solution is new” (Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 237). For the phenomenon— that is to say, the manifest—is always what covers itself with a veil of enigma: “And what makes the enigma all the more puzzling is that we should be unable to see what we cannot not see.” The “phenomenology” understood lato sensu here is precisely the method that consists in making manifest the manifest by removing it from its own concealment. But how does Augustine proceed in order to do this? Here, as so often in great philosophical texts, everything is already settled at the beginning or, rather, everything is settled in the very position of the problem. This is why it is necessary to redouble our attention when we begin to read the first lines following immediately after the stating of the question: quid est ergo tempus? (XI.14.17): “What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away (si nihil praeteriret), there is no past time (praeteritum tempus), and if nothing arrives (si nihil adveniret), there is no future time (futurum tempus), and if nothing existed (si nihil esset) there would be no present time” (Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 230–31). Here Augustine articulates the only certainty that he possesses at the beginning of his interpretive journey, the certainty that conditions, as one might expect, its entire subsequent development: without something that becomes in time, there would not even be time. This entire passage is built upon a parallelism between the verbs, provided with prefixes indicating a movement—praeter-ire: to go across or through, to pass away; ad-venire: to come toward us, to come about, to arrive— and substantives that, in a sense, are modeled on them: praeteritum, futurum, praesens. The strict parallelism is broken only once, in connection with the present: instead of saying, si nihil praeesset (literally: if nothing was close to or near to), non esset praesens tempus, Augustine says only, si nihil esset. This apparently

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insignificant omission will soon reveal itself to be full of consequences: indeed, it seems as if, in Augustine’s eyes, it goes entirely without saying that “being” pure and simple and “being present” mean the same thing. But what, then, does the parallelism we just spoke of point to? On the one hand, some verbs expressing a movement; on the other, some substantives that correspond to them term by term. That which is in motion is, in each case, that which becomes; or, put another way, that which, whether it changes or maintains itself identical, is nevertheless subjected to time, in time. This is the case for things to which one can assign a certain duration, but also for states of affairs or for events: whatever is the difference between their modes of appearance, they are, in each case, inner-temporal realities, to which predicates such as “future,” “past,” or “present” may be applied. I can say today of an event that will take place tomorrow that it is “future,” but tomorrow, when it will have taken place, I will have to say that it is “present,” and after tomorrow, that it has “passed away”; the movement suggested here by the usage of verbs refers back to the change of these temporal predicates. But what of the substantives that qualify time itself: praeteritum, futurum, praesens? Are they subject to the same change, to the same mobility? Not at all. Tomorrow the event that today appeared to me as “future” will have perhaps become “present,” but there will always be for me, no matter what happens— as there always has been for me in the past—a Past, a Present, a Future. Indeed, these are not inner-temporal predicates of things or of events, but rather the structural features of time itself in which these things can appear. I shall call them the “dimensionals” of time, in order to avoid any confusion. These dimensionals of time designate the horizons of appearance of every inner-temporal thing. The Future, for example, is the horizon or the horizontal dimension of appearance of every thing “to come”—that is to say, of every thing “not-yet-present.” It is thus a condition for the appearing of something absent; but of itself, as a dimensional, there can be no meaning in saying that it is present or absent, nor, consequently—if these terms are taken as interchangeable—that it “is” or “is not” [present]. With these distinctions taken into account, Augustine’s thesis, his sole beginning certainty, is the following: without the “mobility” of phenomena that come to be in time, the dimensionals of time, and consequently time itself, could not even appear. But what is the meaning here of this relation of foundation of time itself in inner-temporality? The answer will be given through a displacement of the question “What, and how, are times?” “Take the two times, past and future. How ‘are’ they (quomodo sunt) when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, and was not going away into the past 70

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(nec in praeteritum transiret), it would no longer be time but eternity” (XI.14.17; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 231, modified). Augustine here equates what we had right away taken care to distinguish: the dimensionals of time, on the one hand, and the changing inner-temporal determinations of what “passes away” or comes to be in time, on the other. Note the usage made of the adverbs of time in this passage: regarding the Past itself, Augustine states that it no longer is ( jam) and, regarding the Future, that it is not yet (nondum). But don’t “already” and “yet” only apply to that which is in time (for example: “the shot already rang out,” “it has not yet rung out”)? Indeed, the aim of these adverbs is to specify in which temporal horizon such or such phenomenon appears to us: under the horizon of the Past (already) or of the Future (yet). It is therefore meaningless to apply these temporal adverbs to the dimensionals of time themselves. Yet this is what Augustine does: the Future is no longer the dimension of appearing of the things or the events that are not yet, it is itself something that is not yet; no longer is the Past the horizon of appearance of that which no longer is, but, rather, something that is no longer. Put another way, the dimensionals of time are equated with the inner-temporal predicates of things. This is what will allow Augustine to pass, without a solution of continuity and without any difficulty, from the use of futurum and of praeteritum as substantives to their adjectival form: futura (future things), praeterita (past things). This identification of time and inner-temporality conditions all the reasoning that follows; it is the ground upon which everything rests: only starting from there is it possible to say of the times themselves that they “pass” into one another, and to conceive of time as a whole as a “passage” or, literally, as a “transit.” It is the verb transire, to go across or through, to pass away, that describes this movement: “If then, in order to be time at all (ut tempus sit), the present is so made that it passes into the past (in praeteritum transit)” (XI.14.17; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 231). The whole reasoning, in effect, amounts to the following: in order to know what time is (quid sit), it is first necessary to know how it is (quomodo sit), and even if it is (an sit); now, no one of the times taken in itself can be said truly “to be”: the future because it is not yet, the past because it is no longer, the present because it possesses only a reality that is endlessly vanishing. In these conditions it will be necessary to base the being of time upon a more stable and permanent support and, by entrusting its being to the mind, by defining it as something of the mind itself, to secure a supplement of presence to its ever-changing fleetingness. In other words, to grant a being to time, it will be necessary to place it in the mind, defined by its inalienable self-presence, and thus lead the three tenses back to three modes of this §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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presence: expectation, attention, and memory. But in order for such a reasoning to be conclusive, it is necessary to restore to it two implicit premises: to be means the same as to be present; it is possible to equate “past,” “present,” and “future,” as inner-temporal determinations of things, with the Past, the Present, and the Future as dimensionals of time, which articulate time’s phenomenological structure, so as to confer on the latter the characters of the former (“to pass away,” “to flow”: transire). The first premise belongs, in some ways, to Augustine’s “Platonism.” There only is, in the full sense of the term, that which is not subject to becoming, the eidos that, for Plotinus, belongs to the intelligible world of the second hypostasis, the very life of which is eternity. The eternal, henceforth, is what truly is, what is purely and simply, that of which one can say: ἔστι μόνον, a present that excludes, as such, every past or future. This Platonism merges, in Augustine, with a “metaphysic of Exodus,” to take up Gilson’s expression—that is to say, a Platonizing interpretation of the text of Exodus 3:14, where God, in the classical translation, responds to Moses: Ego sum qui sum. Here God is being itself, ipsum esse, the being truly being who, like the Platonic οὐσία, is necessarily self-identical, immutable, and eternal. If God alone truly is, in the sense in which his being is always present, without past or future (“you are the same and your years do not fail”), then “to be,” for the created, is to imitate temporally this full and supra-temporal presence: to be present. But this first implicit premise is not enough to ground Augustine’s reasoning: for it does not follow that, from having restricted being to what is present, there only is the Present (as a dimensional)! Augustine probably should have drawn the opposite conclusion: one can say of the Present as dimensional of time neither that it “is,” nor that it “is not,” since these determinations only fit with something “present” (and “absent”) in the inner-temporal sense. The question of the being of time, if “being” must be understood strictly as “to be present,” rests henceforth entirely upon an equivocity of principle. This is precisely where Augustine’s second premise comes in. Indeed, only the identification of time with inner-temporality can lead to the refusal of a true being to time, envisaged as such: non vere dicamus tempus esse, nisi quia tendit non esse?: “So indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends towards non-existence” (XI.14.17; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 231).

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(b) The problem of the measurement of time It is only by virtue of this identification—and, probably, of this confusion— between time and inner-temporality that we can understand the displacement that the preliminary question undergoes: quid est enim tempus? Augustine reformulates it first under the form quomodo sunt [tria tempora]? (XI.14.17), then under the form: ubicumque sunt [futura et praeterita]? (XI.18.23): “Where are future and past things?” The question in view of the understanding of time itself henceforth bears only on the mode of being of inner-temporal beings. The problematic that will allow us to pass from one question to the other is that of the measure of time. This question of the measure of time is not identical to that of the measure of movement, which will be broached later (XI.23.29) in an anti-Aristotelian perspective. The question is not, for the moment, whether time is itself the measure of movement, or if it is instead possible to grasp its essence outside of motion and of its measure. The question is only that of “when” we measure time. Indeed, in order to be able to measure it, it must itself be present. Neither the past nor the future is thus measurable. But what, then, do we mean when we speak of a “long time” and of a “short time”? A time can be long only if it is long. Now, “to be” fundamentally signifies “to be present.” Time, then, is measurable only when it is present. But how long is the present? A century, a year, a day, an hour, a minute, a second? Each of these durations can always be divided again, indefinitely. It would then be necessary to assume the existence of an atom of time, of a duration absolutely indivisible. Augustine gives a hypothetical turn to this passage, refusing to decide the question of whether or not the division of time can be pursued to infinity: “If we can think of some bit of time which cannot be divided into even the smallest instantaneous moments, that alone is what we can call ‘present’ ” (XI.15.20; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 232). The value of this hypothesis aside, the present, in every case, does not “last,” it possesses no space (nullum habet spatium), it extends over no duration (nulla morula extendatur)—it does not cease to “fly away,” to vanish: raptim a futuro in praeteritum transvolat; it passes in rapid flight from the future to the past, escaping, by this very fact, from every measure. How can we exit this aporia? This whole piece of reasoning, let us note, is rather strange: it rests upon the possibility of applying to the Present itself an adjective such as “long” or “short,” not in the spatial sense, but in the sense in which one speaks of an interval of time more or less “long”—that is to say, of a duration more or less great. In sum, the question is: does the Present last a long time, or a short time? But does such a question have the least bit of sense to it? Indeed, to last a long time is, for a thing or a state of affairs, to remain §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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present for a long time: but the Present cannot last more or less long, for the simple reason that the inner-temporal predicate “present” could in no case whatsoever be applied to the Present. Augustine’s conclusion thus should not be that the present extends itself over no duration, but rather that the question of the duration of the present is totally meaningless. In other words, instead of concluding from the fact that praesens autem nullum habet spatium that the Present is not supposed to have any extension or space, which is to say, to last for a given time, to have such or such interval of time as its mea sure, Augustine tends to conceive of the Present itself, throughout the analyses that follow, as an interval of time (intervallum temporum: XI.16, 21) that is infinitely short; thus it will be necessary to lengthen it, to restore to it an extension; and this will be the role of the soul. Certainly, the statement according to which the now, in itself, has no temporal extension is not original: it is found in Aristotle’s Physics, since the now is defined there not as a “part” (οὐ μέρος: 218a6), but as a limit (πέρας) of the temporal continuum (218a24). But this apparent similitude sharpens the differences. Indeed, Aristotle never conceives of the now, after the fashion of things that are in time, as “passing away” or “flowing”: to argue that it is a limit is precisely to refuse, by principle, such a formulation. From the idea that the now is not a part, but is rather the limit of time, Aristotle draws the following conclusion: the now, in a certain sense, is indeed “in” time (223a5), but not in the manner of things that are “in” time; it is thus necessary to distinguish different ways of being-in-time, different meanings here of the “in”: (1) being-in-time in the sense of innertemporal things: these are in movement and change in time, which means that they are measured by it (221a3), that they are “in number” (ἐν ἀριθμῷ: 221a11), since time is the number of movement; (2) being-in-time as the now, which is to say, being itself that which numbers, and no longer that which is numbered. In sum, Aristotle’s conclusion is in fact the distinction of time from the inner-temporal and the impossibility of assigning to the former the determinations of the latter. In complete contrast, it is precisely because Augustine does not distinguish between the two ways of being in time, and because he thinks of the Present according to the model of inner-temporal present things—we could find a supplementary testimony in the fact that the same verb, transire, is used indifferently to designate the passage of the present: praesens . . . in praeteritum transit (XI.14.17.l.28), and the passage of sounds or words that resonate: voces transeunt (XI.26.33.l.13)—that he will need to have recourse to the soul in order to confer a true being upon this vanishing present, which unceasingly flies by and passes away. 74

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The aporia we had run up against is clearly formulated a bit further on in this form: “That I am measuring time I know. But I am not measuring the future which does not yet exist, nor the present which has no extension (quia nullo spatio tenditur), nor the past which is no longer in being” (XI.26.33; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 240). This difficulty is finally going to be resolved by showing that these times that, by themselves, “are” not or “are” only improperly, are nevertheless present in the mind and receive from it a supplement of being and of presence. In such a way it will be possible to operate the methodical reduction of the three times (tria tempora) to their mode of presence in the mind under the form of three faculties: expectation, attention (or intuition: contuitus), and memory— that is to say, to three modes of time (haec . . . tria quaedam: XI.20, 26). But this reduction is only possible because the soul is defined by its original self-presence: quid tam menti adest quam ipsa mens?: “what is so present to the soul as the soul itself ?”; non enim quidquam illi est se ipsa praesentius: “nothing after all is more present to the soul than itself.” To sum up, as Guitton rightly states, “time is the provisional and imperfect form by which the soul is present to itself.” The whole inquiry is developing as an analysis of ordinary language: are we justified in saying, as we were taught as children, and as we ourselves teach children, that there are three times (esse tria tempora)? Should we not rather say that there is only the present? For the future ( futurum) signifies future things ( futura), and the past ( praeteritum) past things (praeterita); now, future things, in order to be, should be present, but hidden from us; it would then be necessary to imagine that “when the present emerges from the future, time comes out of some secret store” (XI.17.22; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 233). But where is such a place? The hypothesis is not necessarily outlandish, for oracles seem capable of predicting future things as if they were already present. Now, then, to foresee is already to see: neque enim potest videri id quod non est (XI.17.22); the paradigm of vision (videre, cernere, intueri) here is determinant. Only vision joins and reconciles the gaze and the visible in the present tense. The primacy of vision is one with the primacy of the present in the Augustinian determination of being. If future things are—that is to say, are present to a foreseeing gaze, the question is: where are they (ubicumque sunt)? What is this obscure hideout from whence the present arises, and to which it returns? Wherever it is, Augustine responds, things can be there only as present (XI.18.23). Thus, it is necessary to introduce an additional distinction upon which everything depends: it is necessary to make the separation between past and future things that, as such, are not, and the representations by the intermediary of which they are present to consciousness: in §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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scholastic language, the esse reale, on the one hand, and the esse intentionale, on the other. If past things are present, it is not in themselves and in reality that they are so; rather, it is through their intentional species, through the images and the traces (vestigia) that they impress upon the soul; and the same goes for future things, which the oracles predict by the intermediary of their signs (signa) (XI.18.24). Then, it is necessary, as Plotinus had already said, that “the image persists in the absence of the thing (τοῦ ἀπόντος ἤδη ἡ φαντασία).” But this theory of memory as an image really present in the soul comes up against the same sort of objection that Husserl will address, much later, to Brentano: if memory is nothing other than an image of the past really present in consciousness, what will allow us to differentiate a lived experience of recollection from a fiction of the fantasy? If “memory and the retention of the object belong to the imagination (τῷ φανταστικῷ),” what difference will there be between the imagination and memory? How could memory persuade me that what it represents has really existed, if it didn’t aim at (and reach) the past in itself, in its real transcendence, beyond every image? “The intuition of the past cannot itself be a pictorialization. It is an original consciousness.” Augustine does not give an answer to these questions: in order to do so, he would have devoted himself to describing time-consciousness by distinguishing primary from secondary memory, pre sentation from representation. But this is not his purpose: it is enough for him to show that it is the soul, and it alone, that through its acts makes the absent present, grasping the future through the signs prefiguring it and the past through its vestiges. Whence there comes a necessary reform of language. The three times must be led back to three modalities of the present of the soul: “What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times—past, present, and future. Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else. The present considering the past is the memory (memoria), the present considering the present is vision (contuitus), the present considering the future is expectation (expectatio)” (XI.20.26; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 235, modified). Here we have reached the genuine ground for the determination of time as distensio animi. This solution will be articulated only later in the text (cf. XI.27.36), but it is clear from now on that what is measured is time at the moment where it elapses, but that this time is only present and offered to measurement if it is retained by the soul, so that time is only measurable in the soul and through its presence. It is the self-presence of the soul that confers on the present the extension that is its own. It is only 76

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in the soul and through it that the present acquires its own “space” or extension—that it is present as present for the one who is present to it, which is to say that it is present to itself and for itself. (c) Excursus on motion and time Because we have secured the principle of the Augustinian solution to the problem of time, it is now possible to undertake an apparent excursus on the relations between time and motion. In the image of what takes place in Plotinus, the aim of the subsequent passages is to assure the autonomy of time on a double front: with regard to motion, on the one hand, whether we are talking about a particular movement, the revolution of the sun and the stars, or the movement of all bodies taken together; and, on the other hand, with regard to the measure of motion—which is to say, of its duration as it is quantifiable in each instance. Time, in substance, is neither motion (motus), nor duration (mora): the first term probably refers back to the Pythagoreans, as well as to common sense; the second, through the metamorphoses that Plotinus’s critique caused it to undergo, aims quite probably at the theory of Aristotle. Motion and time are two different things. On this point Augustine follows Aristotle and Plotinus closely: time is not movement, for movement is in time. These authors advance two arguments in order to establish the point: (1) the discontinuity of movement is opposed to the continuity of time: while movement can be stopped and changed into its “contrary,” rest, time has no empty hours and is never interrupted; (2) every movement possesses a speed—that is to say, it covers a given distance in a given time; now, time cannot cover a distance or accomplish a trajectory in a given period of time: ταχὺς δὲ καὶ βραδὺς οὐκ ἔστιν: “[Time] is not fast or slow.” Augustine will take up these traditional arguments by conferring on them, so to speak, a superior dramatics. To do this, he will proceed to a series of imaginary variations or “eidetic reductions” allowing him to isolate a pure eidos of time by disassociating it from that of motion. In order to establish that time is not the movement of the celestial bodies, Augustine appeals, like Aristotle and Plotinus before him, to the difference between the discontinuity of movement and the continuity of time; but he goes so far as to imagine, in order to render this difference in some way “visible,” that the “luminaries” of the sky (caeli lumina) could stop their course, while other movements of the world would continue to take place: “If the heavenly bodies were to cease and a potter’s wheel were revolving, would there be no time by which we could measure its gyrations, and say §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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that its revolutions were equal; or if at one time it moved more slowly and at another time faster, that some rotations took longer, others less?” (XI.23.29; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 237). At the point we have reached in the text, Augustine does not tell us how this counting of time could unfold in the absence of a constant movement of reference: for the potter’s wheel accelerates and slows, and thus it cannot, unlike the celestial revolutions, furnish a fi xed standard of mea sure. We will find the same difficulty again later. The second imaginary variation bears on the problem of speed: instead of reasoning abstractly by saying that speed, as a property of movement, makes a factor of time intervene, and that, as a consequence, motion is not time, Augustine attempts to furnish, once again, an intuitive illustration of this difference of essence by devising the fiction of a variation in the speed of revolution of the sun. If the sun completed its movement from sunrise to sunrise twenty-four times faster, what would be the interval of time that would have to be called “a day”? The author of the Confessions considers three possibilities: either time is identical to the movement of the sun, and a day will have no more duration than one hour; or time is the duration of the movement, and this acceleration of the sun would in no way modify the flow of time: the sun will have to accomplish twenty-four revolutions in order for us to be able to speak of “a day”; or, finally, time is at once movement (motus) and its duration (mora), in which case it would become strictly impossible to use the expression “a day.” None of these answers is entirely satisfying, even if the second most likely has Augustine’s preference. What is at stake through them is not the definition of what we call “a day.” Rather, what this imaginary set of variations indicates positively is that the speed of the movement may vary (and especially the speed of the movement of solar rotation) without the measure of this movement, its duration, being affected: it follows that I will be able to continue to measure the speed of the sun, even if it were completing its circuit from sunrise to sunrise twenty-four times faster. Th is conclusion still does not tell us what time is. We know simply that the mea sure of the movement, the duration, is independent of the movement and of its speed. Time is thus not the movement of a body: tempus [non] esse motum corporis (XI.24.31); but is it the mea sure of this movement? Before attempting to respond to this question, it is worth considering one last time the nature of the arguments employed. As Ricoeur rightly remarked, following Meijering, the argument of a cessation or acceleration of the movements of the universe had never been used before Augustine. Neither Aristotle nor Plotinus, indeed, had freed time entirely from 78

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all cosmological reference— Aristotle, because time for him was always defined in reference to motion; and Plotinus, because the soul, of which time was the diastasis, was “the World Soul”: for him, psychic time was always and inseparably a cosmological time. It was therefore necessary that the stars be stripped of the divine character they held for the Greeks, that they be demoted from the rank of “luminaries” or lights dedicated to marking the succession of the hours and submitted to the free action of a creator God in order for the hypothesis of their acceleration or deceleration to be formulated. It is probably in this way that the biblical reference to Joshua, who asks God to stop the sun so that he may complete his victory (XI.23.30), must be understood: only a God who is master of the world and of creation is capable of such a miracle. If time is not movement, is it then the mea sure of movement? If this measure is called “duration,” can we equate time with duration? Augustine does not answer this question directly; he limits himself to insisting that it is rather (potius) duration that can rightly claim the name of “time”: “a body’s movement is one thing, the period by which we measure its duration (quo metimur quamdiu sit) is another. It is self-evident which of these is to be described preferably (potius) as time” (XI.24.31; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 239, modified). Thus, Augustine can conclude from this passage that he “still do[es] not know what time is” (XI.25.32; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 239), and pray to God to enlighten his darkness. If the question is not settled, and cannot be for the moment, this is because the difficulty that we raised a moment ago still has not been answered: if time is what allows us to measure movement, how is this measurement carried out? The fiction of an acceleration of the sun’s movement has, believes Augustine, allowed us to make evident the fact that the duration of the day would be the same and, consequently, since it is this duration that deserves the name of “time,” that time would continue to flow in the same way before and after this modification. But is this conclusion as certain as Augustine would like it to be? Indeed, one could object that in losing all reference to a phenomenon-clock—that is to say, to a constant and uniform movement adopted in a conventional manner as the standard of measure for all others—it becomes impossible to assign to the sun’s revolution the least amount of duration. Henceforth, there are two exclusive possibilities: (1) either, on the one hand, we must admit that other clocks—for example, artificial ones— continue to function at the same rate, at the very moment when the solar clock slows. But then Augustine’s conclusion would be trivial: for the circuit of the sun would run in a time different only with regard to clocks having been set according to the prior movement of the sun. However, it would not follow that the §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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duration would be entirely separable from the movement. At the very most, it would follow that the duration would be separable from a certain movement. Thus, we would not be a single step closer to resolving the problem in front of us: that of the relations between duration and movement in general. (2) Or, on the other hand, it would be necessary to go all the way to the end of the eidetic variation that is here put into play and confront the case in which it would not be only a movement (a clock) that would undergo an acceleration or a deceleration, but all the movements and the clocks, at the same time. What would happen, for example, if the speed of all the movements in the universe were multiplied by twenty-four? Does the claim that the duration of the sun’s revolution would last an hour still have, in this hypothesis, the least sense? Put another way: can we entirely separate duration and movement? To this hypothesis that Augustine does not consider, it seems that there are only two possible responses. It could be argued that, since every measure of time (every duration) is relative to a movement of reference, the equal acceleration of all the movements of the universe could in no way modify their duration: the artificial clocks would always indicate “twentyfour hours” for the cycle of the sun, and there would be strictly speaking no sense in supposing that the interval of time that is necessary to this movement had been modified. In sum, there would be no sense at all in speaking of a modification of any sort: it would even be impossible to speak of an “acceleration” of movements. But, on the other hand, it could also be argued—and this in fact is, it seems, Augustine’s thesis—that the duration of the movements would be modified in proportion to their acceleration: henceforth, all the movements that previously were completed in twenty-four hours would instead be completed in one hour of time. But of which “measure of time” are we speaking? It seems inevitable to assume at least one movement of reference that would have escaped the general acceleration, and with reference to which, alone, this acceleration would become measurable; and this movement could be only that of the “flow” of the acts of the mind. In sum, it is only if we suppose that there exists something like an inner “duration” of the mind that the acceleration of all the other movements could be measured. In front of this alternative, nevertheless, the question remains: is there any meaning in supposing the existence of an inner movement of the mind itself that would serve as the movement of reference for the measurement of all the other movements, in the hypothesis of a general, equal acceleration of these movements? And above all, by what right could we choose this movement, among others, as the movement of reference and make it the standard for all duration? What right could we have to assume that it 80

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is all the movements of the universe that accelerate, rather than that of my mind that slows? Augustine could object that this quasi-movement, which he will soon call “distention of the mind,” is by essence absolutely regular; but isn’t the same true of the cosmological movements? Why is a miracle conceivable in one case and not in the other? And, under these conditions, what is it that still confers primacy on the soul for the mea surement of time? What authorizes us to consider the inner movement of the mind as equivalent to time and not as an inner-temporal movement among others? No response is given to these questions in the Confessions: this lacuna heavily mortgages their overall progress, as well as the conclusions to which they lead, as I will attempt to show. Time is, then, for Augustine, entirely independent of cosmological movement—that is to say that it is no longer at all necessary, in order to mea sure the speed of movement—for example, in the present case, the movement of the sun—to take into consideration a movement of reference that is exterior to the soul. It is on this point that Augustine radically innovates with regard to his predecessors. Even when Plotinus assigned time to the soul, he nevertheless argued that time was also, by accident, the mea sure of movement; but he suggested in addition that this mea sure could become effective only if it took as its standard the sky’s movement, alone absolutely constant, uniform, and regular, which thus becomes the movement of reference measuring all the others. Because of the fictions to which Augustine appeals, the celestial movements lose their privilege: they now appear on the same level as every other sort of movement, just as fluctuating and relative as any other. The decosmologization of time is here pushed to its endpoint. But the question of its measurement only becomes more crucial. How can it be accomplished? Augustine does not respond directly to this question. The soul seems to be sufficient for measuring the rate and the speed of every innerworldly movement; it seems no longer to have need of any movement of reference. Or, rather, it finds the movement of reference in itself: it is this movement. This solution, which remains to be understood, is announced at the end of the “excursus” on movement: “How then do I measure time itself ? Or do we use a shorter time to measure a longer time, as when, for example, we mea sure a transom by using a cubit length?” (XI.26.33; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 239). This passage is followed by several examples: a long syllable is measured by a short one, the space of poems (spatia carminum) by the space of the verse (spatiis versuum). But what is the value of this solution? It obscures the problem at least as much as it sheds light on it. It leads, in fact, to an infinite regression: for if a longer time is measured by a shorter one, how is the shorter one mea sured? By a time that is even §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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shorter? The apparent weakness of this answer makes for its strength in Augustine’s view: it is what will allow him to conclude, at the end of the whole passage, that “time is simply a distension. But of what is it a distension? I do not know, but it would be surprising if it is not that of the mind itself (ipsius animi)” (XI.26.33; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 240). How does this conclusion follow? The statement according to which we measure a longer time by a shorter one means, in fact, nothing other than this: time must be measured by itself; time is something that is measured by time. To hold this thesis is to sever any linkage of time to movement, or in any case to exterior movement, and thereby to situate time in the mind alone. To say that time is measured by itself is to say that there is a sort of continuous and regular arch-movement, that of the mind itself (ipsius animi), the speed of which, assumed to be constant, allows for the measurement of all other movements. The mind is the universal standard, the unit of measure that is no longer relative to another, and that grounds all the others: “some absolute standard outside of motion,” according to Callahan. It is therefore toward this type of solution— of a movement that is not innertemporal, as all cosmic motions are, but is instead identical to time itself, and situated in the human soul—that this entire passage orients us. Without the presupposition of such an inner movement, it would no longer be at all possible to understand how time could find in itself its own measure and thus measure the speed of every other movement. But isn’t this hypothesis artificial, since Augustine never speaks of “inner movement”? To this objection it can be answered first that the thesis of a movement or change of the soul itself was already present in Aristotle: in the absence of outside motion, it is this change of the soul’s thoughts that allows it to perceive time, as the myth of the sleepers of Sardinia illustrates: “when the state of our own minds does not change at all, or we have not noticed its changing, we do not realize that time has elapsed” (218b21 and following; Basic Works, 290–91). The only conclusion that Aristotle drew from this was that time presupposes change, just as the (numbered) number presupposes the numerable: φανερὸν ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἄνευ κινήσεως καὶ μεταϐολῆς χρόνος: “evidently time is not independent of movement and change” (218b34; Basic Works, 291). Of course, this “inner” movement of the soul, like all other motion, remains innertemporal: the soul must number this movement according to anterior and posterior in order for there to be time. But what about Augustine? First, it is worth stressing that, in the Confessions, time is thought of expressly as a passage, a transition, a change that happens from the future toward the past, a movement provided with a direction: “When time is measured, where (unde) does it come from, by what 82

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(qua) route does it pass, and where (quo) does it go? It must come out of the future, pass by the present, and go into the past; so it comes from (ex) what as yet does not exist, passes through (per) that which lacks extension, and goes into (in) that which is now non-existent” (XI.21.27; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 236). It is enough to underline, in this passage, the adverbs indicating a movement: time is this very movement. What is more, this movement situated in the soul is the very movement of the soul. Indeed it is the soul, by means of an “intention” (intentio), the status of which must be understood, that makes the future pass into the past through the present: to the question quoted above (unde . . . , qua . . . , quo . . . ?), Augustine will give an answer that brings to bear the activity of the soul: praesens intentio futurum in praeteritum traicit . . . : “present intention transfers the future into the past . . .” (XI.27.36; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 243, modified). It is therefore the soul that makes time pass and that produces this inner movement that will soon be described in terms of distension; and, what is more, this movement is the soul itself. But this entails that the movement or change under consideration is no longer inner-temporal: it is, absolutely speaking, time. (d) Intentio and distensio The entire last portion of Book XI of the Confessions is dedicated to describing the process through which the mind or the soul, by the intermediary of its three acts— expectation, attention, and memory—makes (agit) time or engenders it. We will have to return to this “agit” (XI.28.37), the interpretation of which is difficult. Augustine’s thesis, which had already been anticipated (XI.23.30) in an indeterminate form (quandam distensionem), is now subjected to a thematic analysis. But how does this definition of time as “distension . . . of the mind itself” (XI.26.33) make possible an answer to the problem of the measurement of time? In order for time to be measurable, it must possess a certain dimension: the future and the past have no dimension whatsoever: they are not. What about the present? We have seen that it, too, goes its own way and renders itself past continuously: ibat . . . et praeteribat, writes Augustine (XI.27.34). Therefore, it has no dimension; it extends over no space. But is it truly so? The definition of time as distension of the mind contradicts this alleged piece of evidence: for the present receives from this distensio of the soul a certain extension, a “certain space,” thus presenting the opportunity for mea surement: praeteriens enim tendebatur in aliquod spatium temporis, quo metiri posset, quoniam praesens nullum habet spatium: “In process of passing away it was extended through a certain space of time by which it could be measured, §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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since the present occupies no length of time” (XI.27.34). Actually, as we shall see, the verb tenditur designates less the activity of the present itself than the activity of the soul according to the double modality of intentio and distensio. If the present extends in a certain way, if it embraces a certain extension of duration, it is because the soul stretches itself in a double direction, toward the future by expectation and toward the past by memory. This double intentionality of the soul allows access to an enlarged present— that is to say, to what Husserl will call the “living present” of consciousness. The entire end of book XI, which is also its heart, will be dedicated to the phenomenological description of this process. This is both the culmination of Augustine’s analyses and the most difficult point, the one where all the previously evoked difficulties converge. At stake in this analysis is the interiorization or subjectivization of time. Do we have here, as Ricoeur believes, an “inestimable discovery,” a “stroke of genius”? Perhaps not. But before I can pronounce upon this point, it is helpful to review the movement of thought that led Augustine to this assertion. To show how the present is enlarged in the recent past and in the immediate future, thanks to the distension of the soul, is to show how time is (in order to be measurable), but at the same time, it is to show in what way it passes away, it flows, since such is its nature. It will thus be necessary to make visible, in other words, which specific modalities the mind uses to pour the future into the past, like sand in an hourglass or water in a clepsydra, through the bottleneck of the present; such is the role of intentio: “present intention transfers the future into the past, by making the past grow through diminishment of the future, until, by exhaustion of the future, everything is in the past” (XI.27.36; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, modified, 243). By “future,” “present,” “past,” we must no longer understand the three times (tria tempora) of the beginning of the text, but rather three modalities of the consciousness of time, or more simply, three modes of time (cf. XI.20.26); the mechanism we need to understand is that by which the mind pours, in some sense, the expectation (the “present of the future”) into the memory (the “present of the past”) by means of the attention (the “present of the present”; or again, the vision, contuitus, of XI.20.26). The example thanks to which this mechanism can be placed, so to speak, before our eyes, is that of a verse of eight syllables: Deus creator omnium (XI.27.35). What happens when I declaim (pronuntio) and proclaim (renuntio) this verse? In order to be able to pronounce these eight syllables, it is necessary that I all at once anticipate the syllables to come, hold (tenebo: XI.27.35.l.14) the syllables that I have just pronounced, and 84

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bring my attention to bear on the syllables that I proffer in this very moment. It is this triple intentionality that Augustine describes with a striking acuity and precision. Take a resounding sound or a prolonged silence: what allows us to assert without mistake that the interval of time over which they extend is of the same length? (1) cogitationem tendimus (XI.27.36.l.10–11): we direct ourselves by thought toward the sound that will resound or the silence “as if a sound occurred” (Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 242); (2) we fi x our attention on the sound at the moment when it occurs or on the silence; (3) memoria commendans (l.20): we entrust the sound that sounded (or the silence) to memory. These three activities of the mind take place together during the entire duration of the measure, from the moment in which the sound began to sound up to the instant where it ceases. But what we measure is not the real sound, whose first vibrations ended long ago, have “passed” (praeterierunt: XI.27.35.l.22), have “flown away” (avolaverunt: XI.27.35.l.22), but the sound retained in memory, such that it continues to persist (manere) in the mind, through the impression (aff ectio) that it leaves there: “The impression which passing events make upon you [my mind] abides (manet) when they are gone. That present consciousness is what I am measuring, not the stream of past events which have caused it. When I measure periods of time, that is what I am actually measuring” (XI.27.36). This presupposes that the past remains present in the memory, under a modified form, in an interweaving of absence and of presence that remains to be understood. The past must still be there, present, even while being already past; it must be present under a past form, and it is this immediate memory that is still a quasi-perception, a modified perceptual intentionality, a “primary memory,” as Husserl would say, distinct from recollection as presentation (Gegenwärtigung) is from re-presentation (Vergegenwärtigung), that book XI of the Confessions strives to describe. Of course, Augustine does not distinguish here between these two modalities of memory, the primary memory in which we “see” the past, we perceive it, in which it is “given” to us in a presentative manner, and the re-presentation of a past perception that is always the reproduction in an image of this perception. Memory is, for Augustine, entirely on the side of the image: the image is what incarnates this composite of presence and absence, this presence of the absent in the presence to itself of the soul that defies the total absence of forgetting. Even our childhood is somehow there, in these palaces of memory that are also its mazes. When I evoke or recount this childhood that is no more, Augustine asserts, “I am looking on its image in present time, since it is still in my memory” (XI.18.23; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 234). §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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How can the mind thus weave presence into absence and absence into presence? We still need to describe this process that supposes a mixture of activity and passivity, the first belonging to intentio, the second to distensio, a passivity in activity and an activity in passivity, the intricacies of which it will be necessary to attempt to unravel. Let us quote in its entirety the passage that sums it up: “I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before (antequam) I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when (cum) I have begun, how soever much (quantum) that the elements chosen from my expectation become part of the past, my memory in its turn stretches toward them. The life of this act of mine is distended two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future transits to become the past. The more (quanto magis) the action advances, so much the shorter (tanto breuiata) the expectation and the longer the memory, until (donec) all expectation is consumed, when (cum) the entire action is finished, and it has passed into the memory” (XI.28.38; trans. Confessions, Chadwick, 243, modified). I have emphasized, in parentheses and in Latin, the multitude of temporal adverbs that punctuate this text from beginning to end; later I will come back to discuss their function. What is Augustine trying to describe? Nothing other than the process by which the soul “makes” (agit) time, which is to say, engenders the passage (transitio) of the future toward the past through the present. This is said explicitly in a passage occurring a bit earlier: quomodo crescit praeteritum, quod jam non est, nisi quia in animo, qui illud agit, sunt tria?: “[H]ow does this past, which now has no being, grow, if not by the fact that, in the mind that produces it, there are three actions?” (XI.28.37.l3– 4; trans. Confessions, Chadwick, 243, modified). Here, in the excellent French translation of Tréhorel and Bouissou (in turn translated literally here into English), there is almost a hesitation; it is marked by an attenuation of the strength of the Latin text: illud agit is rendered by: “the mind that makes this action” (Bibliothèque augustinienne 14:335), even though illud demonstrably refers to praeteritum. The mind does not accomplish only these three actions—expectatio, attentio, memoria; through this continuous action it literally “produces” time—that is to say, temporalizes it. Kurt Flasch emphasizes it in his commentary: “Augustine asserts that the mind, animus, produces (bewirkt) these three dimensions [past, present, future], agit.” But doesn’t such an activity of the mind, which is present in Augustine starting at the level of sensible perception to the extent that perception requires the intervention of attention subordinated to voluntas— doesn’t such an activity, by which the soul “makes time pass,” or even 86

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“makes” time outright, lead to an extreme subjectivization of time? It is difficult to deny it: for Augustine, time is one with the subjective experience of time, with the consciousness of time, it is this consciousness itself. But these formulations are still insufficient, for the consciousness in question is not only a passive consciousness that would limit itself to taking notice of a flow from the outside: it takes part in the passage of time, since it produces it and engenders it in some way. It is not surprising that this last assertion shocked many commentators, beginning with medieval ones: how could a Christian author hold that the past of Adam, or of Christ, exists only in his individual soul, which engenders these pasts in some way? Certainly what is here engendered by the soul is not history itself, the events and the beings of which it is composed; it is only its past-being. But, actually, this distinction is not made by Augustine; as Kurt Flasch emphasizes, the question “Are there, in nature or in history, temporal relations that do not depend on the memory and the expectation of the subject?” is never posed in the Confessions. What is more, one fi nds no mention there of the modern distinction between an “objective” time and a “subjective” time (Husserl), or between a measurable time and a lived time (Bergson). For Augustine, there is only one time, the nature of which he strives to grasp: ego scire cupio vim naturamque temporis (XI.23.30): “I desire to understand the power and the nature of time” (Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 237), not merely time such as it exists for me, in an inner experience, but time itself: ipsum tempus (XI.26.33). Thus, there would be a retrospective illusion if we saw, in the closely argued inquiry into time in the Confessions, only a prefiguration of an analysis of the consciousness of time, in the style of phenomenology: if Augustine “struggled . . . almost to despair,” as Husserl wrote in his introduction to The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time of 1905, this perhaps was not in order to put into operation an “analysis of time-consciousness” in the frame of a “descriptive psychology.” Henceforth it is as if Augustine were contented to juxtapose two definitions of time. In some texts, and sometimes even in the Confessions themselves, he does not hesitate to present time as a purely “objective” phenomenon, without relating it in any way to the mind: time is “the motion of creatures (creaturae motus) from one state to another as they succeed one another according to the decree of God,” or again, more succinctly, time is the very movement of things: “For the changes of things (rerum mutationibus) constitute time.” Is this purely cosmological definition of time compatible with that of book XI? Is the “time . . . marked by hours, days, months” the same time as that of which Augustine states that it is a certain distension of the mind? We have to admit that Augustine does not §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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answer this question, and that in fact nothing allows us, in the course of the Confessions, to compensate for this deficiency. Nevertheless, it could be objected to the thesis that Augustine subjectivizes time that it is impossible for the soul to be the origin of time, since it is explicitly stated several times that it is God, and He alone, who is its creator: Ipsum tempus tu feceras (XI.14.17): “Time itself: it is You who made it.” Wouldn’t conceiving of the human mind as that which produces or engenders time be, inversely and in a humanist perspective, entirely foreign to the spirit of Augustine’s work to make man the true center of creation? “If time is nothing other than the expansive and extensive movement of the animus,” Flasch objects, “man becomes its dominus and master.” These objections do not appear to me able to shake the traditional interpretation (which was already that of the medieval commentators), according to which book XI of the Confessions accomplishes a true spiritualization—and consequently, a subjectivization— of time. First, it is indeed true that God is explicitly designated, in the Confessions, as operator omnium temporum (XI.13.15). But what does this expression mean? God is the creator, on the one hand, of beings in motion, and, by this fact, he creates the necessary—but in no way sufficient— condition for time: for minds are necessary to mea sure the time within themselves and thus to measure the movement of the things of the world, their duration; but, on the other hand, God is also the creator of these minds, and therefore he is indeed indirectly the creator of time as such. The second objection, according to which the distensio animi would make of man a dominus and master of creation, fares no better under analysis. For, far from presenting the soul’s distension as a privilege that would exalt man, Augustine presents it as a factor of dispersion, of scattering, of multitude: “I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand, and the tumultuous variations tear to pieces my thoughts” (XI.29.39; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 244, modified). That is why time, as it does for Plotinus, represents a fall— ἐξέπεσε —in comparison to the eternity and unity of God; the dispersion into which it plunges man is the mark of original sin; it testifies to his incapacity to be gathered together, to be unified, to return into himself and to recollect himself in the contemplation of his Creator; whence the final exhortation of book XI: “We who live multiplicity in and through the multiple”— such is, indeed, the temporal condition—we must, in “leaving behind the days of the old man,” by means of a conversion, “be gathered to follow the One (sequens unum),” “not in an effort of distension, but in one of intention” (XI.29.39). To this end we must turn not toward the ever-renewed tribulations of time, but toward the eternity of the One who remains. 88

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Thus, it is superfluous, in order to avoid the pitfall of “subjectivism,” to bring to bear upon the analysis of book XI a hypothetical reminiscence of the Plotinian World Soul by detecting its traces in the caelum caeli of book XII. Time, for Augustine, exists in the individual mind, in te, animus meus (XI.27.36), and only in this mind. It is the animus that makes time pass, or temporalizes it, by anticipating the future in the mode of expectation, by conserving the past in the mode of memory, and by fixing its gaze (contuitus) on the present in the mode of attention. Thus, we must go back to the central text of XI.28.38 in order to attempt to understand concretely in what manner the operation of these three acts of the mind engenders time or carries it into effect (agit). The example is that of a song that I prepare to sing: even before beginning, my expectation is directed (tenditur) toward the song in its entirety (in totium); then, when I begin to give voice to the first notes, I deduct (decerpsero) elements from my expectation in order to make them pass into my memory in such a way that my memory is directed toward it in turn (tenditur et memoria mea). This double tension of the mind belongs to the sphere of activity (hujus actionis meae), and this activity is expressed in the vocabulary of the intentio. The intention is tension: this tension of the mind itself toward that which, in occurring, passes from the future into the present and, in making itself past, slides from the present into the past. The active intention is thus what brings along and makes to pass (traicit: XI.27.36.l.25), what mobilizes the intrinsic mobility of times. But just as soon as the active part played by the intentio is evoked, its passive correlative, distensio, is named: “The life of this act of mine is distended two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say” (XI.28.38; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 243, modified). It is this double tension of expectation and of memory that engenders in the mind a corresponding distension, thanks to which the present acquires a space of time, embracing a part of the future and a part of the past. Through the intentio the active mind makes possible the transition of the times into one another; through the passive distensio the mind recollects, in a certain sense, the result of this transition, enlarging the present to the immediate future and to the recent past. Or rather the intentio and the distensio are not two different acts, for only the expectation, the attention, and the memory are “acts” in the proper and true sense. Intentio and distensio designate, rather, the obverse and the inverse of a same process in which activity and passivity are inextricable in the image of the Husserlian passive synthesis. The distensio is assuredly on the side of the impression, of the aff ectio, thanks to which the movements of the world impress their traces in the mind that remembers them, and wherein they persist. For its §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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part the intentio is rather on the side of the three acts of the mind by which the mind turns itself actively in the direction of the three times, so as to anticipate, to retain, and to make-present, and in this very way to engender a quasi-coexistence of the successive parts of time in an enlarged, extended present, dilated in a “space,” having acquired a dimension that allows its measurement. But this mixture of activity and passivity of the intentio/distensio also possesses a deeper meaning. Indeed, it would not be possible for the mind to make time pass if the mind itself were not passing away—that is to say, was not subject to a sort of flow: not only is the mind always other than itself (multus in multis, to paraphrase XI.29.39), but, what is more, it must in some way retain itself thanks to a kind of “longitudinal intentionality”: for “the mind also remembers itself” (X.25.36; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 200)— and this is why, Augustine adds, “the mind is the very memory itself ” (X.14.21; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 191). But then a difficulty appears, centered on the pair intentio/distensio: on the one hand, the mind, thanks to the intentio’s activity, makes time itself pass, which is to say, temporalizes it; through expectation, there is a “before,” through attention, there is a “during,” and, through memory, there is an “after” in the things themselves that, for their part, endlessly fly away and dissipate. But, on the other hand, the distensio’s passivity seems to signal the fact that the mind is not only what temporalizes, but is also in its turn what is temporalized. The distensio is really, in this sense, the result of the intentio, under its triple modality of expectation, attention, and remembering—it is the sedimented passivity of the intentional activity of the soul. The soul is at once and indissolubly both temporalizing and temporalized. Or, more precisely, it is what temporalizes itself, that whose temporality is the result of an activity of itself upon itself. And time is nothing other than this: an active-passive process. Once he has brought to light this activity-passivity of the mind buried in its own depths, at this level of intimacy where we are only darkness to ourselves and constantly need the help of God in order to see more clearly in us—for the self, insists Augustine, is not given to us in transparency, and remains “a soil of difficulty and much sweat” (X.16.25; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 193, modified)— once he has pierced the veil of the phenomena that hide and obscure themselves by excess of evidence, Augustine is able to lead back the traditional characteristics of time to the soul itself, since the soul is time’s locus. The same goes for continuity, which Aristotle argued belonged to time by the intermediary of motion, and to motion by the intermediary of magnitude— continuity of which the now was the operator, since it divided time in potency and unified it 90

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in actuality. In Augustine’s view this continuity rests henceforth on the attentio: it is attentio that possesses “a continuous duration (perdurat attentio),” leading “what will be present . . . towards absence” (XI.28.37; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 243, modified). Hence the unity of individual history, that which is narrated by the Confessions, becomes easily conceivable, but the unity of universal history is not; the final affirmation—“It [the succession of time, the continuity of which resides in the attention] occurs for the whole series of centuries lived by the ‘sons of men,’ where all human lives are but parts” (XI.28.38; trans. Confessions, Chadwick, 243, modified)— only skims the surface of the problem, and leaves us with an aporia. There remains a fundamental difficulty, which is the difficulty of Augustinian analyses of time. The soul is at once both temporalizing and temporalized; but it is temporalized only inasmuch as it is temporalizing and on this sole condition: itself engendering succession, which is to say the transition from the “before” to the “next,” or, as Augustine prefers to say it, the passage of times one into another, itself allowing the becoming to possess a continuity, the soul is indeed the only origin of time. No doubt there are exterior movements: but these, in themselves, are not time; they are not even necessary to its measurement; they participate not at all in its essence. What then becomes of the many temporal adverbs that we emphasized in the decisive text from XI.28.38? By what right can Augustine, describing the activity of the mind that somehow gives birth to time, write: “Before I begin, my expectation is directed . . . ; but when I have begun, how soever much that the elements chosen from my expectation become part of the past . . . ; the more the action advances, so much the shorter the expectation and the longer the memory, until all expectation is consumed, when the entire action is finished . . . ?” (XI.28.38; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 243, modified). What authorizes his recourse to temporal adverbs in order to describe the temporalizing activity of the soul? For the time to which these adverbs refer is certainly not the time of the soul, temporalized by its activity: it is a time prior to the soul, where its successive acts take place. This difficulty is clearly not a simple linguistic or terminological difficulty. If Augustine, in order to describe the mind’s intentio/ distensio, cannot do otherwise than to have recourse to temporal adverbs, it is certainly not by virtue of any failure of his language or by virtue of an impossibility of fact tied to the constraints of the language in which he expresses himself. On the contrary, the impossibility of the language coincides here strictly with an impossibility of thought and this impossibility of thought with a phenomenological impossibility of describing the state of affairs otherwise. For what reason? §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time

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In order to attempt to respond to this question, it is useful to return, a final time, to the presuppositions upon which Augustine bases himself and that condition his entire analysis. These presuppositions are at least five in number: 1. the reduction of the three dimensionals of time to past, present, and future things or events. 2. the leading back of the mode of presence of these things or events to the modalities of the soul’s present: expectation (the present of the future), vision or attention (the present of the present), and memory (the present of the past). 3. the “passage” of things in time (the continual change of their innertemporal predicates) is identified, following from (1) and (2), with the “passage” of the modes of time, which is to say of the three acts of the soul, each “into” another: expectation being transformed into attention and attention into memory. 4. the continual transition of the soul’s acts—by virtue of (1), (2), and (3)—is identified with the “passage” of time itself: the soul is time; 5. if the soul is time, any foundation of time on motion thus finds itself excluded on principle. No argument is advanced by Augustine to establish his claim that the transition of the acts of the soul deserves the name of “time” more than any other change or movement in the world. Isn’t this change also innertemporal? The absence of argued response to this objection renders highly problematic the leading-back of the movement of bodies to their temporal mea sure (duration) and from there to the fundamental dimension— or distension— of the mind itself, which grounds duration and makes it possible. But we thus get a better understanding of the fundamental aporia of these analyses: indeed, if we refuse the identification of time itself, understood as the unity of the three dimensionals that structure and articulate every inner-temporal change, with the coming to be of things, events, states of affairs in time; if, consequently, we refuse the very principle of the subjectivization of time by Augustine, we can no longer accept that the changes of the soul are the changes of time itself. We must, on the contrary, support the claim that inner-psychic changes presuppose the time in which they play out, and that they cannot in themselves constitute the origin of time. Or rather, expectation, attention, and memory can claim to be the origin of time only to the extent that time has been first led back to and identified with inner-temporality. The soul anticipates the sound to come and retains the sound that has passed; it accompanies by its successive pre92

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sentations the temporal unfolding of the melody; but this temporal unfolding is not time itself. Time is rather the fundamental “dimension” in which both “objective” phenomena, the changes of every sort, and “subjective” phenomena, the acts of the mind, unfold. That is why time is nothing subjective. For it would be necessary to hold, then, either that the subject in which time has its source is itself intemporal, like the Plotinian Soul, which seems impossible, or that it temporally engenders time, which is contradictory. Modern thinking of time, because of its Augustinian heritage, moves constantly within this dilemma. But if time is in no way subjective, how can we bring to light its own phenomenological determinations? Is it possible, and under what conditions, to conceive of time itself outside the subject? And if such an enterprise doesn’t imply simply returning to a purely “objective” conception of time, it does require, at the least, that we examine more closely the metaphysical horizon in which this subjectivization of time takes place. What is a “subject”? What makes the subjectivity of the subject? What other phenomenon can a temporal hermeneutics take as its guiding thread?

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PA RT

2

Time It is clear that the hic and nunc do not localize and temporalize the event, but rather that the event temporalizes the nunc and localizes the hic. —Carlo Diano, Forma ed evento

§5. The Stakes for a Phenomenology of Time and Its Differentiation from the Metaphysics of Time My concern thus far has not been to do history, and even less to comment on some pages, however brilliant they may be, of Plato or Aristotle. Directing my analyses was a search for a guiding thread in the interpretation of the temporal phenomenon—that is to say, for a privileged and remarkable phenomenon, by the light of which and “on” which it may be possible to “read” time, according to the requisites and the method of a hermeneutics attached to the “things themselves.” A first guiding thread proposed itself to us in the form of the inner-temporal change. If things change, move, and are modified, perhaps it is possible to understand time itself in the mode of a change, whose nature it would be necessary subsequently to study thoroughly. However, this type of approach soon demonstrated its limits, revealed in a masterly fashion by Plato: by understanding time in light of what is in time, we are irresistibly drawn to think of time itself as an innertemporal phenomenon. It is this fundamental difficulty to which the various paradoxes in the Parmenides give echo: from the moment it is conceived through the lens of inner-temporality, time becomes a contradictory reality, whose aporiae resist analysis. In such a view, the now is both what “passes away” and what “remains”; the future is reduced to a past in waiting, since it “becomes” continuously present, at the same time as the present endlessly makes itself past: times are thus passing “into” one another and leveling their differences. The future and the past no longer appear, except as modifications of an inner-temporal present, the now [le maintenant], which, in passing away, makes possible the paradoxical maintenance of time as the fixed and immutable form of passage. In this regard, Plato’s 95

lucidity and vigilance and the rigor and prudence of Aristotle, who never confuses the inner-temporality of the now with the being-in-time of that which, in its being, is subject to becoming, matter little; what matters is the conceptual horizon in which their attempts are inscribed and by which their results are conditioned through and through. The other possible guiding thread for a temporal hermeneutics seems to be that of the “subject.” Is it not, indeed, by analyzing the very essence of the mind or the soul, that we can fulfill the description of time itself at its origin by shedding light upon the acts by which the mind itself gives the time to itself or “constitutes” it as such: expectation, memory, attention? And yet, instead of offering a starting point that is entirely new and free of all presupposition, an analysis of subjectivity rests entirely on the adoption of these same metaphysical schemes, the provenance of which I have sought to question. Such an approach obliterates from the start the decisive phenomenon of the transcendence of time in relation to inner-temporality. Indeed, it is only once time has been determined as a certain “passage” or “change” endowed with direction, from the future toward the past, that we can formulate the question: What makes possible the transition of times into one another, and their paradoxical maintenance in the form of the now? This reality can only be the mind, the soul, consciousness, whatever name we give to it, to the extent that, tensed toward the future (expectatio, expectation) and retaining the past (memoria, recollection), it always remains present to itself (contuitus, intuition). It is, then, the “subject,” and it alone, that is capable of unifying the different times, which is to say, is capable of gathering them into presence under the (common) measure of its presence, or by subordinating them to an original presence, that which the subject itself deploys through all time by relating itself to a re-presented future, in expectation, and by interiorizing the past under the form of an overcome present [présent dé-passé ], in remembrance. Now, it is this fundamental presupposition that still governs, albeit indirectly, the position of the problem of time in modern philosophy, starting with Kant. Thus, the three major contemporary philosophers who raised the problem of time—Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger— each distinguish two temporalities; and, even if the modalities of this distinction are different, their meaning and their motivation are identical: in each case, the issue is to discriminate between a “subjective” time (the duration whose moments interpenetrate and are not juxtaposed, the flow of the appearing phases of time, the “forgetting-enpresenting-expecting”) and an “objective” time, that of watches and clocks, which originates in the former; in order to be able to count with time, or simply to count time, it is first necessary “to give” time to watches by expecting the nows that are to 96

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come and by retaining the nows that have passed away, while saying, at each now: “now.” Of course, sometimes the subjectivity of the subject who accomplishes the operation of “counting” (with the) time (of things) is understood in a psychological sense (Bergson), sometimes in a transcendental sense (Husserl), and sometimes in an ontological sense (Heidegger); but these oppositions count less, when all is said and done, than the affinities that bind together these different approaches to the issue, however far apart they may appear. Time, in each case, is conceived as being originally something “subjective,” which does not exclude that it could also, and to this very extent, be something “objective.” The objectivity of time here derives from its subjectivity, to the extent that this is not a psychological or empirical subjectivity, but precisely a transcendental subjectivity. It is the permanence of a transcendental apparatus, from Kant to Husserl and even to Heidegger (at least in Sein und Zeit), that makes it possible to guarantee at once— and in relation to each other—both the subjectivity and the objectivity of time. But isn’t it this very formulation of the problem that deserves to be questioned further? Unanimous as it may be, the thesis of the subjectivity of time is nonetheless a philosophical thesis that, for this reason, demands to be put to the test and questioned in its implicit presuppositions and requisites before it can be properly adopted or rejected. Is time something “subjective,” to which we might oppose an objective time that depends on it and derives from it? Or, instead, is it not better to give up entirely the horizon within which modern philosophy has formulated the problem of time by searching for a new guiding thread that is neither the inner-temporal phenomenon of change nor subjectivity in its diverse varieties and definitions? But then what could be such a guiding thread? Is there a phenomenon that is neither inner-temporal nor subjective, and upon which “subjectivity” itself nevertheless depends? The event responds, as we shall see, to this triple requirement. But, before risking ourselves in the enterprise that consists in questioning the evential meaning of temporality, it makes sense first to make evident the strict necessity of doing so. Indeed, what prevents a phenomenology that begins from subjectivity, whether it be the transcendental ego or Dasein, from escaping the aporiae of the metaphysics of time? What motivates this radical overturning of perspective that it will be necessary to accomplish with regard to time, so as to conceive it no longer as a characteristic of the subject, but as a characteristic of the event insofar as, in its structurally suspended occurring for the one to whom it happens, it does not cease temporalizing the time prior to every “subject”? What compels us to think of time itself outside the subject [hors sujet], and henceforth, too—if it is possible to say it—to conceive the “subject” himself outside the §5. The Stakes for a Phenomenology of Time

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(framework of the) subject—that is to say, to conceive of him as the “advenant,” by conceiving what is “older” than him, and in which he originates: the event and ex-per-ience? In order to attempt to answer these questions, it is necessary first to begin by asking ourselves about what forms an obstacle to a phenomenological analysis of time in every enterprise that considers time on the basis of the subject; that is to say, we must ask ourselves about what truly ties the Husserlian and Heideggerian enterprises to what we have called the “metaphysics of time.”

A. The Guiding Thread of the Subject §6. The Aporiae of the Constitution of Time How could an originally temporalized subjectivity also be originally temporalizing, the source of the very temporalization of time? Or again, how could the subject be able to guarantee a certain co-presence of the different times (past, present, and future), as well as their reciprocal transition “into” one another, all the while itself having a constantly vanishing presence, a presence intertwined with absence, fragmented and fissured by its internal mobility, exposed to forgetting, to loss, and to death? These questions, which emerged already with regard to Augustine, are raised again, as we shall see—and are even raised in an exemplary manner—within the frame of the Husserlian phenomenology of time. Without entering here, for reasons of space, into the details of the analyses contained in Husserl’s 1905 Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, it is nevertheless possible to highlight the principal problem that makes them soar, and which lies in the background of this entire project: that of the constitution of objective time, really transcending consciousness, starting from the time immanent to this consciousness. As always in Husserl, this exposition of a constitution requires a prior reduction. In the 1905 lectures, this reduction does not yet have a strictly transcendental status; it is not a reduction to intentional immanence, but only to real immanence, which is to say to the pure data of sensation (hylè) and the acts of apprehension that animate them (morphè). The phenomenological elucidation of time puts into play three types of phenomena, sharply distinguished by Husserl: (1) the transcendent objects that occupy positions (Zeitstelle) in objective time; (2) the modes of appearance of these objects, or in other words their modes of givenness in immanence, called “phases” of the consciousness of time, which are continuously modified in the form of a flow: thus, the primal impression 98

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(Urimpression), that of a sound, for example, through a specific intentional modification, does not stop changing in the retention of the same sound, a retention thanks to which the initial impression is maintained in its selfidentity and undergoes, at the same time, a modification characterized as “temporal distance.” The retention here is not a supplementary act that would be added to the hyletic impression, but a purely hyletic modification, which is to say an utterly passive one, which is presupposed by every act of apprehension; through the retention of prior phases and the rising up of new phases of the sound, the retention is deepened, which is to say it makes itself an ever new retention, a retention of retention, in such a way that, in this continuity, each phase is in turn a continuum, and thus the continuum of phases is more precisely a continuum of continua; (3) finally, this flow, this flowing continuity of phases, which is to say of the objects according to their mode of appearance, is constituted, in turn, in the “absolute, time-constituting flow of consciousness,” through a new kind of intentionality called “horizontal”: this absolute flow is thus that in which the objective time of the thing as well as the continuous gradation of its appearing phases is constituted. The mere statement of this project is already enough, it seems, to render problematic any identification of the Husserlian analysis of time with the “vulgar concept of time” such as it is specified by Heidegger. Husserl in no way understands time as a sequence of present-at-hand nows, but as a sui generis “flow” whose phenomenological characteristics are irreducible. By contrast, the problem of the necessity and the impossibility of an innertemporal characterization of time haunts the Husserlian project through and through, and prescribes it its limits within the field of metaphysics. In what way? The fundamental problem that pervades these analyses could be succinctly formulated in the following manner: How could “the definitive and genuine absolute”  of the inner consciousness of time, which is to say, of the originally constituting subjectivity (which, in these lectures, is not yet qualified as “transcendental”) not be, in its turn, temporally constituted, and how could it not lose, therefore, its very absoluteness?—unless we assume, according to the paradox of an infinite regression, that the originally constituting consciousness of time, the acts of which are always temporally constituted, in turn refers back to a new constituting consciousness, and so on. Indeed, it is the act of apprehension that confers on the hyletic datum its temporal objective determinations: but since this act, as a real component of the lived experience, flows together with immanent time, it must be retained in turn as the apprehension of the same temporally situated object, by a new intentional act, and the latter by a new act, and so on. This problem, which stands out at §36 in the 1905 Lectures, is §6. The Aporiae of the Constitution of Time

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at the heart of its entire architectonics: on the one hand, both the acts of apprehension and the hyletic contents, as real components of consciousness, are “constituted in immanent time” ; but on the other hand, it is in these acts themselves that the origin of the constitution of objective time can be found. How then can the originally constituting consciousness and its temporally constituted acts be the origin of the constitution of time? There are only two possible solutions: either we admit that the acts of the inner consciousness of time, as really immanent, succeed one another in time—in which case the consciousness of time presupposes the objective time that it claims to constitute, according to a retro-reference of the constituting to the constituted that leads to a primacy of the latter over the former— and thus, consciousness loses, purely and simply, its constituting function, it is in time as any other object, and cannot henceforth be its “source”; or— and this is doubtless the solution that Husserl adopts—it is necessary to hold that the flow of the ultimate consciousness constitutes itself in some fashion, that the constitutive consciousness of time constitutes itself temporally: “As shocking (when not initially even absurd) as it may seem to say that the flow of consciousness constitutes its own unity, it is nonetheless the case that it does.” This auto-constitution, which rests on horizontal intentionality (§39), does not, however, signify that the unity of the absolute flow would itself take on the form of an inner-temporal unity of the same type as the constituted immanent unities (for example, the phases of apparition of a sound); otherwise the constituted flow would have in turn to point toward a new constituting flow, and so on, ad infinitum. It is therefore necessary to admit that the final flow of the consciousness of time constitutes itself “outside of time,” that it is itself the intemporal source of time. As Husserl writes in a later manuscript, “this original movement (Urwandlung) [of the ultimate constituting consciousness, which Husserl henceforth designates as ‘living present’] is, in absolute terms, in no time at all (in keiner Zeit), for time only finds its source in it.” Or again, as he states in the Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, “we can no longer speak of a time that belongs to the ultimate constituting consciousness.” But doesn’t Husserl thus fall back into the conception of an intemporal consciousness that he criticized in Brentano? To tell the truth—for such is indeed the problem—in order to elude the specter of an infinite regression of constitution, Husserl is forced to make the hypothesis— escaping every description— of the intemporality of the ultimate constituting consciousness, of which he must specify, not without hesitation: “But I cannot perceive in turn the consciousness itself into which all of this is dissolved. . . . Hence the question arises: How do I come to know about the constitutive flow?” Here we are not very far 100

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from the hypothetical constructivism that Husserl criticizes in Kant, since it is the absurdity of an infinite regression that forces Husserl to accept, in the impossibility he finds himself in of exhibiting the least “phenomenon,” the hypothesis of an absolute flow constituting itself outside of time. Indeed, once a “consciousness in which [it] would be an object of consciousness” is no longer there to allow its description, phenomenology can only name metaphorically what eludes analysis, and ruin every demand for “scientific” univocity: “We can say nothing other than the following: This flow is something we speak of in conformity with what is constituted, but it is not ‘something in objective time.’ It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be designated metaphorically as ‘flow’; of something that originates in a point of actuality, in a primal sourcepoint, ‘the now,’ and so on. . . . For all this, we lack names.” But in philosophy, there are no mere metaphors. The kinetic or kinematic metaphor of flow here is grounded in the state of affairs under consideration, and reveals the pregnancy of an inner-temporal grasp of time that, since Augustine, is one with the very possibility of its subjectivization. Of course, this figuration of the ultimate consciousness as “flow” remains analogical; but, more profoundly, it is so because it is antilogistic. Its constitutive paradox lies in the fact that, as Husserl recognized, “there is no duration in the original flow”: but what is a “flow” without duration and without anything that flows? What can we say of the flow taken in this last sense? Nothing other than a tautology: “There is one, unique flow of consciousness in which both the unity of the tone in immanent time and the unity of the flow of consciousness itself become constituted at once.” The flow is constituted in the flow: but how should we understand this latter “flow,” if it can be said of it neither that it is “now” nor that it is “earlier” or “later,” neither that it “remains identical” nor that it “flows,” since all these inner-temporal determinations cannot fit it? The solution seems always to escape, infinitely postponed in the movement of an impossible elucidation. Henceforth, the question would be whether the last unpublished texts from the series C manuscripts on time are able to shed an additional light on this difficulty or if they merely prolong the antinomies of the Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, by giving them a more systematic form. What these texts bring that is new is an egological conception of original temporality. The “living present” is described there as the situs of an absolute subjectivity that is temporalized by maintaining itself in the immanence of its original present and endlessly exceeds itself as the ecstasy of its absolute auto-temporalization. This is why the living present appears there as a sort of dialectical synthesis, worked on the one §6. The Aporiae of the Constitution of Time

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hand by the requirement to describe the “movement” of the absolute, ultimately constituting flow, and on the other hand by the impossibility of shedding light on it on the basis of the inner-temporal characteristics that belong to the constituted. This dialectical synthesis is characterized by the necessity of taking charge of these contradictory determinations, without, however, annulling them: the living present “is in a certain sense the nunc stans for which the word ‘present,’ insofar as it already refers to a temporal modality, does not really fit.” Once again, it is impossible to name it without falling prey to an image: it can be only a “ ‘present’ in a figurative sense. For its own being, as transcendental being in the original form, is in no way a present in the normal sense (albeit enlarged) of a temporal moment persisting in its flowing between a past and a future that flows with it.” Here again, the names are lacking, for we speak of present and past in general only by reference to the constituted, which is excluded when we are dealing with the ultimate transcendental ego and its constituting temporality: we cannot do otherwise, then, than to refer to the constituting in terms of the constituted, to confuse the domains and the levels of constitution—as the 1905 Lectures already emphasized in order to put the reader on guard: “The constituting and the constituted coincide, and yet naturally they cannot coincide in every respect.” The recourse to the living present does not resolve this difficulty, but rather sharpens it: the living present is an absolute now, a nunc stans, which, however, flows and gives birth to time; it is the immutable form of its auto-engendering as flow, starting from which objective time is constituted—a contradiction in terms: “It is the originarily temporal or supra-temporal ‘temporality’ (die urzeitliche, überzeitliche ‘Zeitlichkeit’), which bears within itself all time as the persisting-being temporal order (als verharrend-seiende Zeitordnung), and all temporal content.” But does this dialectical synthesis of the living present really improve our analysis? And does it not dissolve the aporia, rather than resolve it? The difficulty in front of which we find ourselves, in other terms, is the following: must we attempt, with Husserl, to resolve the aporia, or instead, should we not rather deny it all pertinence? And if we do the latter, isn’t it necessary to begin by refusing the assignment of time to subjectivity? Can we truly comprehend and grasp phenomenologically the temporal phenomena designated as “future,” “past,” and “present” on the basis of acts, attitudes, or subjective comportments taken as guiding threads of the analysis, starting from which and through which the subject (whatever its philosophical characteristics and requirements may be) “unfolds” time or “temporalizes” it? In other words, might it not be necessary to change guiding threads— and thus horizons—in order to attempt to interpret the temporal phenomenon? 102

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This is what Heidegger was the first to attempt: it remains for us to examine whether the analysis of temporality that he furnishes in Sein und Zeit breaks in a sufficiently radical manner with the entire problematic that we have briefly attempted to circumscribe. §7. The Ambivalence of Temporality in Sein und Zeit Did Heidegger surmount— or did he rather skirt—the aporiae that were the result of the subjectivization of time in Husserl? In his analysis of primordial temporality, the “forgetting-enpresenting-expecting,” precisely in the place where Heidegger refuses, after the fashion of Husserl, every psychologization of time, since the awaiting (Gewärtigen), retaining (Behalten), and enpresenting or making-present (Gegenwärtigen) do not designate acts of a psychè, but only existentialia, the issue nevertheless remains that of accounting for the manner in which, by counting with time, that is to say by being “in waiting for what [he has] resolved to do,” and by “retaining a preceding time,” Dasein can “give time” to watches and clocks, which is to say deploy the horizon in which beings can present themselves in the mode of the “now,” the “previously,” the “next”; thus the issue is that of accounting for the manner in which comportments (Verhaltungen) of what Heidegger himself calls “the well-understood concept of the ‘subject,’ as existing Dasein, the Dasein as Being-in-the-world,” are capable of deploying time as such. In this respect, as Rudolf Bernet has remarked, the Heideggerian characterization of primordial temporality remains fundamentally at the same level as the Husserlian analyses of the flow of the consciousness of time: to this extent, then, it can only renew their aporiae. Of course, the profound originality of the Heideggerian analyses lies probably in the elaboration of a third level of temporality, residing above: (1) the time of concern (or world-time: Weltzeit) dominated by the makingpresent, and its leveling in vulgar or ordinary time as succession of vorhanden nows; (2) the primordial temporality as ecstatic unity of a making-present that awaits and retains (gewärtigend-behaltende Gegenwärtigen) (Sein und Zeit, 409; Being and Time, 462), insofar as it contains within itself the condition of possibility of world-time. This third level is that of authentic temporality (eigentliche), where the Dasein, in the resolute pro-jection (Entwurf ) toward the possible impossibility of its existence, is thrown back upon its fundamental and unavoidable thrownness (Ge-worfenheit), and must decide, in the moment of vision (Augenblick), what, each time, its “situation” is: a temporality that Heidegger designates synthetically as the “moment of vision of anticipatory repetition” (Sein und Zeit, 391; Being §7. The Ambivalence of Temporality in Sein und Zeit

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and Time, 443). The authentic temporality maintains with the first two levels a relation of foundation, since the primordial temporality proceeds from it by derivation and concealment: awaiting, indeed, is the inauthentic modalization of resolution; forgetting is the inauthentic modalization of resolute repetition as Dasein’s assumption of its thrownness; makingpresent is the inauthentic modalization of the moment, as Dasein’s synoptic “glance” (Augen-blick) on the situation where it has to choose itself. Put the other way around, the authentic ecstatic temporality is a modalization or a modulation of the primordial temporality, a manner for Dasein to exist it resolutely. Thus it is always on the basis of the three attitudes or comportments of Being-in-the-world that authentic ecstatic temporality can be characterized: “The original unity of the future, past, and present . . . is what we call temporality. Temporality temporalizes itself in the ever current unity of future, having-been-ness and present. . . . The essence of the future (Zukunft) lies in coming-toward-oneself (Auf-sich-zukommen); that of the having-beenness (Gewesenheit) lies in going-back-to (Zurück-zu); and that of the present in staying-with, dwelling-with, that is, being-with (Sein-bei). These characters of the coming toward, back-to, and dwelling-with reveal the basic constitution of temporality. As determined by this toward, back-to, and with, temporality is outside itself. Time, as future, past, and present, is within itself ecstatic. As future (als Zukünftiges), the Dasein is carried away ecstatically to its capacity-to-be; as having-been, it is carried away ecstatically to its having-been-ness; and as enpresenting [or making-present], it is carried away ecstatically to some other being or beings.” Thus, it is beginning from existentialia—the finite capacity-to-be, that is, the resolute anticipation of death, thrownness, as assumption and repetition of its having-been, enpresenting that, when Dasein exists it as its own, takes on the character of the momentary—that is to say, on the basis of the three fundamental modalities of the transcendence of Being-in-the-world as care (Sorge), that the authentic ecstatic temporality is approached, and that it can be determined as das ursprüngliche Aussersich, “the original being-outside-self.” In other terms, it is because the Dasein is carried away ecstatically (entrückt) toward the three dimensionals of time—future, having-been, present— and thanks to three ontological comportments (Verhaltungen)— anticipation, repetition, “moment of vision”— that temporality can be determined as the unitary articulation of three “ecstases.” And, since these ontological comportments here serve as the guiding thread for the bringing to light of the temporal phenomenon, it follows that time is fundamentally and originally a determination of the Dasein itself (and of it alone). Not only is the Dasein “the temporal entity simply as such,” but 104

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temporality can be only a determination of Dasein alone: “There is no nature-time, since all time belongs essentially to the Dasein.” Of course, there is indeed a world-time, but it is based in the manner in which Dasein in its concern disposes of time by counting it—that is to say, by giving it to clocks: once again, time is grounded on the ontological comportments of the exemplary being. In sum, time is and remains, for Heidegger, a determination of “subjectivity,” even if subjectivity must be understood henceforth in the renewed meaning that fundamental ontology confers to it (the Dasein as the concept well-understood ontologically of the “subject”). Nevertheless, at least on a decisive point, Heidegger’s analyses differ from those of Husserl: it is not the Dasein that, through its existentialia, temporalizes time; instead, it is temporality that temporalizes the Dasein. Granted, this is much more than a mere nuance—but it remains for us to measure its significance: “Temporality temporalizes, and indeed it temporalizes possible ways of itself. These make possible the multiplicity of Dasein’s modes of Being, and especially the basic possibility of authentic or inauthentic existence.” It is not Dasein that, through its ontological comportments or the modalities of its transcendance, makes temporality possible and temporalizes it; it is rather temporality, as the horizon of every understanding of Being, or meaning of Being as such, that makes possible Dasein’s differentiated ways of Being. Th is par ticu lar point fi nds its “technical”— and apparently definitive—formulation in the distinction of Being from the meaning of Being: “Temporality is the meaning of the Being of care. Dasein’s constitution and its ways to be are possible ontologically only on the basis of temporality, regardless of whether this entity occurs ‘in time’ or not.” The ontological structures of Dasein are possible only on the grounding of the temporalization of temporality—and not the other way around! However fundamental it may be to the economy of Sein und Zeit, this distinction between Being and the meaning of Being, which conditions the very position of the ontological question (§2) and its articulations, is not as clear-cut and precise as it at first seems. At several points, time is not determined as the meaning of the Being of Dasein, but as that which Dasein itself “is”: “properly speaking, time is Dasein itself,” we may read, for example, in a course from 1925–26, when Heidegger elaborates the problematic that he calls in that period “chronological,” “which is to say the pointing out (Aufweisung) of temporality in the various comportments (Verhaltungen) of Dasein”; or again: “Care is determined ‘by’ time in such a way that care itself is time. Care is the very facticity of time.” If care is the Being of Dasein, and if care is time, then we must conclude that §7. The Ambivalence of Temporality in Sein und Zeit

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time has the mode of Being of Dasein. And yet, in the same course, Heidegger insists that “time does not have the mode of Being (Seinsart) of any other thing,” and yet that it is “the condition of possibility of the fact that there is Being (and not entities).” The ambiguity is not entirely dispelled with Sein und Zeit, for structural reasons. Certainly, “temporality reveals itself as the meaning of authentic care”—that is to say, it appears constitutively “beyond Being.” But it is always conceived according to the guiding thread of ontological structures: the future is grasped in light of existentiality, as “the coming in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality-forBeing, comes towards itself,” and the having-been, in the light of facticity, as the determination by virtue of which Dasein can “come back” (Zurück-kommen) toward its ownmost “there,” and, by thus coming back “from these horizons to the entities encountered within them,” can exist in a moment of vision for the situation that is its own. On the one hand, temporality is determined as a beyond of Being, and on the other, it can be described in its phenomenological concreteness only by the guiding thread of the existentialia, so that Dasein appears as being itself time: “All Dasein’s comportment is to be interpreted in terms of its Being— that is, in terms of temporality.” This hesitation is perfectly natural. Indeed, from the moment that “the temporalizing of [temporality] takes various forms,” which is to say, is accomplished according to two differentiated modes, authentic and inauthentic, it is quite necessary that these two manners, in which time is temporalized, happens in the realm of the manifest, is phenomenalized, and thereby is able to be the object of a phenomenology, correspond structurally to two of Dasein’s ways of Being. It is therefore necessary that the temporalization of temporality— and consequently the temporal “phenomenon”—derives from the differentiated ways in which Being-in-theworld, each time, exists. How could temporality temporalize itself in a diversified manner if time was not temporalized by Dasein in conformity with the latter’s various ways of Being? Thus, according to the Cartesian viewpoint that still dominates in Sein und Zeit, it is the ontic guiding thread and its ontological characterization that serve as support to the questioning directed toward time: temporality is reached and described from the point of view of Dasein, at least as much as Dasein is interpreted in the light of time. This ambivalence explains at least in part the “unfinished” state of Sein und Zeit—that is to say, the impossibility of the “turn (Kehre)” announced by Heidegger, which was supposed to allow for the repetition of the existential analytic on a higher and more authentic basis, in light of the Temporality (Temporalität) of Being itself, in the third, unpublished section of the work “Zeit und Sein.” 106

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Ecstatic temporality thus remains an attempt—probably the last—to conceive time within the orb of a radical ontology of the subject. But doesn’t this affirmation run up against Heidegger’s most explicit warnings? Is it not this very formulation of the problem that he dismisses on numerous occasions? “We point the question about the Being of time in the wrong direction from the beginning if we base it on the alternative as to whether time belongs to the subject or object.” Why try to force the problematic of Heidegger into the final retrenchments of a thinking about the subject? Why turn on him a question to which he denies any pertinence? But we should examine things more closely. What does Heidegger mean when he insists that neither the “subject” nor the “object” allow for an answer to the question of the phenomenological meaning of time? Which concepts of “subject” and “object” is he relying upon when he makes this claim? Does the non-subjectivity of time mean that time does not belong to Dasein? On the contrary! “Subject” must be understood here in its traditional—and ontologically obscure—sense, as the pendant to its metaphysical correlate, the “object”: the “subjectivity” in question, in the same way as objectivity, falls under a determination of beings within the horizon of Vorhandenheit, which is to say under an ontological determination that is not that of the “subject” in its original and genuine meaning: the Dasein. This is confirmed in an exemplary way by a passage from Sein und Zeit: “The time ‘in which’ the present-at-hand is in motion or at rest is not ‘Objective,’ if what we mean by that is the Being-present-at-hand-in-itself of entities encountered within-the-world. But just as little is time ‘subjective,’ if by this we understand Being-present-at-hand and occurring in a ‘subject.’ World-time is ‘more Objective’ than any possible Object because, with the disclosedness of the world, it already becomes ‘Objectified’ in an ecstaticohorizontal manner. . . . World-time, moreover, is also ‘more subjective’ than any possible subject; for it is what first makes possible, conjointly with temporality, the Being of the factically existing Self— that Being which, as is now well understood, is the meaning of care.”  The mention, as if in passing, of “conjointly with temporality,” seems to place temporality and care on the same plane, if not to identify them, thus confirming the already emphasized difficulty of distinguishing the meaning of Being and the Being of Dasein. But this is not what is essential in this passage: indeed, what it affirms, without any ambiguity, is that the traditional or ordinary meaning of the “subject” apprehended within the horizon of presence-at-hand in no way exhausts the resources of ontological questioning: far from the nonsubjectivity of time (in the sense of the ordinary concept of the “subject”) contradicting time’s belonging to Dasein—that is, its belonging to what is determined here as “more subjective than any possible [i.e., metaphysical] §7. The Ambivalence of Temporality in Sein und Zeit

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subject”—it is, instead, its condition. What is more, if temporality appears beyond the opposition subject-object in its ordinary or metaphysical sense, it is precisely inasmuch as the Dasein, of which it forms the meaning of Being, is situated itself beyond such an opposition. To affirm the nonsubjectivity of time, therefore, is strictly to lead time back to the Dasein’s mode of Being: “the Dasein, inasmuch as it exists, is further outside than any object and at the same time further inside, more inward (more subjective), than any subject or soul.”  Here temporality receives almost to the letter an identical characterization to that of Being-in-the-world: more objective than any object, more subjective than any subject. For the ecstasies of temporality and their horizontal schemas are at the foundation of the phenomenon of the world inasmuch as it is a moment of Being-in-theworld: “the transcendence of the world [is . . . ] ecstatico-horizontally founded”  —that is to say, temporally founded. This leading back of the transcendence of the world to the unity of the horizontal schemes of temporality accomplishes the verification of the structural solidarity of time and of the “subject” in its fundamental-ontological meaning: “If the ‘subject’ gets conceived ontologically as an existing Dasein whose Being is grounded in temporality, then one must say that the world is ‘subjective.’ But in that case, this ‘subjective’ world, as one that is temporally transcendent, is ‘more Objective’ than any possible ‘Object.’ ”  On the one hand, temporality founds the world as ontological determination of Being-in-the-world, and on the other, it receives, almost to the letter, the same characterization as the world, as if temporality were the Dasein itself. It is never sufficient to dismiss as null and void an opposition in order actually to surmount it. If Heidegger frees temporality from its relation to the “subject” of traditional ontology, he in no way frees it of its rootedness in the subject in its fundamental-ontological sense; he confirms, on the contrary, the belonging of the temporal phenomenon to the reign of subjectivity by conceiving it in light of the ontological structures of Being-inthe-world. In so doing, he tends to render at the least ineffectual the distinction that could have served as a means to a true phenomenological destruction of metaphysical subjectivity: the distinction between Temporality (Temporalität) as transcendental horizon of Being, thus situated beyond Being, and temporality (Zeitlichkeit) as the meaning of the Being of Dasein. By thinking Temporality (Temporalität) as the unity of the horizontal schemas that belong to the three ecstases, and ecstatic temporality (Zeitlichkeit) as rooted in the temporalizing attitudes of Dasein, Heidegger reestablishes the metaphysical horizon of a thinking of time as subjective and of subjectivity as time. He thus restores the right of a problematic that 108

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goes back as far as Augustine and that merges, in Kant, several centuries later, with the accomplishment of philosophical modernity. But is time an originally subjective phenomenon? If the subjectum or the ὑποκείμενον are inseparable from a certain analysis of change, of becoming, or more exactly from an analysis of becoming carried out in such a way that it excludes the very possibility of an absolute change, of a change that is “through and through”—that is to say, of an event—it follows that the enterprise of conceiving time outside of the horizon of subjectivity merges with that of conceiving the “subject” itself in terms of what its metaphysical consideration excludes on principle: the event itself. It is man interpreted according to this guiding thread that we have designated in Event and World by the name of “advenant” in order to differentiate him from the object of the positive sciences, of anthropology, of sociology, of ethnology, of psychiatry, and so on. The advenant is the title for man apprehended outside the subject, in the light of his event-advent to, and as himself starting from, what happens [advient] to him. Defined in this manner, the advenant is unthinkable independently of the changes of the world in their largest acceptation: it is to them that, in a first moment, we must return.

B. The Other Guiding Thread: Time and Change §8. The Phenomenological Amplitude of the Concept of Change If the interdependence of time and subjectivity is precisely what is problematic from the standpoint of a phenomenology, it is worth taking up again the analysis of time on completely different bases. In order to do so, it is possible to return to the path opened by Aristotelianism: what first manifests the phenomenon of time is its connectedness with and the relation of phenomenological foundation that unites it to another phenomenon: change. Wherever a change (μεταϐολή) occurs, wherever movement (κίνησις) takes place, there too is time visible, and appears as such. Now, change is not first of all a character of the soul and of sensation; it comes about a parte rei as the alternance of contrary predicates in a subject: it thus reveals the potentialities that, in the thing, preexisted their actualization; it is the putting-into-operation (ἐνέργεια) of power (δύναμις) as such— that is to say, as power operating in every opus (ἔργον). Consequently, time belongs to the things themselves and to the reign of φύσις and of the κόσμος, before being a change in the soul or of the soul. But thus to insist that time is phenomenalized only in connection with change (in the first place local change), is not to assert that it is itself a change. On the contrary, §8. The Phenomenological Amplitude of the Concept of Change

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it is precisely because the Aristotelian definition of time excludes thinking it in turn as something that changes or that becomes that it also and to begin with excludes, on principle, thinking it as a privileged change, that of the soul and of its acts. As real as any res, time has its being in things: it is never exclusively in the soul, even if it is never without the soul, insofar as the soul is present to everything and to the whole itself. This is why its description belongs first to a “physics.” However, the difficulty that emerges here is the following: by envisaging time in its phenomenological connection with movement and, more generally, with change, as something that takes place in things inasmuch as change takes place in them, Aristotle neglects to question further the phenomenological amplitude of the concept of “change”: he understands it exclusively in the sense of an inner-substantial process. He relates every movement, local or other, to a subject (ὑποκείμενον), understood as that which sub-tends the alternation of its contrary predicates. He never suspects the possibility of a “change without a thing that changes” (Bergson), of a pure event that, because it occurs not to a univocally determinable being that would bear its load, but instead to an open plurality of beings, is irreducible to an inner-substantial modification. Of such a nature are, for example, atmospheric phenomena: “It is day,” “the rain has stopped,” “the wind is picking up,” and so on; but also events that might first appear as referred to a singular subject of assignation (“the shutter slams,” “the bell sounds”), yet that actually belong to an evental context: they can be described in a phenomenologically satisfying manner only starting from the context in which they are inserted, and that they in turn modify; they are changes of the world itself under a certain description. Insofar as they are thus referred to a world as to that which conditions their appearing and their understanding, such “events” can be characterized as “innerworldly facts”: these are what will serve as the guiding thread in a first attempt to elucidate the temporal phenomenon (see below §9). But innerworldly facts do not cover the whole amplitude of the phenomenon of change. Among the number of these ontically unassignable changes, there are some, indeed, that do not occur only in the world, by taking place in a prior context in the light of which their meaning becomes interpretable and understandable as such, but that transcend their own context by radically upending its meaning: such are events in the evential sense. These we will designate henceforward, by contrast with innerwordly facts, under the name of “events.” Aristotle was not unaware of the existence of changes of this type, even if he assigned them no privileged status whatsoever. Thus, in the Nicomachean Ethics he points out, as if in passing: πολλαὶ γὰρ μεταϐολαὶ γίνονται καὶ παντοῖαι τύχαι κατὰ τὸν βίον: “[M]any 110

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changes occur in life, and all manner of fortuitous events.”  An event is that which, by modifying some possibilities of the world, always strikes, at the same time, the world as a whole, that is to say, reconfigures the possible in totality. With the event, “all is changed”: what is modified is the very countenance of the world, that which the world, so to speak, turns toward me when I consider it in its possibilities: “That happy time is past, all wears a diff erent face.”  There is no “metaphor” here: an encounter, a bereavement, a sickness, a decision do not leave the world intact for the one who undergoes their ordeal, which is to say, for the one for whom they make an event. What the event strikes at its root is the configuration-of-possibilities that articulates the world and that, consequently, determines its meaning. A bereavement, for example, not only affects my relation to the deceased—it will also render my own idleness unbearable, plunge me madly into work or travels, throw a veil over all things; it will, even on a radiant day, darken those places that I loved, make my mortal destiny more intimate and more doleful. If I am a painter or a writer, I probably will no longer paint or write in the same way, assuming that I will continue to paint or write at all. In the sense in which it makes sense for every understanding, by prescribing it its possibilities, every event always affects the whole, because it first affects meaning. The meaning is what every project of understanding aims at inasmuch as it operates, each time, only in conformity with a totality of prior hermeneutic possibilities, or a context. By unsettling its own context, which is to say by modifying the articulated and hierarchized totality of possibilities from which all understanding takes place, the event alters, as a consequence, the horizon of every possible meaning—that is, the world as such. But does the “world” here signify the same thing as it did earlier? Hasn’t the meaning here of the world itself been modified? And if so, in what way? The event is what introduces “into” the world a meaning that is irreducible to its own context, strictly incomprehensible on the basis of the former world, and a fortiori inexplicable in terms of this world: it is the very origin of meaning for all understanding. In other terms, the event is not what can, or cannot, be endowed with meaning, according to a prior context in which it announces itself and in conformity with which it is understood (such is, precisely, the innerworldy fact); instead, it is meaning itself at its origin. The meaning of the event is to be the bearer of meaning, to make sense for an adventure—that is to say, to carry in itself the conditions of its own comprehension. This is why the ambient world as explanatory context (the world in the evental sense) is precisely that in terms of which the event §8. The Phenomenological Amplitude of the Concept of Change

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is rigorously incomprehensible in its own meaning-character ; the event does not happen in the world as the horizon of meaning for all understanding; rather, it opens a world for the one to whom it occurs. This is why its coming about overturns the world as context; it introduces “into” the world eventualities that were in no way prefigured in it and, consequently, it also introduces a meaning irreducible to its own hermeneutical horizon. To this extent, it “makes a world” for every subsequent understanding; it is only interpretable, in its eventness, from this horizon of meaning that it bears in itself and brings with itself in and through its very bursting forth. Thus, to understand an event is always to aim at it according to an interpretive project that no longer unfolds on the basis of the prior horizon of meaning of a context in which the event is inscribed also as a fact; it is to base oneself primarily on the interpretive possibilities that the event opened up by occurring—that is to say, to understand it in the light of its future. Only the posterity of an event allows for the grasping of that by which it makes sense for its own context, or in other words, thoroughly renews it. There is here a transition from one meaning to another of the “world.” When an event springs forth, there comes about, at the same time, a “conversion of the gaze,” so to speak; or rather, an alteration in appearing, the pivot of which is not the subject, after the manner of the phenomenological reduction in its diverse modalities or varieties, but the event. This conversion in appearing— or “phenomenological transition”— bears on the world and on its meaning. It is the transition from the world as that in which the fact is endowed (or not) with meaning—the significance of the significant—to the world as that whose very meaning is in suspense in the event; the transition from the world as the horizon of meaning of all that happens, on the basis of which all interpretation may be accomplished, to the world as dimension of the appearance of meaning in its very origin: in the event. A transition from the world as horizon of meaning, or context, to the world as meaning of the horizon. Here the meaning-horizon of meaning, the dimension of its appearing, is the event itself. Or, more simply: the world in the evential sense is one with the bursting forth of the event as opening new possibilities for the advenant, including new interpretive possibilities, in light of which the old world is brightened and furnished with a new meaning: origin of meaning itself for every interpretation. Consequently, just as it does not happen in the world, the event does not occur in time; it unfolds time in the plurality of its dimensionals by occurring itself as its own temporalization. Unlike the innerworldly fact, it does not happen in the present but, by originally exceeding the present 112

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of its actualization, it gives time to be seen according to a phenomenological standpoint that remained entirely closed to the traditional philosophy of time. Taken as a guiding thread, it enables us, as a consequence, to tear the temporal phenomenon from the inner-temporal horizon where its metaphysical consideration takes place (cf. §10), and, thus, to formulate on entirely other bases the problem of the relation of time to the “subject.” §9. The Inner-Temporality of Facts: First Approach to the Temporal Phenomenon (a) Time as order and as succession Every innerworldly fact is also inner-temporal. It can be made the object of a dating by means of clocks whose degree of precision may differ, from the approximative registering of the sun’s position to the atomic clock of the physicists. “Clocks,” whatever their nature, are natural or artificial signage systems that allow us to attribute a conventional dating to different innerworldly facts, and in this way to mea sure with a relative precision their contemporaneity or their succession, or in other words, the temporal gap that separates them. Thanks to clocks, we are able to situate every fact that arrives within a single, unidimensional continuum by making a numerical value correspond to it. What we thus determine by measuring the gap between several phenomena and by attributing a dating to each is a serial order where each fact “precedes” or “succeeds” other facts, a sequence where each innerworldly event can take place by being ordered according to the distinction between “before” and “after.” The definition of time by its measurement, privileged by Aristotle, is possible here only because it refers more fundamentally to a temporal order where each fact receives a dating, or in other words, where each fact can be specified in its situation in a univocal manner with regard to all the other facts, according to the double criterium of anteriority and posteriority. Time can be determined, then, in a first approach, as this serial order itself. Time thus apprehended is that which scans the “works and days,” the time that gives rhythm to the successive hours. An innerworldly fact appears in time to the extent that its situation can be determined within this unidimensional order; and, since every innerworldly fact can burst forth, as such, only within a context as subject to a possible explanation starting from a causal order that determines the hermeneutical horizon of its grasp, it follows that to the opposition before/after, which governs time as the order of succession of facts, is always added, within a given context, the opposition of cause and effect: what is prior in time can be a cause of §9. The Inner-Temporality of Facts

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what follows, but not inversely. The serial order and the causal order are here inseparable: time is the order of facts insofar as they are concatenated under the horizon of a world, according to a causal-explanatory context. This context puts into play not only causes, but also ends, in light of which human action becomes explicable. Specified in this way, the temporal order includes the entirety of possible phenomena: the cosmic (cycles of the sun and moon, days, months, and years), the natural (the seasons), the historical. In each case, time is what conditions the causal-explanatory framework of innerworldly facts and what governs, as immutable serial order, their “next era.”  But this fi rst approach to the temporal phenomenon exposes itself immediately to a classic objection: is this immutable and unidimensional serial order, on the basis of which every innerworldly fact may receive a dating, sufficient to give an account of the phenomenon of time, or is it limited to furnishing a suitable representation of it? What justifies this objection is the fact that the most common experience of time does not include only an immutable serial order allowing the assignment to any fact of a relative situation with regard to all the others; it also implies from the outset a change that affects the facts themselves, a certain modification of their temporal predicates: before happening, such and such fact was “future”; after its occurrence, it appears as “passed.” Time is not only an order, but a becoming, a constant modification. Or rather, time is what makes both possible; it is what inseparably joins the serial order with the becoming. Otherwise, it would become impossible to distinguish temporal order from spatial order, since both could be described by means of a single relational criteria, betweenness, which obeys the following formal property: of three elements, A, B, and C, only one can be situated “between” the other two. This formal property fits just as well the temporal order of facts governed by the distinction between “before” and “after” and the spatial order of points situated on a Euclidian straight line. Th is is why, in a purely relational theory of space and time like that of Leibniz, for example, it is necessary to distinguish the two orders by means of a supplementary criterion: time is “the order of successions,” and space is “the order of coexistences.” Th is criterion, moreover, was implicit in— or rather, strictly presupposed by— the defi nition of the temporal order as an order governed by the opposition of “before” and “after,” since these two features cannot be defined, in turn, without recourse to the idea of succession, which is to say, of modification of the temporal predicates: isn’t saying that one phenomenon is prior to another the same as saying that this phenomenon has “passed away” when this other is “present”? 114

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But what does this inseparability of a serial (and causal) order of facts from a becoming, as modification of every fact’s temporal predicates, mean here? Let’s note right away that if time is defined inseparably by these two characteristics, it becomes strictly impossible to separate an “objective” time, conceived as immutable serial order, from a “subjective” time, a becoming—that is to say, a continuous change of the temporal predicates of a thing, of a fact, or of a state of affairs, insofar as this change refers to attitudes through which a “subject” becomes aware of it, to the expectation that is changed into presentation, and to the presentation that changes into remembrance. In short, if it appears, as we are arguing, that the order of facts and succession are inseparable and correlated phenomena that can be set apart only at the price of an unjustifiable phenomenological abstraction, it follows that it becomes strictly impossible to oppose time defined as serial order (the “objective time” of physics) to time defined as “becoming” (and qualified as “subjective”). In order to show this, it is worth considering and discussing two philosophical attempts apparently opposed, but that share the same presupposition. The first, inspired by logical empiricism, consists of a naturalistic approach to time that claims to isolate the serial-causal order of “physics” from the allegedly “subjective” time characterized by the phenomenon of succession; the second, which prevails in Husserl, consists in willing to separate the pure phenomenon of succession from any reference to physical “objective” time, in order to establish how the latter derives from the former. I shall try to show that both attempts end in failure. (b) Order without succession: physical objectivism Is it possible to separate the immutable serial order of facts, governed by the opposition between “before” and “next,” or, more formally, by the criteria of “betweenness,” from time considered as a succession? Is it possible to distinguish, as Grünbaum puts it, physical time, on the one hand, characterized by the possibility of making numerical coordinates of time correspond to every phenomenon, in such a way that if a fact is temporally situated “between” the two facts F and F´, it must possess coordinates numerically included between those of F and F´, and, on the other hand, what he calls “becoming,” which is characterized by the phenomenon of succession, or in other words by the property according to which every fact must constantly receive changing predicates: “to come,” “past,” “present”? The stake of such questions lies in the possibility of a purely physical determination of time that conforms to the results of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Indeed, Whitrow’s representation of the “block §9. The Inner-Temporality of Facts

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universe” had already concluded, from the fact that the simultaneity of two facts has meaning in relativistic physics only in reference to a particular inertial system, that it was impossible to give a physical meaning of any sort to the notions of past, present, and future. Whitrow’s account thus echoed the declarations of Einstein himself: “Physics,” he writes, “only knows different values of time indicated by clocks in relative motion; it has no expression for the ‘now,’ for the ‘past,’ or for the ‘future.’ ” Let us note from the start that to hold that the physicist has no expression for the different times does not yet mean that he or she must deny all reality to this distinction; it only means that she can abstain from conferring value upon it in physics. For the theory of relativity, “time” is reduced to a purely operative concept; it consists in the measure taken by clocks localized spatially and capable of synchronizing with one another by exchanging light signals: it is a “clock-phenomenon” (Paul Valéry) submitted to the same conditions of observation as any phenomenon whatsoever. If, by virtue of the relativity of simultaneity, we disregard the distinction between past, present, and future, it becomes possible to represent time, following the mathematical formalization of Minkowski, as a coordinate of the same rank as the others in four-dimensional space-time, where each physical phenomenon can be figured by a “line of universe”: “An event is a point (x, y, z, t) and the life of a particle can be figured by a trajectory, by a linear continuum of points. The history of a physical system is laid out as a whole, in which time is incorporated. The history of the world is laid out in a sort of eternal present, where events are linked following an anterior-posterior order.” In these conditions, it becomes strictly impossible, from the physical point of view, to hold that a fact “takes place,” “has taken place,” “will take place.” According to the famous formulation of Hermann Weyl, “the objective world simply is, it does not happen.” Or, according to the commentary of Whitrow, “External events permanently exist and we merely come across them.” One could, then, go to the point of interpreting Einstein’s theory as a new Eleaticism and a variant of the most absolute determinism: “Therefore there can no longer be any objective and essential (that is, not arbitrary) division of space-time between ‘events which have already occurred’ and ‘events which have not yet occurred.’ . . . For those authors, of whom I am one, who take seriously the requirement of covariance, relativity is a theory in which everything is ‘written’ and where change is only relative to the perceptual mode of living beings.” The philosophical project of Grünbaum relies on these interpretations of physical theory, while amending them in a way that the author judges to be decisive: the point is no longer to argue, along the lines of a new 116

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Eleaticism, that the events that are described by the physics of relativity are timeless, but only that they are becomingless, and in order to do this, it is necessary to separate the serial order governed by the before and after, or, rather, by the formal property of betweenness—“time”—from the phenomenon of succession inasmuch as it brings to bear the various temporal predicates: “past,” “present,” “future,”—“becoming.” To accomplish this, Grünbaum thinks it is possible to lean upon Quine’s distinction between statements expressed in the “temporally neutral” present tense and statements endowed with a temporal index. Indeed, it is always possible to reformulate the proposition “Such and such event will happen tomorrow” into “Such and such event happens from t onwards.” While the first statement brings in a “becoming”—that is to say, a distinction between the various times expressed grammatically by the tense of the verb—which, as a consequence, makes the statement’s truth value vary, the truth value of the second statement, expressed in the temporally neutral present tense, remains constant. But Grünbaum’s logicist attempt to specify the temporal order of physical events governed by the sole relation before/after by leaving entirely aside the supposedly mind-dependent becoming— according to a thoroughly metaphysical opposition that the author fails to question—is exposed to several fundamental objections. It is superfluous from the physical point of view, because it expresses only in a very imperfect way what the mathematical formalism of the theory expresses, in the form of equations, in a perfectly rigorous and sufficient manner; in this respect, it substitutes for the theory’s formalism a logical formalism issuing instead from an interpretation of the theory: while Einstein came to the negative conclusion according to which the physical theory cannot give any expression to the notions of past, present, and future, Grünbaum claims to draw from the theory itself positive consequences concerning the nature or the essence of time. He thus revives the dream of a philosophy that could immediately translate the content of a scientific theory into the ideal language of logic. Now, philosophy develops its concepts by means of the natural language that is rooted in the world of experience; it cannot give an intelligible meaning to the notion of temporal order governed by the relation before/ after without bringing in succession, which is to say the “becoming” of Grünbaum. The temporal order of two phenomena expressible mathematically by their numerical coordinates necessarily involves one of them being “past” when the other is “present”— or that the second is “future” in comparison to the first— and no system of coordinates can here dispense us from defi ning the “before” and the “after” in reference to a succession. The distinction of temporal situations in an ordered series is §9. The Inner-Temporality of Facts

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strictly incomprehensible without the times’ distinction that sub-tends this order: thus, “A is before B” always means “When A is present, B is still future and when B is present, A is already past,” and so on. The formulation of statements in a “temporally neutral” present tense in no way remedies this problem, for the following reason: the very language from which philosophy draws its concepts before submitting them to a formalization holds an ineradicable tie to the human experience of time. No logical formalization can break this tie; on the contrary, the notions that are formalized (“before,” “past,” “future”) continue to refer back, despite this logical operation, to the experience from which they draw their meaning, and outside of which they mean nothing. The adoption of the formal criterion of “betweenness,” allowing us to do without the concepts of “before” and “after,” in no way changes this situation: for this criterion fits just as well to time as to space and thus cannot allow us to account for the specificity of the mathematical formalism of space-time, in which the fourth coordinate, that of time, as Einstein repeatedly insists, does not have the same physical value as the three spatial coordinates. The paradox of this kind of attempt then bursts out: it claims to draw lessons on the nature of time from the physical theory, but the very meaning of this theory resides in the impossibility, expressed by the Minkowskian formalism of the four-dimensional representation of space-time, of separating the time-coordinate (t) from the three other spatial coordinates (x, y, z). Grünbaum thus grants himself what the physical theory explicitly refuses him: the possibility of speculating on time and of considering its “nature” as if we were dealing with an independent reality, while such a reality—time—does not even exist in the physics of relativity, and, from the standpoint of the physical theory, only the events situated in space-time possess a value: “It is neither the point in space, nor the instant in time, at which something happens that has physical reality, but only the event itself.” This inconsistency here arises from the fact that the philosopher asks more from the scientific theory than it is capable of giving him: not a mathematical armature allowing him to make correct predictions, but a conceptuality expressible in the natural language that is thoroughly rooted in the human experience of time. What’s more, regarding the very possibility of a disassociation between “time” and “becoming” of the type proposed by Grünbaum, Einstein would probably have been more prudent, since he wrote, for example, “[with the special theory of relativity] the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but become yet more complicated.” In short, it is because philosophy plunges its roots into the world of experience, which it has the task of translating into concepts by means of 118

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the natural languages at its disposal, that it cannot escape from the demand incumbent upon it to “come to the rescue of phenomena (τὰ φαινόμενα ἀποδώσειν).” The world out of which the advenant and language together spring here plays the role of a veritable absolute: it is because it misjudges the specificity of mathematical formalism as well as that of philosophical language and conceptuality that Grünbaum’s logicism thinks it can define anteriority in time without any reference to the phenomenon of becoming. The result is an ambiguous amalgam, unable to reach a coherent expression in the natural language of philosophy and far from responding to the requisites of the formalized language of physics; a theory composed of bastard concepts, neither physical, nor philosophical, like the concepts of “time” and of “becoming,” which no logical formalism could ever entirely remove from the experience from which they proceed, and from the natural language that articulates this experience. But if it is impossible to separate entirely the temporal order expressible by means of mathematical coordinates from the phenomenon of succession inherent to the experience of time, as Grünbaum attempts to do, then the inverse attempt, aimed at thinking and describing the pure immanent change of a flow of lived experiences independently of the temporal order, is also destined to fail. (c) Succession without (or before) order: phenomenological idealism Husserl’s phenomenology of time consists, as we have seen, in an attempt to search for the origin of objective time, understood as the order of temporal positions (Zeitstelle) that are immutable and capable of being dated, in a subjective flow of “phases of appearance” modifying themselves continuously. It thus postulates the possibility of analytically separating the pure phenomenon of succession, which is to say the multiplicity of the phases of appearance in continual flow through which a temporal object is given, from objective time, the serial order of the datable positions of this object, since objective time is constituted on the basis of the primordial flow of the inner consciousness of time, according to an order of derivation that is necessary and impossible to reverse. The well-known example of a sound that resounds thus allows for the showing of the manner in which the objective sound occurrence is constituted in its self-identity and its immutable temporal position, on the basis of the phases of appearance of the sound, which is to say on the basis of the diversified phenomenological modalities according to which the sound gives itself, each time, with §9. The Inner-Temporality of Facts

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changing temporal characteristics: sometimes expected as “to come,” sometimes retained as “just past.” Now, this postulate comes up against a serious difficulty: indeed, Husserl does not specify how we come to expect that a fact to come occurs, or how we come to retain that a past fact has truly taken place. For there is never actually any such thing as a pure hyletic sonorous datum: it is always the streaming of the rain to which we listen, it is always the sigh of the wind in the hills, or such and such movement of a symphony. In short, we could never expect or retain anything if the fact did not show itself to us within the horizon of meaning of a context. It is precisely this context that the Husserlian example of the sound as hyletic datum disregards. Now, such a context is just as eff ective as the fact itself, because it conditions both its actualization and its grasp: its actualization to the extent that the context articulates the multiplicity of possibilities in light of which a fact becomes explicable in its factical arising: its causes; its grasp insofar as it is solely in the light of its causes— and of the ends projected by the advenant—that the fact can be interpreted and understood as such. Thus, the sound of a moment ago can appear in the world with the characteristics that are its own only to the extent that it fits into an explanatory framework. I always expect such and such type of sound, for example that of a piano, with its specific timbre, because I see the pianist seated at his instrument in the characteristic collected posture that precedes the playing of the work; I expect that he will play a C sharp because that is the first note of Liszt’s Transcendental Etude that is on the recital program. These two meanings of “because” do not coincide: the first refers to causes (to the resonance and timbre of the instrument, to the quality of its harmonics resulting from its objective properties: it is a stringed instrument, rather than a wind instrument, and so forth), while the second refers to motives, which is to say to a system of ends, those of the pianist, which I am able to interpret because I myself am capable of projections. Without this worldly context in which the fact takes place, there would be neither forecasting, because this rests on the recognition and the identification of a causal relation, nor expectation in the wide sense, including an order of motivations. But in addition, without context, there would be no remembrance: for I remember that C sharp and, more generally, those first mea sures of that particular Debussy prelude, heard in this or that particular year, performed by Michelangeli, at such and such concert. Neither the expectation nor the recollection is suspended in air; rather, they are inserted into the causal framework of the world insofar as it intertwines a multiplicity of facts and their explanatory grasp. This is why these attitudes alone do not allow us to account for the phenomenon of succession; in120

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stead, the past and the future, to the extent that they condition the apparition of contextually determined facts, are always the past and the future of a world. To put it another way, if we reintroduce into the description what had been disregarded by the Husserlian example of sound—namely, the causal order in which the sound fits as a fact given in a worldly context—it appears that the phenomenon of succession is strictly inseparable from an explanatory order. The experience of time narrowly and necessarily articulates a factual chronology, as order of the phenomena subjected to a possible dating, and a continual alteration of the innerworldly characteristics of these facts, according to which these acquire mutually incompatible specifications—“to come,” “present,” “past”—through the three modalities of presence to . . . deployed by the advenant, namely: expectation, making-present and remembrance. These three attitudes are the “subjective” ground for the phenomenon of succession. The inner-temporality of facts is inseparably this metamorphosis of the advenant’s presence to . . . and the causal-explanatory order that links the facts to one another within the horizon of a “world,” an order according to which the facts to come appear as the causal consequent of the past facts, and these latter as the causal antecedent of the facts to come. If the attitudes of the advenant are stressed, the time that lies at the ground of the inner-temporality of facts will appear as the structural unity of the “horizons” that are deployed by these attitudes themselves; if, on the contrary, we insist on the causal order of phenomena, time is defined as a world’s dimension, in the evental meaning of “world” as explanatory context. But these two aspects of time are actually structurally interdependent. I have designated as “dimensionals” of time the horizons of appearance of every fact as “present,” “past,” or “to come,” insofar as they are not “constituted” by the acts of a “subject,” but unfold instead according to the causal-explanatory order of the world. The future, considered as a dimensional of time, is the horizon of appearance of a fact not yet present insofar as it is inscribed beforehand within a causal order that is already determined by its context: there is a future, not only to the extent that I wait for it and expect it, but inasmuch as a causal order precedes it that conditions every future fact and makes explainable its bursting forth. This causal order makes of the future and of the past scansions of the world, and not merely modes of a consciousness or dimensions of existence, as Being of an entity for-the-sake-of-oneself. The problem of time thus appears insoluble for as long as we raise it within the frame of the opposition between succession and order, or in other words, between “subjective” and “objective” time. We should instead set back to back those who champion a naturalist approach to time— and §9. The Inner-Temporality of Facts

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for whom the serial order is separable from the phenomenon of “becoming”— and those who hold to an idealism according to which the phenomenon of “becoming,” the “flow of consciousness,” makes possible the serial and causal order of phenomena, insofar as it makes possible its constitution. Time, in reality, is neither a mere modality of the advenant and of his comportments as articulations of his presence to the world nor a mere order of facts, insofar as they are ordered one after the other within the causal-explanatory horizon of a context. Time is a phenomenon that is in each case total—namely, the structural unity of the horizons that a subject’s changing attitudes unfold (horizons according to which the phenomenon of becoming is possible as such) and of the world’s causalexplanatory order, insofar as every fact can be characterized by changing temporal characteristics with regard to the different attitudes of the advenant only insofar as it presents itself in the world as coordinated to other facts, according to the double legality of the causal and final “because.” Neither of these two dimensions here possesses the least primacy, since the temporal order does not allow us by itself to account for the phenomenon of becoming; instead, against every idealism and every subjectivism, it is necessary to maintain that the attitudes of the advenant themselves conform necessarily to the context in which they are rooted: nothing could ever be expected or retained without the causal explanatory order of a world that precedes expectation and recollection and conditions their very possibility. This is why time as succession-of-facts is originally a structure of the world as evental context. In this context there take place both the innerworldly facts that are independent of the advenant and the acts of the advenant, such as expectation or remembrance, without any privilege of one over the other. The problem that is raised, then, is the following: are there not events that, because they appear irreducible to their proper context—that is to say, irreducible both to every causal explanation and to every expectation or forecast (and, consequently, to every recollection)— do not announce themselves in time—that is to say, do not present themselves within the temporal horizons of the world, but carry with them their own horizonsof-time, “unfold” time, or temporalize it? If such were the case, it would then appear that the irreducibility of the temporal phenomenon to the subject-object opposition should have as a methodological consequence a genuine “reversal of perspective”: the advenant’s temporality, as determination of his ex-per-ience, then would have to be thought according to the guiding thread of the event as temporalization of time. Nietzsche probably saw the possibility of such an inversion or conversion of the gaze when he wrote, in a fragment from 1885– 86: “The ‘self,’ the ‘subject’ taken as ho122

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rizon line. Reversal of perspective.” But taking this pathway would require that we abandon entirely the horizon of the “subject” in the traditional metaphysical sense and the temporality that is proper to it. It is because time is an originally evential phenomenon, because it originates in the event as temporalization of itself and, therefore, as temporalization of time, that it cannot not be thought beginning from the advenant and his modalities of presence; inversely, it is the advenant who must be apprehended in the light of time—that is to say, in the light of the event itself as the temporalization of temporality. §10. The Event as Guiding Thread Unlike the fact that always occurs within the meaning-horizon of a world, the event transcends its own actualization as fact and appears irreducible to its own context. Inexplicable in terms of prior possibilities given within the world that would account for its bursting forth, it brings with itself the horizon of interpretive possibilities in light of which its very meaning is sketched out and decided. By reconfiguring the possibilities that articulate its hermeneutic context, it illuminates that context with a new light and is the origin of meaning for its interpretation. This amounts to saying that all causal explanation starting from the world does not reach its phenomenological meaning-character. Structurally transcending all the advenant’s projections, including his hermeneutic projections from which an understanding could take place, the event brings forth its own horizon of intelligibility and prescribes to every hermeneutic projection the interpretive possibilities from which an understanding of it as such can only appear. In short, the event always announces itself within its own horizon of intelligibility, like a riddle that it both formulates and solves; a riddle manifesting itself both through the non-sense of what appears from the outset as incomprehensible and by the excess of a meaning of which the event is the origin, open for this reason to a hermeneutic task inexhaustible in principle. Here, the initial incomprehensibility and the excess of meaning are structurally linked and phenomenologically inseparable. But, insofar as it transcends its own context, the event also appears, as a result, as irreducible to the attitudes of the advenant in conformity with which this context assumes the aspect and the meaning that are its own: irreducible to expectation, to the extent that it can be related to an expected fact only by virtue of a causal analysis of this fact’s antecedents; irreducible to remembrance, insofar as it itself is possible only as the reevocation and recovery of a fact in its context; finally, irreducible to makingpresent, which can be related to what takes place “at the very moment” §10. The Event as Guiding Thread

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only by reinserting it in an explanatory context starting from which and according to which its meaning can be apprehended. And since expectation, making-present, and remembrance all equally put into play, each time, an understanding of what is thus expected, made present, or reevoked, the event is equally irreducible to a fourth attitude, anticipation, which is at the base of every hermeneutic projection as such. Now, expectation, remembrance, making-present, and anticipation as attitudes or comportments of the advenant also have a temporal meaning: they signify modes of presence to . . . what happens— and, consequently, also to the “world,” as the context in which what happens happens. Expectation is the modality of ex-per-ience according to which the advenant brings himself to the encounter with innerworldly facts “to come” as if these were already “present”; remembrance, analogously, is the modality according to which the advenant relates himself to “past” facts by conferring upon them a quasi-presence; presentification is the manner in which he makes himself contemporary to the happening of present facts as such. Finally, understanding underlies the three other attitudes, and is necessarily implicated in them: it designates the modality of the apprehension of the meaning of what has taken place, takes place, or will take place, in light of an evental context. It makes present to itself this context in the very act of understanding. Irreducible to the attitudes of the advenant—that is to say, to the modalities of his understanding of what may present itself for him as fact within a given context—the event appears, consequently, as incommensurable to the modalities of the presence to the world that the advenant unfolds across time. Indeed, the event presents itself from the outset with the characteristic of absolute newness: radically unforeseeable, because first of all fundamentally unexplainable starting from the possibilities that preexist it in the world. By happening, it opens in the possible the crack of a surprise: having no more hold on what exceeds the mea sure of his expectation, the advenant can no longer hold to anything, or even stand in front of the nothing of this unforeseeable in-breaking. Tear and hiatus, irreparable break, the event lacerates the framework of our expectations and overturns the plan of our projects. Un-expected, not merely in a contingent sense, but in a necessary and structural one: for even when it is awaited or foreseen, the event never comes about except against all expectations—not de facto unexpected, but “unexpectable” de jure. Only its happening can elicit an expectation that did not preexist it, in the very movement in which it fulfills this expectation. This is why its bursting forth is new, with a newness that is not a mere correlate of surprise: the event doesn’t so much deceive the expectation as annul it through its in-breaking. It elicits this 124

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detachment [dé-prise] that surprises us and suspends us in every surprise, according to the excess of this hold [prise] that surpasses every hold and every grip [emprise] of ours, and that takes hold of us by opening us to itself. The event surpasses even the surprise at the very moment in which it elicits it—that is to say, when it is too late: for the surprise still supposes a sort of contemporaneity, even if minimal, a relation to what is present; but the event is present, as we shall see, only when it has already taken place, and to the measure of this having-taken-place itself, according to a constitutive suspension. Th is is why, even if it is always surprising, the event is sometimes so according to a surprise that takes time before it manifests itself—like a cold that is already there for a long while when it breaks out— according to a latency that is inseparable from its manifestation. But the event is also— and, indeed, for the same reason—irreducible to remembrance, insofar as remembrance, like expectation, is inseparable from a context. Just as expectation has a hold on the “to-come” only because it is rooted in a contextual forecast, so too does remembrance gain access to a “past” only because it can recapture its explanatory lineaments. In remembrance, the advenant relates himself comprehensively to a past fact insofar as this fact presents itself first in the light of a world and a history. This is why there is never an isolated recollection, separated from the context out of which it surfaces and within which, alone, it takes on meaning. Rigorously an-anarchic, irreducible to its factual actualization, the event thereby eludes remembrance. It is never accessible, in its eventness, in the manner in which an empirical object of remembrance is, because it is a metamorphosis of the world in its very origin, a revolution of its meaning. At the moment when the event takes place, happens, or, more accurately, breaks out, it is already too late to remember it. Remembrance has only to do with facts; the upheaval of the world, which happens in certain facts as their event-advent [événement-avènement], exceeds its reach. The event is accessible only to memory [mémoire] —that is to say, to a nonempirical and necessarily forgetful undergoing of what has taken place, the meaning of which we shall return to below. It follows that the advenant can never make present an event, either, in the sense of being able to make himself contemporary to it: the event only gives itself to be understood and experienced according to this sometimes infinitesimal, but always intimate and profound, de-phasing that belongs to its eventness, opened to a necessarily retrospective understanding: inseparable from this inad-vertance, which is the event’s particular way of turning itself toward us and, in turning us aside from ourselves, of opening us to it. §10. The Event as Guiding Thread

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Irreducible to the three modalities of presence to the world that, for the advenant, articulate every apprehension of facts (presence to a “world” such that it necessarily shows itself in every fact, according to the evental concept of “world” as context), the event thus eludes, by principle, the phenomenon of inner-temporality, as it is structured by expectation, making-present, and recollection. Inner-temporality designates, as we have seen, the mode of manifestation of every innerworldly fact insofar as the advenant, tensed toward the future (expectatio, expectation) and retaining the past (memoria, remembrance), remains present to what comes “at the very moment” (contuitus, making-present). By virtue of these three attitudes, the fact announces itself first as “to come,” then as “present,” and then as “past.” Now, the event is that which, unlike the fact, never presents itself as accomplished in the present, since it can only appear with the meaning that is its own to the one who ex-per-iences it according to a constitutive lateness and delay. It is this suspended occurring that distinguishes it from every inner-temporal phenomenon; its temporalization exceeds every capacity of a subject to gather time into presence by bringing it back to the measure of its own presence—that is to say, by subordinating it to an allegedly “primordial” presence, that which it deploys itself through all time by relating itself to a re-presented future, in expectation, and by interiorizing the past under the form of a rendered-past present, in remembrance. A capacity of the subject, and not of the advenant: for the latter is phenomenologically understandable only in light of the event and of its mode of appearing. Thus, the event is not first present for an advenant, who would be contemporary to it, and then retained by him in the form of a remembrance. Its temporalization transcends all factual succession and chronology. It cannot be present as event, either in the present of a perception that would coincide with it, or “later,” as remembrance: for what is proper to remembrance is to conserve the past as self-identical; and it is hard to see how the act of remembrance, by re-evoking the past as it was (that is to say, as present), could by its own dynamic make new possibilities burst forth that this present did not announce. The event is not first a fact that, in a second phase, would be comprehensible as a “marking” fact to the extent that a subject would relate itself to the past through remembrance in order to compare it to a given present: for if, through the retrospection of remembrance, it was we ourselves who “constituted” events into events, by lending them a meaning that they did not have as facts, nothing such as an event would ever be possible. There would only be facts clad, after the fact, with a meaning that they didn’t have at first, by a forever incomprehensible alchemy of remembrance. Indeed, from where would this meaning that 126

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the advenant would confer retrospectively upon past facts so as to constitute them precisely into “events” come? It could not come from new events, since, from this point of view, nothing like an event could ever happen. The source of this Sinngebung could be, then, only a transcendental instance, a “subject” that, impermeable in itself to everything that happens to him and constantly self-identical, would always stand “behind” events— that is to say, perforce, outside of their reach. But the event is precisely not a fact bestowed, in a second phase, with a meaning that the subject would give to it on its own initiative; it is what precedes and anticipates every initiative and announces itself of itself as the origin of its own meaning, stripping the “subject” of its transcendental prerogatives and delivering it to the hiatus and the tearing of an ex-per-ience from whence it can, after the fact, receive itself only as transformed. The event “is” nothing other than this ex-per-ience of a transformation of the world through which the world’s very meaning appears overturned: it is in the event that the possibilization of the possible and the temporalization of time originate. This is why its happening appears fundamentally anachronic with regard to every factual chronology. Irreducible, for example, to the temporality of a consciousness, such that it “flows” continually from the future toward the past. Every conception of a “constitution” of events by the subject on the basis of retained and interiorized facts is, in this regard, a mere non-sense. Impossible to approach and to describe in terms of remembrance, making-present, and expectation, the event is therefore irreducible to the explicative understanding that unfolds within the horizon of the world as context, and that is implicated in these three attitudes. For the explicative grasp of a fact leads it back to other facts upon which it depends, according to the double legality of the causal and final “because.” Now, the event, as we have seen, is incomprehensible in its very meaning beginning from such a “world.” It does not announce itself within temporal horizons, those that coordinate expectation, making-present, and remembrance with the context that is, in each case, that of expected, presentified, and retained facts: it consequently escapes the inner-temporality that determines the mode of manifestation of innerworldly facts on the model of the previously cited three attitudes of the advenant. Th is amounts to saying that the event unfolds its own temporal horizons, according to a dramatics that we have yet to describe. We shall call these horizons “dimensionals” of time, by analogy with those within which the innerworldly fact announces itself insofar as it is comprehensible in terms of its context. These dimensionals (instant, always-already, future) are neither parts of a unidimensional continuum belonging to the causal order of facts, nor “ectasies” or “horizontal §10. The Event as Guiding Thread

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schemas” that would articulate the modalities of a Dasein’s presence to the world. They are openings of the world itself, no longer in its evental, but in its evential sense, insofar as it originates, in its turn, in events and is configured starting from possibilities that the events make-possible. The advenant is not the measure of these dimensionals of time: for the world in its evential sense is not a structure of the subjectivity well-understood ontologically, a constituent of the Dasein’s transcendence. If the dimensionals of time indeed belong to the phenomenon of the world, it is insofar as the world designates a structure of phenomenality rooted in the transcendental neutrality of the event: the world is that which itself advenes from itself, that which enworlds itself in each event; it is the “there is” [“il y a”] that takes place in every taking-place, inseparable from this takingplace itself. But how can the event thus deploy its own dimensionals—that is to say, how can it originally temporalize time? Until now, I have proceeded only in a negative way by exhibiting the irreducibility of the event to structures that govern the inner-temporality of facts; it remains for us to put this thesis to the test and to positively exhibit its meaning through new analyses. §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time Events are not temporal, but temporalizing. They are “present” only as past and inscribe their temporalization within this original suspension from themselves that consequently opens to itself the opening of the present. Paradoxically, the event “is” the opening of a presentation, in the deferred afterward of its own taking time [temporisation], insofar as that presentation is inseparable from the originally prospective character of its own happening. An event is not first present (as fact), to be deferred later (as event); rather, it originally exceeds the fact of its actualization insofar as it precedes itself, is prospective, opens a future, and receives itself from this future that it opens, from which and through which it appears after the fact in the “presence” that is its own: which implies that it “is” originally time. In order to grasp the dynamics or the dramatics of this temporalization, it is worth starting, in an analysis that is in a certain sense “static,” from the phenomenal characteristics of the event itself, and more precisely from a triple characteristic: (1) an event is a bursting forth from nothing: it thus displays a radical newness; (2) at the same time, an event declares itself with the absolute evidence and the “ancientness” of what is always there from the outset; (3) the event happens only in suspense from itself and from its meaning; it “presents” itself with the transcendental lateness of 128

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ex-per-ience regarding every present. Let’s begin, then, by examining each of these three phenomenal traits. (a) Static analysis: the triple phenomenological determination of the event 1. Every event is a bursting forth: it occurs with the character of an absolute beginning. It possesses this character of “firstness” (Erstmäligkeit) that is inseparable from the initial leap (Ur-sprung) of the origin. This absolute newness means that the event bursts forth from nothing, that no possibility whatsoever preexists it, and that, instead, it preexists its own possibility, which it opens itself by occurring. Its eventuality is thinkable and determinable only after the fact and from its very bursting forth. A pure prelude to itself, the event is not possible before being real, its realization is not limited to making a pre-given possibility pass into actuality within the horizon of the world; it “bursts forth before being possible,” which means that, in bursting forth, it annuls its own “conditions of possibility.” It eludes classical thought—Aristotelian, first of all— of the possible, where the ontological primacy of actuality over potency does not exclude, but on the contrary implies, the temporal priority of potency over actuality: φανερὸν ὅτι τὰ δυνάμει ὄντα εἰζ ἐνέργειαν ἀγόμενα εὑρίσκεται: “Obviously, therefore, the potentially existing constructions are discovered by being brought to actuality”; but Aristotle immediately clarifies: ὕστερον γὰρ γενέσει ἡ ἐνέργεια: “though the single actuality is later in generation than the corresponding potency.” By contrast, considered and conceived in light of the event, the possibility of the possible, literally its eventuality, signifies its possibilization by the event. This does not involve a Megaricism, a pure and simple inversion of the thought of Aristotle; it does not imply the claim that the possible has only an illusory character and is nothing but a “retrospective mirage” (Bergson). On the contrary, the possibilities are “real” insofar as they are the correlates of projections and expectations, which does not mean that they are “merely subjective”: the possible is what wells up from the event itself, and only on this condition is it capable of being taken up in a projection by the advenant. This is why it is necessary to take seriously, even against Bergson himself, the thesis according to which, “in duration, considered as a creative evolution, there is perpetual creation of possibility and not only of reality.” Not that the possible would be only an avatar of the real, the mirage of the present projected into the past—that is to say, the real plus the act of the mind that throws it “backward”; indeed, if such were the case, there would never, properly speaking, be “creation” of possibility, but creation of reality and, only to §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time

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this extent, a retrospective mirage of a preexisting possible. Bergson’s thesis cannot refuse all true reality to the possible without denying, at the same moment, every “creative” characteristic of duration. On the contrary, to state that events make-possible the possible does not amount to denying the possible’s “reality,” but only to reinterpreting its meaning. It is because the event opens possibilities that did not preexist it that it originally makespossible the projections of the advenant—beginning with its hermeneutic projections. It is precisely because the eventual possibility is not an illusion—because it is absolutely “real” and “effective”—that it can thoroughly reshape the understanding of the one who undergoes it and restructure the horizon of his hermeneutic possibilities. Consequently, the event is inseparable from the possibilities that it arranges and that articulate, each time, its understanding—and, as a consequence, it is inseparable from this understanding itself. But in order to be able to occur thus in its incomparable newness, as “making-possible,” the event must establish a beginning that nothing precedes, and that proceeds from nothing: it must be a pure initiation to itself that comes about only with itself. It must be born from itself or, what amounts to the same thing, be born from nothing, be prefigured by no possibility but, instead, reconfigure unforeseeably the possible in and through its own bursting forth. But what is the status of this “nothing” that has insinuated itself into the description? The event bursts forth from nothing: it is the manifest-out-of-nothing, the manifest-overhangingnothing. Now, the “nothing” in question here is not another name for Being, conceived in terms of the ontological difference as the pure and simple other with respect to every being. Or rather, it is no accident that Heidegger was able to specify the nothing as the shrine of the manifestation of Being: it is because he had first conceived of Being, in its verbal meaning, as event. But to put the accent on the event itself, and on the nothing that articulates its manifestation, is to go back “higher,” on the hither side of Being, of beings, and of the fold of their difference. The event is what always comes about as a supplement of Being (or in addition to Being): a phenomenology that strives to understand it is a phenomenology of the “otherwise than being” (Levinas). The nothing in question is not; it is not the other of beings, specifiable as no-thing (ne-ens); it is not even nothing. The nothing is what allows the event to appear by letting it appear from itself. The event does not come from far away— it comes from nothing. The nothing “is” the nonappearing shrine of its appearing advance, outside of which there is nothing. The nothing is one with the “there is” [l’ ‘ il y a’] of the event. There is nothing more to say, at least if “to say” is always more or less to say the 130

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Being of something, to say the Being of this nothing and, consequently, to identify this nothing with a manifestation, however oblique, of Being. In front of this nothing, there is nothing to say: it escapes the nets of ontological discourse. It means nothing other than the “newness” of the event. Anxiety can burst forth, too, in front of the absolute newness of what happens—“anxiety,” writes Kierkegaard, “is always present as the possibility of the new state”—that is to say, in front of the fact that what comes about comes about from nothing, is as near as can be to nothing, and is in suspense in the nothing. Of this, in a sense, there is nothing to say, except that there is the nothing. The nothing comes about in the event as the very mode of its showing, under the sign of newness. The nothing “is” the very newness of the event as event. The event occurs beginning from nothing, ἐξαίφνης. It is its own opening-occurring in the split of the nothing. It might also be said that the nothing happens as possibility. This means that the event also creates a vacuum, removes the past possibilities, establishes a hiatus, a dehiscence in time, that can be designated as the nothing of the instant. The instant, like the event, opens to itself by occurring ex nihilo. The nothing happens by occurring ex eventu. The two statements are intertwined in the instant that is their paradoxical expression. The instant is the site of the newness—that is, of the event of the event. The event of the event is the advent of the nothing in the bursting forth from nothing of the newness. The newness is the bursting forth from nothing of the event in its eventuality that opens the way for possibilities. All these formulations amount to the same, in that they indicate a very poor and very simple phenomenon. The advent of the event overhanging the nothing is the newness. The instant is the temporal mode of this occurring. The instant is the nothing from and through which the very possibility of the new is opened, a possibility that does not exist before the instant, a possibility of the new that does not precede the newness of the possibility. The blossoming of the possible in the instant is the unconditioned newness of the event in its occurring overhanging the nothing. Nothing precedes it that could engender it or explain it, in the sense of a causal fundamentum, or of a causa sive ratio, because it is from the nothing, out of which the event wells up, that the possibilities, in light of which it can be understood, in turn burst forth. That which nothing precedes proceeds from nothing. This “nothing,” in each case, belongs to it constitutively. The event “is” the suspended nothing of its own possibility, which originates only in itself. We would exhaust ourselves in wanting to describe it otherwise. This is why it excludes on principle all causality and all creation. This is why the “nothing” in question is not the ex nihilo of the biblical creation, but rather an “it is not” [“ il §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time

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n’y a pas”] that is not in league with Being, nor that designates the reverse of Being. In order to approach it, perhaps it would be necessary to resort to non-Western—that is to say non-ontological—thought of the void or of nothing; for example, to the wu, the “there-is-not,” the undifferentiated ground (as opposed to figure) that contrasts with the you, the “there is,” in the Laozi, and of which a definition can be found in Wang Bi and especially in Guo Xiang: “As negation of the you that signifies ‘to have [avoir],’ or ‘to be there [y avoir],’ and thus ‘there is [il y a],’ wu designates the ‘there is not’ [il-n’y-a-pas], not in the sense of nothingness or of nothing, but in the sense that, not yet being manifested, it does not have the contours of visible reality. . . . Thus, the undifferentiated cannot be an entity that is opposed to the manifest; rather, it is ‘that by which’ (suoyi) the there-is is there.” Regarding this latent there-is-not, which is inseparable from every manifestation, Wang Bi refuses the alternative between being and nothingness, between presence and absence: “One would like to say that it is not there (wu), and yet it accomplishes every thing. One would like to say that it is there (you), and yet one does not see its form.” But, as Guo Xiang stresses, we must nevertheless not make of the wu an origin: “Because the there-is-not is not there, it cannot engender the there-is”: the there-is-not signifies nothing other than the fact that the there-is is there “of itself,” sua sponte (ziran), in such a way that, outside of that which thus manifests from itself, there is nothing: the only “mystery is the real world.” The real is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega of every mystery; that is to say, the mystery of the absence of mystery. If the event, strictly speaking, is not, but if there is the event, the nothing (the there-is-not) from which it bursts forth cannot be grasped itself as a nothingness: it only has an evential meaning. Of “nothing,” there is only in light of the event. The event is the pure taking place that takes place from nothing. Of nothing, there is only if the event takes place; of the event, there is only if the nothing takes place: affirmations that are crossed and indefinitely interchangeable. This is also to say that the event is its own origin—that is, just as well, the erasure of every origin. The origin of the event is the nothing, which means not that the nothing would be an origin, an arch-cause, a central Nothingness that would take the place of the creator Being, but that there is nothing to search for as origin. And this origin-lessness is the erased origin of the event, the horizon from whence it arises as its own origin. “I know-not-what / that one may come on at a venture,” according to the expression of St. John of the Cross, the event strictly bursts forth as if nothing had happened [comme si de rien n’ était]. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche wants to say when he describes it, at its arrival, as “borne on doves’ feet.” 132

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2. But this characterization of the event by its absolute newness does not exhaust its proper phenomenological specifications. The event is not only new, it is also “older than itself,” in the sense in which, when it breaks out, it has always already happened as such. This is where its absolute evidence lies. When it appears—that is to say, after the fact, retrospectively for the one who ex-per-iences it—the event has already preceded him from the outset. This “from the outset” must not, of course, be understood here as an inner-temporal determination, but rather as a mode of the temporalization of time. The event is more ancient than every empirical remembrance, “older” than every factual having-taken-place, since, when it “comes about” or begins to come about, we are already no longer its contemporaries: “The real,” according to Maldiney’s rigorous definition, “is that which was not expected and, as soon as it appears, has already been there from the outset.” For the event is not to come before having passed away; it brings with it its future insofar as it is already passed away, it is not possible before being actualized; its possibility wells up from its actualization as the possibilization of itself and of the world. Thus the event, both surprising and obvious, bears always already the seal of the irremediable. This is what becomes evident, for example, in every encounter that is endowed with the apparently contradictory characteristics of an absolute newness and of a sort of blind familiarity, a recognition or foreknowledge preceding knowledge, a “first time” both striking and evident of an “immemorial” evidence in which the other has, in some way, “from the outset” been known to us. It is this paradoxical evidence that is signified in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education by the figure of bedazzlement: It was like an apparition: She was sitting in the middle of the bench, all alone; or at least he could not see anybody else in the dazzling light which her eyes cast upon him. Just as he passed her, she raised her head; he bowed automatically; and stopping a little way off, on the same side of the boat, he looked at her. The inversion in Flaubert’s sentence between the apparition and the gaze reveals to us something of the phenomenon described: the apparition is first here; the sharp burn of the beauty in its sudden and imperious declaration comes before all visibility and all vision, dazzling Frédéric, who, in order to see it in detail, must retreat, and stop seeing for an instant: “and . . . he looked at her.” In the suddenness of the encounter, it is this ever global, ever integral meaning of the first apparition of a person, that §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time

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I initially grasp: I “know” everything about her, but with a blind knowledge, exceeded by what it sees and as if bedazzled; it is only in the following moment that this totality of the apparition is progressively dismantled under the anatomy of the gaze that enumerates its traits: only then can the physical description of Mme Arnoux be made. What is true here for the amorous encounter is true for every genuine encounter—the encounter with Monsieur Arnoux, in Flaubert’s novel, is no less decisive: it is an encounter with “red boots of Russian leather, which were decorated with a pattern in blue”; it is “the gentleman in the red boots,” as the narrator refers to him, whose vulgarity reveals itself right away, all at once, with the same “totality” that will not be contradicted, and that is assuredly a characteristic of every encounter. The evidence of that which takes hold of us and seizes us, the familiarity of this foreknowledge—where the “fore” does not refer to any prior knowledge—are not mere “metaphors”; nor do they point toward a mythological construction that is in some way “pasted” onto the phenomenon. Rather, they designate a phenomenological given. It is because the event is accessible as such only according to an original suspension and disparity, in such a way that it is only “later,” according to a necessary a posteriori, that it takes on, retrospectively, the meaning that was then already its own; it is because the event is stretched constitutively, as prospective-retrospective, between the “already” and the “later” of its own manifestation that it precedes itself in some way and appears evident with an evidence that is as impossible to date as it is to elude. The event is obvious because retrospective: it does not precede itself in time; rather, it precedes itself in the sense in which it is time itself that proceeds from it—that is, in the sense in which time has its source only in it. But it is necessary further to add this: considered no longer merely in itself, but in its relation to other events and to the history that precedes it, the event possesses the following phenomenological trait: it forces us to understand in a different way its past in conformity with the new meaning that it makes emerge. In rearranging the possible, it closes former possibilities and, in so doing, it reveals them. It always manifests something of its own context that, without it, would remain hidden. To this extent, it is not only retrospective but, with regard to the events that precede it, it also possesses a critical and alethic dimension: by bursting forth, it renews the understanding of what preexists it. Indeed, each event pours forth in such a way that it alone creates “its own prefiguration in the past and an explanation of itself by its background.” It possesses a critical dimension: it calls upon the advenant to judge (κρίνειν) the situation according to a perspective that could not appear otherwise than through it. In this sense, 134

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it is a revealer: it is by undergoing it that we recognize the possibilities that were ours in light of different possibilities of which we are not the measure. Its alethic dimension is inseparable from its critical dimension. As unforeseeable as they may be, the events that fall to the advenant always unconceal him to himself. Their trial is a test of truth. This is a tragic theme par excellence: the essence of tragedy does not reside in the action (δρᾶμα), but in knowledge (μάθος). Tragedy is that action in which, through the revelatory power of suffering (τῷ πάθει μάθος), the relation of man to his own truth— and thus to his non-truth, to mere appearance—is played out. Here it is the event’s laceration that both prevents the advenant from recognizing himself in what happens to him and obliges him nevertheless to recognize in what happens a moment of his destiny: a tension without resolution, of which tragedy is the knot. This is why the event’s absolute newness always goes together with a belonging to a destiny in which the event plays a part and that it reflects in its own way: the event resembles us; it is the point of coagulation for the possible, where an understanding of ourselves emerges. Thus, all the joys and crises through which a love relationship passes reflect the structural traits of this love, all the upheavals in an adventure are the revealers of a unity of meaning— even if partial and provisional—that belongs to it constitutively. In this sense, no event occurs absolutely outside an adventure; no event is a mere accident. It can overturn a destiny only because it becomes integrated into it from the start and sums it up. Destiny is the truth of an adventure such as it reveals itself and reveals its meaning starting from these critical and alethic turning points that are events: it is not the blind fate that weighs on us like a fatality, but the lucid viewpoint on ourselves that events make possible, inasmuch as they shed light upon their own past, manifest its main incitements and cohesion, and restructure the hermeneutic horizon from which is manifested to us, sometimes even in spite of us, a certain unity of meaning. Destiny is a modality of the understanding of ourselves and of our adventure in light of what happens to us. The event always engages an exercise of the gaze and a patience of discernment: it is the center of a destiny, the point of crystallization from which an understanding of who we are emerges. 3. Finally, the event is not only inaugural and obvious (retrospective); it is also in suspense from its own meaning, more future than itself. By transcending its own factual actualization through the reserve of possibilities that it carries in itself, an event announces itself only according to the delay and the latency of that which is not brought about “once and for all” in the datable present of the fact, but instead takes on the meaning that is (always already) its own only in light of its future. The event is in precession to itself §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time

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to the extent that its very meaning as event only springs from the suspension that runs across it, from the eventualities to come that it arranges and that it unceasingly accomplishes. Thus, an encounter would not be an encounter if it did not open an ulterior destiny, if it did not find its prolongation in a history but, instead, exhausted itself in the initial face-to-face. The apparition of the face of Mme Arnoux, and that of the red boots of Russian leather that are, in a sense, “metonymic” of the entire person of her husband, do not occur only in the present, but exceed it, too, from the outset. If the “apparition,” in the un-anticipatable and un-objectifiable present of its own epiphany, is an experience of the shock in which I am deprived of my “powers” and delivered over to the excess of that which surpasses my measure, if it is indeed, for this reason, an event, that does not mean, by contrast, that the event of the encounter is reduced to this fugitive exchange of gazes that occurs “once and for all,” in a definitive present, as a datable fact of the world. What the novelistic narrative structure here gives the illusion of—the idea that one could describe the encounter as a datable innerworldly fact—must not fool us: for there is only an event if, in anticipating the following chapters of the novel, I apprehend in this exchange of gazes on board a steamer between Paris and Nogentsur-Seine something other than a mere peripetia in the life of a young student; consequently, there is an event only if I perceive that which, in this encounter, transcends the fact of its actualization, that according to which it is actually inseparable from a certain suspension that confers on the event its evential tenor: the encounter, as event, “is” precisely nothing empirical or factual, it happens in suspense from itself as its own taking time [temporisation]. This is why, if the apparition occurs in the present, the encounter can appear as this event that it already is only in the transcendental aftermath of an ex-per-ience, in the transformation of the advenant in light of renewed possibilities that nevertheless spring only from this event. This triple characterization of the event as: (1) absolutely new; (2) obvious as endowed with an immemorial evidence; and (3) in suspense from its own meaning can, therefore, serve as a guiding thread for the illumination of its temporal meaning. How must we interpret, this time in a dynamic way, the bursting-forth-in-suspension of the event through which, by opening its own temporal horizons, it temporalizes itself and temporalizes time as such—that is to say, makes it appear, manifests it as itself [tel qu’en lui-même]?

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(b) Dynamic analysis: the event as bursting-forth-in-suspension and its temporalization/taking time Every event arises from nothing and establishes an absolute beginning while it manifests itself with the “ancientness” of what is already there, through an “already” without possible contemporaneity, and by deferring its own meaning according to a constitutive suspension. Thus, to the three moments of static analysis there correspond three features of its temporality. The event is: (1) inaugural; (2) retrospective; (3) prospective. These three characterizations, which must be described at first separately, will allow me, in a second phase, to specify the meaning of the three dimensionals of time: apertural present, always-already, and future (cf. §11c). It is worth noting, to begin with, that the three phenomenological features of the event as such—newness, obviousness, and suspension— are opposed, term for term, to the determinations of the innerworldly fact that structure the fact’s inner-temporal manifestation. As we have seen, the fact is: (1) foreseeable in light of its context; (2) allowing for contemporaneity; (3) exempt from every structural suspension. This means, first of all, that it does not arise out of nothing as its own origin, but, instead, inserts itself into a causal framework and, as a result, is foreseeable, at least in principle. The fact is essentially not new, or its newness is purely extrinsic, ratifying the course of the world. And this non-newness likewise has nothing to do with the transcendental “ancientness” and evidence of the event as such. Second, the fact unfolds as an inner-temporal process provided with a specific beginning and an end— that is to say, datable in time— and stretching out over a certain extension of duration: the advenant is rigorously contemporary with the fact as long as he expects its moments to come and retains its past moments, while making-present the fact, by keeping it present under the focal-point of attention. Finally, third, the fact is fully completed in its present: it holds no secrets, nor any constitutive suspension. It is transparent to an understanding that gathers its meaning in light of interpretive possibilities already offered within the horizon of its context. This hermeneutic transparency of the fact conditions, in return, the first two features, since a fact can be a foreseeable inner-temporal process only because it always already submits itself to an explanatory etiology. As a result, the fact gives itself first as “to come,” in conformity with an expectation, then as “present” in attention’s contemporaneity, and finally as “past,” more and more distant, as the remembered object sinks into the past and retention gives rise to ever new retentions. These temporal adverbs—“first,” “then,” “finally”—here refer to the time in which the temporal modes of the fact (“to come,” “present,” “past”) endlessly transform §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time

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themselves. For time itself always co-appears through the temporal features of every inner-temporal phenomenon. The temporality of the event is completely different, since, first, an event announces itself under its own horizon of intelligibility, as the origin of its own meaning, as endowed, therefore, with a radical newness; second, an event only occurs according to the evidence of that which has “already” taken place and, as a consequence, allows for no contemporaneity; third, an event opens its own future irreducible to any projection and to any prefiguration by the measure of a present. Let us, then, attempt to describe more precisely the dramatics of this temporalization. We have seen that the event is not an inner-temporal process or change: it is not already “present,” even before happening, under the form of an expected fact, by virtue of a forecast on the basis of its causes; as a phenomenon hermeneutical through and through, a metamorphosis of meaning and of the world in their origin, it is the change from nothing to the present, a change in which nothing changes and everything has already changed, a change that becomes accessible as such only after the fact, in such a way that the event is at once absolutely to come— occurring from a future inaccessible to every expectation— and, for this very reason, always already past—without possible contemporaneity— opening a split in a present perpetually in suspense from itself, a present in no way closed in on itself but “open to all the time that opens itself in it,” opening the time itself to which it gives rise, in whose space it allows us to dwell, and of which it is the taking-place. Exceeding the present of its actualization, always already come and yet always to come, the event is the monstrance of time; it unfolds its dimensionals and makes time itself appear from itself—temporalizes it. Indeed, the event “presents” itself as such for the advenant only with the transcendental delay over every present of ex-per-ience. It is never itself given in presence in a completed and definitive presence, but shows itself and appears as such only from the movement of its own taking time [temporisation], and as this taking time itself. It is temporalizing “before” being present, since it is only in terms of its ulterior destiny that it acquires the meaning that was already its own and is revealed— only to this extent— as an event. Unlike every inner-temporal fact, it is not first present, in order to flow and become past in a second moment; it is never present before being past, but it is only as being past that it retrospectively acquires the presence that is its own: the event comes into presence only against the backdrop of factual absence. Its “presence” is not the presence of something present, but rather of something constitutively absent (its own factum): it is only present as past in light of its future. Entirely shaped in itself 138

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by this structural delay over itself that makes it so that occurring, for it, is never to happen in the present, but already to enclose in itself (or to unfold from itself ) the three dimensionals of time, the event thus shows itself as present (that is to say, as itself: event) only if it appears as such in the past tense, in light of its future—that is to say, in light of the essential dimension in which its ad-vening as meaning plays out. The event never occurs in time, but opens time or temporalizes it in the triplicity of its dimensionals. Its temporality as taking time [temporisation] signifies the being-always-already-in-the-past-what-it-will-be-as-present. This is why the event is, in the movement of its taking time or of its “differance,” that which does not allow itself to be gathered into presence under the mea sure of an original presence that would make possible its reception; in this very way, it is what exceeds the span of the question of being as presence (Anwesenheit). As the third part of this work will show, the event diff racts every original self-presence of a being placed in the posture of the “subject” of what happens to him and disperses it through time. It is true that the advenant is present to the “there is” [l’ il y a] of the event; but this “there is” does not allow itself to be led back to the measure of this presence: “envelopment,” “overflowing,” and “excess” are some possible terms to define the absolute anteriority and the excess of the unpresentable “there is” at the heart of the advenant’s presence to itself, of which the event outlines the fault. It is for this reason that the evential “there is,” in the movement of its temporalization, is not thinkable on the model of the ecstatic temporality of Dasein, which circumscribes the orb of its presence to itself and to the world insofar as Dasein opens, from the anticipation of its projectiontoward-death, the different ecstasies of time in which something can appear to it as “past,” “present,” or “to come.” The event is irreducible to the temporality of an exemplary being that, by projecting itself toward the future and by authentically repeating the past, exists in a moment of vision for its world and gathers together the three temporal ecstasies in the synoptic moment of resoluteness. The question that must be raised here, indeed, is the following: can we conceive the temporalization of the event in light of the three subjective attitudes of the “subject . . . well understood ontologically,” which are anticipation, repetition, and opening to the world in the moment of vision? In other terms, can we lead the temporality of the event back to the temporality of an exemplary being, not temporal, but temporalizing, which in existing always beyond itself, in the heightening of its transcendence, could project itself toward the future, and as a consequence open time as such? The answer here can only be negative: for to state that Dasein temporalizes time by the resolute anticipation of the §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time

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existential possibilities that stand out for it on the horizon of its death is necessarily to claim that Dasein— and it alone—possibilizes the possible by existing. Consequently, it is difficult to see at all how events could occur as such: for the event is precisely what overturns the world by (re)possibilizing it. Because its happening is incommensurable with prior possibilities, it transcends every projection and every anticipation. If, then, it is Dasein who, by “raising itself away” into the possible and the impossible through an originary projection of itself— that is to say, by possibilizing them in a free anticipation — opens the future and the past as ecstasies of time and temporalizes temporality as a whole, then it follows that nothing of what I have called, up to this point, an “event,” in its difference from the fact, can happen any longer. Or rather, there is actually no longer but one sole event, that of the resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) by which Dasein, in making-possible the possible, opens time to its ecstatic gaping openness. But if such a reduction of events in their irreducible plurality is untenable, it follows, instead, that it is necessary to conceive temporality not in terms of the subjectivity well understood ontologically (Dasein), but in terms of events and of their own temporalization; it follows, in other words, that the event is the sole guiding thread for the exhibition of the original meaning of time. Interpreted in its evential sense, time will appear as that which happens or is temporalized starting from the event, and which “is” nothing other than the very “movement” by which the event, in its transcendental “mobility,” mobilizes the three dimensionals by occurring: thus temporality will signify, for every event, the manner in which this event unfolds time insofar as it is its own having-taken-place-as-to-come-presenting-itself. Another consequence results from this new orientation toward the phenomenon. The “ecstasies” of time that articulate the Dasein’s Beingoutside-itself and its transcendence toward Being give access only to a “re-presented” future and a past—that is to say, to a future and past referred fundamentally to this plenary presence to itself through all the time that Dasein unfolds in existing. Things are otherwise, as we shall see, for the future and the past that are opened from the event in its suspended occurring: irreducible to their re-presentation for me, and incommensurable to Dasein and its presence, they also elude, necessarily, every representation. They transcend every possibility of a gathering into presence, of a totalization of time, in the moment of vision’s blink or glance (Augenblick). This is the case, for example, for that pre-personal past that, springing from and through birth, is never present as such for the advenant, but nevertheless belongs in principle to the phenomenological tenor of the temporal phenomenon. 140

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Temporality understood in this way no longer refers itself originally to the self-presence of a subject. If it is a characteristic of the human adventure, it is so insofar as this adventure is interpreted itself in light of the event, whose presence is never fully given, but always deferred, always intertwined with absence, always temporized. Even if we accepted to say of the event that it “is,” this would be in a way radically incommensurable with every entity that always signifies fundamentally a pre-sent (Anwesendes), whose Being is the modality of presence (Anwesenheit): it would thus be in a way irreducible to any “ontology.” Including, no doubt, the ontology of the Dasein that, though non-present in the sense of a being present-at-hand (vorhanden), nevertheless unfolds a singular presence inasmuch as it always “exceeds” its present in the direction of a re-presented future and past (anticipatable future and having-been that can be taken over, in Heidegger’s vocabulary). This is why the advenant, in turn, is irreducible to any ontology (even fundamental ontology), if it must be conceived by the guiding thread of the event; for an event means what is never given in presence, that which can only present itself and appear after the fact, as “being” what it has been; that with which I can never be contemporary by principle, and that always occurs in suspense from its meaning, deferring this meaning from its origin, in such a way that this “differance” is itself originary. Thus the evential hermeneutic of temporality excludes every distinction between a “form” of time and its “contents” and every formalism in the approach to the temporal phenomenon: the event is not a “content” occurring “in” time—rather, it opens an inaugural present by its own occurring, a present that neither succeeds nor proceeds from an anterior time nor bequeaths itself to any ulterior time: in the image of the ἐξαίφνης through which, “outside of time,” time ceaselessly and without respite advenes. The event is not first present, in order next to be deferred; rather, it originally exceeds the fact of its actualization by its own arising, and thus precedes itself: it unfolds its own “past,” in the sense that its manifestation is always retrospective. It also opens its own future—that is to say, it is prospective— and receives itself from this future that it opens, within the horizon in which it appears, after the fact, in the temporized “presence” that is its own. As inaugural, retrospective, and prospective, it mobilizes its own temporal horizons—that is, it temporalizes time originally. Conversely, time “is” nothing other than the internal articulation of the event in its transcendental “mobility,” the very structuration or declension of its appearing. But how does this temporalization “take place”? How does the event exhibit time according to its own phenomenological viewpoint? How should we describe the dimensionals of time in themselves? §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time

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(c) The dimensionals of time: the instant, the always-already, the future In order to conceive the present in which the event arises—which the event itself opens by arising—it is necessary to conceive the verticality of a present-origin that absolves itself from all previous time in the uprising of its appearing, in the burst without genesis of its coming to self; it is necessary to conceive the possibility of a radical beginning, which is not a beginning in time, the initial phase of a process, but the prelude, each time replayed, of the instant. It is thus necessary to attempt to conceive the beginning itself as the birth to itself of the present in the movement, from itself to itself, in which the present is constituted as such, in the in-stasy of which time itself is the ec-stasy—that is to say, in the bursting forth from itself in itself within its own horizon, through which is inaugurated, in return, the very difference of times. A “beginning” whose meaning Schelling alone, perhaps, attempted to penetrate: “At each instant time arises, indeed, time in its entirety, the time in which past, present, and future are dynamically separated, and at the same moment conjoined.” Now, this opposition and this split among times are possible only by the virtue proper to the beginning, in which the times burst forth together in their polar opposition. What, indeed, is “beginning”? The problem of the beginning is that, in order to be a true beginning, it cannot be subsequent to any time, nor as a consequence relative to any prior present of which it would take, so to speak, the relay: the absolute beginning is not a beginning in time, but a beginning of time itself; it can neither succeed nor proceed from any previous time—it must come from itself to itself and arise from an ab-solute instant, without relation to a prior present. Nothing begins absolutely without beginning from nothing, and thus from time itself; now, this nothing [rien] is not a pure nothingness [néant], but the very feature of the instant in that it ab-solves itself from any prior duration. The process by which the present is constituted as such, by splitting itself radically from the future and the past, consists precisely in this internal dynamic of the beginning: we will call “instant” the present incommensurable to any prior one in which the event bursts forth, a present that is constituted in itself as a pure beginning, without reference to a prior present. The instant is the suspended nothing of the beginning, insofar as the beginning, because it cannot proceed from any preceding time, is the absolute rising up of itself in itself, a pure bursting forth starting from itself—that is, starting from nothing, which opens therefore to itself the nothing of the instant. This apertural present of the beginning, which neither bequeaths itself to itself nor succeeds itself, in the way an inner-temporal present does, but 142

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is the pure bursting forth of itself in itself (in-stasy), freed from any heritage, where time appears itself in statu nascendi—this instant differs radically from the inner-temporal present that receives its features from the metaphysics of time. Indeed, the inner-temporal present necessarily presents itself within a double horizon of anteriority and posteriority: now bequeathing itself to itself, succeeding the now that it no longer is and preceding that which it not yet is, characterized both as that which passes away and that which remains, that which begins and that which finishes, that which is extended in itself, having a certain ex-tension, and that which “lasts” no time at all, since, in arising under a double horizon, it presents itself only in order to be made-past, and in “passing away” ensures the paradoxical “maintenance” of time as the pure form of “passage.” Wrought in a tensional manner by the internal contradictions that articulate the metaphysical concept of time, such a “present” appears in some way as always already completed, in the sense in which everything that presents itself there is completed—namely, the “fact/made” [le fait] ( factum), the “all-done” [le “tout-fait” ]: it is nothing other than its own completion, where the present and the past coincide to the point of becoming rigorously indiscernible; a present that presents itself as already “old,” in which everything is accomplished and, consequently, entirely closed to the future. Things are completely otherwise for the instant; for, just as the event occurs only under its own horizon and announces itself, emancipated from every causal conditioning, as its own origin, so too the only present that is adequate to the event is not the inner-temporal present subordinated to a double horizon, characterized by its relation to the future that it has been and to the past that it will be; rather, it is the present-origin that bursts forth itself only from itself, according to its own in-stasy. Radically freed with regard to the form of “succession,” it escapes inner-temporal categories that govern its economy: for only that which occurs as such in time, and unfolds a stay and a duration there can “maintain” itself, “succeed” itself, be “prior” to or “after” something; only facts or beings characterized fundamentally by their inner-temporality can succeed one another. The paradox of such an instant as pure initiation to itself, whose entire “adventure” consists in occurring, is that one must already be in it in order to begin to be there, but that this “already” does not refer to a past or to a present prior to that of the beginning; instead, it describes the internal drama of the present as a pure beginning, a coming from itself into itself, an instant—the very “process” by which the present is constituted as such in itself, is instantiated, without ever succeeding or proceeding from any prior time. §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time

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Therefore, the instant instantiates itself starting from itself in an instasy that nothing precedes or prepares: the drama of the instant lies completely in this coming into itself under its own horizon, in this springing forth radically ex novo. However, if the instant is constituted or instituted— instantiated—by its own “movement” of coming into itself, if it is a pure beginning from nothing, it is nevertheless worked by an inner tension. As the apertural present of time, the instant indeed appears stretched “between” the actualization of the event as fact and the irreducible delay with which it reveals itself: a present whose always pending [en instance] stance is that which defines the phenomenon of the instant. Indeed, even if the instant constitutes itself in itself, according to the interior drama of the beginning, it never coincides with itself in the parousia of an origin, but its instantiation only appears after the fact, according to an interior dephasing: it always already harbors, in the inner drama of its autoconstitution, the “principle” of its differentiation from itself and, consequently, from the other times. In short, the instant is not a present taking the succession of a past, but a present that, precisely because it begins absolutely, can be apprehended as such only after the fact—that is to say, is passed as soon as it is present (to the extent that it is still to come), is only constituted as present as past and in light of its future—that is to say, opens originally, by its own dramatics, the dimensionals of the “always-already” and the “future.” No sooner does the instant spring forth and instantiate itself than it has already passed, and this “already” does not refer back to a prior present, but describes the differential breaking-out of the present itself insofar as it poses outside of itself a past always already there, which did not become such by virtue of the phenomenon of “passage,” thus opening the always-already and the future as dimensionals of time. This is why the always-already, as dimensional allowing the description of the “mobility” of the event in its suspended occurring, does not succeed the apertural present, but is instead rigorously contemporary with it. Such a “contemporaneity,” naturally, does not have an inner-temporal meaning here. It does not signify the co-presence of two facts inside of a present arising within a double horizon of anteriority and posteriority—it refers to no factual simultaneity whatsoever. Rather, it describes the temporality of the event insofar as the event, by arising from itself in its ab-solute beginning and by thus opening to itself the apertural present of time, has always already taken place, and thus, in the youth of its instantaneous bursting forth, is always already delayed with regard to itself, because it can appear only after the fact in its newness—precisely as an event. This delay with regard to itself and this suspension belong to the internal constitution of the instant, and do not contradict its springing forth ex novo. On the con144

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trary, it is precisely to the extent that the instant is pure beginning that this beginning excludes all possible contemporaneity: the instant is in itself open toward the two other dimensionals of time that it itself opens by instantiating itself, in the contemporaneity of the always-already, the future, and the present. It is co-originally that the event takes place, that it has taken place, and that it opens its future: for these three dimensionals articulate the phenomenon of the instant from the outset. This is why the always-already of the event “from the outset” belongs to it. It does not succeed the instant; it is contemporary with it, in the differential springing forth through which the instant instantiates itself by opening time in the triplicity of its dimensionals irreducible to one another and incommensurable. However, do we not come across here again that paradoxical contemporaneity of the present and the past that appeared to us in Aristotle (or in Bergson) as the index of a metaphysical understanding of time? Not at all! For the “now” of Aristotle was closed and completed in itself, in the sense that every fact able to occur in it was accomplished: the simultaneity of the present and of the past, manifested in the problematic of the ἐν ᾧ πρώτῳ μεταϐέϐληκε, testified to the pregnancy of the scheme of passage for the understanding of the temporal phenomenon: if a change at once “takes place” and “had taken place,” is present and is past, this is because time is already conceived, in certain respects, as a passage taking place according to a single dimension—that is, according to a continuum to which a measurement can be applied. Now, the co-originality of the three dimensionals in the phenomenon of the instant signifies something completely different. Apprehended and understood by the guiding thread of the event, the instant is ecstatic to all time through the in-stasy in which it is constituted itself as such, in the sense in which it poses “outside of itself ” the always-already in the very “movement” by which it frees itself from it; the instant is for itself without possible contemporaneity. Unlike the innertemporal present, it unfolds its own temporal horizons and escapes fundamentally from the order of succession. To put it differently, the phenomenon of the instant is inseparable from its being always in waiting [en instance], according to which it appears only as always already past in the light of its future. So, between the instant and the always-already no time elapses, but the instant itself arises “in the meantime”; it is the “meantime” of time itself. It is this suspension or this gap of the “meantime” that characterizes the event itself in its deferred occurring. If in the instant time is born, it is as the instant in waiting [l’ instant en instance] of its own birth. To insist that time arises from the meantime by which the event, in its original arising, §11. The Event as Temporalization of Time

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has already begun to differ from itself, to defer its presentation, to inscribe itself in the suspension that it itself opens, is certainly not to conceive this “meantime” in an inner-temporal mode: “Meantime” does not mean here the lapse that separates two “instants” of time; such a “meantime” is not conceived starting from a “time” that is already given as an articulation of instants. We should not conceive the “meantime” on the basis of a succession of things in the instant, but rather the instant, as a dimensional of time, on the basis of the meantime. It is time that arises from the “meantime”—that is, from the gap or the split of the event through which this event acquires, after the fact, its figure or stature as event. Time is fundamentally what takes place in the meantime, the “there is” [“ il y a”] of the meantime as such. It is therefore in the light of the instant’s inner de-phasing that the always-already can in turn be described and interpreted. The instant only instantiates itself in the co-originarity of the beginning, the suspension, and the always-already that confers on it its proper phenomenological features. Or again: the instant instantiates itself in its coming to itself from itself, emancipated from every horizon of anteriority and posteriority, as retrospective-suspended-beginning. This is why the always-already, as dimensional, indicates the event’s antecedence over itself, inseparable from its being constitutively in waiting, such that they are both knitted together in the drama of the instant. As for the future, it too is implicated in the dynamic of the instant, since the event discloses its meaning only according to the suspension of its own futurition. The future of this futurition, insofar as it arises from the present-origin, is thus inseparable from the stance in waiting of the instant. To every event, in its instantaneous occurring, there belongs originally the horizon of possibilities that it itself opens and that was not prepared in any way before its occurring. Because the event is, originally, possibilization of the possible and of the world, it is also temporalization of time: it unfolds its own future, irreducible to the expectations and the projections of the advenant. The always-already and the future, the dimensionals of time, are thus dimensionals of the world itself in its evential meaning. Consequently, the event, in the suspension of its own futurition and the always-already of its own retrospection, insofar as they both articulate the phenomenon of the instant, opens time in the difference of its dimensionals that are incommensurable with one another, because irreducible to the modifications of an inner-temporal present. By unfolding its own horizon of “past” (the always-already) in its instantaneous arising, and by opening a future incommensurable to the advenant’s projections, a future according to which its own meaning is decided, the event appears in itself and by 146

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itself not as temporal, but as temporalizing. In the instant of the beginning ecstatic to all time, the event is always-already-what-it-will-be-as-such (as event). Time is defined, therefore, as the advent in itself of an inaugural instant, constituted in itself under its own horizon, but whose “stance” constitutively in waiting already opens a future and an always-already and is temporalized only with them. “Future,” “instant,” and “always-already” here designate co-originary dimensions of the world as evential in their differential arising and not parts inside of a unique continuum, nor even ecstasies that articulate the presence to the world of an exemplary being. But to insist that the event temporalizes time is certainly not to argue that it engenders it in the sense of a real-factual genesis: for the event, in a sense, “makes” nothing; it is of the order of meaning. No more than time brings about the event does the event bring about the difference of times: the event can only play the role of guiding thread for the phenomenological elucidation of time. Nevertheless, these analyses still remain largely unilateral: they are limited to the event as temporalization of itself and do not yet bring in the advenant’s modalities of response to what happens to him, his eventials. They remain abstract— and rightly so!— because they only consider, in each case, an isolated event. They neglect the reciprocal linking of events in their diversity and plurality, such as is revealed through a history. In these conditions, the phenomenological analysis of the dimensionals of time that has been conducted up to this point remains incomplete and provisional. It calls for new developments: it is worthwhile, at this point, to pass from time, such as it is temporalized in each event, to temporality, as the articulation of events in relation to one another along the singular path of an ex-per-ience.

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Temporality The great temporal mystery, . . . the mystery of the rhythm and of the flow and, so to speak, of the event of the event. —Charles Péguy, Clio

§12. From Time to Temporality Our interpretation of the temporal phenomenon has been accomplished by following the guiding thread of the event as self-temporalization. It has allowed for a first characterization of time as the unity of three dimensionals: the “instant,” the “future,” the “always-already,” themselves conceived in light of the inaugural, prospective, and retrospective character of the event. These dimensionals cannot be interpreted as modes of the present— that is, as modifications (possibly “intentional”) of a subject’s presence to itself and to the world, whose declension time, in some way, would constitute. These dimensionals are not the horizons articulating the modes of presence to something of a subject, but rather openings of the world as evential. Nevertheless, these analyses still remain rather short of the phenomena to be described. They disregard—by design—the modalities of response that condition the advenant’s experiential grasp of events: modalities starting from which the advenant becomes thinkable in his adventure. From now on, the point will be to apprehend and to show how time in its evential constitution, as having-already-taken-place-as-to-come-presenting-itself, gives rise to ex-per-ience, as unsubstitutable understanding of the meaning that is in play and in suspense in the critical upheavals of our adventure, by reintroducing into the analysis the dimension of responsibility according to which the advenant, while transforming himself, appropriates to himself what happens to him. For the event is not merely its self-temporalization and, consequently, the bringing to light of time as temporalizing occurring; it always signifies, for the one to whom it occurs, the beginning and the end of an era. Every event is a revolution in time; it elicits Abner’s ex149

clamation, in Racine’s Athalie: “How times are changed!” It is a matter of an upheaval in which the very meaning of the adventure vacillates, where a fracture, a radical rupture between the having-taken-place and the future takes place. These terms here no longer refer to the dimensionals of time; they refer instead to the dimensions of ex-per-ience, insofar as it is originated in the temporalizing occurring of events and, conjointly, the modalities of the advenant’s response—appropriated or unappropriated—to what happens to him. The events, as beginnings and ends of eras, open a fissure in the adventure of which ex-per-ience is precisely the crossing over, the comprehensive appropriation at the risk of oneself— a fissure between the having-taken-place, as the dimension of appearance of every event belonging to a bygone era and the future, as the dimension of appearing of every new event. These dimensions of ex-per-ience no longer belong to time, but to temporality. Indeed, if time is a description of the appearing of the event in its suspended occurring, temporality is a determination of ex-per-ience insofar as it articulates the modalities of response (or the eventials) through which, in each case, the advenant advenes to himself starting from what happens to him. It is thus solely at the level of temporality as determination of ex-perience that the problem can be raised of the articulation and the mutual cohesion between events inside a history, that belonging to the advenant. But in order to understand fully this distinction between time and temporality, it is necessary briefly to return to the phenomenological characterization of the advenant, such as it was developed in Event and World. (a) Advenant, event, ex-per-ience “Temporality” is nothing other than the name given to the way in which events happen for us by giving rise to an ex-per-ience: does this thesis lead inevitably to the re-introduction of a distinction whose pertinence I had already challenged—namely, that between an “objective” and a “subjective” time? Aren’t events objective phenomena, the occurrence of which is made temporal by a subject who, because he is intrinsically time, is alone able to bestow upon them any dating whatsoever? In fact, nothing of the kind: to hold that the dimensionals of time are also, necessarily, dimensions of ex-per-ience is in no way to conceive ex-per-ience itself in reference to subjectivity. It is not the subject who is the condition of the possibility of ex-per-ience, but rather ex-per-ience, eventially understood, that is the advenant’s condition of possibility: the ex-per-ience serves, in this respect, a transcendental function. Ex-per-ience is not a transcendental condition of welcome in the subject, but a transcendental condition of possibility for 150

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the advenant, the condition required so that the advenant might advene to himself in his adventure, starting from the events that make sense for him, and of which he is not himself the measure— and foremost among these, the event through which and according to which all the others become possible: birth. Accordingly, ex-per-ience describes the still neutral dimension of the human adventure starting from which the advenant himself advenes (and advenes to himself ) from what happens to him, insofar as he is implicated in person in the events that befall him—that is to say, insofar as he is himself at stake— at the risk of himself—in events in which he is himself the stake. In short, ex-per-ience is the condition of every understanding of oneself and of the world, to the extent that it is rooted in events. As a consequence, the advenant, understood and interpreted himself in light of ex-per-ience, has practically nothing in common with the protagonist of modern metaphysics: the subject. Unlike the subject, the advenant can be understood and described as such only in his “relation” to events, to which he must respond. Indeed, every event possesses an addressed or destined character, which belongs to its phenomenological tenor. There are never events “by themselves”—the event (this is its major difference from the fact) always occurs to someone, to you or to me, in a way that is in each case incomparable. The advenant is precisely he to whom something happens or can happen: he can be characterized solely in terms of eventials. But the advenant cannot be conceived as a formal condition of possibility for events: otherwise, the latter could not happen to him in such a way that he is not himself their measure; they could not make sense for him—that is, determine in their own light the meaning of meaning for the adventure, by prescribing to the advenant his interpretive possibilities. The evential hermeneutics privileges this dimension, not of passivity, but of passibility, by attempting to recapture the meaning itself at its origin, in a prepersonal, pre-individual, and as such immemorial history, and by placing the accent on the excess of this meaning that, because it is rooted first of all in birth as the arch-event, surpasses the advenant, escaping every constitution and every possibilization by its hermeneutical projections— an excess of meaning over every understanding that originally conditions the phenomenon of understanding. Thus, unlike the subject who, in his immunity and radical autarchy, remains always the same through his alterations and cannot be affected by any event, there is an “advenant” only if events take place: the “advenant” is precisely the name for a description of the event constantly underway of my own advening to myself from the events that occur to me and through which I come to be. This is why the event of being born belongs to him originarily and determines him before any §12. From Time to Temporality

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other: the advenant “is” nothing other than his native passibility to events and the totality of the modalities of response through which he appropriates them to himself; he advenes only inasmuch as something happens to him or as he himself becomes something through this happening [qu’ il lui advient quelque chose ou qu’ il advient quelque chose de lui]. He is only the instance— structurally in waiting— of ex-per-ience as the passage through and the endurance of these critical upheavals where the adventure is configured, and of these cores of meaning where it is signified. For him, every a priori is structurally a posteriori—that is, structured a priori by an a posteriori in no way “empirical,” but transcendental, that bestows on the a priori itself its evential meaning. The advenant is thus not describable or interpretable in himself, apart from the events that befall him and his history: events and the advenant arise together and are inextricable. But how is their “link” established phenomenologically? The event is what precedes the advenant and is prior to all his initiatives; it is what radically surpasses his powers. It is that which is too much for me, and for this reason unthinkable starting from the self-sufficiency of the authentic (Eigentliche) and from the radical autonomy of existence. More “exterior” to the advenant than every fact in the world, and more “real” than every empirical given, the event is thereby also the vehicle of a radical empiricism where no subjective instance set up in a transcendental position can harbor the condition of what, in this way, gives itself. Its givenness exceeds from the outset every “constitution” (in the Husserlian sense) as well as every ontological understanding that would furnish the condition for its manifestness. But, at the same time, the event is never “purely exterior”; it is never objective as a fact in the world. The concept of “exterior event” is actually a contradiction in adjecto. The event is never an objective fact that would, in addition, exert a causal efficacy on a subject distinct from it, but the way, in each case incomparable, in which the “encounter” between a fact and a “subject” takes place. Thus, the event causes nothing, and is not caused by anything: instead, it is of the order of meaning. It is more “exterior” than every factual objectivity exactly insofar as it is also more “interior,” conditioning for the advenant every “self-intimacy” and every singularity. If the event, consequently, is indeed “real”— and therefore we might say, the vehicle of a certain “realism”—this reality is that of a meaning inseparable from its interpretation, where interpretation and phenomenon are one. The event is not what faces a “subject” and announces itself to him from the world, like an ontic correlate, but this interface between him and things, in which, in the vacillation of the old meaning and in the bursting forth of a new one, the very appearing of the world is at stake. It occurs at

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the point of intersection between the world and the advenant, at the crossing of their trajectories, manifesting the world as the pure dimension of meaning through the collapse of every explanatory “why?” and revealing the advenant to himself, by giving him to understand who he is in light of a destiny. The event is not first an objective fact that, in a second phase, would happen to the advenant; it is not a cause situated outside of him that, subsequently, would alter his “lived experiences.” As the overturning of the possibilities and of the world, it is that which excludes in principle such distinctions, since its occurrence is possible only according to an interpretation in which that which happens and the one to whom it happens are understood in relation to one another and cannot be understood in isolation. In these conditions, the distinction between, on the one hand, time as descriptive feature of the event, insofar as the event, as a phenomenon in each case global, mobilizes the world itself and its dimensionals, and, on the other, temporality as the dimension of ex-per-ience, does not refer to two distinct “times.” Temporality is not another time— or a hidden time—that would belong to the subject, as opposed to an “objective” time. Time and temporality are instead only two manners, albeit interdependent, of apprehending a single and same phenomenon, according to two different and correlated viewpoints—that is, according to two complementary orientations of the understanding: the evential pole and the experiential pole are only two aspects of a single dramatics. Nevertheless— and this explains the plan that is followed—the event, in its transcendental neutrality, enjoys an original primacy in the temporalization of time and, therefore, of temporality, to the extent that ex-per-ience is only what proceeds and results from the upending undergoing, from the critical traversal, and from the integration/appropriation of events; thus, time, from the phenomenological point of view, precedes temporality by right; it is grounded in the still neutral priority of the event over the advenant, who must respond to it, and over the temporality of his modes of response. It remains, then, to attempt to describe this temporality. (b) Temporality and its three vistas What are the modalities of ex-per-ience according to which the advenant is oriented toward events having-taken-place, present, or future? In raising this question, it goes without saying that I am not inquiring into innertemporal processes, those in which, for example, each fact’s temporal situation changes continually with respect to the present of the one who can

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relate himself to it in the mode of remembrance. Since every event, as such, is fundamentally a phenomenon of the hermeneutical order, the question we are facing is entirely different: according to what phenomenological modalities can the meaning of an event (or rather, the event as meaning) be modified in such a way that this event, whose eventualities were articulating the world of the advenant, appears henceforth “inactual” with regard to the present eventualities, all the while continuing indeed to contribute to the intelligence that the advenant has of himself in light of his history? For the event acquires its character as concluded not from a modification of its “distance” from the present, but from the phenomenological change of its meaning with regard to new events—that is to say, from a metamorphosis of itself in itself. The change here that is in play, the meaning of which we will delve into later, is inseparable from a transformation of the advenant from itself into itself—that is, inseparable from the very movement of ex-per-ience in its original meaning. Ex-per-ience is the manner in which the advenant is oriented, by understanding them, toward past, present, and to-come events as facts, according to three fundamental dimensions of this understanding: the future, as the horizon of appearance of events in their pure, un-anticipatable eventuality, the having-taken-place as the dimension of the actuality or inactuality of events and of histories, and the present as the site of upheaval and of the (re)configuration of the world in its origin. I designate by the name of “vistas”  the dimensions of ex-per-ience that structure the phenomenon of temporality. This term here is preferable to that of “horizon,” commonly employed in phenomenology. “Horizon,” indeed, comes from ὁρίζειν, which means to trace the limits, to separate by a border. Now, the three vistas of the future, the present, and the having-taken-place do not consist in delimitations of the sphere or area of presence of a subject; they are irreducible to the modes of presence across which a subject makes present for itself “events” past or to come—because the event in the evential sense is in principle that which removes itself from the possibility of such a gathering into presence under the mea sure of a subject. While a “horizon” is always a de-limitation (in the double sense of that which encloses the gaze, poses a limit, and, by this very fact, indicates a beyond of the limit), whose closure refers to the subjective modalities of presentation or of re-presentation of what can enter into presence under such horizons, the vista is constitutively open—that is, it eludes the measure of a subject’s presence to . . . that would condition its access: it loses itself, on the one hand, in the immemorial of absolutely un-presentable events, and on the other, in the pure, un-anticipatable eventuality of death. The vistas of temporality constitute, in other terms, the phenomenal con154

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ditions of appearing of every event (having-taken-place, present, future) insofar as its manifestation is irreducible to the modalities of presence of a subject across time. But how can events that are concluded and still to come announce themselves from vistas that are irreducible to one another and incommensurable to the present of a subjective presence to . . . ? How are we to describe phenomenologically these vistas themselves? How are we to describe the temporality of ex-per-ience in light of events in their suspended occurring, on the one hand, and the advenant’s modalities of response, on the other? §13. The Having-Taken-Place and Memory (a) Memory and remembrance For as long as something happens to him, the advenant recovers himself as already having a “past” to which he can eventually relate in the mode of remembrance. The problems that are raised for a phenomenology of remembrance can be of different kinds: how can a consciousness be directed toward the past so as to aim at and attain the past in itself? How must we conceive the eclipses of remembrance, its deficiencies and failures? What status should we attribute to the forgetting that continuously gnaws at it? Does remembrance conserve the past intact, or does it instead conserve the past according to the laws of a temporal perspective that would be to remembrance what cavalier perspective is to painting, proceeding according to a symbolic foreshortening? Can we be sure that the recollection indeed bears on a real scene and not on a scenography reconstructed after the fact? And if the answer is yes, how can we be sure of this? If these problems are indeed real, and their solution difficult, it is not at all certain that they exhaust the tasks and the resources of a phenomenology of memory. Among the most decisive events of our childhood, for example learning to speak or to walk, rare are those of which we could give a psychological equivalent in the form of remembrances. This is not merely an impossibility of fact, which would depend on the very finitude of our powers of recollection, and according to which only the access to the remembrance would be lost, and not the remembrance itself. Rather, this impossibility possesses a phenomenological necessity. Indeed, how could there be a remembrance of the event as such—that is, according to the very movement of its temporalization, as having-already-taken-place-as-tocome-presenting-itself, if the advenant has never been contemporary to it, if the event has never been present for him in the way of an inner-temporal, §13. The Having-Taken-Place and Memory

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datable fact? How could there be a presentation (Gegenwärtigung), a representation (Vergegenwärtigung), a figuration, or an image of that which was never present as such for the advenant? The event is lost from the first moment. “As soon as” it occurs, it is “always already past”: this means that it manifests itself as such only after the fact; in occurring, it brings with itself its own horizon of past, of an absolute past, irreducible to the present and to the presence of the advenant across time; it looms up only as past, according to an absolute self-evidence. The advenant is never contemporary to its arising as event, even if it can be contemporary to its actualization as fact. This is why the event escapes memory in the various meanings this term can have. Of an innerworldly fact there can be a memory— and even of the fact of which the event is the event, for example, of the decision as a datable occurrence in the world. But the event, as metamorphosis of the world and of its meaning, is always already “forgotten”; this primary and inaugurating “forgetting” is inseparable from the evential occurring of the event. Such a transcendental forgetting differs radically from the empirical forgetting without which the remembrance could not conserve anything. It is not a secondary loss, an accidental failure of memory, but rather the original way of appearing of the event insofar as it eludes in principle all retention. For the metamorphosis of the world itself in which the event consists is precisely of such a nature that it can be understood only subsequently, in light of the possibilities that it opens: I cannot be present to it, retain it, or, afterward, forget it according to a secondary forgetting, to the extent that I cannot first be contemporary to it. Insofar as it escapes structurally all empirie and all factual datability, the event is not only “more future” than every projection and every expectation, but also “more ancient” than every remembrance. But isn’t it then necessary to assume the existence of a modality of exper-ience of the past that would be irreducible to every remembrance, and according to which the advenant would relate himself to events having taken place for him beyond any possible presentation or re-presentation? Is it not necessary to consider the possibility of a memory that does not retain the past—that is, that does not maintain it under the gaze of a consciousness in the form of a quasi-present—but by virtue of which the possibilities that events have opened continue nevertheless to be addressed to us, to invest our adventure, to determine our history and our present projections? A memory of possibilities as such, or rather, a memory of events as the original possibilization of possibilities, which would be a nonempirical undergoing of the events themselves in themselves, withheld absolutely from every reminiscence, from every re-living, from every image? Such a memory would be essentially— supposing that its very pos156

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sibility could be attested—a memory of the immemorial (with regard to every remembrance). But what status can we attribute to it? How can we describe it? Let us return to the example that I took up a moment ago: I live bodily in a world where it is possible for me to walk. To say that we are dealing here with a possibility of my body is insufficient. This possibility is also the possibility of things to lend themselves to being reached by me in the form of an individual-capable-of-walking; it manifests the very way in which things offer themselves to my skillful activity. It is the very world to which I am present that lends itself thus to being apprehended as a world where most things—not, certainly, the clouds or the stars—lend themselves to being reached by walking. And yet, walking is not a possibility that was always there in this world, since it was of course necessary for me to learn it one day. Learning to walk is an event that, in a sense, underlies each of my steps. But what does this mean? “To walk is to remember”: this affirmation of Valéry’s would be false if it meant that, in order to walk, it were necessary, at each step, to engage oneself in a sort of anamnesis. If I had to recall old gestures and repeat them, I would not walk; I would fall. But Valéry clarifies what he means: “He who walks remembers knowing how to walk—but this remembrance is not conscious— one does not go back to the time of learning to walk, but one walks as if he has always walked— and the same is true of words, as if he has always known them.”  To walk as if one has always walked is possible for man only through the event of a learning. But this learning withdraws from remembrance. For the transformations undergone by the one who I was since the time in which I learned to walk make every process of recollection rather problematic: can we make present the context in which this fact came to light, our emotions at that time, can we put ourselves back in this world where the resources of speech failed us? Time here has dug such an abyss between the one who remembers and the one about whom he remembers that it becomes practically—if not absolutely— impossible to identify any remembrance whatsoever as ours. I walk as if I had always walked, and it is actually only from someone else that I can learn of having learned it. But the possibility of recollection is in no way required by this architectonic or basal memory that constitutes the ground of all our practices, and according to which the having-taken-place is there, for us— or rather, is reflected by the world of our possible conduct— without ever being thematic. Here memory has no psychological status whatsoever; it cannot be described as a phenomenon of consciousness; nor does it belong to the unconscious, if by this word we mean a part of the psyche itself present that would be like a permanent reserve of representations §13. The Having-Taken-Place and Memory

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and remembrances. Memory is not the way in which the advenant relates himself to the past in order to render it present, but rather the way in which the having-taken-place is there for him, even in a non-thematic way; it “shines” through the possibilities that articulate his world, as the ground for all his conducts—including remembrance. The having-taken-place, as evential vista of temporality, is distinguished here from the past, as the horizon of the recollection of inner-temporal facts. Actually, the advenant could never relate himself to the having-taken-place in the mode of remembrance if it were not announcing itself to him under the form of a memory. Memory is architectonic: it concerns originally the very ground of all our behaviors: the world. Understood as an evential, memory is not “in us,” in the form of remembrances, but outside of us in the world, since it is the very manner in which the world, as the articulated totality of our possibilities, originally configured by inaugurating events, happens for us, envelops us, and hangs over us. The eventualities in question are not the vestiges of a past buried or disappeared, but the very manner in which the having-taken-place is present for the advenant, like a dimension of the world itself. Of course, it could be objected to the example of walking that the structural relationship between an empirical forgetting and a memory belongs to the phenomenon of habit. Not only does habit require no thematic recollection of previous gestures, but the presence of such a recollection would be rather an obstacle to habit’s successful operation: it is best to have “forgotten” the gestures to be accomplished in order to accomplish them with the infallible security of custom; this concealment of remembrance is necessary to the very constitution of habitus. Yet, as right as this objection seems at first sight, it remains superficial. Indeed, it is undeniable that the act of walking mobilizes a set of dispositions acquired from an exercise, a complex of habitus integrated by the advenant. But these habitus, if we consider them as present dispositions, “assimilated” by the body and available for it, do not by themselves allow us to understand the actual capacity for walking. It is not enough to have the habitus at my disposal; I have to be able to make use of them, mobilize them at the required moment for a given action, in the midst of a concrete situation; it is not enough that I know how to walk—I have to know that I know it. Such a “knowing” has nothing theoretical about it: it is a pure power. In order to know that I know how to walk—that is, in order really to walk—it is necessary that I possess the memory of a possibility that is originally rooted in the event of an apprenticeship. I could never make use of the habitus that are at my disposal if I didn’t have a memory of the possibilities of which these habitus themselves determine the actualization. In sum, habit, far from making 158

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understandable the original relation of the advenant to the having-takenplace, is in its turn rooted, after the example of remembrance, in the evential of memory. As an evential, memory is first of all and originally memory of the possible. It is the very manner in which an event—learning to walk—has reconfigured the world of the advenant by bestowing on it possibilities that it did not at first possess, and thus, even while constitutively lost in a transcendental forgetting, impossible to collect or to actualize in a remembrance, latent with a latency irreducible to any self-presence of the advenant, the event nevertheless shows through in the possibilities that dawn for the advenant in the world, thus giving to his powers their hold on the world. In this respect, the having-taken-place is not behind me, in remembrance, but in front of me, in the resources that I mobilize in order to respond to the present. Because memory is fundamentally memory of the possible, the event of the first time that I walked stands there, in front of me, in each step with which I not only repeat the preceding gestures, but take up anew the attempt to walk. For a disposition is never a simple acquisition: walking is a continued re-establishment of equilibrium; it is, according to the accurate expression of Erwin Straus, “a continuously arrested falling.” A disposition is based on flexibility of adaptation that makes it so that its “problem”—that of the mutual articulation of the having-taken-place and the present—“is resolved naturally with each step” and does not have to be posed otherwise than in the very action in which the foot poses itself. Walking is both necessarily walking as if one had always walked, actualizing a body’s knowledge that seems practically infused by dint of having served, and also walking as if one had never walked before—that is, in walking, perpetually initiating oneself to the walk, recovering an initial possibility by clearing a path for oneself toward it, in a manner that is not set out in advance, but that each stride reinvents in its own way. Even in the case of conducts that have become habitual, memory is irreducible to the possession of corporal dispositions in the form of “motor schemas”; memory is first of all an exercise of the possible and not the actualization of acquired motor schemas. Thus, we never remember past facts, but always events; we retain them because they, in the first place, retain for us a future in light of which our destiny and our possibilities are decided. Even if we had no remembrance at all of facts, even if we had forgotten everything— circumstances and places, faces and names—past events would be “there” for us, not in the form of remembrances, but in themselves, in the same way as that purely “virtual” memory to which Bergson makes allusion, and that he distinguishes from image-memory [souvenir-image]. But, unlike this Bergsonian §13. The Having-Taken-Place and Memory

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memory that retains, despite everything, a psychological status, memory in the evential sense is a modality of ex-per-ience of the having-taken-place itself, according to which events, even forgotten as facts, still condition for us a future. It is not necessary, in this regard, that the past be conserved intact in the form of remembrances for us to be able to have memory of them. Most of the time, on the contrary, memory does not need the auxiliary help of remembrance. We know that we have loved, suffered, hoped. “If someone remembers his hope,” writes Wittgenstein, “on the whole he is not therefore remembering his behaviour, nor even necessarily his thoughts. He says—he knows—that at that time he hoped.” Such a central and architectonic knowledge is not necessarily tied to specific remembrances: “Just as one often imagines that the memory (Erinnerung) of an event (Ereignis) must be an internal picture— and such a picture does sometimes really exist.” Remembrance is only an epiphenomenon of memory. Memory is the non-empirical undergoing of all that which, in the “past,” has struck, reached, and sometimes wounded us, that is to say, of these possibilities in play in events that drew the very contours of our history and determined the manner in which we ourselves, for ourselves, undergo and understand our singularity. These possibilities are not first “in us,” in a psychological form, but they are addressed to us and befall us from the world as the correlate of all our attitudes: they are present in all that we are present to, and in the significant context conditioning the very presence of all that we can be present to: the world. Only the possible is truly unforgettable. Th is is why memory does not have to do with facts, but germinates at the heart of events insofar as they, though past, bear the seeds of an irreducible future. A germinal memory of the possible as such, which can be conjugated only in the future perfect tense: what the advenant remembers is that which, in the “past,” still has a future for him: the event itself. “Memory,” affirms Péguy, “digs and dives and probes into the event”: it is “central and axial” to the event, and “being in the event, consists essentially and above all in not going out from it, in remaining there and in going up into it from within.” Memory conserves nothing; it is related to the possible according to the possible’s gestation and grasps it in its becoming. From a journey undertaken, or from a book written, we can have forgotten everything, or almost everything, except for the possible that was consubstantial to them—that which made them for us a promise for the future: what I recall of a book I have written, in the evential sense of memory, is precisely that of it that remained most in the state of an outline or a draft, that which remained a promise and, therefore, a task. But what does it mean here to say that we remember evential possibilities? By what strange “mechanism” is memory in the position of selecting, 160

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among past facts, those that will hold a future for us? The answer can be only this: there isn’t any “selection,” insofar as the event is not first a fact that, in a second phase, would be endowed with an additional index. Memory is originally an undergoing of events: it is they, and they alone, that open for us the dimension of the memorable as such. Consequently, memory is not a subjective faculty of conservation and selection of remembrances. Memory is not at all a subjective operation: the event is this “interface” between us and the world, neither objective nor subjective, thanks to which both a memory and the one who “possesses” it take place. Memory is not a faculty of the advenant; it is the advenant who “is” the takingplace of a memory. Memory indicates the very manner in which events, even those concluded as facts, happen for us from the having-taken-place by lavishing on us a future: it is an evential. It is not we who carry out an act of selection in the past in light of a present and a future, in light of decisions and projections; rather, it is the events having-taken-place that open, according to their own dramatics, the dimension of the memorable, by giving us a destiny. Only memory understood in this sense opens for the advenant the present of a decision and the future of possible projections— granted that these projections do not amount to a mere repetition of old possibilities, but inaugurate new possibilities on the basis of a situation. This is why memory is not only distinct from remembrance, but is situated on an entirely different level from it: for remembrance, whether it has to do with “habit-memory” or “image-memory,” is a modality of conservation of the past in the present in the form of something present—that is, in accordance with the modalities of presence to time of a subject characterized by its presence to itself and to the world. Memory, by contrast, does not indicate the conservation and interiorization (Er-innerung) of the past in the present, according to the intentionality of a consciousness that, because it fundamentally signifies presence to . . . all things and to the world of a subject, maintains the past present by relating itself to it. Indeed, whether the concern is “primary memory” or “secondary memory,” as Husserl calls them—that is, a presentation (Gegenwärtigung) of the past or a re-presentation (Vergegenwärtigung)—it is no less the case that the past can here claim being—that is, presence, only insofar as a subject makes an ob-ject of it and then re-presents it: the ultimate measure of the presence of the past can only be the consciousness’s presence to itself and to the world. Now, unlike remembrance, memory is the undergoing of the havingtaken-place itself as vista of temporality incommensurable with the present and with the presence of a consciousness, according to which events can announce themselves to us as actual or inactual, from a radical “past,” and thus make sense, in the present, for our own adventure. These events are §13. The Having-Taken-Place and Memory

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present to us in the mode of a pre-subjective sense, transcending all remembrance, but we are not present to them: this statement means that it is not our consciousness that deploys an original presence across all time as the condition for the appearing of all that can announce itself for us as a “phenomenon” and be, or not, endowed with meaning; it is rather the having-taken-place as evential dimension of the actuality or inactuality of every event that is concluded as fact, or as the original dimension of meaning, which is present to us in such a way that we are neither the origin of this presence, nor its measure. Such a “past” is not reduced to the potentialities or fringes of intentional life, to the multiplicity of empirical remembrances that might be eventually re-actualized by a consciousness, or left by it in the shadows: this having-taken-place exceeds consciousness from the outset. The event is present— as rigorously absent in the sense of an absence of the corresponding fact—in all that we are present to, and in the very manner in which we are present to it, to the extent that memory originally determines the ultimate horizon of meaning that conditions the very presence of all that we can be present to: the world as evential. We ourselves as subjects are not the measure of such a horizon of meaning. This is why the opposite of memory is not forgetting, but repetition. This is what appears in traumatism. In the case of these sufferings, sometimes forgotten but always unbearable, which have reached the adventure in its heart of exposition and weakness, and which we are not able to overcome, the impossibility of every memory is precisely manifested by an incessant repetition of the inappropriable trauma. Thus, in front of the excess of an event that we cannot make our own, it is no longer possible to face freely what has taken place as something concluded, and so we suffer its violence constantly in the present; we are no longer capable of ex-per-ience, and therefore also of this distancing through memory that is inseparable from it. There are several ways in which the past thus haunts the present: either the traumatism is recalled constantly in the form of fi xed recollections or it can be entirely forgotten, but in such a way that this forgetting, in its own manner, remains the vehicle of a certain repetition. In both cases, what manifests itself is the impossibility of a genuine memory that, because it is the undergoing of what, in the having-taken-place, still opens a future for us, does not consist in conserving facts but, on the contrary, in freeing us from them: “This is the use of memory: / For liberation. . . . / . . . liberation / From the future as well as the past.” For memory, to the extent that it bears on events and on their world, always also inaugurates a future. Traumatism, by contrast, precludes all memory, since the trauma has closed off in advance every genuine future wherein new events could arise. 162

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Thus, a counter-example of traumatism is bereavement. If bereavement is, indeed, an exercise of memory, it is so to the extent that it bears not on empirical recollections, on the other as he is “interiorized” in me by the alchemy of remembrance, but on the very world that we held in common: on the totality of shared possibilities that had fallen to us from a singular encounter, and that the death of the other has closed up, withdrawn, torn away—in short, de-possibilized. Bereavement is a memory process, not in the sense in which it would be a “work” on recollection, a purely “psychic” work of introjection or of idealization— as if a psychic working-through could ever fill the lack of the other or surmount the event of his loss!—but, on the contrary, in the sense in which memory requires a liberation from remembrance, a renewed relation to the possible and to the world. Indeed, with the death of someone close, the advenant’s possibilities are at that point transfigured, so that the whole world trembles— and he with it: bereavement is precisely this dying to . . . the other, as a mode of our common adventure, as a way of being still in relation to . . . him, of being “with” him, in the mode of an absolute separation— a dying to . . . the other that, because it involves our entire history, is inseparably a dying to . . . ourselves. But, in this lacuna of the world into which the death of the other plunges us, in swallowing up our shared possibilities, our compossibilities, these shared possibilities nevertheless do not disappear: they continue to live on in, or rather, to haunt the present of our history, feeding our suffering. The suffering of bereavement is this agonic and endless suffering of a death to another and to ourselves— a suffering in which the other is endlessly “living” for us, in us, for as long as the bereavement continues. And at the same time, bereavement consists precisely in breaking the spell, in exiting the magic circle of a past that invests the entire present, preventing the future from happening. If bereavement is not a traumatism, this is because it breaks the tyranny of recollection, because it relates to the old world of a friendship or a love only in light of the renewed present of an ex-per-ience. Bereavement is this suffering of a death of ourselves within ourselves, through the disappropriation of our shared possibilities, which is truly completed only when these shared possibilities themselves, like an invisible tide, withdraw from our world. Th is is why bereavement is indeed, through and through, a memory process. The concluded event (the encounter with another) continues to make sense for the advenant, despite the metamorphosis of the world that separates him from it, without its necessarily being “conserved” by him in the present in the form of recollections. Memory is not the conservation of remembrances, but the liberation with respect to a concluded past, dead for us, its survivor; it is the way in which we can respond to that which has taken place §13. The Having-Taken-Place and Memory

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across the upheavals and crises of our history, or, to put it otherwise, the manner in which events continue to be addressed to us, to make sense beyond the changes of our history and in conformity with the modified lighting of the present. The memory by which the advenant relates in person, in light of his evential present, to events having-taken-place for him thus puts into play his selfhood as capacity for response. It is a modality of responsibility. Responsibility consists, for the advenant, in the capacity to respond of himself in front of what cannot be taken over, and, in that way, to free himself from it. Indeed, as we shall see, only memory understood in this way opens the possibility of an availability to the future and of a possible transformation of the advenant in the present. Responsibility, availability, and transformation articulate the evential phenomenon of selfhood and form the inescapable conditions of possibility for any freedom. But how should we describe the having-taken-place phenomenologically so as to account for the evential character of memory? In order to get to that point, it is worth returning to the temporalizing unfolding of the event in order to try to regain, through it, the temporalization of temporality as it manifests itself through the different modalities of ex-per-ience. (b) The evential conditions of memory: the diff erence between the having-taken-place and the past The event is prospective, retrospective, and inaugural. These phenomenological characteristics belong a priori to its mode of manifestation; they are inseparable from the event in its eventness, insofar as it mobilizes the various dimensionals of time: to the prospective character there corresponds a future of the event that it itself opens by occurring; to the retrospective character there corresponds a past that it illuminates, and the meaning of which it modifies; to the inaugural character there corresponds the apertural present of its instantaneous occurring. Now, modalities of ex-perience correspond to each of these characteristics of time. Thus, the prospective character of every event, which belongs a priori to its evential tenor, does not “disappear” purely and simply when the event, as fact, has ceased happening: even when past and concluded as an innerworldly fact, an event nonetheless conserves a future for the one to whom it happens— or to whom it has happened. This future, as a dimensional of the time of the event, signifies the ‘on the way’ character of the possibilities that it makespossible. Even concluded as fact, an event can continue to determine certain possibilities that confer upon my present situation its meaning and face. We call “having-taken-place” the vista of the temporality according 164

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to which the advenant can relate himself to the concluded events of his own adventure, insofar as they conserve a future for him—that is, insofar as they condition his understanding of the present world. The original exper-ience of the having-taken-place, which is rooted in the originally prospective character of the event—that is to say, in its character as configurator of possibilities—is memory. But how can such a memory be described and interpreted phenomenologically? How can the advenant relate himself comprehensively and affectively to the having-taken-place in such a way that the events that have befallen him, and even passed as facts, nevertheless conserve for him, as concluded, an irreducible future? In order to attempt to exhibit the evential conditions of the phenomenon of memory, we should dismiss in principle every inner-temporal understanding of the phenomenon in question. Indeed, an event does not first occur in a datable present in order, next, to become past; it is not innertemporal. If such were the case, it would be possible to raise, in its regard, the following problem: at what moment does the event, “first” present and “then” retained in the form of recollection, become an event? Is it right away? But it goes without saying that it cannot become so from the outset, because it becomes an event only in light of its ulterior destiny, of the history to which it gives rise, of the possibilities that it conditions, and so on. Then, does it become so “later”? But how to characterize the delay in question? To answer this question, it would be necessary to assume the existence of a subject who, at a given moment, would bestow upon the event its status as event and constitute it as such: the event would be a prominent fact, stamped as exceptional, freely constituted by a subject according to its own initiative. But the absurdity of such a hypothesis is immediately evident. The event is precisely that which withdraws in advance and in principle from any constitution, that which has always anticipated every initiative of a subject and is older, for him, than any possible “constitution.” The eventness of the event cannot lie in its eventual constitution by a subject; otherwise, the only genuine event (the one in which the fact would become an event) would be this constitution itself. Consequently, it is the alternative from which we begin that reveals itself as untenable. The event cannot acquire its status as event, whether “right away” or “later,” precisely to the extent that it is not subjected to such an alternative, that its phenomenality is unthinkable in inner-temporal terms: it “is” an event insofar as it becomes so; this means that being an event and becoming an event are the same thing, that an event “is” precisely nothing other than its own becoming-event—that is to say, the negation of all “being.” The event “is” only this interior tension of its own becoming, this stretching and this diffraction of its temporalization, this self-constitution of itself in §13. The Having-Taken-Place and Memory

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itself, this inner revolution of its duration, the infi nity of “real planes that are the very planes where the event was successively, or rather continually, accomplished,” and that Péguy, already, calls “memory.” Or, more simply, the event is not first present, and then temporalized; it is only the movement of its own taking time, as to-come-as-already-past-presentingitself. The question of the moment in which an event becomes an event is phenomenologically meaningless; it would have “pertinence” only if the event were downgraded to the rank of an inner-temporal fact and thus stripped from the outset of its evential dimension. This is why the having-taken-place, as vista of the temporality of ex-perience, is irreducible to the past, as mode of inner-temporality, insofar as this can be characterized according to the phenomenon of succession. The having-taken-place does not signify the temporal mode of that which is no longer present, in the sense of effective in an inner-temporal, datable present, but refers to the character of actuality or inactuality of events insofar as, from the instant in waiting of their own occurring, they do not cease temporalizing time by deferring their own presentation; in other words, it signifies the opening or the closure of the possibilities in waiting that the event makes-possible. It is precisely because an event is not first present, and then past— and constituted only at this moment as an event— but is originally its own having-taken-place-as-to-come-presenting-itself, not temporal, but temporalizing, that it can, even completed as a fact, still hold for the advenant a future—that is to say, appear, with regard to the present possibilities that articulate the world, as actual or inactual. By “actual” and “inactual,” we understand evential determinations: actuality is the characteristic, for a concluded event, of conditioning the interpretive, but also the affective, possibilities in light of which the advenant can understand his present and understand himself. Inversely, the in-actuality of an event signifies the closure of the possibilities that it brought with itself, in its instantaneous occurring—the closing of its future. But this “closing” still remains a manner in which the completed event unfolds a future in the mode of de-possibilized possibilities, since a future as dimensional of time belongs structurally to the very mode of its appearing. The problem, more precisely, is the following: on the one hand, we have to hold in principle that every event is necessarily in waiting for its own meaning; being nothing other than this very meaning—that is, the possibilization of the possible and of the world starting from which every grasp and every understanding happen—the event does not cease, as long as the adventure goes on, to defer its own presentation. It is always constitutively in-actual—that is to say, open to an understanding that, because

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it is never contemporary with its origin, can appropriate a meaning only according to the constitutive delay and suspension of a task forever open. But, on the other hand, some events, precisely because they appear only according to this inexhaustible suspension (and as long as the adventure itself is not “exhausted”), can appear with regard to this suspension and this differance as inactual; this means that, having exhausted their specific possibilities, they “present themselves” in the present only as bereft of all future—which is still a way of inhabiting the present—that is to say, of appearing out of the vista of the having-taken-place, in the light of depossibilized possibilities of a de-futurized future. It is here that the occurring of new events confers upon past events their sense of inactuality, by shutting their future in such a way that they no longer offer to the present any lineaments of intelligibility. They are nothing more than inactual events, which appear, in light of new possibilities, as belonging to an entirely other era—to a henceforth concluded era—in the sense that they no longer stand out [ne font plus date] except as “dated” events, no longer shedding light except on themselves and their own past. Thus it is necessary to affirm at once both that it is always possible to re-open the archives of the past, that every event, in this respect, by right remains perpetually re-interpretable, and, consequently, in waiting for its own meaning—and that there are events that, in light of the present, appear henceforth closed, filed away, in the sense in which the possibilities that they opened appear as concluded. Otherwise, no other event could ever happen, no other possibilization of the possible, since the temporal vista of such an appearing—the present—would be shut in advance: collapsed under the weight of an unsurpassable past, succumbing to the impossible appropriation of an inassimilable past, the present would no longer be the dimension of the beginning, of the virginal, vibrant, and beautiful today, but would instead be obturated in advance and foreclosed, as it happens in those cases in which memory can no longer fulfill its function because the dimension of the memorable as such, the having-takenplace, appears shut, as does, at the same time, the present of a possible transformation—in the case of traumatism. Consequently, the having-taken-place as evential vista of temporality appears actual or inactual not as a past interiorized in the present, but solely as having-taken-place. The events that announce themselves out of this dimension of the advenant’s adventure have not become past by virtue of the inner-temporal phenomenon of passage. The event does not pass away, like an inner-temporal fact; but it is “concluded”[révolu]—in the sense of inactual— by a revolution [révolution] of the possible itself in

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itself—that is to say, by a metamorphosis of the event’s meaning. Its inactuality in no way signifies a pure and simple disappearance: rather, it characterizes the very manner in which the event is present to us, from the having-taken-place, as constitutively absent—that is, as irreducible to every inner-temporal presence of a fact, as well as to the modalities of presence of a subject across time that articulate the inner-temporal manifestation of every fact as such. To say it another way, it is because the event is originally temporalizing and not temporal that it can appear, even though past as a fact, either actual or inactual, and thus give rise to a memory, which does not signify, in its evential sense, the conservation of the past in the present, but the original ex-per-ience of the having-taken-place itself in itself, as the vista of the actuality or inactuality of every event. Memory is thus the relation of the advenant to the having-taken-place as dimension of the belonging of events to a destiny according to which events, even when “past” as facts, nevertheless conserve as concluded a “future” and a “present” that are unthinkable in terms of the phenomenon of succession. Not only is it strictly impossible to gain access to the phenomenon of the having-taken-place starting from the present of a consciousness, but, inversely, it is necessary to maintain that it is in no way required, for the phenomenon of memory to be possible, that the past be presented or represented in the present. Memory is not a modality of recollection—that is to say, of a present “extended” to the past. Temporality is not the declension or modification of the present, but the articulation of heterogeneous vistas that are incommensurable. Events having-takenplace, whether or not they are forgotten as facts, continue nonetheless to make sense for the advenant, whether he relates himself to this sense in order to understand it, or this meaning remains buried, hidden from him and structuring his adventure “without his knowledge.” Meaning indeed does not have to be thematic: it issues from the configuration of hermeneutic possibilities, such that they condition the understanding in a given situation. Memory is always the memory of meaning, but of a meaning that the advenant has not posed nor made-possible in an original projection. This is why the having-taken-place is not only irreducible to the past (Vergangenheit) of a consciousness, but to the having-been (Gewesenheit) of a Dasein inasmuch as having-been conditions the phenomenon of facticity. What characterizes facticity is that it is not only able to be taken over in a projection by Dasein, but it is understandable fully and without remainder in the light of this projection. The having-been manifests itself in the “transparency” of resoluteness, thanks to which Dasein has the

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possibility of “basically dispersing all fugitive Self-concealments” from its own existence, and thus of holding together, in a moment of vision, birth, death, and their “between”— that is, its whole finite temporality. But memory in the evential sense excludes the possibility to take over the having-taken-place as such, as well as every integral and faultless understanding of it. Not only does memory not bear exclusively, or even principally, upon what the advenant is capable of taking over, but it manifests the excess over every hermeneutical projection of a meaning that is indecipherable to start with, because fundamentally inexhaustible for the advenant. The having-taken-place is not brought to light by an original projection that would furnish the condition for its intelligibility. It is not made possible by “anticipatory making-possible”; rather, it conditions the circle of possibilities starting from which every projection can rise toward the possible, and it downgrades every projection to the rank of uncondition. It constitutes the dimension starting from which concluded events make sense for us and address to us possibilities in waiting that accompany every projection and that are always in excess in their respect. Th is is why the having-taken-place, as it is undergone through memory, originally frees the vista of the future as vista of possible projections, and not the other way around: it precedes the future by right, to the extent that the adventure only advenes to the impossible of itself from the original making-possible of events, with respect to which the advenant is always delayed. Thus, every event opens understanding itself, in its intrinsically experiential dimension, to the infinity of an originally late appropriation of hermeneutic possibilities that happen only with it. As a result, the task of understanding my having-taken-place—that is to say, the meaning that actual or inactual events could have for me, the very manner in which they have modified not only my sensibility, my feelings shared with others, and the way in which I experience myself—that is to say, the domain of sentiments in general, but also my projects, my decisions and the set of possibilities starting from which I understand myself in my singularity— such a task is necessarily inexhaustible. It is only indirectly, in the light of present events, that the meaning possessed by events that are completed as facts can appear to the advenant. For example, my amorous failures can play the role of “symptoms” of sufferings undergone in the course of my childhood; they reveal to me, in my present situation, impossibilities whose meaning is opaque to me, and that seem to send me back to the beginnings of my history. By virtue of its evential character, meaning is never given to the advenant in the self-transparency of an integral understanding, but

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rather is characterized first and foremost by its fundamental opacity. Old and sometimes immemorial sufferings confer on the advenant’s affectivity its present features: interpersonal meanings as a whole structure, through a family and a given history, the advenant’s relationships with a community from which this history is inseparable. This “phenomenological unconscious” is not understandable, strictly speaking, through the category of the unconscious, since the unconscious shares with the metaphysics of time the presupposition that only a past that would remain present—while being inaccessible—under the form of a reservoir of drives, of representations, and of recollections, could retain, by this very fact, for the subject, a causal efficacy, be active, since a cause must be present in order to produce an effect. But the “efficacy” of events on the human adventure is not of the order of a factual causality. Rather, it is of the order of meaning: it concerns, primordially, the making-possible of possibilities, including hermeneutical possibilities, that articulate the meaning of the world in its origin for the advenant, and his understanding of himself in light of this world. Only a memory in the evential sense is needed here in order to allow us to grasp the manner in which events that are constitutively absent— as facts—for the advenant can nevertheless make sense for him, without himself being the origin of this sense or its measure. It is absurd, in this respect, to suppose that, in order to have a sense, the events having-taken-place must be present somewhere—possibly under a psychological form. The having-taken-place does not happen for the advenant as present, but solely as having-taken-place: its actuality or its inactuality are not thinkable themselves after the model of the mode of presence, in the present, of a given inner-temporal fact. Put another way, the having-taken-place—unlike the “past” of metaphysics—in no way has to be present somewhere in order “to be” (or to be efficacious); it temporalizes itself constantly as having-taken-place, it is actual or inactual with regard to the present: these characterizations describe its eventness as suspended occurring and original temporalization. A consequence results from all this: the opacity of the meaning of the having-taken-place as it gives itself to a memory leads to underscore the primacy of the affective dimension in the interpretation of this memory. Nothing attests more to the constitutive character, for the advenant, of his own history than the peculiarity according to which his affectivity itself has a history. The feelings that continuously color its passibility unveil the fact that the advenant “is” only the event perpetually in waiting of his own adventure, starting from the events that happen to him and through which he comes to be: even his way of feeling and of experiencing himself with

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the world derives from possibilities that his history configures, and of which he cannot himself be the initiator. The excess of the having-takenplace over the existential structure of the thrown-projection manifests itself here through the opacity to the advenant of the constants of his affectivity—for example, the primacy of such and such feeling over some other, of sadness over joy or of boredom over enthusiasm. It is not only remembrance that is affective; more originally, it is feeling that is “memorial”—that is, that reveals the changing and often forgotten senseconfigurations that have given consistency and form to his history. Memory is thus neither the integral conservation of the past nor its faultless comprehension; it consists instead in the aptitude not to repeat it. An objection could be raised here: doesn’t such a liberation from the having-taken-place already put into play the two other vistas of time and the modes of ex-per-ience proper to them? In analyzing memory as the evential that conditions the “relation” of the advenant to the having-takenplace, have we not already involved considerations bearing on the present and the future? We shall soon realize that this particularity of the analysis is not due to a fault in construction or method; rather, it is grounded in the “things themselves”—that is to say, in the phenomenological articulation between temporality and time (see below, §19). §14. The Future and Availability The event is the unheard-of, the unforeseeable. It eludes all expectation, if expectation always goes hand-in-hand with a foreseeing that only reaches the fact in leading it back to preexisting possibilities within the horizon of the world, according to an explanatory etiology. This is why it declares itself in the mode of the surprise. The event is surprising, not always in the very moment, but sometimes only later and retrospectively; there is a matinal surprise and a vesperal one, which catches fire only when the flash of the event has finished growing dim. But what does surprise signify phenomenologically? How to conceive of its relationship to expectation? And above all, in what way can surprise enlighten us about the original evential meaning of the future? (a) Expectation and surprise If the event escapes, structurally, every expectation, it is worth showing phenomenologically the mode according to which it does so. Only such an analysis is able to make us understand the manner in which the advenant

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is oriented beyond every expectation toward the phenomenon of the future. The future is the vista according to which the happening of events insofar as they can give rise to a surprise is possible. But does every surprise have to do with the event in the evential sense? Can’t a fact surprise us by not meeting our expectations and failing to match our forecasts? Wouldn’t it be better to distinguish between two meanings of surprise, phenomenologically contrasted? There is a first meaning of surprise, wherein it is reduced to an unmet expectation: the surprising or the astonishing is that which announces itself to us from the world as evental context, from the network of causal explanations that are always possible de jure and inexhaustible de facto, and constitute the constant correlates of all our expectancies. The surprising manifests itself under the sign of the unexpected: it swoops down on us without warning; it is, according to Descartes’s rigorous designation, a “sudden and unexpected arrival” that takes us unawares, off our guard, thwarting our foresight and dismantling the frame of our expectations. It is, in a strong sense, that which contradicts expectation—that is to say, that which prevents all fulfillment by coincidence for the intentional or protentional acts that predelineate and sketch the horizon of the future. Thus, the feeling of surprise always arises from an overt contradiction: the astonishing (θαῦμα) only shows itself through aporiae (ἀπορήματα). An a-poria, a pro-blem—literally that which lies across the road, that which stands in the way and prevents access—is that which throws off all our causal explanations: for example, says Aristotle, if some inanimate puppets move by themselves before our eyes, without our understanding the cause of their motion, or if a finite length, the diagonal of a square, requires, in order to be measured, an infinite process. The real, here, exceeds any forecast: the contradiction between the fact and the expectation elicits a particular shock provoking a pause in the search, a suspension in the mind, and thus leaves the body itself immobile like a statue. Astonishment is the very shock, the pathos of the contradiction, in the sense of the inadequation between the intention aimed at an object and its fulfillment. Indeed, the θαῦμα does not go without θραῦμα: “Astonishment (Verwunderung),” emphasizes Kant, “is a mental shock (Anstoss) at the incompatibility of a representation and the rule that is given through it with the principles already grounded in the mind.” Surprise is a contradicted expectation no longer finding, in the real, a hold on which to anchor itself—that is to say, a correlate to grasp in the unity of coincidence between the intending act and the given, in the homology of their correspondence. It is the “affect in the representation of novelty that exceeds expectation.” If the surprising exceeds here, from the outset, every purchase and every comprehensive grasp, it is because the 172

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understanding is led back, by the bias of expectation, to a modality of explanation. In the pathos of surprise, in surprise as feeling, which, like every feeling, is a feeling-oneself-with the world, a feeling-oneself in (or out) of tune with the fundamental tone of the world—what Heidegger calls a Stimmung—, it is thus the things themselves that turn a questioning face toward us. But does every surprise reduce to a contradicted expectation? Is the newness of what astonishes merely that which closes up the possibilities of the imagination? Is it not, more fundamentally, that which surpasses the imagination’s resources? Is the newness of the surprising that which dashes our expectancies, or is it rather that which in principle eludes them? Is there not a surprise that is not the mere shock in response to a contradicted forecast, when an unexpected fact takes place, but, instead, the sudden sense of being struck in front of and by that which necessarily exceeds all expectation—that is to say, that which only happens constitutively against all expectation—namely, the event itself? There really is an astonishment that does not arise from an inadequacy between expectation and the real: it is this θαυμάζειν that bears, according to Aristotle, upon the real itself, “the astonishment that things are as they are.” Here, we find no contradiction, no aporia, no gap in fulfillment, but instead the mere inanity of every explanation in front of the irreducible and incomprehensible “there is” [“ il y a”]. This is why philosophy will distinguish, beginning with Descartes, between astonishment and wonder [l’admiration]: the former arises with the failure of explanation and is extinguished with the exhibition of causes; the latter alone remains beyond astonishment. Wonder is “an astonishment that does not cease when the novelty is lost.” For surprise no longer arises here from a failure in expectancy or a leap in explanation. The surprising is the world itself in the “there is” of the event, insofar as it does not contradict expectation, but exceeds it primordially. This surprise is an evential phenomenon: it is not in league with expectation, but with the sphere of anticipation and of projection, to the extent that the latter manifest a possible grasp [prise] on the possible, the bearing of a power according to which the real lends itself to understanding. An event elicits surprise [surprise], because, in a first moment, in its often sudden occurring, it surpasses and suspends every grasp [prise]—that is to say, every power by which the advenant would dominate the possible and take hold of it in an act of understanding. Surprise is the very manner in which the event breaks into the adventure by rendering null and void the advenant’s projections and by depriving him of his settledness in the world. This is why it implies a tearing away of the advenant from himself and a letting-go [dé-prise] with regard to the former possibilities that used to confer on his projections their §14. The Future and Availability

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meaning within a given situation. Surprise is the tearing away from himself by which the advenant undergoes the trial of a hiatus in the world— through the event: the former world is no longer able to shed light on the meaning of what happens; it is still too early to interpret the event just occurred, too early for the comprehensive appropriation of an ex-per-ience: the advenant is in the in-between of an invalidated meaning and a meaning to be born, in the wide-open of a between-world. Surprise is precisely this suspension, the collapse of every projection’s grasp on the possible through which the advenant could reign over the real by understanding it. It is always the meaningful that surprises, but it surprises us only by exceeding our grip. Surprise is the suspension of every com-prehension— that is to say, of every complete prehension on the world and on the possible that the world articulates: it places us in front of the pure incomprehensible, of which it is the original ordeal. This is why Descartes can say of the passion of surprise, in the strong sense of wonder [admiration], that it is characterized fundamentally by the incapacity to understand: to wonder [admirer] is “to recognize how much [a thing is] beyond all understanding.” If wonder, thus considered, is “the first of all the passions,” this is because it is the origin of every feeling, that by which every feeling is a feeling, that by which the world itself takes a hold on us and affects us. Surprise is at play in every feeling insofar as that which affects us, that with which we feel in or out of tune, that which thus gives the tone, is always the world itself. For the advenant surprise lies at the very roots of his passibility: this is the reason, as Descartes profoundly emphasizes, it has no opposite, since it is that which allows every affect to touch us and to move us, in such a way that, without it, there would be no longer any affect or emotion. Far from being a particu lar variety of feeling, surprise is the root of every feeling. This is why, when all things sink into the specific atony of despair, when nothing more happens for the advenant and the world itself is no longer gathered for him, every possibility of surprise disappears at the same moment: through this painful apathy, all things become insignificant, deprived of all pathos; despair is, at the same time as the closing off to every surprise, the feeling of the loss of all feeling. Thus, in the shock of surprise, which can go as far as the extreme forms of terror, the advenant undergoes the original trial of his incomprehension in and through the trembling of the world. Indeed, not only is the event astonishing, breaking every expectation by occurring, but it happens constitutively only against all expectation; it is unforeseeable in principle: it suspends every understanding in the lacuna of meaning and the gaping open of the world. The event no longer falls under astonishment as an 174

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evental phenomenon, but solely under surprise as an evential phenomenon. But to what extent is this phenomenon capable of shedding light for us on the original relation of the advenant to the future? Surprise, like every feeling, possesses its own power of revelation; it allows us to exhibit the evential that sub-tends it and from which it is inseparable. For, as Valéry emphasizes, “it is surprise itself that discloses the existence of that which it breaks and puts in jeopardy.” But what does the surprise reveal in this way? Not only expectation, protention, expectancy: for surprise is not mere astonishment in front of that which contradicts a foresight and thwarts a possible innerworldly explanation. The event is, instead, that which by principle eludes every intentionality of expectation, that of which an expectation would amount, by itself, to an absurdity, as shown by James’s wonderful story The Beast in the Jungle. Because he has lived in the obsessed, hypnotic expectation of an unknown event that he hoped would “alter . . . everything, striking at the root of all [his] world,” the Jamesian hero, John Marcher, will fail to recognize the only true event of his destiny, the love of a woman. Nothing will happen other than this empty and vain wait, nothing will take place except its no-place, which in the end will deliver the hero, shaken and annihilated, to his original nothingness: “The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance—he had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened. . . . [T]he wait was itself his portion.” James’s parable thus describes accurately the original mode of givenness of every event. The event is originally and constitutively the extra-ordinary, that which precedes and anticipates every expectancy, if expectancy is always an expectation of a something specific; it is the pure undetermined with relation to the expectations that are always already intertwined within the horizon of the world; it is that which, when it happens, does not lead expectation astray, but annuls it by breaking in. But, precisely for this reason, surprise manifests—in the very moment in which it exceeds all expectations— an “expectation” preceding every expectation, an “expectation” that, because it expects nothing, is open to everything, and, because it is directed toward nothing, toward no fact, can also welcome everything. This evential we call availability. Consequently, what surprise reveals is the availability according to which the advenant is turned toward the future as the vista conditioning the occurring of events. Availability is this exposition to the impossible of ourselves, to the event in its pure meaning. If it indeed implies an “expectation,” this expectation bears quite singular features: it is directed toward no fact to come, it is turned toward nothing, except the nothing of the future itself, and it is only to this extent that it can be related to the event in its bursting forth §14. The Future and Availability

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from nothing, that it can be opened to the eventuality of the arrival of that which happens only against all expectations, in its irreducible novelty— of that which, with regard to every foreseen possibility, is the im-possible, as well. But what relations does availability, as it reveals itself in and through surprise, hold with eventuality and with the future in the evential sense? How can the advenant relate himself to the possibilities that the event arranges and addresses to him, by holding himself open to them? (b) Availability as original ex-per-ience of the future The event, in its suspended occurring, is inaugural. Its happening is configurative of the world and opening of possibilities. The future is the vista according to which the happening or the coming of possibilities for the advenant is possible. In order to understand the way in which the advenant can keep himself available for events, it is thus necessary first of all to determine the phenomenological meaning of possibility. Availability, indeed, is neither of the order of expectation nor of the order of projection. The first point was made through the analysis of surprise; it now remains to examine the second. Availability makes possible for the advenant a relation to the possible that is more original than any projection. In what way? Availability is not an awaiting of something determined, and it is not even an awaiting of something undetermined: it is not an intentional act that would give to itself a factual correlate whose possibility would signify its actualizability. It is an evential: a modality of understanding and of exper-ience according to which the advenant relates himself to the future as the vista of the occurring of eventualities and of events. It is, more precisely, the evential according to which the advenant keeps himself free— that is to say, open according to a vacuousness without prior measure, to the sudden and imperious eruption of the new, to the newness of the new as such. Such an “expectation” expects nothing and, therefore, is open to everything; it is a “projection” that is tensed toward no specific possibility, but that brings itself to the encounter with the event as possibilization. Availability is the transportation of the advenant in the direction of the future, toward the encounter with it, the anticipation of the future as unanticipatable opening; an opening inaccessible to every projection, irreducible to every prior configuration of the possible according to which the advenant would relate himself to a merely re-presented future. An awaiting of nothing, but that is not a nothing of awaiting; a projection toward nothing, but that is not a projection reduced to nothing. For these negations do not mean privations; they constitute the very mode of the showing of the event in its transcendence with regard to every subjective structure of an176

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ticipation or of welcome. Availability is the opening to nothing insofar as it belongs to the mode of manifestation of the event as occurring-fromnothing. If the expectation of nothing is not an expectation reduced to nothing, if the projection that brings the advenant toward nothing is not, however, a projection reduced to nothing, this is because the eventual possibilities that the event bears can happen structurally only against every expectation and to the impossible of every projection; it is because the event in its eventuality, such as it rises up from the vista of the future, transcends every possible anticipation. That the possible does not mean only for the advenant what is offered to his powers [ce qui est pu], but that which, at the heart of his powers and of his possibilities, strikes him with powerlessness [impouvoir]; that the advenant is preceded at the very heart of his possibilities by the impossibility of that which happens for him only in excess of every projection—this implies that the possible not only has its cradle in the projection, but has its origin in the event as possibilization. The possible is not, fundamentally, that which is offered to the advenant’s powers, but that of which he is passible; such a possibility is ready for its possibilizing taking-up through the appropriation of a project only on the condition that it absolutely precedes it. The possible is that of which the advenant is passible before being that which is projected by him. Only the one who is available for the eventuality of the possible according to a passibility preceding every projection can then project himself toward the future in different ways. Availability to the future as the evential vista of the occurring of events and of histories, irreducible to every projection because incommensurable to the modalities of a subject’s presence to himself and to the world—this availability precedes and makes possible every projection and every decision according to which the advenant can lift himself toward a merely re-presented future. No projection, in this respect, can give access to the future in its original sense. Here lies the fundamental difference between evential hermeneutics and the analytic of Dasein. Both strive to determine phenomenologically the meaning of the future following the guiding thread of the concept of “possibility”; but this concept varies between the two approaches. As Sein und Zeit stresses on multiple occasions, it is Dasein that “configures (ausbildet)” possibility as possibility through the anticipation that goes with resoluteness: “Being-towards-death, as anticipation of possibility, is what first makes this possibility possible, and sets it free as possibility.” Every possibility is rooted, for Dasein, in the finite projection of a potentialityfor-Being: the possibility of the possible is grounded in resoluteness. For the possible here signifies, fundamentally, that which is powered by me [ce §14. The Future and Availability

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qui est pu], or, according to a redoubling inherent in its meaning, that the power of which is in my power [ce que je puis pouvoir]. The possibility of the possible is that which is powered by Dasein, and what is thus powered by Dasein is Dasein itself as possibility. Possibility is, strictly speaking, that which the Dasein is insofar as it powers itself, insofar as it has power over itself: “the projection is the way in which I am the possibility; it is the way in which I exist freely.” In other terms, possibility has Dasein’s mode of Being. It is exclusively in light of this concept of “possibility” that Heidegger can determine the original meaning of the future (Zukunft) as “the coming [Kunft] in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, comes towards itself [auf sich zukommt].” That which “happens” to Dasein can ever only be itself as possible, from the anticipation that goes with the resoluteness in which Dasein makes-possible the possible as such; this is why the future, understood existentially, can, in turn, have only Dasein’s way of Being: only “the Dasein is futural [zukünftig] in an original sense.” The future, as Dasein’s happening-to-itself from itself, that is, from its resolutely projected projection by which, in carry ing itself away from itself, it nevertheless turns itself toward itself, is to this extent an “existential concept.” Such a future can present no adversity whatsoever to my projections, since it is originally configured by them. In such a future, nothing happens, nor can happen, to Dasein— except itself. “Itself” here means: itself, such as it raises itself and brings itself into the possible by making it possible, through its finite ontological projection, in such a way that this projection makes possible not only the possible, but also the “self” of the one who projects itself. Everything that can happen to Dasein from such a future is determined in advance in accordance with its projection: every possibility is already configured according to the projection that carries Dasein within this possibility by turning it back toward itself. Nothing can burst forth from such a future that might surpass Dasein or surprise it, for, on the one hand, the Dasein existing authentically “can no longer be outstripped by anything,”  and on the other, it essentially evades every surprise. Quite different is the future in which events can befall the advenant outside of every measure of his own, by reconfiguring, in each case, the possibilities starting from which his projections can take form—including the projection that he is for himself: the future in the evential sense. This can appear in its original phenomenological meaning only according to the absolute excess of the possible over every projection or, more accurately, according to the dehiscence by which every projection, in configuring the possible, is in return open to the possible that renders it possible, according 178

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to the hiatus that makes it so that every transcendence is transcended and every condition in the “subject” rocks and collapses into uncondition. It is true that “possibility” is necessarily what an advenant is able to take up in a projection: its evential characterization does not completely abolish its existential one. But the latter is precisely subordinated to the former: possibility is not first of all that which is powered by the advenant, but what the event, and it alone, makes-possible: literally, an eventuality. The primary meaning of the future is grounded in the event as possibilization. The future is the vista of temporality, where the appearing of events in their irreducible and un-anticipatable eventuality plays out, such that it haply befalls us—to the impossible of ourselves. As vista of the eventuality of every event, the future is thus revealed through the undergoing of an alterity of the possibility over every projection that would claim to limit its span. The encounter of the possibility in its alterity to my projections is one with the possibilities of an encounter at play in every event, which is identical with the event itself: the future is the vista of every encounter insofar as every true encounter is an event, and every event is one “of encounter.” But is there any sense for the advenant in being available for events? Isn’t the event precisely that which always occurs in excess over every availability? Certainly! And yet, it does not follow that this availability would be impossible or absurd. Indeed, “to be available” means something other than awaiting or waiting for . . . , since “to await” is always to be familiar with what one is awaiting. Availability for an encounter, for example, is quite a different thing from its empty and vain expectation, or a set of active comportments that would aim to “elicit” it. For what is revealed by the encounter— and that through which an encounter reveals itself—in this oxymoronic ex-per-ience of mixed joy and terror, is the very alterity of the possible vis-à-vis every project, its pure sense of eventuality. The encounter is, perhaps, in this sense, the signal event, the one in which the alterity of the event itself and of its possibilities coincides, on the factual level, with the alterity of the one who reveals him or herself through it: that is, with the alterity of the other himself. For there is never an encounter in general. The encounter always initiates us to the other—to the other according to his own initiative, an initiative of which he alone is the initiator. The encounter thus deepens, in the adventure, the crack of a measureless possibility with respect to the possibilities of which I am the measure, through the failure of all that I awaited—that is, of all that with which I gained familiarity, forcing me to relearn ex novo from the encounter itself, from its thrilling and staggering occurring, all that I had become accustomed to: beginning with myself! Now, it is exactly in this carrying away from oneself in a trans-formation, beneath the alterity, incommensurable to myself, §14. The Future and Availability

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of the event, that the primary relation of the advenant to the future plays out. If the undergoing of the encounter is truly an ex-per-ience, it is because the one who traverses and is traversed by the event must cross this interval of distance from himself to himself, of which ex-per-ience is in fact the traversal, the passing through at the risk of oneself, where the advenant alone is in play, and stands as the only stake. Ex-per-ience thus always signifies a constitutive alteration, the impossibility of every coincidence of the advenant with himself through that which happens to him and through which he happens, the impossibility of recognizing himself in the one that he was—that is to say, of understanding himself as he then understood himself. The ex-per-ience is fundamentally the undergoing of this self-de-propriation of the advenant according to which, in the breaking and the hiatus of the event, he can no longer coincide with himself or accede to the inalienable authenticity of a Dasein. Thus, availability, inasmuch as it conditions the original relation of the advenant to the future as dimension of a possible ex-per-ience, is this suspension, this epochè of every project and of every understanding thanks to which an ex-per-ience can take-place as such—that is to say, thanks to which the advenant can learn from the unexpected all that with which he thought himself to be familiar. What would an encounter be if it did not oblige the advenant to understand himself otherwise, starting from reconfigured possibilities? What would an encounter be if it did not make our certainties and our habits totter over, if it did not destroy every possibility of being habituated to anything whatsoever, by making us doubt everything, including and above all our own capacity to welcome him or her, whose destiny has not only crossed, but altered and overturned our own? In other words, an encounter would never open us to it and call us to ourselves if we were not at stake in it entirely, at the risk of losing ourselves. Availability, inasmuch as it determines selfhood in its evential meaning, is the “condition” (or rather the uncondition) of that which only happens as its own unconditioned condition. Consequently, selfhood does not exclude, but, on the contrary, implies the being carried away from itself of a de-propriation, which is to say, ex-per-ience in its original sense. As availability to the event, selfhood contains the very possibility of such a depropriation, the phenomenological meaning of which ought to be questioned further. If the encounter did not tear us from ourselves—that is to say, if it did not allow us to understand ourselves beyond everything we already understood—we would be unable to encounter anything or anyone. Availability is, in each case, availability for an ex-per-ience, in which, according to a de-propriation of himself, the access of the advenant to his singularity is in play. In an encounter, if it is an encounter, we risk our180

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selves, which is to say, we risk everything. Kafka describes in the following way the journey he had to undertake in order to approach Milena: “[I had] burrowed with such joy the straight tunnel leading to you out from the threshold of my dark dwelling, and . . . gradually everything one is has been thrown into this tunnel which perhaps . . . leads to you.”  This stripping bare is not a mere image. De-propriation belongs properly, and defines what is proper, to every encounter. In this realm, the adage “nothing ventured, nothing gained” is quite true—for the danger in question (Gefahr, per-iculim, per-il) is constitutive of the ex-per-ience (Er-fahr-ung) itself. This is why the encounter never goes entirely without this burden of suffering—whether it be joyous, or whether it be that of losing the other or bearing his absence—which Hegel rightly noted is inseparable from every true ex-per-ience. What Faulkner writes of love is true first and foremost of the encounter itself—for there are only loving encounters, in the widest sense of the term, hatred giving rise only to a more or less active avoidance: “I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.”  An encounter that would avoid this risk and would not go to meet the future in all its overturning power would in no way be an encounter. Now, this going-to-meet the future is availability, eventially understood. Through this example, in light of the evential of availability, the original meaning of the future as the dimension of ex-perience itself is thus uncovered. Availability is, then, the evential according to which the advenant holds himself open to the future and brings himself to its encounter, according to a disposition that is neither of the order of expectation nor of the order of a projection. Availability is the aptitude to render oneself available to the event or, more precisely, the possibility of rendering oneself available to passibility, the faculty of rendering oneself passible to passibility, according to a redoubling that is here the symmetrical correlate, on the side of passibility, to that which occurred on the side of possibility as power over power—if the possible is, in a certain sense, that the power of which is in my power, the availability by which the advenant holds himself open to events and to the eventualities that they bring in, is a rendering-oneselfavailable-to-passibility by bringing oneself to the encounter with the future. This is why availability is not reduced to passibility, but requires from the advenant an aptitude or a capacity that can be, in turn, alienated or lost. Unlike passibility, which belongs to the fundamental constitution of our adventure—that is to say, that defines man as advenant— availability is a way, for the advenant, of being directed in person to his passibility, or of §14. The Future and Availability

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advening to himself starting from it: it defines a possibility or a capacity that the advenant is capable of appropriating more or less, and of making his own: in fact, the very possibility of the “his own” in general: selfhood. It manifests the posture in which the advenant is originally Self, at the risk of himself: “No extreme state,” writes Rilke, “can achieve more than that of ‘availability.’ ”  Understood in this way, availability does nothing, accomplishes nothing; it does not refer to any activity, or to any passivity, but designates an attitude of welcoming reserve, and of suspension. And yet, although it carries out nothing [n’eff ectue rien] and is radically inactual [ineff ective], it is not, however, ineffective [inefficace], because it supports and conditions every efficacy [toute efficace] of the advenant: all projections and decisions, for example, can be carried away toward the possible and have purchase on it only if they let themselves be preceded and guided by the impossibility of that which happens only against every project and every decision—that is to say, only if they are rooted in availability to eventuality and to the future in its evential meaning. Such a future is not a horizon that the subject would lay out, and that would articulate its modalities of presence to itself and to the world; instead, it is the vista inaccessible to every projection from which that which can happen happens, which articulates the appearing of every event starting from itself, and in accordance with which the advenant, if he keeps himself available to the eventual— that is to say, stands himself in the opening of his own possibility— can receive himself changed from a metamorphosis of the possible and of the world. That for which the advenant readies himself, in availability, is thus first of all himself, sub species possibilitatis. By keeping himself available for any eventuality, the advenant readies himself first of all for himself, not so that he projects himself autarchically toward possibilities, but so that he may receive himself and welcome himself through an ex-per-ience. Thus understood, availability enters into every sphere of activity where an ex-per-ience takes place, in all the domains where the human initiative encounters and espouses the initiative of things—that is, everywhere; I will limit myself to two examples. Better than other people, some artists have stressed that all fashioning or working [oeuvrer] depends on an availability of the artist with regard to possibilities of which he cannot avail himself. The possibility at work in every work is not that the power of which is in my power [ce que je puis pouvoir], but that which doesn’t offer itself to me except on its own initiative, haply, surpassing my projections and my capabilities, that which exceeds me at the very moment in which I go toward it, and is revealed only through surprise; a possibility that was not previously knowable, and a 182

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know-how that was not previously possible. Thus, for example, “every poem is fulfilled at the poet’s expense” —which means that “the poet does not make just whatever he wants pass into poetry. It is not a question of will or of good will. The poet is not the master of his own house.”  Here, availability is the opening to a possibility that wells up only from the constantly renewed dehiscence between my powers and what they are capable of— a possibility that gives itself to me only through an encounter, and, accordingly, like every encounter, “strikes me with powerlessness” (Levinas). Hence a precession of the work over me, even where I am the one who is working and fashioning, a prevenient initiative by which it dispossesses me— even in my initiatives—from all prerogative over it: in this sustained encounter with the possibilities that are obscurely at work in the paths of the work, and to which the work alone can give rise, in this agonic faceto-face where all that matters is keeping oneself ready—“as if being ready was not work enough!” —the artist can count on nothing, can rely on no art, on no knowledge or skill, on no preexisting facility, on no know-how or technique. Rilke emphasizes this with regard to Rodin: “He had to suppress an innate facility in order to begin anew as a pauper.” Only this complete poverty, this renunciation, this silent and feverish “expectation” can give access to that which has no other mode of access than itself: the staggering gratuity of the event. Thus, the “work” of the artist is not of the order of a projection: all that he can do is create favorable conditions and keep himself available for what he can never reach otherwise than by letting himself be touched and reached in his turn. Acquiring the capacity to create the conditions: everything is there. The artist is the shareholder of interests that go beyond him. His only preparation and all his formation lie in his aptitude to allow himself to be surprised— and for that to happen, it is necessary first of all that he renounce every claim to mastery of his art. The calligrapher Su Shi (1036–1101) clarifies this in these terms: “It is when one abandons the idea of writing well that one starts to write well.” Here the “idea,” because it preexists its realization, could only rigidify the work and limit its inaugural possibilities—it is such an “idea,” affirmed Georges Braque, that the work ceaselessly tries to make disappear: “The painting is finished,” he wrote, “when it has effaced the idea.”  But this probably applies no less to works of thought; availability, in art and in philosophy, is neither activity nor passivity: it is persistence in passibility. Aristotle stresses this, when he writes, “Thought and τύχη are in the same sphere.” What does this mean? Tύχη comes from τύγχάνω: to arrive, to befall, to occur. The word here probably does not already have the “technical” meaning of “chance”; to be sure, Aristotle does not want to say that to think is to create concepts by chance, to align words and §14. The Future and Availability

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phrases in a purely casual manner! Tύχη is here the occurring of a possibility that only manifests itself according to its own initiative, and to which no project gives access. Accordingly, thought is something that happens to us. Heidegger will say it again, too: “We never come to thoughts. They come to us.” To think is to dispose oneself to thinking: there is nothing more to be done in terms of “activity.” Valéry, with all his perspicacity, was already making it explicit: “To think is to wait—more or less passively.” If thought is an “awaiting,” and even an awaiting of that which can happen and give itself only in excess of every expectation, this is because, more fundamentally, the ad-venture is an opening to that which happens to us, according to which only the advenant can advene to himself, receive himself from the future, and advene as himself—this is because, more fundamentally, thought itself is an evential. I first affirmed that the future was the vista articulating the appearing of the eventuality as such, and I analyzed the evential that corresponds to this appearing on the advenant’s side: surprise. Then I showed that the possibility of surprise rested in an expectation against all expectation, in a pure going-to-the-encounter with the future in its irreducible transcendence, which I have called “availability.” Availability is the exposition to surprise, by virtue of the advenant’s prior passibility, according to which the advenant can be directed toward the future as the un-anticipatable vista from which all that comes comes, and in so doing, can transform himself through that which happens to him, can detach from himself and give up self-ownership—that is to say, can face and endure an ex-per-ience in its original meaning. The future is therefore the temporal-evential vista of the occurring of events and of histories in such a way that they surprise the advenant, insofar as he keeps himself first available for them. This future is not a horizon configured by projections: consequently, it is irreducible to the advenant’s modalities of presence to himself and to the world and to all the declensions of an inner-temporal present. It is a dimension of meaning irreducible to all presence. The future is a vista heterogeneous to the two others that the advenant cannot even anticipate in a free selfmaking-possible; it is the un-anticipatable of every adventure. As a result, availability is the advenant’s comprehensive being directed toward the future as vista of temporality, in accordance with which the event can appear according to the three dimensionals of time that articulate its manifestation, as having-been-to-come-presenting-itself. But, in order to understand this, it will be necessary to pursue further the elucidation of the phenomenon of temporality.

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§15. The Present and Transformation Availability is the evential that gives access to the future as un-anticipatable vista of temporality starting from which the occurring of events and histories is possible. Memory is the evential in accordance with which the advenant relates to the having-taken-place as un-assumable vista of his histories starting from which concluded events continue to make sense for him—that is to say, continue to remain actual or inactual with regard to his present situation. Memory is a modality of responsibility in its evential sense. But, in what way does the advenant relate to the apertural instant of time in which events bursts forth within their own horizon, so as to be able to appropriate the eventualities that they dispense, which is to say, respond of himself before them? In terms of which evential is it possible to describe the vista of the present, as vista of ex-per-ience itself? The event is not temporal, but temporalizing. The instant on the way to its own occurring is not the inner-temporal present of the fact. “As soon” as the event comes, it exceeds us and precedes us “from the outset.” Its manifestation is held in this tension between “as soon as” and “already”: as soon as the event shows itself, it is always already there. In this sense, it is retrospective: the advenant is always already “behind” this instant without possible contemporaneity; he can reappropriate the eventualities that befall him from the event only according to an irreducible and incompressible delay. But this does not mean that the advenant would be condemned to wander endlessly “in pursuit” of the event: on the contrary, it is according to and in accordance with this very delay that the advenant gains access to the present and may somehow “stand in it.” The present is not the primitive given, the originary immediate of sensible certainty, but what is most difficult to reach and to join. The access to the present, the possibility of keeping oneself on the crest of the beginning, requires the mediation of the transformation by which the advenant responds already to the injunction of what happens to him: the immediation is possible only as this mediation itself. The evential according to which the advenant is originally directed toward the apertural present in which the event arises is the transformation. What does this mean? Transformation, as we have seen, is the modality of the adventure according to which the advenant welcomes what happens to him and appropriates to himself in the first person the possibilities that befall him. In order to advene to himself, that is, in order to respond in a manner that is in each case different and adapted to the unavoidable request of the new, the advenant must be himself “in movement”; this mobility is not the instability of the one who can’t keep still, but rather his self-renewal according to the §15. The Present and Transformation

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directions and directives that root themselves in his history. Such a transformation cannot be understood as the transition from one form to another inside of a becoming itself understood according to the temporal scheme of “passage”: instead, it must be interpreted in light of the phenomenon of temporality and its specific characteristics. Insofar as it concerns the event as metamorphosis of the world and of the adventure, the transformation means a mutation that is in each case total, a change through and through. Here, the decision is the modality of appropriation of the evential possibilities that the event, and it alone, makes possible—an appropriation that always puts in play a certain understanding (and is accomplished as this understanding itself ) and, to this extent, can only be “actualized” in real decisions and projects. The transformation has a meaning that is first and foremost hermeneutic, insofar as the advenant must take anew, in each ex-per-ience, the risk of understanding himself in light of the structural totality of the possibilities reconfigured by events. It means a change in understanding that is through and through [du tout au tout] insofar as this change bears on the Whole [le Tout] itself and on its meaning, on the world, starting from which only the advenant can understand who he is and advene to himself in his singularity. The aptitude for transformation thus supposes, from the temporal point of view, the capacity for the advenant to begin anew by keeping himself in the primary-surge (Ur-sprung) of the origin as the bursting forth from itself and in itself of the instant, where time itself appears in statu nascendi. To be able to transform oneself through the undergoing of that which happens to one: this is in each instant to be a beginner who relies on nothing and counts on nothing already there; it is to be with respect to oneself and to every task or every work “the primitive of [one’s] own way.” But how and according to which modalities does the advenant come to decide about himself on the basis of renewed eventualities that offer themselves to him in the present? What can be the meaning of a decision that does not decide about such or such possibility within a given situation, but that decides about the transformation? It is true that the self-transformation of the advenant only happens through a decision and as this decision itself; but what can “to decide” signify here? How could the advenant ever make the decision to change, unless he has already changed? And of course the decision here at stake is not a sovereign decision by which the advenant would exert a mastery over himself and his possibilities. The initiative belongs to transformation, as it belongs first— and exactly to this extent— to the event, for which the advenant is never anything other than—in the proper sense—the respondent. Here decision is the very manner in which the advenant responds, according to a transcendental 186

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delay, to the apertural present of the event; a decision that is always already anticipated by the eventuality of the possibility about which it cannot decide, but that precedes it, and from which it proceeds. To decide about a self-transformation is not to decide among possibilities, but to decide in favor of possibility. Such a decision renounces having a grip on the possible in the very movement in which it opens itself to it. It does not choose between alternative paths according to motives that it would limit itself to actualizing. It instead answers for eventuality by allowing itself to be preceded by it; it results from the transformation that is at work in every exper-ience without being able to arouse it. Only such a decision that is not a choice made between possibilities, but the summons to the very possibility of the transformation, only such a decision that does not exert an original power over the possible, but signifies the unlimited exposure to the pure power of the possible, to the pure power of being able insofar as it is precisely in play in every possibility as power of transformation— only such a decision measures up to the impossible in which all our projections are anchored, and which is the most proper name for possibility. The decision in play in every transformation, eventially understood, thus signifies the summons and the exposition of the advenant to the pure power of the possible as such— a “capability” of which he himself is not the origin, and that signifies not only that of which the advenant is capable, but the potential [puissance] that passes his abilities and that is at work, at the risk of the advenant’s incapacity, in every event. Therefore, the decision by which the advenant relates originally to the present-origin of time as to the site of every eventuality and of every transformation, is a radically in-effective decision. It does nothing, brings nothing into effect, in the sense of an operation that would be factual and datable, explainable by its context or, in other words, by its motives. It makes nothing in the sense that it accomplishes nothing and renders nothing effective. It disposes the advenant to the possibility of transformation, so as to leave this possibility to happen from itself, according to its own dynamic, this dynamic that is inseparable from its own δύναμις. In this respect, the decision is rooted in availability. It decides nothing, in the sense of exerting a power over the possible, of actualizing specific virtualities and not others, but it only disposes itself— and thus disposes us—to the pure power of possibility. But that such a decision is in-effective [in-efficace] in the sense of non-actual [ineff ective] does not mean that it is ineffective absolutely speaking: it draws its effectiveness from the original possibilization by the event. It is radically ineffective only if every effectivity is understood and measured in light of an effectuation: the decision under consideration decides nothing, but opens us to the undecidable; it has no §15. The Present and Transformation

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power at its disposal, but disposes us to the unavailable [l’ indisponible]; it deliberates about nothing, but summons us to the undeliberated by exposing us to it: in this way, such a decision decides more originally than any factual decision. One could describe it further by pointing out that, unlike every factual decision in which I decide, in each case, among possibilities,— of course, here too, by exposing myself to the excess of the im-possible as to that which may later on come to break every decision—the decision that is operative in every transformation, and through which the advenant, preceded and passed over by that which happens to him, keeps himself in the opening of the beginning, consists only in responding in a perpetually new and different way to the renewed injunction of the new, in beginning perpetually anew in accordance with the possibilities that the event makes possible. Such a decision does not decide among possibilities, but decides in favor of the possible; it does not choose between adverse possibilities, but decides for the adversity of possibility. It is, consequently, the decision in play in every factual decision, the decision according to which every factual decision among possibilities is solely— and originally—possible: the decision to decide. But what is the meaning, here, of such a duplication? Surely, one cannot interpret it in the sense of a transcendental duplication that would subordinate every decision to a prior choice, that between deciding and not deciding. The decision under consideration is opposed to every idea of a “choice of choice,” as was formulated by Kierkegaard and taken up later by Heidegger. Indeed, the choice that forms, in Kierkegaard’s view, the “intrinsic and stringent term for the ethical,” and that is certainly not a choice between contraries, but a choice between the choice and its omission, remains a decision in the sense of the exercise of a subjective power over the possible; it is even a decision in an “absolute” sense, since the alternative here is that between choosing and not choosing. Understood eventially, the decision signifies instead the active dispossession from all original power over the possible in favor of the efficacy of possibilization; it breaks the circle of the project in order to enter into the original game of possibilization, such that it is precisely in play in every event. The possibility of deciding is not acquired here through the act of a decision that would duplicate the alternative at a higher level: the decision, eventially understood, is possible only at the risk of the impossibility of every factual decision. The decision in view of transformation is inseparable from the necessary transformation of the very concept of decision. It no longer signifies the exercise of a sovereign capability, but the summons to passibility. It does not belong to freedom as a discretionary power over a possible, which the advenant would have available in advance, a priori; it 188

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is originarily conditioned by the eventuality to which it opens and in view of which it disposes the advenant: its a priori possibility is rooted a priori in a necessary a posteriori. In short, it is not the advenant who makes possible for himself through an original decision the possibility of deciding factically; rather, it is the original decision that is the deposition of every original power over the possible, of every “making-possible,” of every transcendental posture, and the disposition to the power of the possible, to the original making-possible of the event, to possibilization. This is why the decision, in the sense that I have here been trying to make manifest, really holds itself at the furthest remove from every ontologico-transcendental conception of a decision to decide that would ground the possibility of every factical decision; it holds itself so far off, in fact, that it takes on determinations that are incompatible with such a conception. Indeed, the “choosing to make a choice” keeps Dasein from every dispersion and every fluctuation—that is, from the non-Self-constancy (Unselbständigkeit) of everdayness that corresponds at least formally, in fundamental ontology, to the character mutabilis of the esthete in Either/ Or. Not only does resolute Dasein not have to transform itself in the undergoing of that which happens to it, but the authenticity of existence has closed every possibility of an alterity to oneself and of a metamorphosis: by acceding, through the “choosing of choice” of resoluteness, to Selfsubsistence (Selbstständigkeit) and the “existentiell stability” that are opposed to the dispersion and dispersal of the “they,” Dasein “take[s] possession of time” in the synchrony of the moment of vision in which its existence is entirely gathered, in such a way that this existence “can no longer be outstripped [überholt] by anything” according to an enclosure and an “autonomy” that closes off every possible passibility to the event. The choosing of choice here takes on the transcendental function of neutralizing every genesis and all alterity to oneself, in order to lead them back to modes of concealment and obliteration of an authenticity that alone is originary. Dasein does not have to become itself, since it is itself always already in the supremely transparent moment of vision in which it grasps with a single glance its situation, thus acceding to the cohesion of a destiny: it can only become that which it is always already, in a temporality that is withdrawn fundamentally from all loss, from all forgetting, from all constitutive transformation. Temporality is not, for Dasein, the pure adventure of a separation from itself and a death to itself, but the odyssey of a return to itself, of a gathering and of a possible totalization of its existence, in which this existence coincides with its essence, in the coincidence of the Wesen and the Gewesen. As was already the case for Hegel, the essence of time is here fundamentally reminding and recollection, because §15. The Present and Transformation

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time is the essence of essence itself, where the Gewesen and the Wesen are one. The formula that defines it is the one that Heidegger borrows from Pindar—“Become what you are!”—where it is Being that prescribes to becoming its meaning at least as much as Being receives its meaning from becoming. Things are otherwise for the decision that, because it lets itself be carried by the transformation and draws from it its efficacy, decides in view of and starting from the transformation itself. If it makes possible every choice and every factical decision, this is not in the sense in which it would furnish a transcendental condition of possibility for them. For the project is here that which can claim no originariness whatsoever, that which cannot set itself up as a formal condition of possibility, insofar as it is conditioned in its turn, more originarily, by the passibility in which it originates, irreducible to all facticity. To make up one’s mind about the transformation, to decide to decide, is always, for the advenant, to dispose himself to the pure undecidability of the event, to hold himself in the opening of the beginning, from which every transformation is possible, to expose himself to the pure power of the possible such that it happens in excess of his powers. Such a decision decides nothing, not because it would decide everything—that is, because it would decide about the very possibility of deciding—by setting itself up as condition of possibility for every factical decision. It is not, like Kierkegaardian choice and Heideggerian resoluteness, the very making-possible of the possible for an existing being. Instead, it is a modality of response to the event, the opening to transformation as it originates in the event as possibilization. This decision can be the operator of a metamorphosis of the adventure only if, by persisting in the suspended nothing of the instant starting from which, alone, there opens a present for the advenant, it lets itself be oriented and overtaken by the possibilization at work in the event as power of transformation. It does not set itself up as condition of possibility, but sets up a condition for a possibility that comes to it necessarily from elsewhere; and it is on this sole condition that it can make happen this possibility without exerting on it the mastery or the grip of a power. This is why the temporality that is proper to it differs radically from that of resoluteness. The decision does not gather the various “ecstasies” of time into the synopsis and the synchrony of the moment of vision. It summons the advenant to the radical diachrony (deprived of any possible synchrony) of a temporality impossible to “hold to,” to retain or to totalize, since it is only laid out according to the dimension of an alterity to oneself that is irreducible to every self-constancy and self-subsistence as they articulate the existential phenomenon of Selbstheit. The formula that would correspond 190

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to it is not “Become what you are,” but rather, “Be what you become”; to the formula of the odyssey of a return to oneself, of a gathering and a totalization, it is necessary to oppose that of the “one way” (Benjamin), of the eternally one-way trip, where time is no longer the reliquary of Being, but dispossession with respect to every “essence” and dis-appropriation of every “property/authenticity.” If decision in its evential sense can be understood, therefore, as the advenant’s original relation to the present, this is because the present itself here no longer means an “ecstasy” of time. Indeed, ecstasy describes a modality of Dasein’s transcendence in accordance with which is laid out the horizon of appearance for every being capable of coming up against it “in a given time,” in the modality either of the Vorhandenheit or of the Zuhandenheit. But the evential present is not understandable in light of the transcendence of an exemplary being: it can be apprehended only in light of the originally retrospective ex-per-ience according to which the advenant is directed toward the instant-in-waiting or -on-the-way that the event, as temporalization of time, unfolds. Through the decision that decides for transformation, the advenant relates himself to the origin-instant of time as to the original “locus” of all eventuality, according to the transcendental delay of an ex-per-ience—that is, of an originally deferred and a posteriori understanding—in such a way that it is only through and in accordance with this delay that the vista of the present opens for him. As a result, the present is the vista of temporality according to which every transformation of the advenant is possible in response to the event as possibilization: this transformation signifies the appropriation of the eventualities that the event makes possible and their redeployment in a projection. This is the very modality of the opening of the present that is here the central problem for a phenomenology. Indeed, as I have stressed, the event does not occur in the present of the ex-per-ience, in such a way that the advenant, through his attitudes, would furnish the condition of its manifestation: it is not something inner-temporal. On the contrary, the ex-perience only happens starting from the suspended occurring of the event— that is to say, from time— and it is thus time that furnishes the original condition for the opening of the present as irreducible vista of temporality. In short, it is not the event that occurs in the present, but the present that opens itself starting from the transformation as modality of response of the advenant to the event—that is to say, as modality of ex-per-ience. The present is thus the opening, for the advenant, to the possibility of the transformation, which is opened, in turn, only through the original transformation of the possible starting from the instant-on-the-way of the event. Only there, where the transformation takes place, “is” the present in its evential sense. §15. The Present and Transformation

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Consequently, this transformation, of which the event is the vehicle, the advenant the operator, and the present the “place,” points toward the phenomenon of singularity: decision and transformation belong to the selfhood of the advenant, insofar as “selfhood” is a complex phenomenon, articulating several aspects or moments. Singularity is the way in which the advenant can understand himself in the course of the eras or epochs that shape his history, in accordance with the constellations of meaning inaugurated by events: it is rooted, in each case, in his present situation. The advenant understands himself as such or such in accordance with the situation that is revealed to him, and through which he reveals himself. Thus, transformation points in the direction of the phenomenon of singularity, as a mode of selfhood, just as surprise revealed availability and memory was grounded in responsibility. Availability, responsibility, and singularity are the three structural moments that articulate the unitary phenomenon of selfhood. Availability presupposes passibility; responsibility belongs to the phenomenon of implication; singularity is possible only on the basis of understanding. The elucidation of the temporality of ex-per-ience as the unitary phenomenon of surprise, memory, and transformation thus refers back, more originally, to the temporal-evential meaning of selfhood. §16. The Temporal Meaning of Selfhood For a static analysis of selfhood—that is, one that disregards its temporal intrigue— selfhood consists in the following phenomenon: the availability to events, rooted in the advenant’s original passibility, insofar as the advenant, implicated himself in what happens to him, can respond to them and answer for himself—that is, can advene to himself singularly through a destiny by appropriating the eventualities that events address to him. Availability differs here from the primary and inaugural passibility of the advenant in that it means a capacity of the advenant, that of keeping himself open for the staggering excess or disproportion of events or, more exactly, of holding open passibility’s openness by holding himself there, at the risk of himself; this capacity can itself be lost, as the phenomenon of traumatism shows. Responsibility differs from mere implication: while implication in what happens to us constitutes a structural determination of the human adventure from its first event, responsibility likewise means a capacity, more or less great, but always acquired, of relating oneself in person to events in order to undergo their unsubstitutable ex-per-ience. Availability and responsibility are inseparable: they co-articulate originally the phenomenon of selfhood. Finally, singularity presupposes the possibil192

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ity of transformation, which is rooted, in turn, in availability and responsibility: it completes the evential characterization of the “Self-same.” We are now ready to deepen this interpretation of selfhood by reintroducing into the analysis the temporal dimension of these phenomena. Indeed, availability, responsibility, and singularity are modalities of ex-perience. To each one of these eventials there corresponds a different vista of temporality: the future, such as it is revealed to the advenant through the phenomenon of surprise, as the unanticipatable of every adventure; the having-taken-place, such as it shows through memory as the dimension of actuality or inactuality of events that are concluded as facts; the present, “in” or according to which a transformation of the advenant is possible. Re-interpreted temporally, selfhood thus signifies the availability for the future, as the vista of un-anticipatable eventuality such that it surprises us in every event, inseparable from the responsibility of a memory—that is, from the liberation with respect to every repetition of attitudes or of comportments toward events that cannot be taken over by the advenant, because they precede every distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic, between facticity and projection, insofar as both—availability and responsibility— condition the decisive and deciding transformation of the advenant in the present. But how are these three eventials mutually articulated within the unitary phenomenon of selfhood? Only the one who possesses a memory in its evential sense is capable of withdrawing his adventure from the phenomenon of repetition; he alone can break with the having-taken-place and submit it to the critical distancing of a renewed understanding of himself and the world, so as not to cover over in advance the radical newness of every ulterior event; alone, by relating to the having-taken-place as concluded, he can keep himself open toward the future without thereby already shutting it up into the prefiguration of a projection. Responsibility with respect to the having-taken-place, memory, is here the condition of availability: the vista of the having-taken-place “precedes” the two others in the temporalization of temporality, not in the sense in which the past “would precede” the present, according to an inner-temporal anteriority, but in the sense in which it precedes by right and enjoys a structural priority. Only inasmuch as his adventure does not succumb to the repetition of inappropriable events can the advenant keep himself available to the excess of eventuality over every anticipation, allow the possible to happen without capturing it in advance within the circle of an expectation and a projection, and not understand the singularity and the newness of the new in light of the mere ancientness of what came before. Such an availability, to the extent that it expects nothing, is not merely un-expectant; nor is it §16. The Temporal Meaning of Selfhood

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in-active, to the extent that it does not enclose the future into the prefiguration of a project: these negations do not allow us to characterize its phenomenological content. Rather, this availability consists in a positive attitude, the efficacy of which is in no way proportionate to its efficiency. Without doing anything, availability is subjacent to every “doing” and to every accomplishment; without belonging itself to the realm of projection, it conditions the adaptation of every projection to a situation. Consequently, it is responsibility for the having-taken-place and availability to the future that co-determine the transformation in the present, or rather, the opening of the present itself as vista of the transformation. The possibility of a metamorphosis of the advenant and of his projections belongs in principle to the phenomenon of selfhood. It is even necessary to maintain that it is the possibility of such a metamorphosis, in the first place, that defines selfhood itself: selfhood, as freedom for the event, as the vacuity of a measureless opening to its happening in excess, originally signifies the capacity for a renewal in light of what happens to us. But how can the possibility of transformation belong originally to the “Self ” of selfhood? Is not the “Self ” defined, rather, by its constancy, its permanence, its immutability? Indeed, is not the Self that which, in me, cannot be altered or modified, or perish? That which structurally underlies all change? This is the central problem that appears here regarding the temporal meaning of selfhood. In order to solve it we must deepen the phenomenon of “transformation” by relating it to the problem of the “Selfsame” [du “Soi-même”]: how should we understand this “-same” (ipse) of selfhood [ipséité]? One thing already is beyond doubt: the Self of the “self-same” (ipse) is not here the “-same” (idem) of self-identity. For if undergoing in person that which happens to him were to signify, for the advenant, being selfidentical across all his experiences, there would no longer be, for him, either events or ex-per-ience. Selfhood [l’ ipséité]—that is, the capacity to relate myself in person (ipse) to that which happens to me and to appropriate eventualities through an ex-per-ience from which I emerge necessarily and ineluctably transformed—is here distinguished radically from the identity of a being or a thing—that is to say, from their equality to themselves in accordance with the principle “A = A.” Actually, the evential problematic of selfhood is situated at an entirely different level from that of the empirico-factual problematic of identity. The identity of an individual is grounded in factual criteria of identification: the size of an adult, her fingerprints, her genetic profile, and so on. Little does it matter, here, whether these criteria of identification are convincing, and how far; for identity thus defined is not what is under consideration in the present analyses. It 194

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goes without saying that an event reaches one and the same individual, in the sense of a self-identical individual, susceptible of being identified. It is indeed the same (idem) advenant who suffers a bereavement or an illness: these events can indeed bring with them modifications, but these factual modifications nevertheless do not make of him a different individual— criteria of identification like those listed previously continue to be operative. And yet, an event, when it occurs, transforms us to the point that we are no longer, before and after its occurrence, the “same”: isn’t this affirmation contradictory of the preceding ones? In no way! For to maintain that the advenant is not the same before and after the occurrence of the event amounts to saying that he is singularized through this ex-per-ience. In other words, what is affected by this ex-per-ience is his singularity. Singularity, here, is not the factual self-identity of a thing or a being, but a properly evential determination. It means the manner in which the advenant understands himself sub specie possibilitatis, so to speak, in light of the possibilities and impossibilities that confer upon the present world its countenance, and that condition the advenant’s fundamental projections. Singularity amounts to an auto-interpretation. Nothing prevents the advenant, in light of subsequent events, from modifying this autointerpretation, since it is anchored, in each case, in the situation starting from which he understands himself. This singularity is susceptible of variations in the course of his history, without the advenant’s factual selfidentity necessarily coming into question. It is a fact that an event may modify an individual, affect such and such of her comportments, etc.; but precisely, this fact teaches us nothing yet about the evential tenor of this event. By contrast, every event, as such, reaches the very root of possibility. By modifying some possibilities within the horizon of the world, the event actually modifies, in each case, the world as such. For there are no such things, for the advenant, as independent possibilities. Instead, his world can be defined as the structural totality of possibilities in their reciprocal cohesion and articulation. The event is thus that which, through the radical alteration of one or several given possibilities, modifies the very manner in which the advenant can understand himself, in his singularity, in light of the articulated totality of his possibilities: the world. Every event, in this sense, always affects the whole: it signifies a total overturning insofar as it obliges the advenant to understand himself as himself anew in terms of the world that the event reconfigures. From these considerations, the problem of the temporal meaning of selfhood can receive a new light. Selfhood, eventially understood, means, §16. The Temporal Meaning of Selfhood

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as we have seen, the capacity to relate in person to events in order to undergo them in unsubstitutable ex-per-ience. Relating oneself (ipse) to that which happens to one is here the condition of possibility for every transformation from oneself to oneself of the advenant in his singularity. The “Self-same” in question has strictly nothing to do with a thing, a being, a substance, or a subject that, like the ego of modern philosophy, could be self-identical or distinct from itself. Identity or difference can concern only singularity insofar as it originates in constellations of meaning and changing situations. Selfhood, by contrast, means exclusively a “way of Being,” a “potentiality-for-Being” (Heidegger), or, in more neutral terms, a capacity. What is at stake in such a capacity, interpreted in light of an evential hermeutics, is the advenant himself at the risk of himself. Selfhood consists in the capacity of the advenant to change, to become himself, to be singularized through an ex-per-ience. This trans-formation, as we have seen, is not a change of the factual characteristics of the advenant, the passage from one “form” to another within a becoming, but a through and through change of his understanding insofar as it bears on the world itself and its meaning: it consists in a renewed auto-interpretation of the advenant in his singularity in light of what happens to him. Only this renewed understanding of himself in light of the critical cruxes of his adventure, where he himself is in play, opens for the advenant a present as evential vista of temporality. The result is that the alternative of identity and change in their innerworldly and inner-temporal sense turns out to be of no help here for conceiving the evential phenomenon of transformation. Of course, it is indeed, in a sense, the same (idem) advenant who undergoes the transformation of which the event is the vehicle; this means that the advenant conserves, throughout his history, factual determinations that allow for his identification. But the problem of transformation cannot be raised at the factual level of self-identity; it is raised instead on an evential level. Selfhood has nothing to do with any problematic of identity, of constancy, or of permanence, to the extent that such determinations only concern innertemporal phenomena. As an evential phenomenon, it is prior to the division between identity and change. It withdraws equally from the ontologicofundamental alternative between “Self-constancy” or “Self-subsistence” (Selbstständigkeit, Ständigkeit des Selbst), and “un-Self-constancy” governing the analytic of Dasein. It’s true that the “constancy” of the exemplary being in no way signifies the inner-temporal permanence of a present-athand or ready-to-hand (vorhanden or zuhanden) being; but the problematic of the gathering of Dasein, of its potentiality-for-Being-a-whole, inseparable from that of its Self-constancy in the non-transitory “held” moment 196

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of vision of resoluteness, still manifests a certain primacy of presence in the interpretation of temporality, which is of a piece, ever since Augustine, with the subjectivization of time and the origin of which we have attempted to isolate. In addition, it would be necessary to question the proximity of Heidegger to Kierkegaard (whose analyses belong to a “categorial ontology”) when the former opposes the Self-constancy to the dispersion of irresolute Dasein, just as the latter puts in contrast the character indelebilis of the ethicist and the character mutabilis of the esthete: doesn’t this proximity result from the fact that fundamental ontology is still based, even if only partially, on a concept of time that is not without structural analogies to that of metaphysics? Let’s consider the opposition of two temporalities, authentic and inauthentic, the first in which Dasein “takes possession” of time in such a way that it collects its existence entirely in the moment of vision of resoluteness, the second wherein it succumbs to dispersion and is delivered to the endless division of successive nows: doesn’t this opposition manifest this metaphysical stamp? Doesn’t Dasein, by its Self-constancy, still mime and reproduce the aporiae of the self-mastering subject of metaphysics, whose “persistence” would ensure the cohesion of time itself? But couldn’t one raise an analogous, albeit inverted, objection? Is it possible to remove the evential concept of “transformation” entirely from its common inner-temporal meaning? Of course, the transformation inseparable from selfhood eventially understood has no more of a strictly innertemporal meaning than does the “constancy” or “permanence” (Ständigkeit) of Dasein. But does it not have, even partially (supposing that we understood what this adjective means here), an inner-temporal meaning? And isn’t having such a meaning “partially” the same as having it “completely”? In short, can the concept of “transformation” truly be torn from its common understanding according to which it means a process, a modification, an alteration unfolding in a succession of phases, the manifestation of which is subordinated to the “temporalizing” attitudes of a subject? Clearly, this represents a major difficulty. But perhaps it is not insurmountable. In starting from this difficulty itself and making of it the touchstone of an interpretation of the metaphysics of time, I excluded from the outset, and by principle, the conceivability of time in light of the subject. Conversely, it is the “subject”— or rather, that which can no longer be conceived under this name—that is determinable in light of the temporalization of time in its properly evential dimension. The advenant is originally temporalized, in such a way that he can never set himself up as the origin of time. He can neither “hold” time nor retain it, nor ensure its continuity §16. The Temporal Meaning of Selfhood

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and cohesiveness: he comes too late for all of that. Temporality only reveals itself, indirectly, through him, insofar as his eventials are, so to speak, the shadow cast by an original temporalization that necessarily precedes them by right. To this extent, the “transformation” describes first and fundamentally the transcendental mobility, impossible to gather into presence, of events before it describes the dramatics of the ex-per-ience through which, by responding to what happens to him, the advenant opens the very possibility of the present as vista of temporality. Insofar as it describes the original temporalization of events, the transformation is not innertemporal: it “is” nothing other than time. It has no “moment” in which it takes place; it is not subjected to a “before” or an “after”; it is in no way an inner-temporal “mobility” or change, but the “mobility” of temporalization itself, according to which both ex-per-ience and the advenant advene. Transformation is not even directly “visible”; instead, its self-showing can be only indirect, originally constructed, where construction and givenness are closely interdependent, according to the requisites of a hermeneutical phenomenology. Insofar as it concerns the attitudes of the advenant, the transformation is only that which results or arises from the temporalization of time, that which happens according to the plot of an originally late appropriation; it is never “present” or “past,” but describes the very bursting forth of the present as such. And yet, it is necessary to add to all this—as I will attempt to show soon (see §19, below)—that, like all the other eventials, and like temporality itself, transformation cannot be conceived outside of any reference to innertemporality, according to a relation that is still to be defined. Thus, to the extent that this concept of “transformation” can be strictly delimited in its evential sense and distinguished from the innerworldly and inner-temporal acceptation of the term, it must be maintained that the evential characterization of selfhood is inseparable from the phenomenon of transformation. This phenomenon belongs to every ex-per-ience and requires: first, that the advenant does not repeat the having-taken-place but frees himself from it, in accordance with the evential of memory; second, that he keeps himself available to the future as the vista of the occurring of events and histories; and last, that the advenant actively appropriates through a decision the new eventualities that befall him—that is to say, that he redeploys them through a projection, in light of a renewed understanding of the world and of himself. Insofar as it is only possible on the basis of memory and availability, transformation thus belongs to selfhood in its evential sense. It is according to transformation that the advenant can appropriate what happens to him—that is to say, that the possibility of a present is given to him. The present is the articulation between the 198

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having-taken-place and the future, which is given to the advenant only according to transformation. It follows that the present is not a “part” or a point within a one-dimensional continuum in which facts would succeed one another, but what is opened only starting from the evential dynamic of the event and its appropriation. Nor is the present an ecstasy that the advenant would project, and within which events could present themselves to him and occur; rather, it is that which is “born” of the very movement of the temporalization of ex-per-ience. To be himself, for the advenant, is thus to be capable of the total metamorphosis of his understanding of himself and of the world that is synonymous with ex-per-ience in its original meaning. To be oneself is to be capable of ex-per-ience, and vice versa. The phenomenon of selfhood presupposes no constancy, no stability, no temporal permanence; on the contrary, it is characterized by the complete availability to the present of a metamorphosis from which the advenant, at the risk of himself, can only receive himself. As a condition of possibility of the advenant’s mobility, selfhood is not a “property” of the advenant, an attitude or a posture that, once acquired, cannot be alienated or lost; instead, it requires a constant lucidity and a perpetual adaptation to its changing conditions. A capacity to respond in an ever-new, diversified, and adapted manner to the unavoidable and inescapable injunction of the new, and in that way be transformed, by always beginning anew: the advenant cannot maintain himself in this possibility, since it excludes, on the contrary, the possibility of all maintained stability. The advenant cannot maintain himself in selfhood, because selfhood is precisely the antithesis of every permanence, the antithesis of that by which existence would be maintained, which is to say held in hand, retained and mastered, in the momentary stability of resoluteness. But selfhood is precisely such that it is necessary to give up keeping oneself in it in order to have access to it, and to give up maintaining oneself in it simply in order to stay there in those instants of total availability and metamorphosis in which the unforeseeable welcome of events plays out. This is why the present in which transformation is in action— or, rather, the present that itself “is in action” and appears through transformation—is not the now that remains unchanged throughout becoming; it is strictly unthinkable in inner-temporal terms. Nor is this present the instant in which Dasein has its constancy. It is thinkable only according to the dramatics of ex-per-ience.

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§17. The Mobility of the Adventure and Freedom I call “freedom” the very “mobility” of ex-per-ience (a “mobility” that, clearly, cannot be characterized in inner-temporal terms). Freedom is not a property of the advenant, but the advenant rests in freedom. He advenes to himself as such only if he regains freedom, and to regain it is, for the advenant, to regain himself. Such “freedom” keeps itself as far from any instability or versatility of the advenant, as from a sort of fatalism that would let events decide for him in his place. “Free” signifies for the advenant “open to the event,” insofar as in this opening there resides the possibility of every transformation by and through an ex-per-ience. Freedom, consequently, is not an inalienable property of the subject, a sui generis causality thanks to which he could absolutely inaugurate a new causal series, or an ontological fiat that would condition every decision. It is not confined to the faculty of choosing between two contraries, as the metaphysics of free will would have it. Freedom, eventially understood, is more primordial than any power of choice and every alternative: it is a modality of response to the event as opening to the possible that the event possibilizes. It is not a solution to the problem of an ultimate cause of our actions, or of an archcause preceding every cause, and giving rise to an arche-ology. It does not have to do with a question of fact bearing on actions and their causes, but with the question of the conditions of meaning for the advenant. The opposition between free will and destiny is here irrelevant for understanding the “thing” under consideration, insofar as this opposition rests on a purely causal analysis of events previously reduced to their factual determinations. If metaphysics consists in the failure to recognize the event as such—in its difference from the fact— then the opposition between freedom, as a choice’s independence, and fatality belongs entirely to metaphysics. Our problem is instead the following: under what conditions is the advenant capable of advening to himself through an ex-per-ience? What are for him the conditions of access to this “mobility” according to which, by responding to what happens to him, the advenant can advene to himself and take on a destiny? Under what conditions does his adventure have a meaning? Seen from such a viewpoint, being free is nothing, and becoming free is everything. The question of freedom is the question of the paths leading to freedom. Freedom “is” nothing other than the advenant’s paths or ways toward himself—that is to say, freedom is the path toward itself. What is proper to freedom lies in the adventure of its appropriation by the advenant, in the adventure of his appropriation of his own, as adventure of his own adventure. If the evential question of freedom is the question of 200

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the conditions of access to freedom, this is not on the grounds of a “primacy of the practical”— or indeed of the “concrete”—in the philosophical analysis, but by virtue of freedom’s very meaning. Freedom “is” only the advenant’s access to himself—that is to say, the access of the Self to itself, the advent of freedom to freedom. Of course, the advenant is originally [originairement] free, in the sense that, ever since his birth, he possesses a certain “aptitude” for freedom; but he is not originarily [originellement] free, by virtue of the original [originaire] disparity between the originary [originel] and the original [originaire] that belongs intrinsically to the phenomenon of birth. The advenant’s freedom is not originally a power that would be in his power, but the power in play in every possibility as it rises from the opening to the im-possible event. Freedom thus requires a constant exercise, not of will, but of availability. It is necessary to retie ceaselessly the thread of freedom, by taking up anew the adventure of being free. To retie the thread of freedom means to recapture the adventure at its opening. This can take place only in the present, as the vista of every transformation. The “mobility” of freedom first corresponds to that of the instant itself, as the unprecedented bursting forth from itself to itself, and depends on the responses that the advenant mobilizes in order to be able to keep himself in the wide-open of the present. But in what way does the advenant’s “mobility” echo the original “mobility” of the instant? How does the experiential present of freedom happen, in its “mobility,” as the present of transformation? To think, as Paul Klee says, “a freedom which merely demands its rights, the right to be mobile,” we must rely on the very dramatics of the decision, as it determines the vista of the present in accordance with the future of availability and the having-taken-place of memory. Freedom rests in the decision—and even in the decision in view of the decision itself— on the simple and strict condition that this decision renounces every original power over the possible and exposes itself to the impossibility of its own powers, to the event as possibilization, in such a way that this decision is the place in which a transformation of the advenant himself for himself is carried out. Freedom, in this sense, is the opening or the availability to eventuality as eventuality. It only happens in and through transformation. It rests in the impersonal making-possible of the event and in its appropriation by the advenant; it is a modality of response, an evential, according to which the advenant allows the possible to happen as such, before every factual decision and in view of this very decision. To this extent, no habit will ever be able to habituate us to freedom, for freedom is the strict opposite of every habit. It consists in “going beyond what is permitted,” following Braque’s profound saying: “Freedom for most people means the §17. The Mobility of the Adventure and Freedom

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free exercise of their habits; for us, it means going beyond what is permitted.” But what does this mean? “Going beyond what is permitted”: a strange operation! This amounts to saying: to have power over the possible. Is this not a mere tautology if the possible is, by definition, that which is powered by me, that the power of which is in my power? But the definition becomes meaningful and, along with it, the attitude that it describes, if this characterization of the “possible” is revoked in its principle. If the possible—in the sense of the eventuality—is not that over which we have power, but, more originally, that which surpasses our mea sure, that which is powered by us only to the extent that the event itself, and it alone, makes it possible, then the “evidence” of a seemingly tautological definition is transformed, for the advenant, into a difficult exercise. To have power over the possible is precisely to project oneself toward the im-possible as it rises up and springs forth from the un-anticipatable event, and, to this extent, to endure in the apertural present of time by keeping oneself available for an ex-per-ience. Far from being tautological, Braque’s definition says something difficult and at the same time very simple— difficult, perhaps, because simple: the adventure of freedom is summed up and exhausts itself in the opening to possibility. In order to be possible, this adventurous freedom can only be un-premeditated. Only such a freedom can respond to the absolute, unsurpassable newness of the event, because it has made itself previously available for it. This is why freedom can be represented by a movement that is without a goal, and yet intended, whose way exists only by clearing itself. Such a movement is illustrated by Stendhal’s sentence: “It is when somebody does not know where he is going that he goes the furthest.” The mobility of freedom contrasts, then, with the adventure frozen by the past that cannot be overcome of traumatism, by the past of a suffering that continuously comes back in the present, by a suffering perpetually in waiting and a bereavement that never stops ending: an adventure somehow “stopped,” left in the lurch, delivered to a repetition without renewal that weighs on it with the “fatality” of an unrecognizable destiny, a destiny that, for the advenant, is never his destiny. §18. The Antithetic Phenomenon of Selfhood and Its Temporal Meaning. An Example: Traumatism “Each dull turn of the world,” writes Rilke, “leaves such disinherited, / to whom neither the past nor the coming life lends substance.” The trial of traumatism, in which the advenant is crushed by a blind, terrifying, and anonymous power, in which he is no longer himself in the evential 202

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sense, manifests such a possibility. What, therefore, are its temporal implications? Traumatism is an event that we cannot make ours. It can manifest itself, for example, in the undergoing of terror that locks up every defense, inhibits every reaction, and in which the terrifying is not the frightful that we can face, but that which envelops us in the mode of obsession. This is the case with what psychiatry terms “traumatic neuroses,” which strike the victims of accidents, of attacks, or of massacres, or soldiers returning from war. An unassimilable event, traumatism prevents any transformation of the advenant from himself to himself, every ex-per-ience in its proper sense—that is to say, every in-person and “owned” ex-per-ience of that which takes on for the advenant the aspect of a shock. In this state of shock inhibiting every defense or every initiative on the part of the one who undergoes it, the advenant is subject to that which happens to him without the possibility to respond to it, or, consequently, to make it his own. He is reduced to his pure egoity stripped of all selfhood. Traumatism is, in this sense, the “negative,” to use a photographic metaphor, of the event. Opposed to that which happens by opening possibilities and obliging the advenant to invent his future is that which does not happen, but instead returns, that which invades the present in the mode of an incessant repetition, and from which nothing any longer happens, the traumatism having foreclosed the vista of the future. This is why the temporality of traumatism presents features strictly opposed to those of ex-per-ience: (1) the absence of memory, which goes hand in hand with the repetition of anxious dreams, recollections, emotions, and comportments tied to the trauma; (2) the lack of availability in front of a closed future where nothing happens; (3) the impossibility of any transformation— and, consequently, of any genuine present—in a “present” invaded by the symptom and closed by the painful and repeated intrusion into it of an unforgettable past. These features give outline to a temporality of incessant return, where the occultation of selfhood and the loss of freedom eventially understood lock up in advance the leeway in which any new event could occur and, through the return of an unassimilable shock, reduce the ex-per-ience itself to a “backlash.” Indeed, it is first the absence of memory that characterizes the undergoing of traumatism. Not only an absence of recollection of the traumatism itself—which also comes about in certain cases—but, more fundamentally, a modification in the very relation of the advenant to the havingtaken-place. This absence of memory, insofar as the memory is inseparable from the critical distancing of an ex-per-ience, is manifested here by what psychiatry calls the “traumatic repetition syndrome.” The trauma returns §18. The Antithetic Phenomenon of Selfhood

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ceaselessly and is sustained over again in several ways: the advenant is assaulted by repetitive dreams and intense and painful remembrances, he cannot detach his thoughts from the traumatizing event and from its consequences, and he manifests a general and, sometimes, paroxystic anxiety when he is exposed to facts reminding him of the traumatism. One of the most characteristic aspects of this repetition in the present of the havingtaken-place lies in the particular forms that dreams take on: they impose upon the advenant an unchanging scenario, or reproduce in the smallest detail, and identically, certain aspects, or the totality, of the trauma. “Flashback” dreams, or dreams that seem to be an exact “tracing” of the trauma are spoken of, in which the reproduction of the facts of war, for example, is described as “cinematographic.” The having-taken-place here appears interpolated in the present, preventing all mobility for the adventure suddenly petrified in a sort of stupor: the traumatic dream is distinguished by its fixity because the temporality of the ex-per-ience was altered at its root. “Our nature,” writes Pascal, “consists in movement; absolute rest is death”: this natural mobility is made rigid, stiffened by traumatism. The fi xity of the dream thus refers to the immobility, the seizure, and the paralysis that are characteristic of the phenomenon of terror: the dream “always reproduces itself up to this limit, to this point at which it is interrupted by the absence of reaction that had prevailed at the time of the traumatism.” The same goes for the repetition of remembrances and gestures tied to the trauma: in the first case, remembrances loom up again in the waking state, “not as an unpleasant memory, but as something upon which it is urgent to act”; in the second case, recurrent gestures and behaviors invade the present, “gestures that would have been adapted at the moment of the traumatic situation, but which were omitted.” The impossibility for the advenant to detach himself from the trauma goes hand in hand with the obsession with a past that cannot be overcome, which engorges and shuts the present, abolishing practically every demarcation between the various temporal vistas: the having-taken-place is lived as being present, the present appears as being past, it is captured in advance by the having-taken-place and stripped of its transforming virtue; in it nothing happens anymore, but everything returns— and amounts to the same. This stalled and stationary present invaded by the having-taken-place is expressed in a privileged way in the complaint. Indeed, as Maldiney has shown with regard to the complaint of the melancholic, this complaint only bemoans the fact that the past cannot be changed because it is rooted in a present that nothing changes: “The complaint is a defense against the very state that, at the same time, it enshrines.” 204

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This is why the temporality of traumatism is characterized not only by the absence of memory, but by the stagnation of the advenant in an achronous present deprived of all futurition. The present is no longer the place of a transformation in response to the event; it is no longer the vista according to which an in-person ex-per-ience of this critical upheaval is possible. Traumatism, on the contrary, exposes the advenant to the frozen present of a prostration shut in advance against every surprise. There dominates a “psychic dulling,” an “emotional anesthesia,” a feeling of detachment and of strangeness with regard to the present, which render everything meaningless without, however, defusing the imminence of an ubiquitous and insidious threat. Seizure by terror and sideration are the strict reverse here of surprise: “The moments of sideration reproduce and perpetuate the traumatic moment.” If surprise is the ground for all feeling, this shipwreck of feeling manifests the occultation of every surprise. The disinterest in the present, which shuts up and alters the passibility of the advenant, reveals—in opposition to all availability— a permanent anxiety or a “state of alert” that now characterize the relation of the advenant to the future. The victims of post-traumatic syndromes complain sometimes of the “feeling of having a limited future.” Terror has been detached from its fi xation on the traumatic event to become the being-surrounded-by an undefinable threat. This hyper-vigilance is here the contrary of availability. The future is no longer the bright opening to the eventuality of unanticipatable events; it is clouded by the obsession of an imminent danger, less eventual than potential, less potential than on the point of being realized at any moment. The unavailability for the future is marked here by various defensive behaviors aiming to equip the advenant against every effect of surprise. It can go hand in hand with the scaffolding of projects that are unrealizable, because deprived of any real grasp on the situation and of any opening to the im-possible possibility of eventuality. It can go as far as an incapacity for any genuine decision and any taking charge of one’s destiny, in a present henceforth dominated by a kind of stupor. The temporality of traumatism thus unveils itself as the unitary phenomenon of a repetition of recollections without memory, of a present without transformation, and of an anxiety without availability. The having-taken-place of memory is replaced by the obsessive past of repetition, the present of decision by the stagnation and immobility of recurrent thoughts and complaints, the future of availability as exposition to surprise by timorous and doleful anxiety, and the self-fulfilling anticipation of the threat. The adventure is as if frozen in its impetus: it no longer has any headway to propel it further on. The one-upmanship of egoity, as it manifests §18. The Antithetic Phenomenon of Selfhood

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itself, for example, in the syndrome of survivor’s guilt, in which the advenant wants to be responsible even if all possibility of responding in person to the traumatism has collapsed, or in all the “modalities of supplementation” in which, reduced to the rank of an egoity bereft of all selfhood, he nevertheless tries to remediate this deficiency by identifying himself with a group, a cause, or figures of authority —this one-upmanship of egoity, which is here the consequence of a failure of selfhood, shuts up the advenant inside a façade-like identity, all the more cracked and fragile that it pretends to be immutable: it covers over selfhood in its evential sense as opening to the free mobility of freedom. The traumatism weighs on the advenant with the fatal, blind aspect of an individual fate without a destiny. And yet, post-tramatic neurosis is only one of the forms that the human adventure can take in front of events that are inassimilable for and through it; in many psychoses, traumatism can play a structuring role or, at the least, the secondary role of a triggering factor. It is impossible, in the frame of this book, to advance further into the twists and turns of a phenomenology of the adventure broken by the irruption of madness in its extreme forms. Traumatism here plays only the strictly limited role of an example, and assuredly remains the index of significant problems. §19. Recapitulation: The Articulation of Time and of Temporality On the bases of the preceding analyses, it becomes possible to pose directly the question of the articulation between time, as the phenomenological mode of appearing of every event, and temporality as a characteristic of ex-per-ience in its original meaning. To do so, it will be helpful to sum up the very movement of our description. Unlike every innerworldly change and process, the event is not temporal, but temporalizing: it does not become itself in time, in such a way that its self-showing could be articulated in accordance with the three modes of appearing (“to come,” “present,” “past”) of every inner-temporal phenomenon; the event is not first “to come,” then “present,” then “past.” Indeed, if such were the case, the event would present itself, in the present, with a definitive meaning strictly circumscribed in the orb of a prior horizon of appearing: it would not make sense, would not open the leeway for a necessarily belated understanding, the space of phenomenalization for its own phenomenon, but instead would lend itself to an always ready-made explanation, because contemporary with its uprising and, consequently, closed to its incomparable newness—in short, it would in no way be an event. Thoroughly in-actual, which is to say irreducible to its factual occur206

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ring in the present, endlessly deferring its own meaning and thus illuminating, in light of its future, the past of its context: the event’s temporalization must be determined in keeping with these characteristics. Indeed, a fact can present itself as an event only if, by virtue of its very newness, it has a meaning that is necessarily in waiting, constitutively and structurally deferred, open to an understanding that, because it is never contemporary with its origin, can appropriate this meaning only according to the delay and the suspension of an unlimited task, in such a way that this presentation-in-waiting determines the original phenomenological meaning of time. In short, the event bears in itself and brings with itself its always-already and its future, as dimensionals of time, so that it is-always-already-that-which-it-will-be-as-such (event). It is this originally deferred presentation that absolutely prevents it from subordinating itself, in order to appear, to the transcendental apparatus of a horizon of welcoming unfolded by the subject, this subject being defined in turn by an inalienable presence to itself and to the world. It follows that the subject’s temporality is not what makes time possible as the dimension of appearing of every event. On the contrary, it is time that gives rise to temporality as the dimension of ex-per-ience. Here, time means the occurring within itself of an inaugural instant, constituted in itself under its own horizon (and, thus, freed from every subjective horizon relative to the modality of presence of a subject across time), but the “stance” of which constitutively in waiting already opens a future and a past, and is only temporalized with them. This future and this past here no longer signify modifications of an inner-temporal present—that is to say, the parts of a single continuum in continual transition one “into” another, according to the metaphysical understanding of time; but neither do they refer any longer to subjective attitudes as modalities of presence of a subject to all that which happens to him, which still belong, structurally, to this metaphysical apparatus. They constitute dimensions at once heterogeneous and co-originary in their differential arising, the absolute diachrony of which is irreducible both at once to every inner-temporal present and to the temporalizing presence of a subject. As dimensionals of time, the future and the past do not mean a present in expectation and an overcome present, which would refer back to recollection and expectation (or to any other attitude of a subject), but rather a past “more ancient” than any present, to which I was not contemporary, and a future irreducible to every expectation and every projection, because opened originally by the event, and by it alone. The phenomenon of time thus refers to the articulation of the three dimensionals insofar as they burst forth together from the instant and belong to the phenomenological mode of appearing of every event. §19. The Articulation of Time and of Temporality

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However, with such considerations we have not exhausted—far from it!—the determinations of temporality. Indeed, absolutely speaking, there is never anything like an isolated event. The events that befall the advenant are mutually articulated in giving rise to histories. The characterization of time that we have just recalled remains, in this respect, too narrow— and, in truth, still abstract—to give an account of the reciprocal articulation of events and of histories within the ex-per-ience of the advenant, or rather, as this ex-per-ience itself. We were thus constrained, in a second phase, to go beyond the abstraction of the initial description of time by reintroducing into the analysis the advenant’s modalities of response to what happens to him, or the eventials. Temporality is time’s way of appearing, such that it can be the object of a phenomenological interpretation by the guiding thread of eventials according to which the advenant is related to the temporalizing occurrence of events while himself ex-per-iencing them. Temporality articulates, as we have seen, three vistas (the having-takenplace, the present, the future) according to which events can appear in accordance with the manner in which the advenant relates to them in response: memory, availability, transformation. These vistas do not refer to the horizons that would set out the temporalizing attitudes of a subject; rather, they are constitutive of the temporalizing occurring of events, such that it precedes and makes possible the eventials through which the advenant responds to it in person. But if the vistas of temporality are the dimensions of appearing of every event in its temporalizing occurring, it then follows that the future, the present, and the having-taken-place must possess phenomenal characteristics such that events can declare themselves there according to their own way of appearing; and since this very way of appearing is indeed characterized by the fact that the presentation-in-waiting of the event already mobilizes its past and its future, the event being-always-already-what-it-willbe-as-such—that is to say, deferring its own presentation in such a way that this presentation can appear only retrospectively in light of the future that it has itself made possible—the result is that the diff erent vistas of temporality must, in their turn, comprise and articulate in themselves the three dimensionals of time: the future in light of which the event can appear, retrospectively, as an event, the always-already of this retrospection and the deferred present of this presentation. But how is this phenomenon possible? This is what the analyses of memory have already indicated. The havingtaken-place, as the vista of memory, is the dimension according to which an event that is past as fact can appear, in light of its own future, as actual or inactual: either this future, as dimensional of time, appears still open, 208

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to the extent that the event conditions the possibilities in light of which the advenant can understand his present, this event remaining therefore actual; or this future appears shut by the occurring of new events, which henceforth make the first event inactual. The vista of the having-takenplace is thus constituted in itself in such a way that it comprises and articulates the three dimensionals of time that condition the appearing of every event; and the same goes for the two other vistas, the future and the present. The future does not phenomenalize itself starting from the advenant’s attitudes of expectation or anticipation and in conformity with the horizons that these attitudes set out; rather, it describes a heterogeneous vista, unconditioned with regard to the attitudes through which the advenant relates to it, but itself prescribing the way in which the advenant can relate himself to what announces itself there. Insofar as it conditions the possibility for everything that occurs to occur for the advenant, the vista of the future thus articulates according to its proper perspective the three dimensionals of time. In the same way, the present as vista of temporality remains strictly unthinkable starting from the subject’s modalities of presence to itself and to the world: it is phenomenalized in accordance with the modalities of response of the advenant to the instant, insofar as this instant indicates a presence originally deferred and “taking time”—that is to say, a presence that is inseparable from a being in-waiting and an evidence, from a future and an always-already. The dramatics of the present is interiorly sub-tended by the mobility of the event according to its three dimensionals, in such a way that the present constitutes itself in itself in accordance with this mobility. In order that the present might appear as the dimension of every appropriation of the eventualities and of every transformation, from himself to himself, of the advenant, it is necessary that the event be already declared according to the instant on the way of its own occurring, that it be already announced according to the three dimensionals that articulate its self-showing, and that are henceforth implicated in the mode of phenomenalization of the present itself. This complexity and this mutual envelopment of the different times, according to which each of them is articulated to the other two by including them already in itself, conducts us to the limits of what a phenomenology can try to describe. This is a phenomenon that Schelling caught sight of, and T. S. Eliot after him: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” Of course, to stress the reciprocal inherence or inclusion of the various times is sheer nonsense if this statement regulates itself on the phenomenon of inner-temporality. To maintain that the vista of the havingtaken-place, for example, comprehends and articulates within itself the §19. The Articulation of Time and of Temporality

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three dimensionals of time assuredly does not mean that an event having-taken-place would be, in the same respect, “present” or “future.” For the event does not “pass away,” in the sense of an inner-temporal fact; it becomes concluded [révolu] by a revolution of the possible itself, according to which the eventualities that this event had opened appear, henceforward, in the light of new events, as dead-possibilities. In other words, it is because the event is not an inner-temporal phenomenon that it can appear, even though concluded as a fact, as inseparable from its own future, insofar as this future determines its character of actuality or of inactuality in the present. In short, it is only because the having-takenplace, the present, and the future as vistas of temporality do not mean mere modifications of an inner-temporal present or, put another way, modes of appearance of a fact gathered into presence by a subject, that this affirmation of the inherence of the dimensionals of time in the vistas of temporality can possess a phenomenological meaning. The future, the present, and the having-taken-place constitute the conditions of appearing of every event, in its suspended occurring, in conformity with an ex-per-ience; as such, they are irreducible to modes of the present or to modifications of an original presence: “having-taken-place,” eventially understood, does not mean “no longer present,” but rather, “possessing a future in light of which is decided its actuality or inactuality”; and in the same way, “to come” here takes on the meaning: “which will overturn the havingtaken-place,” and “present” means: “which is the vehicle of a possible transformation.” And yet, there are some difficulties here. By reformulating in this way the meaning of the different temporal vistas, do we not fall back into the paradox of an inner-temporal (metaphysical) understanding of time? How should we account, for example, for the conjugation of the verb in the future tense in the expression, “which will overturn the having-takenplace”? Am I not again presupposing here the inner-temporal phenomenon of succession in order to conceive the evential phenomenon of temporality? Moreover, by conceiving the vistas as the “conditions of appearing” of events, do I not fall again into a formalism that my analyses were intended to avoid? Let us begin with the last objection. It would certainly be well-founded if I was saying that the temporality of ex-per-ience, articulated according to its three vistas, would make possible the appearing of events according to the three dimensionals of their temporalization. But it is precisely the other way around: it is not the temporality of ex-per-ience that precedes “in the subject,” and makes possible the arising of events, according to a transcendental-subjective apparatus, but instead, the differential arising of 210

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events as they mobilize and lay out time in the dia-chrony of its dimensionals irreducible to one another, as well as to the inalienable presence of a subject; it is this suspended-bursting-forth that gives rise to the ex-perience and to its temporality. This is why the phenomenological distinction between time and temporality cannot be equated to that between objective and subjective time, whatever the manner in which their difference is conceived. It is strictly impossible to separate here the temporal vistas from the events that they manifest: granted, the vistas are modalities of ex-perience, and, as such, they are conditioned by the eventials of the advenant; but these eventials (memory, availability, transformation), in turn, are conditioned more originally by the appearing of events starting from themselves according to the dramatics of their self-temporalization. It then becomes possible to be more specific: the vistas of temporality cannot be the “conditions of appearing” of events in the sense of transcendental conditions of possibility; they are inseparable from eventials that possess, “in” the advenant, the status of unconditions. They are openings of the world, the very possibility of which is dependent on the dynamic or the dramatics of the events that declare themselves there. The “form” of time and its “content” are inseparable. This is why the attitudes of the advenant cannot enjoy any original status for the temporalization of time, unlike what is the case in the metaphysics of time from Augustine to Heidegger. Now we can answer the first questions, by far the more imposing, formulated above. It is exactly to the extent that the temporality of ex-perience cannot take on a transcendental-subjective status with regard to the inner-temporal phenomenon of change, but is rooted in the temporalization of time such that it can be described through the guiding concept of the event, that it also can never be entirely set free from all reference to the phenomenon of inner-temporality. If the phenomenological description of events in terms of facts and, by way of consequence, of inner-temporality, always remains possible and legitimate, it is because the conversion of appearing (or the phenomenological transition) of which the event is the operator, and which allows for its phenomenological differentiation from the fact, never makes its factual dimension disappear. The time of events (and, following that, the temporality of ex-per-ience) is not an other time or a beyond-time that would keep itself “behind” the time-of-facts; it is this very time restored to the original dimension of meaning such that it articulates the advenant’s understanding of his history. No phenomenological hermeneutics can free itself entirely, in its descriptions, from the phenomenon of inner-temporality—which of course does not mean that it understands time itself in an inner-temporal manner, after the fashion of metaphysics. This is why even the description of the having-taken-place (to take §19. The Articulation of Time and of Temporality

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only this example) as vista according to which events that are past as facts nevertheless conserve, from the point of view of memory, an irreducible future— even this description still brings to bear a reference to the event as a past fact. For an event is the taking-place of a fact to the extent that it lays out the dimension of a meaning irreducible to its context, the taking-place of a fact inasmuch as it is necessary to search for a meaning in it, and to the extent that this meaning structures through and through the adventure of the one to whom it advenes, by giving him the possibility to advene to himself and to understand himself—precisely as “advenant.” The takingplace of a fact does not take place in time; there is nothing factual or inner-temporal about it: it “is” intrinsically time, the temporalization of time itself; but it is also not separable from the fact of which it forms the taking-place. However, these specifications in no way amount to a restriction of the bearing of the preceding analyses. What might appear here as a limit to their validity has, in fact, a positive meaning: the impossibility, for every evential description of temporality, to free itself entirely from all reference to the phenomenon of inner-temporality manifests, indeed, the structural inter-dependence, already glimpsed by Aristotle, of the phenomenon of time with those of movement and change, considered in their widest meanings. In a word, counter to every temptation to subjectivize time and to all idealism, the evential hermeneutics here reconnects with the demands of a certain form of realism: time is first of all a feature of facts themselves, which is to say, an order governing their succession, and, only to this extent, can it be a feature of events and, consequently, of ex-per-ience as the original dimension of meaning, irreducible to the facts and to their succession, but ultimately referred to them. Th is temporality of ex-per-ience structured entirely by self-distance and self-difference, by loss and forgetting, is, as now appears clearly, unthinkable in light of the subject and its modes of presence. The advenant cannot gather into presence the event in its breaking out, at once sudden and yet retrospective—that is, he cannot set himself up as the measure of the presence of the various dimensionals that articulate its appearing by referring their difference back to the measure of his presence. This is why the temporality of ex-per-ience eludes every possible totalization. Th is impossibility reveals itself even more in the light of those events to which there corresponds no fact whatsoever for the advenant: the radically immemorial having-taken-place of birth and the radically unavailable future of death.

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§20. The Finitude of Temporality (a) The immemorial pre-time of birth Insofar as he is born, the advenant is originally struck by an event that he can never entirely appropriate, and that opens the entire adventure to the excess of a meaning of which it is not the origin. For the advenant, to be born signifies first of all and originally not to be his own origin, to advene to himself only according to the suspension and the delay that this inaugural event has introduced into the adventure, and that condition the latter through and through. Thus, birth is in the first place this rigorously incomprehensible event, because it precedes every context and every hermeneutic projection and introduces by itself, into the world, an unassimilable meaning for the one to whom it happens: “I do not know who put me into the world,” writes Pascal, “nor what the world is, nor what I am myself.” This situation is precisely that of the advenant who comes into the world. I know nothing of the world nor of myself, nor of those through whom I am here. This “terrible ignorance,” as Pascal calls it, belongs to the inner tenor of this event. Birth is an event impossible to appropriate for the advenant, for at least two reasons: (1) My beginning is never simply the beginning; at the very moment in which I am thrown into the world, the world gives itself to me as older than me. Birth precipitates me into the world, or rather, it opens a world for me, only by exposing me to an ante-personal prehistory that precedes me and hangs over me from the outset. Birth delivers me over to a history only by delivering me possibilities that precede my history, it throws me into a destiny only by introducing me to possibilities that exceed my destiny: those of a given language, milieu, and culture, those of an ancestral heritage for which I must often pay the price or whose violence I have to endure, and that forms the plot and hidden spring of every tragedy. (2) The appropriation of an event presupposes the possibility of one’s own firsthand experience of this event; now, birth precedes every self-ownership and every selfhood of the one who receives it. It is in an impersonal and anonymous way that this happens, and the one to whom this happens is not in the position to say “I” and to relate to it in person, by answering for it. An anonymity of birth, expressed admirably by Beckett: “I gave up before birth, it is not possible otherwise, but birth there had to be, it was he, I was inside, that’s how I see it, it was he who wailed, he who saw the light, . . . it is not possible otherwise”: the divergence between the “I” and the “there” (or, in Beckett’s French text, the “ça”), relayed by the “he,” here describes quite accurately birth as an evential phenomenon. The

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renunciation (“I gave up”) before being born probably expresses the impossibility of taking over in person and firsthand such an event through which I appear always already inscribed within a history that outstrips me—that of the others. Birth is the proto-event through which the advenant has a destiny before having his destiny. It conditions his adventure by conferring upon it this structurally suspended character according to which selfhood itself is established—aback and with a delay—as possibility of response. For the advenant who is born is not originarily himself, but is such, originally, only by becoming so. Birth instills in the adventure an original disparity between the originary and the original. My selfhood’s original nonoriginality determines selfhood as an evential phenomenon. It is these features that make of birth a singular event, irreducible to others, and that transcend the characteristics according to which the other events allow themselves to be conceived: starting with that distinguishing event and traumatism. If traumatism signifies an event that is unassimilable to ex-per-ience because it outstrips every capacity for appropriation by the advenant, birth is truly the first traumatism, the original traumatism. But if, by “traumatism,” we mean that which, by inhibiting every power of response, de-structures the “Self ” itself, birth cannot correspond (at least in the majority of cases) to such a definition. Neither event nor traumatism, birth here receives an ambiguous status that makes it a limit ex-per-ience, withdrawn from the vistas of temporality: the having-takenplace and the present. Indeed, birth is im-memorial in a rigorous sense that in no way refers to a mere failure of recollection. If memory is the ex-per-ience of events having-taken-place as actual or inactual—that is to say, according to varied modalities that make possible their appropriation in light of their inwaiting possibilities—birth is not among the events of which the advenant could have a memory—that is to say, of which he could appropriate to himself the possibilities in the course of an ex-per-ience. For as far as he can go back among what had taken place for him, he will never encounter this event; for as long as there is for him, in general, having-taken-place, birth appears “older” than that; or rather, for as long as events array themselves temporally for him as to-come, having-taken-place, or present, birth does not appear among these events; it is not on the same level as them. The advenant cannot answer for the very possibility of the world such as it is addressed to him through this event, because he cannot appropriate the infinity of possibilities that precede him in a pre-personal history upon which he is dependent. In being born, the advenant is not himself the origin of his own possibilities. Others have given him a name, to begin with; a place has been decided for him in the midst of a social group and a 214

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family; someone has perhaps even chosen for him a “vocation”: his thoughts, his aspirations, his beliefs, all this is not imposed upon him purely and simply from the outside, but envelops him in a diff use manner, and plays for him the role of an atmospheric milieu. His “milieu” here is not only a social and economic environment, but the totality of the still neutral or impersonal possibilities preceding every choice of his, between which he cannot choose, but rather, on the background of which every choice of his can solely be made. These possibilities are, we might say, “his” possibilities before the advenant is even “himself ”: they are “his” possibilities in the mode of a neutrality that does not mean the falleness (Verfallen) of an original selfhood, but rather the original non-originarity of the Self, the fundamental anonymity of the adventure from its inaugural nonground. The advenant, in being born, is still, properly speaking, “no one,” and it is precisely for this reason that the impersonal is his lot. Selfhood will never be able to establish itself and be conquered except against the background of this primary and fundamental impersonality. The anonymity in question therefore influences the very meaning of selfhood: selfhood is necessarily second, originally non-originary; it responds originally to the impersonal event. This is why the gift of the world exceeds every possibility for the advenant to appropriate the anonymous possibilities that precede and condition his own possibilities, to the extent that this gift precedes every possibility of the “own” as such: every selfhood. Never truly able to appropriate these possibilities, the advenant can never ever free himself from them, either: he cannot gain access to a memory of that which in this way precedes for him all self-ownership. These anonymous possibilities in the midst of which he has grown, those of an imposed language, a culture, traditions, a place of residence, those choices that others have made in his place, or rather, those choices that no one, actually, has carried out, but that impose themselves on him with a kind of evidence, he can, of course, attempt to undo them, to renounce them, to rid himself of them, but this is only ever another way of determining himself in relation to them, even if against them: the advenant will never abolish this delay, will never fill this immemorial vacancy of himself, he will never retract this delay that is his delay, the very delay of selfhood. He will never be able to raise himself to the rank of origin of himself and of the possible. Therefore, birth, at the same time that it dispenses to the advenant inexhaustible eventualities transcending every power of appropriation, also opens his history to an immemorial pre-time that the advenant “inherits” at the same time as he “inherits” himself. Birth manifests the immemorial in its positive sense: it hangs over the advenant from the absolute anteriority of a more-than-past that is never a mere modality of its having-taken-place. §20. The Finitude of Temporality

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Consequently, birth also hangs over every possible instant and every possible present. About the fact of which the event is the event, indeed, there can be in principle a remembrance; but birth is an event that was never a fact for the one to whom it happens. If every fact presupposes a context in accordance with which it appears and from which it draws its meaning, birth is not itself a fact: no context preexists it, in the light of which the “fact” of the birth would be explainable and understandable for the one who “experiences” it. Not only is the advenant not contemporary with the event of his birth—which is true, in principle, for every event— but he is not contemporary with the fact of which there is event, or that makes event in his own adventure— of which the adventure itself is the advent. In order that birth may occur as a fact in the world, it would be necessary that the world be already there before I am born; it would be necessary that I be able to be present in some way at my coming into the world, and understand it in light of the context that would preexist it. Th is would be the condition for my being able to remember my birth: for every remembrance, as we have seen, presupposes a context in which it takes place, which confers upon it its meaning and allows for its identification. But if I am never contemporary to the fact of being born, to the fact by which there are facts, or rather, if birth, as an event, was never done/was never a fact [n’a jamais été fait(e)], it follows that birth transcends not only every recollection, but also every possible instant. Having never been done, having never been a fact—that is to say, having never been accomplished in a definitive present—this event announces itself only according to an absolute delay over every present, according to the delay of the absolutely unpresentable, with relation to which all contemporaneity and every present of a transformation will ever fall short. “Anterior” to every instant, birth can never be either actual or inactual for the advenant: it precedes such a division. Absolutely un-experienceable, the unpresentable nonpresence of birth precedes, in the more-than-past, every possible instant, so that it makes impossible any conception of a beginning of time, in the sense of an origin that would have itself been present. If this original event possibilizes “for the first time” all the advenant’s possibilities, there is no “first time” for this event. If birth is indeed original— determining a priori the very meaning of the adventure—it is in no way originary, in the sense of an origin itself present, in the sense of a coincidence of the present and the origin, of an inaugural beginning or of a first moment of time. Devoid of any first moment, without possible beginning, temporality only unfolds itself from this impossible-to-present or -re-present “origin,” from the abyss of all present that signifies, first of all, the erasure of every origin. Birth is 216

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the erased, because divided, origin of temporality, where the originary and the original diverge originally. This is why, as the un-presentable origin of the temporalization of time and, consequently, the erasure of every “origin” conceived as its “first moment” and “beginning,” birth signifies not the closure of the adventure in on itself, its possible gathering under the horizon of death, but, instead, the absolute impossibility of every horizon according to or beneath which a totalization of the adventure and of its meaning would be thinkable. Birth is not the ultimate horizon, the horizon of all horizons, but the vista through which they escape: open in the direction of a pre-time that the advenant inherits without ever being able to reduce it to his mea sure, gather it into presence or take it over in person. But, one might object, if birth is in no way a temporal horizon, in the sense of that which delimits, following the guiding thread of specific attitudes, a subject’s modalities of self-presence and presence to the world across time, the orb of non-presence belonging structurally to every subjective presence to . . . , how can there still be a phenomenon of it? The horizon, even if it does not appear directly itself—that is to say, thematically, even if it can never become a theme, is nevertheless co-implicated a priori in every appearing. It articulates the manifestation of that which does not appear, but is always in principle susceptible of appearing, in accordance with the attitudes of a subject. It manifests itself, henceforward, at least indirectly, through these attitudes, as what they project or lay out. Now, birth transcends every horizon understood in this sense: it indicates an unpresentable past—that is to say, one rigorously incommensurable with the modalities of presence to . . . itself and the world of a subject; it announces itself through the vistas of temporality for as much as these are thinkable only following the guiding thread of the temporalization of events. On what grounds, then, can birth still be the object of a phenomenology? Is it still a phenomenological given? Yes, without a doubt, but we are dealing with a “given” that does not at first show itself, but that must be entirely “reconstructed” from the witnesses of others and from the experience of the birth of others. And yet, this in-apparent event, entirely reconstructed, never given in the sense in which a fact is, belongs structurally to the way in which the advenant is given to himself; the advenant can recover himself only on the ground of this non-ground impossible to be taken over, impossible to present or represent, preventing all self-totalization of the adventure, all integral understanding of the possibilities that cross it, all “self-transparency” of a meaning entirely accessible to an interpretation. Now, this prehistory that confers its initial possibilities on my history, this prehistory that has never been there for me, irreducible to every §20. The Finitude of Temporality

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having-taken-place, this prehistory that I have to appropriate according to the in-finity of an ever-open task without ever being able to do it entirely, stands not only “behind me,” hanging over me from an un-presentable past; it also stands “in front of me,” “ahead” of every projection, and hangs over me from a radically un-available future that points, ultimately, toward the future of my death. To the pre-time that birth brings with it, that it contains and conceals in the folds of the origin, there corresponds the irreducible after-time that is inscribed in the event of death. Indeed, the absolute, irreducible delay that traverses my adventure from its initial advent, and that makes of my birth an event that is forever unappropriable, is also inseparable from the absolute suspension of my death, insofar as it will remain forever unavailable. By establishing an absolute delay of the adventure from itself, according to the un-presentable suspension of an un-appropriatable origin, the birth with respect to which the advenant ever “delays” makes it so that the possibility is “in advance” over him and thus wells up from the future: the birth exposes the adventure to eventualities of which it is not the measure, and opens it, ultimately, on the un-available possibility of death. Death is not a pure accident, but an event whose possibility depends on the evential character of the native adventure itself. (b) The unavailable after-time of death Like birth, death is never a fact for the advenant to whom it occurs. It is the event in which every event is abolished, and in which no world is configured any longer. An event more future than every possible future, transcending the future as vista of temporality. Indeed, “death is never present,” as Maurice Blanchot writes, “it is the abyss of the present, time without a present, with which I have no relationships.” It does not occur in the instant; it is without a possible present. Hence a series of paradoxes: death is an event to which there corresponds no fact for the one to whom it happens; as an event it is not only unexpected, but un-expectable, and yet, it is of all the events that can befall us the only one that we can expect with complete certainty, the only absolutely certain event; it manifests an eventuality to which there corresponds no availability, in the sense that I have attempted to specify, and yet, it does not exclude our “preparing” for it. But let us examine these paradoxes more closely. Like any event, death can be expected as a fact: to expect death as death, to prepare oneself for it or resolve oneself to it are attitudes familiar to every advenant, and that give rise to practical measures: choosing a burial plot, drawing up a will. But what is expected in such an expectation? By 218

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making arrangements touching on his death, the advenant organizes a posthumous time: he makes the hypothesis according to which his death, as a fact, would already have taken place, and he relates to the world following this cataclysm in the mode of a fiction in which he is a character. He relates in a contradictory manner to a world from which his presence has been canceled as if he were still present there: he imagines his own burial in order to decide whether he would prefer it to be modest or imposing, intimate or solemn. The contradiction that bursts out in such an attitude manifests, positively, the phenomenological meaning of death as event irreducible to its actualization, radically and definitively in-actual— that is to say, definitively non-definitive, bringing no end or conclusion whatsoever, since only a fact that has occurred in the present tense in the world can be accomplished, definitive. Consequently, even if death can be expected as a fact, it can never be a fact for the one who awaits it: it transcends constitutively every expectation, not only in the sense in which every event is by definition unforeseeable or un-expectable, but in the sense in which, unlike every other event that comes about also as a fact, it remains forever in-actual for as long as there are facts in general for the advenant. Its future more future than any future, stripped of every possible instant and present, is a future without any possible grip, a future without future, inaccessible to every expectation, but also to every projection. Of course, in a sense, death can be anticipated by the one whom it concerns in the first place: but this anticipation only reaches death’s possibility for him. It only aims at a representation where this event is referred back to a modality of the presence or of the Being of the one who will undergo it, the “Being-towards-death” that remains Dasein’s way of Being, a modality of its existence, and that, by uniquely determining death sub specie possibilitatis, misses its ultimate and irreducible eventness. The resolute anticipation of its “ultimate possibility” by the exemplary being gives no access whatsoever to death as such—that is to say, to death as event, in the secret of its radically un-anticipatable eventuality—for such an anticipation remains entirely empty, its emptiness belonging constitutively to what Heidegger calls the “formality” of ontology. What is more, this anticipation must be grounded, to begin with, on the possibility of death: “death is indeed a distinctive possibility of Dasein,” writes Heidegger. But why is this death “possible”? How to account for the fact that Dasein is “thrown” into it? Because he has excluded in principle that Being-in-the-world and its existentialia can be characterized in light of events (Ereignisse)—that is to say, because he has dismissed every evential constitution of existence and has not conferred upon birth any original status, Heidegger is not in a position to answer these questions. §20. The Finitude of Temporality

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Indeed, in order that death might be an anticipatable possibility for Dasein, it must be certain. But where does such a “certainty” come from? Sein und Zeit distinguishes between the empirical certainty (Gewißheit) of a not-yet present “event” (Ereignis), which is the certainty of the They alone, and “apodictic,” unconditional certainty, which belongs to resolute Dasein and designates a Being-certain (Gewiß-sein). But what grounds, for Dasein, the unconditional certainty of its death, if it is neither an empirical grounding (the experience of another’s death), nor any calculus of probabilities? Heidegger gives no answer, because the very ground of such a certainty is lacking in fundamental ontology, because this ontology claims to understand Dasein independently of any event that could happen to it, beginning with the one through which it advenes itself to itself: birth. Indeed, what makes death certain as an event is precisely its original connection with birth: it is the evential character of the adventure itself, insofar as the advenant comes to such an adventure by being born in it. It is to the extent that we are exposed, from birth and by birth, to events, that death can announce itself for us as one among these events. It is because the advenant “is” nothing other than the adventure of his advent to the world from an initial event, because this latter traverses and structures his adventure through and through, that death, as the event of the loss of the world, determines him a priori. Death’s being unknown and, indeed, the last unknown, does not, for this reason, make death less certain, since its absolute certainty is not the certainty of a merely probable fact, but the unconditioned certainty of an event inscribed within the evential structure of the adventure itself. Thus, even if we were to assume— as the fantasies of biologists sometimes invite us to do—that aging could be slowed or even entirely stopped, and that death could be indefinitely moved back, nevertheless neither accidents, nor sickness, nor murder, nor suicide would thereby be removed: a biologically immortal advenant would still be a “mortal-immortal,” because he would still come into the adventure through birth. Nothing could ever withdraw the advenant from the adventure of an opening without measure to events: including the event of his own disappearance. An event that is unknown and known from the outset, unforeseeable as to the time and yet expected at every instant, the only certain one and, nevertheless, subject to the widest gradient of uncertainty, absolutely undetermined as to its meaning and its tenor: this event is death. But how can the advenant then relate himself to it, beyond every possible expectation and anticipation? Can death be phenomenologically characterized in accordance with the evential of availability? Not in the least. Death remains forever un-available, in the sense that it transcends all availability. Indeed, if availability is defined as the adve220

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nant’s capacity to transform himself through that which happens to him, death eludes such a capacity: it is the absolute transformation in which the journey endpoint abolishes itself in the traversal, the ultimate transformation in which every possibility of a transformation is ultimately abolished. And yet, the advenant undertakes with death a fundamental relationship that is manifested in the phenomenon of despair. Despair consists in the unbearable revelation that we are nothing. We are already dead to the world, so to speak: nothing has meaning any longer, nor can it have meaning; all our initiatives sink into insignificance. Being already dead, we no longer have to anticipate death, nor advance toward it, we are stripped of all power over it— of all capacity-to-die—and, at the same time, of all power over ourselves. Everything sinks into a fundamental anonymity in which we are no longer there for anyone, in which we are no longer anyone, but run aground endlessly on the non-ground of the adventure, on its passibility stripped of all selfhood, deserted by every feeling other than the desert of feeling, its painful and unbearable absence. It is here that a fundamental relationship is tied between the advenant and the neutral, common, banal, and indistinct death, the impersonal “they die” as ultimate event. When it comes toward us in this manner, ruining every projection toward it, when everything seems already finished, death—insofar as it announces itself from the painful apathy of despair— appears, at the same time, stripped of all pathos. Not only does it no longer strike fear, not only does it no longer give rise to anxiety in and through which selfhood is always at stake, but death seems almost sweet, welcoming, and generous: in it, through it, we abdicate our powers, we fraternize with every other in an indistinct communion. The adornments of pride, the preoccupation with oneness, the desire for recognition or distinction leave us. Humble, we enter into the humility of death, which lowers us to the ground and stretches us out on its humus. The trial of despair thus opens onto an entirely different disposition, which we will call, for lack of a better word, “serenity.” Serenity is the fundamental relation of the advenant to death inasmuch as he abandons himself to it or gives himself up to it entirely, not for himself, but for it. Up to the point that, in doing so, he fraternizes with all the dying—that is to say, with every mortal, according to an immemorial communion. All serenity is only possible against the background of despair, in the collapse of all that about which we care or may care, beginning with ourselves. All serenity is serenity beyond despair, which means, first of all, through despair. It arises from this traversal and is possible only through it. Serenity thus means this “availability” for that which overhangs and transcends every availability in its evential sense, every transformation in and through §20. The Finitude of Temporality

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which we would still be at stake in our selfhood— an availability for the un-actualizable event of death. This death that we can welcome, in the latency of its secret, this wide-open death, is not the death considered from the standpoint of Being and through its lens, it is not death as nothing or as nihilation playing at the heart of Being itself. But, in order to be able to understand it thus, in order simply to try to be capable of such an achievement, we would, as Rilke says, have “to read the word ‘death’ without negation.” Death thus appears, with regard to these analyses, as an eminently paradoxical phenomenon, since, on the one hand, in its radical eventuality, it withdraws from every expectation, every anticipation (like every other event), but also from every availability; however, on the other hand, of all events it is the only one for which it is possible— and even necessary— truly to prepare oneself, the only one for which the possibility of “being ready” has a meaning; it is the sole event that is expected from the outset, the only event that surprises us [nous surprend ] less than it simply takes us [nous prend], and that, in carrying us off, removes us from all surprise. Inscribed from the outset within our possibilities as they befall us from the event of being born. Accompanying us from the outset and conferring upon our destiny the “fatal” face that it presents to us. But in order to understand this paradox of an adventure’s ultimate eventuality inscribed a priori in its evential structure, it is necessary to consider again the link between birth and death. What the hermeneutics of birth showed in the first place was the original exteriority of the meaning of the adventure for the one to whom this adventure advenes: to be born is not to be one’s own origin; it is never to begin at zero, to be exposed from the origin to an original pre-time; it is not being able to gather the meaning of the adventure within the closure of a horizon, not being able to subordinate the bursting open of time to a subject’s presence to itself and to the world. This excentricity of meaning is the very way according to which the meaning advenes—that is to say, takes on an evential status: in order for the adventure to have sense or make sense for the advenant, it has to be opened to the original excess of a meaning of which it is not the origin, which always comes from “elsewhere” than this adventure and originally transcends every hermeneutic projection. Birth thus confronts me with the phenomenon well described by Sartre, according to which “I find myself engaged in an already meaningful world which reflects to me meanings which I have not put into it.” But, far from this phenomenon ultimately referring, as Sartre believes, to a mere fact, to the “originary fact of the other’s presence in the world,” it is necessary to hold, instead, that the priority of meaning over me is a phe222

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nomenon that determines a priori the adventure in its evential sense. The priority of meaning over me is of one piece, here, with the precedence of the other over me that belongs structurally to the phenomenon of birth—that is to say, is implicated a priori in all my eventials. It is precisely the failure to recognize the phenomenon of birth that anchors Sartre’s philosophy in a classic metaphysics of subjectivity, and that leads him to conceive the existence of others than me as “an entirely contingent fact.” It is because the “for-itself” can in no way be born that the precedence of meaning over it takes on a character of total absurdity. By contrast, if the world and the adventure advene to the advenant only through the event of a birth, the others appear co-implicated from the origin in his adventure in such a way that the meaning of this adventure is prior to the advenant and, subsequently, incommensurable to his hermeneutical projections. There is nothing, beginning with my birth and my name, that was not decided for me before me— that is to say, before any possibility for me to decide about myself—and such a possibility is gained, in return, only against the background of pre-personal possibilities of which I am not the initiator. If others, for example, had not been painters, musicians, or philosophers before me, there would be strictly no sense, for me, in discovering or in choosing a vocation, for there would actually be no vocation, nothing in favor of which or against which to define myself. If humanity, before me, had not suffered, loved, made war, erected monuments and works of art, discovered mathematical theorems, elaborated systems of exchange, juridical and political systems, and so on, there would be for me no sense in “finding my place,” even if by rebellion—that is to say, there would be no sense in becoming the one that I am becoming. An existence starting with itself would be a total and sheer absurdity. But, then, this excentricity of the meaning of my own adventure is not a contingent feature. For there would also be no meaning for me in discovering a vocation, to take up this example once again, if indeed there was nothing to transmit or to bequeath to descendants. If I could not “give my life,” devote it to a cause, commit it to a task that transcends my own finitude, my adventure, truly, would sink into absurdity. What is more, if the transmission of inheritances, the erection of memorials, the foundation of works and of signs less perishable than the advenant himself are such universal phenomena in the human sphere, this is because an adventure’s meaning can never be reduced to or exhaust itself in what the advenant understands of that meaning or confers upon the adventure. By birth and by death, the advenant enters into a wider history, that of others, in such a way that the very meaning of his adventure escapes him constitutively. Thus, death is not the horizon of every projection according to which the adventure would appear closed in on itself and circumscribed entirely §20. The Finitude of Temporality

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by the closure of its meaning, but instead that which makes the adventure’s meaning impossible to unify or to “totalize,” inaccessible to an integral understanding, necessarily opaque for the one whom it nevertheless concerns in the first place. It is only for others, beyond my own death, that my adventure takes on a global meaning that lends itself to an interpretation; and even then, this interpretation can unfold itself only in accordance with the presuppositions of a given historical age and situation: it is never definitive. Through my death, it is thus a certain privilege for the understanding of my own adventure and a certain perspectival centrality that are refused to me; death announces itself to me under the vista of the future, as a vanishing point in which the projection is inverted and a perspective appears of which I am no longer the projective center. My adventure escapes outside of its own horizons and flees me, it is carried away in a whirlwind that expels it outside of itself, it seems prey to a sort of hemorrhage: the hemorrhage of its meaning, which is no longer subordinated to the central, axial viewpoint of the advenant and of his understanding. In short, it is only for others that the adventure can appear closed or completed: death, by itself, closes nothing, completes nothing, it opens always already, in the imminence of its coming, the adventure begun in birth to the excess of a meaning that necessarily comes to it from elsewhere, from others, and that, in this way only, can give rise to a taking up by others. It enshrines the inconclusive, elusive character of this adventure that escapes every integral understanding for and through the one to whom it falls. Death achieves nothing, concludes nothing—it suspends everything— and this is why it is without any consolation whatsoever: “What, finally,” writes Rilke, “would be more useless to me than a consoled life?” Therefore, death is not that which closes the horizon of my anticipations, but that which withdraws itself from all anticipation; it is that which transcends every possible horizon, to the extent that every understanding of the adventure in terms of horizon is inseparable from a conception of time that subordinates it to the allegedly original presence of a subject. This is still the case in the analytic of Dasein, with the idea of a totalization, of a Being-a-whole (Ganzsein) of this being for which the meaning of Being is temporality, of a gathering of the various ecstasies of time in the “held” moment of vision of resoluteness. Indeed, as Levinas points out, “the finitude of time that the ‘being-toward-death’ of Sein und Zeit sketches out, in which— despite all the renewals of the received philosophy that this brilliant book brings us—the meaningful remains enclosed within the immanence of the Jemeinigkeit of the Dasein that has to be and that thus—in spite of the denunciation of being as presence—still belongs to a philosophy of presence.” Death, on the contrary, is un-representable, it is irreducible 224

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to any representation by which Dasein would bring it back to a modality of its presence or of its Being. It is inseparable, for the advenant, from an aftertime that is incommensurable to his presence, and yet structurally inscribed in his evential temporality. Death is this rigorously un-presentable, unrepresentable event that hangs over the advenant, beyond every horizon, in a future without a possible present or a possible ex-per-ience. Thus, the advenant is never the mea sure of the very meaning of his adventure. A meaning happens to the adventure only because, exposed to the un-representable pre-time of a pre-personal history and opened to the irreducible after-time of an ulterior history, the adventure is not closed in itself within the horizon of its own meaning. The advenant advenes to himself only by responding originally to the in-finity of an excessive meaning that is addressed to him, in excess of his destiny, from his unappropriable origin; and this meaning still hangs over him, beyond his own death, inasmuch as he has to appropriate it in an inexhaustible task. A beginning burst apart from the outset, which does not coincide with itself in the parousia of an origin, birth thus opens for me beyond every totalizing self-projection an in-finite eventual possibility that death takes and tears from me, but does not close. But how to reconcile, then, these statements with the finite character of my adventure? Doesn’t such in-finity contradict the finitude of the adventure itself? It remains to be seen that such is not the case; this in-finity belongs, rather, to this finitude’s mode of appearing. (c) The adventure’s finitude and the excentricity of its meaning How are we to conceive the finitude of the human adventure, without identifying this finitude with the closure of the adventure’s meaning within the horizon of death? If death, in other words, is not originally interpretable as the ultimate horizon of any totalizing self-projection, but instead as a radically unavailable event, hanging over us from a “future” deprived of futurity, how are we to conceive the finitude of temporality? Can there be a finitude of the adventure without any possible totalization of it? The in-finity of the meaning to which I have to respond and the infinity of the tasks by which I answer for it do not allude to the possibility of an indefinitely prolonged adventure; rather, they are the modalities of appearance of the possible in its incommensurable excess over every projection, in its meaning of eventuality. At issue here is the feature according to which the advenant is not the measure of the possible that travels across his own adventure, precisely insofar as he is not its origin. Not having its origin in the advenant, neither does this possibility have any end with him: §20. The Finitude of Temporality

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it surrounds him and surpasses him, offering itself to him as impossible to circumscribe and to inventory, inexhaustible by right, because passing his powers. Consequently, far from the in-finity of the possible and of meaning contradicting the finitude of the adventure, it is, instead, inseparable from it. The advenant’s finitude is born precisely from the excess of the possible over every power of appropriation: it is not because he is mortal that the advenant possesses a finite power of appropriation of the possibilities that precede him, but the other way around; it is because the advenant is necessarily born, because the infinity of an anonymous possibility has preceded him from the outset, because he has to answer originally for an event that surpasses him and transcends his own powers, that the finitude of his power over the possible manifests itself as such. Finitude must not be conceived starting from death as that which fixes an end to the powers of the advenant, but from birth—that is to say, from that which inscribes within his powers the powerlessness of a delay over the possible that travels across his adventure and structures it through and through. By virtue of this delay, the possible offers itself to the advenant as in-finite from an immemorial prehistory and hangs over him beyond his very death, in such a way that this in-finiteness conditions the original phenomenological meaning of his finitude. Because there is for him a pre-time and an after-time that are impossible to gather into presence, but are structurally implicated in the evential character of the adventure itself, this adventure is finite, and its meaning in-finite. This “beginning” and this “end,” un-presentable in reference to a representation of which the advenant would be the center of presence, condition the structure of his finitude: the adventure, like the sea, soaks into the sand. This is what makes all the difference between the evential concept of “finitude” and the existential concept laid out by Heidegger. Indeed, the finitude of Dasein is determined without recourse to any infinity whatsoever. Sein und Zeit attempts to understand the finitude of the exemplary being in terms of its transcendence alone, insofar as, emerging from the nothing of its thrown Being-in-the-world, it relates itself to the Being that “is” nothingness, or rather, in which nothingness plays as the pure and simple other of every being, in such a way that Being “is” the nihilating itself, from which Being and being differ. From this viewpoint, Dasein’s finitude does not have the meaning of an ontic privation with respect to an ens infinitum, but is rooted only in the nihilating inherent to Being itself: “Being itself is essentially finite and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing.” Finitude thus signifies fundamentally the equivalence between Being and nothingness, not in Hegel’s sense, but in the sense in which— since Being is always referred to the understanding of the Being of Dasein, insofar as Dasein is essen226

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tially mortal—Being “is” fundamentally dying, to be and to die mean one sole thing: this sameness that anxiety, originally, reveals. Thus, the finitude of Being itself, conceived in light of the projection of Dasein toward the finite horizon of its Being—which is the very horizon of its death—is only the closure upon itself of Being as dying, which prescribes its meaning to this horizon; and it is only starting from such a closure that the equivalence between Being and nothingness becomes understandable. But then, doesn’t this finitude, thinkable outside any relation with an infinite being, amount to a pure and simple in-finitization of Dasein and of its Being? Since finitude here is only the horizon of its self-surpassing as transcendence, the horizon of its Being as mortal, the Dasein appears in a sense in-finite, because it is finitude itself, and this finitude is no longer opposed to anything, but is its own measure. Moreover, is not this “absolutization” of finitude in Sein und Zeit of one piece with the proximity that remains, despite everything, between Dasein and the metaphysical subject? Doesn’t this finitude that is conceived as purely autarchic in kind, outside of every relation to any infinity whatsoever, replace the traditional autarchy of the subject? Things are completely different for the finitude of the advenant, to the extent that it is rooted in the radical “exteriority” of the event; the event is in no way a modality of Being, but that which thwarts every possible gathering into presence, revoking the very horizon within which the problem of time is raised, from Augustine to Heidegger. It is starting from this absolute excess of the event over the advenant that inscribes in his adventure a constitutive delay, and makes of the appropriation of its evential possibilities an ever-open task, that the finitude of the advenant declares itself. Consequently, if there is indeed a finitude of the advenant, it has meaning only in relation to the in-finity of the possibilities that precede him; possibilities that are addressed to him through the plurality of the histories of those close to him, first of all those of his family, then those of the various relationships in which he is situated in being born, and in this way, step by step, those of all humanity. Such a finitude thus proceeds from the unconditioned primacy over him of the event that, by making-possible the possible, temporalizes temporality while preventing its “totalization”: it delivers the advenant over to the flaws of a presence constantly infiltrated by absence, in which selfdifference, self-loss, and forgetting are original. §21. The Unity of My Histories On the basis of the preceding analyses of temporality, it now becomes possible to answer a certain number of questions that we had deferred: (a) If §21. The Unity of My Histories

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the event, in its an-archic upsurge, frees itself from every causal conditioning, how can we then understand the mutual articulation between events within a history, the events’ emplotment starting from themselves, their historialization? (b) What makes the unity of a history, upon which in turn the singularity of the advenant depends? How, starting from the multiplicity of events that occur in his adventure, does the advenant attain to the uniqueness of a destiny? (c) Finally, if each event signifies, as such, the opening of a world, how should we conceive this “plurality” of worlds? Can several worlds coexist by virtue of the simultaneity of some histories? Even more fundamentally, how to understand the articulation between this “plurality” of worlds and the single, unique world, if it is true that a unique world is required by the preceding analyses? Naturally, these three series of questions are connected and refer to one another: only if we succeed in removing the evential concept of “history” from an inner-temporal and innerworldly (factual) understanding will we be able to consider anew the question of the articulation between events and of their specific cohesion; only if we attempt to raise anew the problem of the unity of the advenant’s history will we be in a position to gain a satisfying phenomenological answer to the question of what grounds its singularity; finally, only on this double condition will it be possible to return to the evential determination of the world in order to sharpen it. (a) The multiplicity of histories “I am of the opinion that the being man exhausts himself in the beinginvolved in histories, that man is he who is involved in histories”: Wilhelm Schapp’s statement may put us on the path of the problem that is our concern here. Indeed, how must we understand this word “history”? Are there several ways, or only one, for the advenant to be involved in histories? How must we interpret the plural of this sentence? Do all my histories have the same structures, from the phenomenological point of view? There are big and little histories. I shall designate the latter by the name “peripeties.” Not a day passes without peripeties: their banality dissuades me from giving examples. But what confers upon each peripety its own phenomenological unity? Each consists first of all in a multiplicity of facts. These facts are tied to one another by explanatory connections. Each of the facts succeeds the others, not in a purely fortuitous manner, but by virtue of a rigorous concatenation: this concatenation calls for an explanation in terms of causes or of ends. A more developed analysis of the latter would lead to distinguishing the ends that belong to the sphere of mobiles and those that lie within the realm of motives. Consequently, each fact is only 228

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interpretable with the meaning that belongs to it, in conformity with the concatenation that it forms with the others, if it is located in its causal-final context. Only the one who understands this context is able to invent a narrative that manifests the facts’ concatenation in relation to one another—that is to say, their cohesion within a single “plot.” A peripety can thus be defined as the concatenation of a few facts within a same history by virtue of the subordination of their meaning to a prior explanatory context. The unity of a peripety is an archeological-teleological unity. However, with such analyses we remain manifestly at the evental level. But are there not for the advenant histories that, unlike mere peripeties, put into play events in the evential sense? Certainly. I shall reserve the term “history” to characterize them. But if such histories do not receive their unity from the subordination of facts and their meaning to a prior worldly context, if they put into play, specifically, events the meaning of which is incomprehensible in light of such a context, how must we then conceive their unity? Far from the concept of “history” understood as peripety— that is to say, as causal concatenation of facts in conformity with an explanatory context—being able to serve here as a guiding thread to reach the evential meaning of history, it represents instead an obstacle to its elucidation. Indeed, the event, as Hannah Arendt rightly emphasizes, “illuminates its own past; it can never be deduced from it”; its an-archic bursting-forth implies the irreducible character of its meaning to any prior context, the absolute impossibility of explaining this meaning by its context by remaining at the level of a strict etiology: for the event, as such, has a context only after the fact—that is to say, once it has occurred, since it is only in light of the possibilities that it has opened and of the meaning that it has manifested for the interpretation, that its context is illuminated back-ward and appears with the meaning-configuration that is proper to it. Consequently, the event is not that which enters into a history conceived as concatenation of facts in light of a context, but that which makes history, opens a history and the dimension of its meaning. It is not “historic,” but historical: it gives rise to a history, which happens only through it. The unity of a history, in its evential meaning, thus demands to be understood by the guiding thread of the events in light of which it historializes itself. More precisely, the unity of a history proceeds from the totality of the possibilities that structure it, and starting from which it becomes understandable in its meaning, insofar as these possibilities and this meaning originate, precisely, in one or more events. The understanding at issue here is not the contextual explanation, but the singular grasp of the unique in light of the horizon of meaning that it itself sets out for itself, in its an-archic occurring. But how to describe more analytically the unity of such a “history”? §21. The Unity of My Histories

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In order to be able successfully to carry out such an analysis, it is necessary to understand in what way a history begins and ends for the advenant. It is only in light of its beginning and end that the unity of this history, as unity of meaning or hermeneutic unity, can be disclosed. In general, a history begins with an event. Th is event overturns my preceding histories, by modifying the very manner in which I can understand them and understand myself starting from them. It is epoch-making, in the sense that it suspends, in a sort of ἐποχή, all the peripeties in which I am involved: it imposes itself, in an imperative manner, rendering outdated most of the ends that I project, in light of which my peripeties are arrayed and acquire the meaning that they have for me, and metamorphosing the very context in terms of which I can explain these concatenations of facts, to the extent that they still take place within the horizon of the world. The death of a close friend, a love encounter, the sudden appearance of an incurable illness, the birth of a child, a brutal accident, the discovery of a vocation: all these are epoch-making events that suspend the meaning of my peripeties, render them suddenly insignificant; and, thereby, open a new chapter in my histories and signify, at the evential level, both the beginning and the end of a new era. Indeed, every event impels the advenant to understand his past otherwise, in accordance with the new meaning that it makes burst forth. By rearranging the possible, it shuts down past possibilities and, in that way, reveals them. It possesses a critical and alethic dimension. It cannot burst forth without thereby becoming part of a destiny, the sense of which it reveals at the same moment in which it transforms it and gives it a dramatic turn: it is the crisis that is revelatory of what it breaks and overturns. By thoroughly restructuring the understanding of that which preexists it, the event sheds light on its own context and makes it appear as such. It is always already linked to older histories, in the very moment in which it establishes a new beginning. This is why, most often, the event has the tendency to shut down some histories, to plunge them into in-actuality— that is to say, to reconfigure the present situation in such a way that events already having-taken-place are no longer in the position to furnish the interpretive possibilities that would allow its comprehension. To shut down past histories—to open new ones: the event manifests itself through this double character. Th is affirmation thus allows us to circumscribe what makes the unity of a history in the evential sense. We have emphasized that an event is in-actual not as a past fact, but to the extent that it has “exhausted” the eventualities that it brought with it in its instantaneous occurring. And the same goes for a history: it can appear accomplished in itself by the exhaustion of its possibilities. To say of a his230

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tory that it is accomplished, brought to a close, or concluded is not to affirm that it is finished in the sense in which a succession of facts is complete, for nothing in this history itself allows us to define such a “completeness”: other facts can always, in principle, be added, and thus it is not the facts that determine the intrinsic unity of a history, a unity that reveals itself precisely when the history is finished. The closed, accomplished character of a history thus does not mean the “complete” character of the facts that compose it, but rather the exhaustion of the possibilities that it harbored; these possibilities are those that one or more events have opened, and that one or more events can shut down, insofar as the event, in general, is not a fact merely occurring in the world and realizing a prior possibility, but the origin of every possibility, the possibilization as such. The unity of a history is thus the unity of its possibilities, originally made-possible by events; a history is “finished” not when the facts that compose it are complete, but when it has exhausted its intrinsic possibilities, as one might say of a love that it is a closed, accomplished history, even if I might see the loved one again later, or as one says of a book that it is finished, even if I might, many years later, correct it or rewrite it. For it would not be the same book that I would write, but rather another; it would no longer be the same love story. Now, this “no . . . longer” is in no way thinkable in light of inner-temporality understood starting from the phenomenon of “passage” and its alleged “irreversibility.” It designates the temporalevential character of “conclusion” of the event itself as it announces itself from the having-taken-place, insofar as this vista is inseparable from the two others, the present and the future—that is to say, is inseparable from the present-in-waiting that precisely belongs to this event as such. In short, a history is only concluded when the possibilities that gave it its configuration and its meaning are exhausted, or de-possibilized. These possibilities have been opened by one or more events in the first place. Granted, an inaugural event does not form a history all by itself—but a history advenes, precisely, starting from the possibilities that this event possibilizes. The event determines possibilities that will vary in turn, according to subsequent facts that will modify them—without, however, entirely reconfiguring them—until a new event puts an end to this history, preventing me from this time on from recognizing myself in it. Let us note that these subsequent facts subordinate themselves, as for their own meaning, to an inaugural event: whatever might be, for example, the changes that occur in the history of a love, this history has its beginning in the event of an encounter that alone can confer upon it the unity of meaning that is its own. It is indeed a history of love, and each subsequent fact can declare itself as belonging to this history only by virtue of its subordination §21. The Unity of My Histories

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to the hermeneutic horizon that has been opened, inaugurally, by the love encounter. Consequently, it is the in-actuality of its inaugurating events with regard to other histories, as temporal-evential character of their having-taken-place, that determines the retrospective unity of a history, its concluded character, as unity of meaning or hermeneutic unity. To this extent, the evential unity of a history is irreducible to the causal-factual (archeological-teleological) unity of a peripety. And yet, a difficulty arises here: it may be that the love in question will encounter developments that entirely reconfigure its possibilities, and that, as a consequence, take on the full status and title of events; for example, the birth of a child. This event is the beginning of a new history, of a history without precedent, that of my paternity; and yet, from another side, it also belongs to the history of this love “within” which it takes place: it could never deeply modify the “relationship” of two people and the history of this “relationship” if it did not already belong, as such, to this history. We must distinguish two possible perspectives on this same event. On the one hand, insofar as it continues and prolongs the history of this love, the birth of a child is still inscribed within the horizon of a prior meaning that was opened by the event of an encounter: it possesses the status of a fact among other facts within the history of this love. But, on the other hand, insofar as it inaugurates the unprecedented history of my paternity, the same birth appears as an event irreducible to its own hermeneutic context, and the origin of a new meaning for its interpretation. Thus, the same event can be situated at the crossing of several histories. Histories, like epochs or eras, do not cease to encroach upon one another exactly to the extent that they are irreducible to every succession and to any concatenation of facts. Starting from events that, in each case, are epoch-making, plots are born, grow, and develop, interpenetrate, communicate with one another by the intermediary of events, to the extent that these events, in turn, are situated at the crossing of multiple and branched histories. These plots do not overlap, nor do they coincide entirely, but instead superimpose themselves on one another, stratifying themselves, sketching a multi-leveled history, without fi xed and assignable dates, which is not the history-offacts, but the history of events that do not cease to occur in suspense from their own actualization, to set out their own history to the rhythm of a slow tectonics, invisible like the crack-up of Fitzgerald that only shows itself “long after it has occurred,” and “all at once.” Some of them are radically concluded; they belong to the having-taken-place and the undergoing that is proper to it: memory. Others are in course, or are being accomplished, or are in the course of being born, and signal themselves only by their first signs. Yet others we have outlived. 232

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But how could these histories coexist, overlap, stratify, without taking place in a single history, that of the advenant, which is neither an addition of events, nor an addition of histories, but that which takes form and figure through them? Indeed, we have considered, until now, only the manner in which plots are unified in themselves, starting from inaugurating events. We have not yet faced the question of the mode of unity of these different plots. From now on, it is this question that will occupy us. How must we conceive the unification of these multiple histories in which the advenant is involved from the outset, and their integration in a single history? How, through these histories, does the advenant acquire a singular destiny? (b) The unity of my history This question of the unity of my history can receive a rather simple answer in conformity with our premises. 1. Th is unity cannot proceed from the uniqueness of a subject who would preexist such a history—that is to say, the uniqueness of a being the history of which— or rather, the historicity of which—would be an ontological characteristic. It is not grounded in the unity of a being already singular in its very constitution. The advenant is not singular as a being, but only to the extent that something happens to him: he defines himself in his singularity only to the extent that he appropriates a history as his history. Indeed, the history of which the adventure itself is the declension unifies itself in itself, historializes itself from events in their transcendental neutrality, and it is only through such a history, whose modalities of historialization were described above, that the advenant can advene to himself and thus acquire a singularity. 2. It is therefore impossible, in order to understand the unity of my histories, to start from the phenomenon of singularity, because this singularity proceeds from that unity—and not the other way around. If my histories are both what changes me and that through which I change— continually— into myself, it is excluded to affirm that the unity of my histories would proceed from my self-identity or from the individuality of the one to whom they happen. There would never be for me the least event if the question Who am I? were not posed, each time, ex novo starting from given histories. The child that I was is certainly not the “same” (in the evential sense, not the empirico-factual sense) as the old man I will be. Singularity—that is to say, the set of desires, projections, constants of my affective life, which can bring an answer to the question Who . . . ?, and according to which or in conformity with which I can understand myself as myself—this singularity is defined by its fundamental mobility: it unceasingly transforms itself in light §21. The Unity of My Histories

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of the constellations of meaning inaugurated, in each case, by inaugurating events. To understand my destiny is always to understand the alternation of these changing faces that I myself have taken for myself in the course of epochs as distinct as worlds and as distant as galaxies. Far from “grounding” in any way whatsoever the unity of my histories, my singularity sanctions its irremediable dispersion. It manifests self-alterity as an original determination of the advenant. 3. The unity of my histories is rooted, consequently, in a capacity of the advenant, that of responding to events by answering for himself in front of them. This still neutral capacity, in the sense of pre-individual, presingular, pre-personal, pre-subjective, has been defined as “selfhood.” Such a selfhood implies no self-identity or self-permanence, but points only toward the aptitude according to which the advenant, implicated in what happens to him, can respond to and answer for what advenes to him. Inversely, what advenes to him only advenes to him to the extent that he can answer for it. To respond in person does not, in this sense, imply that the advenant is a single person, “one” in the sense of “singular” across all his histories. If someone speaks to me of an event that occurred in my infancy, and of which I have only a fading memory, can I say that it truly happened to me? If I mean by “me” a being that can be identified through external and objective criteria of identity, the answer is obvious, but this factual identity can teach us nothing about selfhood and singularity as evential characteristics. Indeed, who was I at the moment in which that happened to me? I have no idea about it. All that I can do is examine the extent to which this event that is attributed to me had eventually an influence on my subsequent behavior: I can only try to answer for it by seeking to understand what meaning it could have taken on in this history that I answer for as my own by vouching for the possibilities that are in play in it. In short, it is the capacity to answer for, and it alone (selfhood), that grounds the mineness of my histories—that is to say, their unity of assignation— and not the other way around. The result is that the question of the unity of my history must be raised in a different way from that of the unity of any one of my histories. As we have seen, the unity of a history depends on the events starting from which it can begin and end, and which confer upon it the meaning that is its own: its unity is hermeneutic. But my history neither “begins” nor “ends” in this way, for it is by right and structurally impossible to circumscribe or to “totalize” within a single hermeneutic horizon. Birth, in this respect, is not comparable to the first event of one of my histories. It is true that all my histories seem to stand out against this first event. And yet, to the extent that this original event is never for me an origin, but instead connects me to a prehis234

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tory on which I depend, by opening the adventure to the non-ground of possibilities that it does not make possible and to an inexhaustible meaning that hangs over it from the outset, birth prevents instead every closure of my history, in the sense in which any one of my histories could be closed. Indeed, to be born is to be unable to coincide with one’s origin, to be originally open to inexhaustible possibilities, never to be able to recover entirely the meaning of one’s history in the self-transparency of a total understanding. This is why the configuration of my history differs profoundly from the configuration of a history that, for me, can begin and end. While all my histories have a beginning and an end, to the extent that I can understand them retrospectively, as an accomplished whole, closed in itself, by contrast, my adventure does not stop leaking at its two “extremities” and pouring, so to speak, outside of itself. Birth is precisely this radical exteriority that no “subject” can ever take back into itself, subordinate to itself or reduce to its own measure, and that constitutes the subject without the subject being able to constitute it. For the advenant, to be born is precisely not to be able to take back into himself his exteriority, to be open in himself to more than himself, to a history that precedes him and determines him from the outset, to possibilities that hang over him and that he does not make possible, to a meaning that travels all through his adventure without, however, proceeding from it. Birth does not mean here a first event, in the sense of a first beginning of my history, and so of a first history that would also be the last one, since all the others would be subordinated to it; rather, it signifies the impossibility of every first history, the lack of every first event: it manifests, we might say, the event of the lack of every first event, the non-ground of the adventure as absence of origin. Or again, birth is this impossible-to-present or –to-represent “origin” of an adventure without possible totalization, where death, at the other “extremity,” is only thinkable as a wound—pure event and nothing else—which, far from closing a horizon, forbids every closure of the advenant and of his possibilities, and which is not a possibility that he could reduce to the measure of his own presence—that is to say, of his Being. It is solely on the condition of maintaining this difference that it is possible to safeguard both the irreducible plurality of my histories, whose unity of meaning depends on events (their beginning and their end), and the unity of assignation of my history insofar as I am its unsubstitutable respondent. If my history were, indeed, in the image of one of my histories, every other event, with regard to its beginning and its end, would appear as a mere fact subordinated to their hermeneutic horizon: there could no longer be for me any other genuine events than those of being born and of dying. §21. The Unity of My Histories

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(c) The problem of the world But then, don’t we fall back into another, even worse difficulty? How, indeed, can we reconcile the plurality of events (and of the histories to which they give rise), each of which opens— and shuts— a world, with the uniqueness of the world for every advenant? How can these “plural” worlds coexist, if my histories are not necessarily “successive,” but if certain among them are “simultaneous”? How can the advenant relate at once to several worlds? Is not such an affirmation contradictory? And for an additional reason: unlike my history that “begins” and “ends” with me, at least insofar as it is attributed to me, the world into which birth throws me appears to me necessarily older than me. There is only one single world in which every adventure takes place, from birth to death. But how then can we reconcile these apparently incompatible assertions? It will help to go back briefly over some of the preceding analyses. The world is not new in each event, in the sense in which the event would “recreate” it in some way. It is always one single world that the event overturns and that it reconfigures in its an-archic upsurge. Indeed, by radically modifying one or several possibilities of the advenant, the event always strikes at the very root of possibility as a whole. In what way? It is not at all necessary in order to do so that the event, considered as a fact of the world, modify one by one all the advenant’s possibilities; even the sheer accident that annihilates, provisionally or definitively, most of my physical capacities will leave outside the field of its efficacy my intellectual or affective aptitudes. But, for the fact in question, its event-character lies precisely in this: it aff ects the very meaning of the world and the totality of the possibilities that articulate this world. In other words, for the advenant there are never isolated possibilities: the meaning of the world as such, that is to say, as a whole, is at stake in each event of which the advenant is the stake at the risk of himself. The world is not the sum of its constituting possibilities, but the structural, hierarchical, and signifying totality that integrates them. If the world were indeed an addition of possibilities, the least factual modification of a given possibility would signify ipso facto a change of the world itself. But since the world is, actually, a meaning-structure, a totality transcending each of its “parts,” or rather each of the possibilities that is subordinated to it, it follows that the world is one and only one through their modification. Thus, each event opens (and shuts) a world, insofar as it re-possibilizes differently the possible and confers on it a new meaning. And at the same time, it is the same world that two distinct events reconfigure; otherwise, they could not reconfigure it, but would belong to distinct 236

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worlds, without relation to one another. There is no contradiction there: for the world is this unitary structure of meaning that articulates all the possibilities, but whose very meaning varies according to the occurrence of events and histories. It is both one and multiple according to whether it is considered as the structural totality of all possible meaning, or as such or such constellation of meaning, configured in each case by an event. This remark leads me to make a step further. Earlier, I distinguished an evental from an evential concept of “world”: the former designates the signifying context conditioning the appearing of every fact as such; the latter refers to the structural and hierarchical totality of possibilities for the advenant, insofar as these possibilities are possibilized, in each case, by events. It is only in light of this latter concept of “world” that an evential understanding can appear that does not subordinate the meaning of events to a prior explanatory context, but instead grasps them as the origin of their own meaning for the one to whom they advene. Now, what becomes manifest in light of our preceding considerations is that these two phenomenological concepts do not exhaust the phenomenon of the world, for a simple reason: in order for events to modify the world’s meaning by overturning its possibilities, by ruining some projections and by making others appear (or, at the least, by rendering them possible), it is necessary for these possibilities to appear already articulated, structured, hierarchized; it is necessary that their cohesion itself not proceed from the event, but preexist it. It is not enough, in other words, that the meaning of the world be dependent, in each case, on events; it is necessary that the world have a meaning, be coherent; there must be, if we can put it this way, a meaning of meaning, and this meaning cannot proceed, in its turn, from the event alone. In order for the event to overturn the meaning of the world, it is necessary that the world be something endowed with a meaning; in order for the event to overturn its possibilities and modify their very cohesion, it is necessary that these possibilities be already articulated and coordinated. But where do this cohesion and articulation come from? They cannot proceed from the advenant’s projections, since it is precisely these projections that the events overturn and make possible. If the possible is possibilized, more originally than by any projection, by the events in which it originates, the cohesion of the possibilities—that is to say, the cohesion of the advenant’s projections as well— cannot proceed from these projections themselves. If a sickness, for example, overturns all my projections, ruins the prospect of traveling, ends up undermining a love relationship or professional plans, it is by virtue of a cohesion of the advenant’s possibilities that preexists his projections, and that these projections can in no way create: it is certainly not my projections that have the power to make §21. The Unity of My Histories

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it so that the possibilities connected with a journey, my work, or my love affairs can be ruined or modified by the sudden appearance of a sickness! For sure, my projects are coordinated, but the foundation of such coordination cannot reside in these projects themselves. The world is, on the contrary, a meaning-structure that all my projections find already there, “in front of them,” and according to which the advenant’s possibilities are not coordinated in just any way, but in an articulated and intelligible manner. But neither can this intelligible framework of the world proceed from an event (birth), since it is precisely that which explains that an event can overturn the meaning of the world—that is to say, reconfigure the world itself—for the one to whom it happens. That the event makes sense, that it is the very origin of meaning for the adventure, presupposes that there is meaning, and this “there is” of meaning, so to speak, is not itself an event of the same kind and status. The world is the ultimate horizon of meaning that makes it so that meaning, as evential, “has sense”—that is to say, is understandable; the World is the “there is” of sense itself. Here we reach a third concept of “world” that I call “transcendent”: the world is the “there is” of every possible intelligibility, the meaning-horizon of every evential meaning. For that the event makes sense is only understandable on the background of the “fact” that there is ultimately a meaning of meaning itself— that is to say, that meaning is intelligible; and to understand how this understanding itself takes place does not yet allow for understanding that it takes place, or that it might take place. The advenant is “in the world,” but in a different sense from the Heideggerian Dasein: for “world” is what the Dasein projects in existing; it has the mode of Being of the exemplary being, according to the ontological idealism that subsists in Sein und Zeit and is grounded in the original mineness (Jemeinigkeit) of Being. Here, instead, “world” has an evential meaning: it is what is illuminated by the event, according to a given viewpoint that governs the meaning that it takes on for me. There is only a “world” through the “there is” of events. But, at the same time—and this point now becomes decisive—if the world is that which happens in each event according to a new meaning, the “there is” of sense is not itself an “event” in the same sense as before. The “fact” that there is meaning, the “there is” of meaning itself, is the “condition” for every “there is.” The world is “older” than every event—that is to say, transcends them all. It is indeed “the riddle of riddles,” to take up a formula of Husserl’s. It is also absolutely incomprehensible, since it is the meaning of meaning, that which renders all the rest understandable, that which makes it so that there can be and that there is something such as understanding. Before the very riddle of meaning, thought stops, overtaken with dizziness. 238

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Here we reach the extreme limits of my project, and probably the limits—strictly defined— of every hermeneutical phenomenology. Of the world as meaning of meaning, first and last “there is” of all intelligibility, there cannot be any phenomenology or any hermeneutics, since these necessarily presuppose meaning as the element on which they rest, or from which they draw their possibility, in the same manner as all speech, from its first babblings, presupposes the meaning out of which it arises and that it articulates in its own way— otherwise, speech could never be taken up; there would never be any meaning at all in uttering it. Before this last riddle of the “there is” of meaning itself, as before the Platonic ἰδέα τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, thought can only stop, suspending every claim— or presumption—to understand.

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Notes

Preface 1. Emmanuel Levinas, “Phenomenon and Enigma,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 61–74, 68. 2. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 19th ed. (1927; Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006), 422; Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 474. Introduction 1. Paul Valéry, Cahiers (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1:1316. 2. J. W. Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (Munich: Hamburger Ausgabe, 1968), 12:432; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Refl ections, trans. Elisabeth Stopp (London: Penguin, 1998), 77. 3. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 422; Heidegger, Being and Time, 474. 4. Aristotle, Physics IV.11.219b1; trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 292 (translation modified). 5. Plato, Phaedrus 274a, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett, 1997), 550. Part 1. The Metaphysics of Time 1. Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1967), 10:471.

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2. “The unity of the consciousness that encompasses intentionally what is present and what is past,” writes Husserl, “is a phenomenological datum”; Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins, Hua X/6, 16; English translation: Edmund Husserl, On The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 16. 3. In par ticu lar the conceptuality that is proper in this period to the static mode of constitution, articulated following the pair Auff assung/Inhalt, the limits of which the analysis of the inner consciousness of time will reveal. 4. Cf. this chapter, §6. 5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Ak. A31, B47, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1961), 75. 6. The first dimension, figured on the abscissa by the line (O, E), represents objective time, where the sound occurrences succeed one another; the second dimension, figured on the ordinate by the line (E, E´), represents its subjective modes of appearance flowing away continuously, the retentional continuum that grows with each new impression and determines the growing temporal distancing of sound as “sinking-down,” “continuously sinking deeper into the past” (represented by the vector OE´); see Husserl, Phenomenology of Consciousness, 29–30). 7. Husserl, manuscript D 12 IV, 1931, edited by Alfred Schuetz as “Die Welt der Lebendigen Gegenwart und die Konstitution der Ausserleiblichen Umwelt,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 6, no. 3 (March 1946): 323– 43; cf. “The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism,” in Husserl: Shorter Works, edited by Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 238–50, 245. 8. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 10. 9. Ibid., 211. 10. Leibniz, letter, 25 February 1716, in G. W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, Correspondence, edited, with an introduction, by Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 14. 11. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Aesthetic,” A 33, B49–50, page 77. 12. Bergson, Creative Mind, 11, trans. modified: “The line one mea sures is immobile, time is mobility. The line is made, it is complete; time is what is happening, and more than that, it is what makes everything to happen.” 13. Cf. n. 7, above. 14. Bergson, Creative Mind, 176, emphasis added: “There is simply the continuous melody of our inner life,— a melody which is going on and will go on, indivisible, from the beginning to the end of our conscious existence”; 211: “Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present”; see also in passing. 15. Plato, Republic VII.533c– d, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett), 1149. 242

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16. For example, according to Damascius the first hypothesis “posed the One as the term to which the effort of giving birth to the soul aspires, then suppressed it in order to signify its ungraspable transcendence”; Damascius, Ruelle II.310, cited by Auguste Diès, in Platon: Oeuvres completes, vol. 8, part 1, Parménide: Texte établi et traduit par Auguste Diès (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1923), 111n1. 17. Plato, Republic VI.509c. 18. Cf. Auguste Diès’s remark, in his headnote to Platon, vol. 8, part 1, Parménide, 31: “If, on the other hand, we recall the triple position of the problem of being in Parmenides’ poem: being is, being is not, being is and is not, we will not be astonished to see appearing here a third position of the One, [following on ‘the One is One’ and ‘the One is’]: ‘the One is and is not.’ ” 19. Cf. Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. Walter Kranz, 6th rev. ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1951), fr. 7; trans. R. D. McKirahan, in Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, From Thales to Aristotle, edited by S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, and C. D. C. Reeve, 4th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 43 (translation modified). 20. Diels, Die Fragmente, fr. 8. 21. A. Diès, Platon, vol. 8, part 1, Parménide, 77n2. 22. This is what the passage immediately following very clearly indicates: what is false (sophistical) concerning being oldest, and is not said with regard to a younger being, but instead with regard to a second entity, different from the first (Socrates is older than Alcibiades, but not at all older than himself ), is no longer false when it concerns coming to be (older): “ ‘What do you mean?’—‘I mean this: there is no need for a thing to come to be different from a thing that is already different [becoming is not said with regard to a being, but only with regard to a coming to be]; it must, rather, already be different from what is already different, have come to be different from what has come to be different, and be going to be different from what is going to be different [to conjugate verbs is once again to insist: becoming is only said with regard to becoming]; but it must not have come to be, be going to be, or be different from what comes to be different: it must come to be different, and nothing else’ ” (141b). If becoming must be thought of here as a sort of changing, this changing does not possess a stable reference point outside of itself to which what comes to be could be compared: what becomes is relative to nothing that is, but only to what comes to be, and consequently to itself considered in this very becoming: the opposite of the becoming older (than oneself ) is the becoming younger (than oneself ): there is no comparandum outside of change, to which what changes could be compared; what changes can only be put in relation to and compared with itself as it is changing ; it can be mea sured only against itself: the consequences of all this will appear later. 23. Cf. Henri Maldiney, Aîtres de la langue et demeures de la pensée (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1975), 287, to which our reading of the Parmenides owes a great deal. 24. Plato, Symposium 207d– e; trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (modified), in Plato: Complete Works, 490. Notes to pages 18–22

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25. Our interpretation departs here from the traditional interpretations, where the paradox of the Parmenides is referred to beings—for example, Socrates or Alcibiades: cf. Proclus, Opera VI.238, ed. Victor Cousin (Paris: Excudebat J. M. Eberhart, 1823); Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, trans. Glenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 569: “that which comes to be ten years old comes to be older than what is nine years old,” but “what is nine years old,” while it is becoming this, becomes “younger than itself.” But then we inevitably consider “the man who is ten years old” and “the man who is nine” as two different persons, the latter having become younger with regard to the first; but then we fall back into a sophism that Plato himself never fails to condemn. 26. A. Diès, headnote to Parménide, 32. 27. According to Plotinus’s expression in the Enneads, V.1.8; Plotinus, Plotinus, With an English Translation by A. H. Armstrong, vol. 5, Enneads V.1–9 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1984), 43. 28. Henri Maldiney has nicely shown the collaboration and competition between these two directional schemes in the interpretation that he gives of these passages: see Maldiney, Aîtres de la langue, 286 and following. 29. Parmenides, Poem, in Diels, Die Fragmente, fr. 8 (5– 6); trans. McKirahan (modified), in Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, From Thales to Aristotle, 43. 30. This is the interpretation proposed by Alain Seguy-Duclot in Le Parménide de Platon, ou le jeu des hypotheses (Paris: Belin, 1998), 91–93. See page 91 for the contentious point: “The second hypothesis here calls upon a spatial representation of time.” 31. See n. 22, above. 32. Damascius, Ruelle II.229.273. 33. Georges Braque, The Illustrated Notebooks, 1917–1955, trans. Stanley Applebaum (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1971), 3. 34. Simplicius, Commentaire de la Physique 887.1; Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 5, trans. J. O. Urmson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 87. 35. “The regressive inquiry (Rückfrage) beginning from the epochè leads to the originary persistent flowing—the persisting ‘present,’ which is in a certain sense the nunc stans, which the word ‘present,’ insofar as it already refers to a temporal modality, does not truly fit”; Husserl, manuscript C7 I (1932), 30. 36. The expression (horizon d’originarité) is that of Henri Maldiney, Aîtres de la langue, 293. 37. Aristotle, Physics IV.222b15 sq. 38. Simplicius, Corollarium de tempore 797.7–10; I follow the [French] translation of Marie- Claire Galpérine, in “Le temps integral selon Damascius,” Les Études philosophiques, no. 3 (1980): 338; English translation: Simplicius, Corollaries on Place and Time, trans. J. O. Urmson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 119: “ ‘This is so since process is evident in things,’ [says Damascius,] ‘and Aristotle has made it luminously clear that no process or alteration occurs in 244

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a now, but that at a now process or alteration has occurred, while the process or alteration wholly takes place in time. At any rate, the leap that takes place in process, which is a part of process, will not be going on in the now, nor will that which is present occur in time that is not present.’ ” 39. Cf. above, 36–37. 40. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 425; Being and Time, 478 (modified). 41. Ibid., 424; 476. 42. What are these aporiae? Time is composed of non-beings (ἐκ μὴ ὂντων συγκείμενον: 218a1)—namely, the future that is not yet, and the past that is no longer; its parts are either past or future, while the now, which alone truly is, is not a part of time (τὸ νῦν οὐ μέρος: 218a7), for time does not seem to be composed of now (ὁ δὲ χρόνος οὐ δοκεῖ συγκεῖσθαι ἐκ τῶν νῦν: 218a8); to this extent, time seems to be able to participate only weakly in beingness (μετέχειν οὐσίας: 218a2); “it either does not exist at all or weakly, and in an obscure way” (οὖν ἢ ὅλως οὐκ ἔστιν ἢ μόλις καὶ ἀμυδρῶς: 217b33–34); Basic Works of Aristotle, 289, modified. 43. Simplicius, Corollarium de tempore 773.8 and following; cf. the valuable English translation by Urmson, Corollaries on Place and Time; and, for the commentary itself: On Aristotle’s Physics IV.1–5, 10–14, by the same translator (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). 44. Cf. Simplicius, Commentaire de la Physique d’Aristote, 698.18–28; On Aristotle’s Physics 4.1–5, 10–14, 106. 45. On this translation, borrowed from Rémi Brague, cf. the remainder of this commentary. 46. Rémi Brague, “Sur la formule aristotélicienne ὃ ποτε ὄν,” in his Du temps chez Platon et Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982), 97 and following, especially the luminous pages 123–24: this formula “furnishes, indeed, a concept of the subjectivity of the subject that can include and express the substratum-function in a more comprehensive manner than could the term hypokeimenon.” 47. Simplicius, Commentaire de la Physique d’Aristote 714.21; Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 4.1–5, 10–14, 123 (modified). 48. Brague, Du temps chez Platon et Aristote, 128. 49. Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975), 24:362 (hereafter Grundprobleme; subsequent references to the Gesamtausgabe will be indicated by GA, followed by the volume and page number); English translation, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 256. 50. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, 379; Basic Problems, 268 (modified). 51. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 421; Being and Time, 473 (translation modified). 52. Ibid., 422; 474 (translation modified). 53. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, 352; Basic Problems, 249. Notes to pages 35–44

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54. Ibid.: “The now— and that means time.” 55. Ibid., 351; 248. 56. Ibid., 352; 248 (translation modified). 57. Simplicius, Commentaire de la Physique 698.4– 8; Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 4.1–5, 10–14, 105. 58. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, 349; Basic Problems, 246. 59. Ibid., 367; 260. 60. Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik, GA 26:262; The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), 203. 61. Ibid., 263; 203. 62. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, 352; Basic Problems, 248 (modified). 63. Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe, GA 26:256; Metaphysical Foundations, 198: “Time neither passes nor remains but it temporalizes itself. Temporalization is the primal phenomenon of ‘motion.’ ” 64. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 339; Being and Time, 389; and Grundprobleme, 412; Basic Problems, 291. 65. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, 367; Basic Problems, 260. 66. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 412; Being and Time, 464– 65; Grundprobleme, 364– 65; Basic Problems, 258–59. 67. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, 370; Basic Problems, 262. 68. Ibid., 387; 273. 69. Ibid., 387– 88; 274. 70. Ibid., 381; 269–70. 71. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 329; Being and Time, 377. 72. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, 382; Basic Problems, 270, modified. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 373; 264, modified. 75. Number is, rather, what makes measure possible; it is its ontological condition. This is why Aristotle can substitute, salva veritate, for the definition of time as ἀριθμὸς κίνησεως, that by μέτρον κινήσεως (221a1 and 221b26–27): time is the number of all movement whatsoever, but it is the mea sure of movement only insofar as a movement of reference has been first determined, which serves as the unit of measure for numeration: for example, the circular movement of the sky (220b32–34); cf. Paul F. Conen,S.J., Die Zeittheorie des Aristoteles, Zetemata 35 (Munich: Beck, 1964), 141. 76. Aristotle, Metaphysics Z.13.1039a12: ὁ ἀριθμὸς σύνθεσις μονάδων; Aristotle, Physics III.7.207b7: ὁ δ᾽ ἀριθμός ἐστιν ἕνα πλείω, and in passing. 77. As Derrida rightly remarks, it follows that “if time comes under the rubric of mathematics or arithmetic, it is not, in itself, in its nature, a mathematical being”; Jacques Derrida, “Ousia et Grammè,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1972), 68; Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 59. 78. Aristotle, Metaphysics N.1.1088a5– 6; Aristotle, Basic Works, 913. 246

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79. From Zeller to Derrida: cf. Eduard Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung, vol. 2, pt. 2, Aristoteles und die alten Peripatetiker (1879; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1963), 399: “The unit of this number is the now”; and Derrida, “Ousia et Grammè,” in Marges, 68; Margins, 59: “The unity of the mea sure of time numbered in this way is the now, which permits the distinction between before and after.” Also, see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 421; Being and Time, 474: “The ‘nows’ are what get counted.” 80. Here I adopt the solution proposed by Wolfgang Wieland, in his remarkable work Die aristotelische Physik: Untersuchungen über die Grundlegung der Naturwissenschaft und die sprachlichen Bedingungen der Prinzipienforschung bei Aristoteles, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1970), Part 3, §18, page 316 and following. 81. Cf. Wieland, Aristotelische Physik, Part 3, §18. 82. Grundprobleme, 334; Basic Problems, 235. “When we look at a clock, since time itself does not lie in the clock, we assign time to the clock” (ibid., 368; 260– 61): for this time is “the time with which the Dasein that takes time reckons” (ibid., 369; 261), so that “time,” says Heidegger, “is in a certain way everywhere and yet it is in each instance only in the soul” (ibid., 335; 236). Now, “the soul,” which is not to be understood here in a unilaterally subjectivist sense, as in modern “psychology,” signifies nothing other, understood rigorously, than Dasein (ibid., 155; 110, where Heidegger expressly relates the Greek ψυχὴ to Dasein, even though the former remains indeterminate in its mode of being), so that time is not “something mental in the soul. Simultaneously it is ἐν παντί, everywhere, ἐν γῇ, on the earth, ἐν θαλάττῃ, in the ocean, ἐν οὐρανῷ, in the heaven. Time is everywhere and yet nowhere and, still, it is only in the soul” (ibid., 360; 255). Put otherwise, time is in the soul in the way in which original temporality, the “forgetting-enpresenting-expecting” is “in” Dasein— or is Dasein— but not in the manner of psychological “lived experiences”; Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 339; Being and Time, 389; Grundprobleme, 412; Basic Problems, 291. 83. Cf. Wieland, Aristotelische Physik, Part 3, §18, page 316. 84. We must firmly refuse here all psychologization of time, and thus also every interpretation that would see, behind the soul that numbers the movement of the sphere of the fi xed stars, in a neo-Platonic perspective, the universal soul— like Eugen Fink, Zur ontologischen Frühgeschichte von Raum, Zeit, Bewegung (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), 231, and Simplicius, Commentaire de la Physique 760.11 and following: “For . . . the cyclic motion, from which all other motions and changes derive their existence, is governed by the intelligence and design, as Alexander also agrees”; On Aristotle’s Physics, 4.1–5, 10–14, 173. 85. Interpreted in this manner, Aristotle’s theory is not so far removed, in its principles, from the doctrine of relativity, as Heidegger already noted in “The Concept of Time” (1924)—without drawing, however, the philosophical consequence: the dissociation of time with regard to every “psychic” determination,— “psychic” either in the sense of the Aristotelian psychè or of that which takes its place in the fundamental ontology: the Dasein; cf. “The Concept of Time,” in Notes to pages 50–51

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Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927, ed. Thomas Sheehan and Theodore J. Kisiel (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 201: “Some of its [Einstein’s theory of relativity’s] propositions are as follows: . . . ([a]n old proposition of Aristotle’s:) ‘Time too is nothing. It exists only as a consequence of the events occurring in it. . . .’ ” More precisely, the analogy resides in the fact that a movement of reference taken to be uniform—that is to say, having a constant speed—plays the role of ultimate frame of reference for the measurement of time: for Aristotle, this frame of reference is the circular motion of the sphere of fi xed stars, while for Einstein it is the movement of light in the void; time is, in each case, a clock-phenomenon whose measurement is tied to the state of movement of a body of reference. Einstein of course takes a step further in the articulation of time and of motion when he defines simultaneity itself in terms of the reception of a light signal emitted by different clocks that each indicate the time of a system. 86. As in Damascius, Corollarium de tempore, in Simplicii in Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quattuor Priores Commentaria, ed. Hermann Diels, vol. 9 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1882), 774, 35–37. 87. Neither Bergson nor Husserl (limiting our consideration to these two authors) was able to escape this consequence, inasmuch as, relating time to the soul or to the transcendental I, they continued to think of it as a certain “change”: Bergson, when he affirms that duration is an “absolute,” which is to say an inner change flowing at a given “speed”—“With a speed that, with regard to my consciousness, is a true absolute”— so that Bergson can ask himself: “Why with this determined speed, rather than with any other?”; Bergson, L’ évolution créatrice, in Oeuvres, Edition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 782; Husserl, when, not without hesitation, he tries to describe the ultimate constituting flow of time-consciousness: “we necessarily find a flow of continuous ‘change’; and this change has the absurd character that it flows precisely as it flows and can flow neither ‘faster’ nor ‘slower’ ”; Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewussteins, Hua X/74; Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 78. This hesitation comes here from the fact that Husserl still conceives this “flow” as a change (hence necessarily having a speed), but as a change in which “any object that changes is missing,” or again as a process in which, contradictorily, nothing happens at all (ibid.). 88. Maldiney, Aîtres de la langue, 117. 89. Time is not composed of nows, just as the line is not composed of points: “the ‘now’ is no part of time nor the section any part of the movement, any more than the points are parts of the line”; Aristotle, Physics IV.220a18 and following; Aristotle, Basic Works, 293. 90. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, trans. Robert W. Lawson (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 28, 29. 91. In his book Wieland rightly insists on the “operative” sense of the Aristotelian continuity: “The infinite,” he writes, “has a truly temporal sense only when διαίρεσις and πρόσθεσις . . . are understood literally as real activities” of the soul, 248

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or rather, of the intellect; Wieland, Aristotelische Physik, Part 3, §17, page 300; see also Julius Stenzel, Zahl und Gestalt bei Platon und Aristoteles, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlich Buchgesellschaft, 1959), 42 and following. 92. Following Strabon, Simplicius in his Commentary raises an objection concerning this argumentation: it only applies, he says, to local movement: cf. Diels, Fragmente, 711–12. Here we find the two main analogies that structure the entire treatise on time: magnitude (line)/point = motion/the moving thing = time/the now. 93. For Aristotle, the present is not the pure beginning of time, where time is perpetually in statu nascendi; it is first and foremost the end of a “part” of time, the past, and the beginning of another “part,” the future; for the now is not innertemporal in the sense of what becomes in time, but only in the sense in which the even and the odd are “in” number; but, in Aristotle’s view, there are only innertemporal “ beginnings” and “ends” because what the now mea sures is always in time, becoming. 94. On these grammatical questions and their philosophical implications, see Marie-Claire Galpérine, in “Le temps integral selon Damascius,” 338–39, and the fi ne analyses of Henri Maldiney, Aîtres de la langue, especially 108 and following. 95. It is necessary to stress that this question, in its Greek formulation, is strange: μεταϐέϐληκε, indeed, signifies “it is changed,” thus referring to an action already accomplished. Aristotle’s question can therefore be reformulated more literally as, “Is there a primary moment of the having-been changed?” 96. Simplicius, Commentaire, Diels, Fragmente, 984.5 and following; On Aristotle’s Physics 6, trans. David Konstan (London: Duckworth, 1989), 82 and following. 97. Diels, Fragmente, 984.23–25; On Aristotle’s Physics 6.83. 98. On the etymology of ἐντελέχεια, see Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: Histoire des mots, 4 vol. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968– 1980), 352. 99. Maldiney, Aîtres de la langue, 64. 100. Ibid. 101. This in between actuality and power is that in which the power (for example, for bronze, the capacity to be a statue) is revealed as such: see Brague, “Note sur la défi nition du mouvement (Physique III, 1–3),” in La Physique d’Aristote et les conditions d’une science de la nature, edited by F. de Gandt and P. Souffrin (Paris: J. Vrin, 1991), 117. In this regard, it is necessary to note, as Brague stresses, that motion is never defined by Aristotle as the passage from power to actuality, which would render his definition circular (according to a reproach addressed repeatedly to him), but rather as the actuality of a certain power. See also Brague, Aristote et la question du monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 498 and following. 102. Here Aristotle simultaneously affirms two things: (1) that motion truly is, against Eleaticism: the whole enterprise of a “physics” consists precisely in this Notes to pages 56–63

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ontological “rehabilitation” of motion, so as to make it the object of a knowledge of the sensible. This is why the verb “is” is stressed by the Stagirite when he affirms that “motion, indeed, is (ἐστὶν αὕτη)” (Physics III.201b6), or, again, that it is an actuality “not incapable of existing (ἐνδεχομένην δʼ εἶναι)” (202a2–3); (2) If motion indeed is, this is because it is a certain actuality, because it is operative; one might object that motion “cannot be classed simply as a potentiality or as an actuality (οὔτε εἰς δύναμιν τῶν ὄντων οὔτε εἰς ἐνέργειαν)” (201b28); and yet, it indeed is an actuality, but imperfect, unfinished (ἀτελὴς); on this definition, see Brague, Aristote et la question du monde, 502. 103. Aristotle, De Anima 416b33 and following; Aristotle, Basic Works, 564. On this connection, see Wieland, Aristotelische Physik, 332 and following. 104. Aristotle, Metaphysics Θ.6.1048b33 and following; Aristotle, Basic Works, 827; and 1048b23 and following. 105. See Jules Vuillemin, Nécessité ou contingence (Paris: Minuit, 1984), chap. 6. 106. Cleanthes is the only one to have denied it; see Vuillemin, Nécessité ou contingence, chap. 4. 107. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.11.1100a11–15; Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics II.1.1219b6. 108. Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de l’ être chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 468– 69; see too, by the same author, La prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 78– 80. 109. In Bergson we find this same contemporaneity of the “present” and the “past”—but transposed in the psychological domain—which attests not so much to a factual continuity between Aristotle and Bergson as to the necessary community of the conceptual frames in which all the traditional (metaphysical) thought of time lies: see Bergson, L’ énergie spirituelle, in Oeuvres, 913–14: “We claim that the formation of memory never comes after that of perception; it is contemporary with it. . . . Let us suppose, indeed, that the memory is not created along with the perception itself: I ask: at what moment will it be born . . . ? The more one reflects on this, the less one understands that the memory could ever be born unless it is created progressively with the perception itself.” 110. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1980), 67; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 63. 111. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Die Weltalter, in Schellings Werke: Nach der Originalausgabe in neuer Anordnung, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1927–1959); Schelling, Nachlassband, Die Weltalter Fragmente in den Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1946), 224. 112. Schelling, Philosophie der Off enbarung, in Schellings Werke, Bd. 3, page 352. 113. Schelling, Die Weltalter, 11. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid., 12. 250

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116. For the ancient, see Simplicius, Commentaire, Diels, Fragmente, 718.13 and following; for the modern, see Heidegger, Grundprobleme, 341; Basic Problems, 241. 117. “So time is the measure of the flow of being”; Simplicius, Corollarium de tempore, Diels, Fragmente, 774.35–37; Simplicius, Corollaries on Place and Time, trans. Urmson, 88. 118. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 339; Being and Time, 389; and Grundprobleme, 412; Basic Problems, 291: “ forgetful-enpresenting-expectance.” 119. See John F. Callahan, “Basil of Cesarea: A New Source for St. Augustine’s Theory of Time,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 63 (1958): 437–59, and Callahan, “Gregory of Nyssa and the Psychological View of Time,” in Atti del XII Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia (Florence: Sansoni, 1960), 9:59– 66. 120. Plotinus, Enneads III.7.11.41– 45; Plotinus, Plotinus, With an English Translation by A. H. Armstrong, vol. 3, Enneads III.1–9 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1967), 341. 121. Plotinus, Enneads IV.4.15.2: “Time belongs to the soul.” 122. Plotinus, Enneads III.7.13.38– 40. 123. Plotinus, Enneads III.7.13.33: Plotinus clarifies that this psychic movement, as opposed to inanimate movement (ἀψύχῳ), is “the most true” (ἀληθεστέρας), to the extent that it engenders the anterior and the posterior, which render the physical movements measurable and numerable. 124. Plotinus, Enneads III.7.13.37–38; Plotinus, English Translation 3:351, modified. 125. See Werner Beierwaltes, Plotin: Über Ewigkeit und Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 260. 126. Plotinus, Enneads VI.9.5.9: “The reasonings are already in a distension and movement (διαστάσει καὶ κινήσει)”; Plotinus, English Translation 7:319 (translation modified). 127. Plotinus, Enneads IV.4.15.13. 128. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991, 1998), 230. Subsequent quotations from this edition are indicated parenthetically in the text. 129. Plato, Timaeus 37.d.5: time is “a moving image of eternity,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. Cooper, 1241. Augustine sometimes seems to adopt for his own purposes this Platonic thesis: tempus quasi vestigium aeternitatis (De gen. ad litt. imp. lib. 13.38); tempora aeternitatem imitantia (De Musica VI.11.29). 130. Augustine, De Trinitate XV.9.16; The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: New City Press, 1991), 407. 131. Going forward, I will indicate them by capital letters, so as to distinguish the Future as a dimensional of time from the inner-temporal predicate “future.” 132. Plotinus, Enneads III.7.3.34; see the commentary of Beierwaltes, Plotin, 172 and following. 133. See Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, trans. A. H. C. Downes (1936; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 133; Notes to pages 67–72

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and “Notes sur l’être et le temps chez saint Augustin,” Recherches augustiniennes 2 (1962): 205–23, where Gilson writes, “It was necessary that Augustine found, in the reading of the Bible, an irresistible provocation to be reminded of Plato”; see, too, the critical remarks of Beierwaltes, Plotin, 174–75. 134. Augustine, Confessions XI.13.16; Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 230. 135. The expression spatium to designate a “space of time” is relatively standard in Latin and does not constitute an innovation on Augustine’s part: see, for example, Ovid, Metamorphoses III.124: brevis spatium vitae; Tacitus, Dial. 16: quod spatium temporis; Cicero, De Inv. I.27: ad spatium temporis; Seneca, Quaest. nat. V.11: spatium diei ac longitude; see also V. Neculai Baran, “L’expression du temps et de la durée en latin,” in Aiôn: Le temps chez les Romains, ed. Raymond Chevallier (Paris: A. and J. Picard, 1976). 136. See above, §3. 137. Augustine, De Trinitate X.7.10, and X.10.16; St. Augustine, The Trinity, 294, 297, modified. 138. Jean Guitton, Le temps et l’ éternité chez Plotin et saint Augustin (Paris: Boivin, 1933), 191. 139. Plotinus, Enneads IV.3.29.26; Plotinus, English Translation 4:128–29. 140. Plotinus, Enneads IV.3.29.23; Plotinus, English Translation, modified, 4:128–29. 141. Husserl, Vorlesungen, §12; Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 33. 142. See Aristotle, Physics IV.218b9 and following; Plotinus, Enneads III.7.8. 143. Aristotle, Physics IV.220b 3– 4; Aristotle, Basic Works, 294. 144. See Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 1:31; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1:14, modified. 145. Ricoeur, Temps et récit, 32; Time and Narrative 1:14. 146. John F. Callahan, Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), 166. 147. Aristotle, Physics IV.219a5. 148. Husserl, Vorlesungen, Hua X/25, 54; Husserl, Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 56. 149. Ricoeur, Temps et récit 1:41 and 34; Time and Narrative 1:21, 16. 150. Nevertheless, elsewhere he distinguishes a memory of the present from a memory of the past: we could, perhaps, find there a prefiguration of the Husserlian distinction; cf. Augustine, De Trinitate XIV.11.14: “As regards things past one means by memory that which makes it possible for them to be recalled and thought over again; so as regards this presence of the soul itself, one may talk without absurdity of memory as that which allows the soul to be present to itself ”; The Trinity, 382, modified. 151. Kurt Flasch, Was ist Zeit? (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), 389. 152. For example: Albert the Great, Summa de creaturis I (IV de coaevis) tr. 2, q. 5, a. 1, Bornet 34, 367a: Si tempus non esset nisi in anima, secundum unum est 252

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Notes to pages 72–87

tempus, scilicet attendentem motum: secundum alium non esset, scilicet non attendentem motum: ergo esse temporis non dependet ab anima, sed temporis perceptio; or Bonaventure, In 2 Sent. 2.2, Opera 21, 118 a C/D, where, insisting on the real, physical character of time, he writes that this is not a fictio animae, but a dispositio rei. On the medieval discussion of the Augustinian theory of time, cf. Udo Jeck, Aristoteles gegen Augustinus: Zur Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Zeit und Seele bei den antiken Aristoteleskommentatoren, im arabischen Aristotelismus und im 13. Jahrhundert (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1992). 153. Flasch, Was ist Zeit? 339. 154. Husserl, Vorlesungen, Hua X, 3; Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 3. 155. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram V.5.12; The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, SJ, Ancient Christian Writers 41 (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1982), 1:154. 156. Augustine, Confessions XII.8.8, Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 250, modified. See also XII.11.14: sine varietate motiorum non sunt tempora. 157. Augustine, City of God, XII, 15; trans. Marcus Dods, Modern Library paperback ed. (New York: Random House, 2000), 396. 158. See T. Liuzzi, “Tempo e memoria in Agostino dalle Confessioni al De trinitate,” in Rivista de storia delle filosofia 39 (1984): 37 and following. See, too, the critique of K. Flasch, Was ist Zeit?, 225. 159. Kurt Flasch, “Ancora una volta: l’anima e il tempo,” in Ripensare Agostino: interiorità e intenzionalità, edited by L. Alici, R. Piccolamini, and A. Pieretti (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 1993), 27. 160. Plotinus, Enneads III.7.11.7: “It [time] fell”; Plotinus, English Translation 3:337, translation modified). 161. Roland J. Teske, “The World-Soul and Time in St. Augustine,” in Augustinian Studies 14 (1983): 75–92; and K. Flasch, who seems, with a few hesitations, to adopt this hypothesis: Was ist Zeit?, 96–98. 162. On this term, see the illuminating remarks of Aimé Solignac in his notes to the edition of the Confessions published in the Bibliothèque augustinienne (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1962), 14:590. 163. It would be probably better to speak of a triple tension, of expectation, of memory, but also of attention, even if Augustine does not expressly refer to the latter; as Paul Ricoeur points out, “as for attention, its tension consists in the active ‘transit’ of what was future in the direction of what becomes past”; Ricoeur, Temps et récit, 39; Time and Narrative 1:20, modified. 164. This is the fundamental difference from Plotinus, for whom, by contrast, the soul “is not one of those which are in a state of flux (τῶν ῥεόντων)” (Plotinus, Enneads IV.3.26; Plotinus, English Translation 4:119), but engenders time on the basis of the eternity of the Noûs from which it proceeds. 165. Husserl, Vorlesungen, Hua, X/39, 80 and following; Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 85 (modified).

Notes to pages 87–90

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Part 2. Time 1. Carlo Diano, Forma ed evento: Principi per una interpretazione del mondo greco, 2nd ed. (Venice: Marsilio, 1994), 71. 2. What is being described is “the original temporal form of sensation”—Husserl, Vorlesungen, Hua X/31, 67; Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 69—which is to say, the manner in which the hylè is temporalized according to a certain (constant) form; the manner in which there emerges from the hylè itself, so to speak, the intentional morphè. 3. Husserl, Vorlesungen, Hua X/34, 73 and X/39, 81; Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 77, 85. 4. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie I, §81, Hua III/1, 163; Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1982), 193 (modified). 5. Husserl, Vorlesungen, Hua X/30, 62– 63; Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 64– 66. 6. Ibid., Hua X/43, 90; Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 95. 7. Ibid., Hua X/39, 80; Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 84. 8. Husserl, Manuscript C 2 I (1931), 22. 9. Husserl, Vorlesungen, Hua X/38, 78; Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 83. 10. Ibid., Hua X, Beilage VI, 111; 116. 11. Ibid., Hua X/42, 90; 94, modified. 12. Ibid., Hua X/36, 75; 79. 13. Ibid., Hua X, Beilage VI, 113; 118. 14. Ibid., Hua X/39, 80; 84. 15. Manuscript C 7 I (1932), 30. 16. Manuscript C 2 I (1931), 13. 17. Husserl, Vorlesungen, Hua X/39, 83; Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 88. 18. Manuscript C 2 III (1932), 8–9. 19. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, GA 24:308; Basic Problems, 216, modified. On Dasein as subject well-understood ontologically, cf. the same course, Grundprobleme, 103, 425, and 427 (Basic Problems, 73, 299, and 301), and Sein und Zeit, 366 (Being and Time, 417). 20. Rudolf Bernet, La vie du sujet: Recherches sur l’interprétation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 202 and 210. 21. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, GA 24:377; Basic Problems, 266– 67, modified. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 384; 271. 24. Ibid., 370; 262. 254

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25. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 328; Being and Time, 377. 26. Ibid., 367; 418. 27. Heidegger, Logik, die Frage nach der Wahrheit, GA 21:205; Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 173 (translation modified). Cf. also Heidegger, GA 20:267 and 317; En glish translation: History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 28. Heidegger, Logik, die Frage nach der Wahrheit, GA 21:205; Logic: The Question of Truth, 173 (modified). 29. Ibid. 409; 338. 30. Ibid. 410; 338, modified. 31. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 326; Being and Time, 374. 32. Ibid., 325; 373. 33. Ibid., 326; 373. 34. Ibid., 366; 417. 35. Ibid., 404–5 (emphasis added); 456–57 (modified). 36. Ibid., 336; 386 (modified). 37. In a course from 1930, Heidegger recognizes that the understanding of time is governed, in the final analysis, by that of Being (and thus also of the Being of Dasein): cf. Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, GA 31:123–24; The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002), 86, trans. modified, where he writes, “we are not inquiring into time in just any old way and without direction, but the manner in which we are questioning time, as well as the reach of this questioning, is already prescribed for us by the question of Being, or put another way, by what we know of this question itself, quite apart from its connection with time.” 38. In the only coherent sketch of the third unpublished section of Sein und Zeit that we possess, the Grundprobleme, the Temporalität of Being is itself approached only from ecstatic temporality (Zeitlichkeit): it is defined as the unity of the horizontal schema that belong to this ecstatic temporality. If the “turn” (Umschlag) that must lead to a radicalization of fundamental ontology on the basis of an interpretation of the Temporality (Temporalität) of Being itself cannot be accomplished, is it not then because Temporalität is itself grasped entirely in the light of the attitudes of “the subject . . . well-understood ontologically”? 39. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, GA 24:359– 60; Basic Problems, 255, modified. 40. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 419; Being and Time, 471, 472 (modified). 41. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, GA 24:359– 60; Basic Problems, 255. 42. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 366; Being and Time, 418, modified. See also §69 in its entirety. 43. Ibid., 366; 418. 44. See Claude Romano, Event and World, trans. Shane Mackinlay (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), §§4– 6, pages 23–39; Romano, L’ événement et le monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 35–56. Notes to pages 105–10

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45. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics A.1100 a 5– 6; Basic Works, 946, modified. 46. Jean Racine, Phèdre I.i.34, emphasis added: “Cet heureux temps n’est plus, tout a changé de face”; Racine, Three Plays of Racine, trans. George Dillon (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1961), 128, modified. 47. Romano, Event and World, §11. 48. See Romano, Event and World, §7. 49. Valéry, “Le Cimetière marin,” l.127, in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, edited by Jackson Matthews, vol. 1, Poems, trans. David Paul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 221. 50. See Adolf Grünbaum, “The Exclusion of Becoming From the Physical World,” in The Concepts of Space and Time, edited by Milic Čapek (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), 473. We shall return later to Grünbaum’s argument. 51. See G. W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, Correspondance, presented by André Robinet, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991). 52. Leibnitz, letter of 25 February 1716, in ibid., 53. 53. In formulating the problem that way, Grünbaum is inspired by the paradox of McTaggart and his opposition between “A series” and “B series”; see J. M. E. McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” in The Philosophy of Time, edited by Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 23–24. 54. G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 81: “The theory of the ‘block universe’ . . . implies that past (and future) events coexist with those that are present.” 55. Einstein, letter to Ruth Levitova, in Einstein, Oeuvres choisies, ed. Françoise Balibar (Paris: Seuil and CNRS, 1991), 5:117. See also the letter to Michele Besso of March 21, 1955, ibid., 119: “For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one”; translation from B. Hoff mann and H. Dukas, Albert Einstein (Frogmore, St. Albans: Paladin, 1975), 257–58. 56. Valéry, Cahiers 1:1361. 57. Jean Largeault, Philosophie de la nature (Val-de-Marne: Université de Paris XII—Val-de-Marne, 1984), 245. 58. Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, trans. Olaf Helmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 116. 59. Whitrow, Natural Philosophy of Time, 81n2. 60. See Milic Čapek, “The Inclusion of Becoming in the Physical World,” in The Concepts of Space and Time (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), 503, and Kurt Gödel, “A Remark About the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy,” in Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, Library of Living Philosophers 7 (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 557. 61. Olivier Costa de Beauregard, “Time in Relativity Theory: Arguments for a Philosophy of Being,” trans. David Park, in The Voices of Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man’s Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and by the Humanities, ed. J. T. Fraser (New York: George Braziller, 1966), 429, 430. 256

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Notes to pages 111–16

62. Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity: Four Lectures Delivered at Princeton University, May, 1921, trans. Edwin Plimpton Adams (Princeton: Prince ton University Press, 1923), 32: “The non- divisibility of the fourdimensional continuum of events does not at all, however, involve the equivalence of the space co-ordinates with the time co-ordinate. On the contrary, we must remember that the time co-ordinate is defined physically wholly differently from the space co-ordinates,” which is translated by a contrary sign from the coordinate of time (Δt ) in Lorentz’s transformation. This point renders untenable the critiques of Bergson and of Meyerson of the “spatialization” of time in Einstein’s theory. 63. Ibid., 31–32. 64. I thus join with Jean Largeault’s conclusion in Philosophie de la nature, 250: “Philosophy probably has no grounds for extracting from the spatiotemporal relativist kinematics any ultimate illuminations on the enigma of time.” 65. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, trans. Robert W. Lawson (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 171 (modified). 66. Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.8.1073b37; Aristotle, Basic Works, 883, trans. modified. 67. See Romano, Event and World, §24, especially pages 199–200. 68. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Massimo Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), vol. 12, Nachgelassene Fragmente, Herbst 1885 bis Herbst 1887, Notebook 2 (67), 91. 69. [Translator’s note: the distinction drawn in the French text between souvenir and mémoire is maintained here by the distinction in English between remembrance or recollection and memory.] 70. On this distinction between evental and evential, see Romano, Event and World, §12 and §21(c). 71. Maldiney, Penser l’ homme et la folie (Grenoble: Millon, 1991), 422. 72. Aristotle, Metaphysics IX.9.1051a29–30 and 33; Aristotle, Basic Works, 833. 73. Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant, in Oeuvres, 1262– 63; Creative Mind, 21. 74. Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant, 1339 and 1341. 75. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik?, in Wegmarken, GA 9:115; Im Sein des Seienden geschieht das Nichten des Nichts—“In the Being of Being the Nihilation of the Nothing Occurs,” in Heidegger, Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell, 2nd ed. (1977; repr., New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 104. 76. See the “Introduction” to Event and World. For this reason, in the statements that follow, I will often have recourse to the verb “to be” placed within quotation marks. Th is is not only a convenience of writing: the event occurs outside of ontology. The objection that would consist in emphasizing that we cannot, despite everything, do without the verb “to be” in describing a priori structures is inconsistent: it underscores only a contingent trait of the language in which I write. Indeed, as Emile Benveniste has shown in his article on “the nominal phrase” (Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale [Paris: Gallimard, Notes to pages 118–30

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1966], 1:151– 67), there is no linguistic necessity to express logical identity as well as the synthesis between a subject and a predicate (in particular in definitional statements) by means of a particular verb, the verb “to be”: a very large variety of languages (including Russian and Chinese) use, for this purpose, a nominal sentence. These sentences are not sentences “with zero copula,” for there is no legitimacy in raising as a model the languages in which the verb “to be” is required in order to operate such a synthesis. Instead, we must consider, as a particularity of certain Indo-European languages, beginning with ancient Greek, that the verb “to be” may play in the statement not only the role of a “full verb,” possessing a specific lexical meaning (“to exist, to have real consistency”), but further that of a privileged verb for linking a subject to a predicate, in this way receiving the value of “copula.” The importance of this linguistic particularity for the entirety of Western thought does not strip this fact of its contingency. We must not confuse here a factitious trait that English and a certain number of other IndoEuropean languages share with a necessity of thought. 77. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte, with Albert B. Anderson (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1980), 115. 78. Anne Cheng, Histoire de la pensée chinoise (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 312. 79. Wang Bi, Commentary on the Laozi, 14, quoted and translated by Anne Cheng, Histoire, 314. 80. Guo Xiang, Commentary on the Zuangzi 2:24, quoted and translated by Anne Cheng, Histoire, 322. 81. Anne Cheng, Histoire, 325. 82. Nietzsche, “Die stillste Stunde,” chapter in Also sprach Zarathoustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), 258 (translation modified). 83. Maldiney, Penser l’ homme et la folie, 354. 84. Gustave Flaubert, L’ éducation sentimentale (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1936), 2:36; Sentimental Education, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1988), 18 (translation modified). 85. Ibid., 34 and 35; 16. 86. Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant, in Oeuvres, 1265; Creative Mind, 25, modified. 87. See the magisterial interpretation of Oedipus the King by Karl Reinhardt: Sophokles, French trans. E. Martineau (Paris: Minuit, 1973). 88. [Trans. note: An allusion to the first line of Mallarmé’s sonnet “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe.”] 89. Maldiney, Penser l’ homme et la folie, 135. 90. No adherence to the theses of “deconstruction” is implied here by the borrowing of this term from Jacques Derrida: it only manifests the belonging to a common horizon of problems— bequeathed by Heidegger—having to do with the “margins” of presence. 258

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Notes to pages 130–39

91. See this volume, §12 and following. 92. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 111; Being and Time, 146. 93. Heidegger, Die Grundbegriff e der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit, GA 29–30: 527–28; Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 363. 94. See Romano, Event and World, 17–19, 134, 139–140, and in passing. 95. Schelling, Die Weltalter, in Schellings Werke, Nachlassband, edited by Manfred Schröter (Munich: Biederstien, 1946), 75. 96. See above, pages 60–67. Part 3. Temporality 1. Racine, Athalie, act I, scene 1, line 5. 2. See Romano, Event and World, §21, 157– 64. 3. Ibid., §9, 53–54. 4. [Translator’s note: In French, a vista is an échappée, which lends a sense of “escape” to the concept here being described. By associating with the word “vista” the notion of a view that “opens out” through and beyond a narrow passage onto a prospect, the English reader should be able to appreciate the nuance of the French term.] 5. Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Günter Neske, 1959); Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 63– 65, 67– 69, 72–74. 6. Valéry, Cahiers 1:1219. See, too, the analysis of Jean-Louis Chrétien in L’ inoubliable et l’ inespéré (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991), 78– 83; Chrétien, The Unforgettable and The Unhoped For, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 50–56. 7. Valéry, Cahiers 1:1219. 8. Bergson, Matière et mémoire, chap. 3, Oeuvres, 276 and following; Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911), 170 and following. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie/ Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980) no. 468, page 90. 10. Ibid., vol. 1, no. 1050, page 183, whence Wittgenstein’s even more categorical conclusion: “Whatever the event does leave behind in the organism, it isn’t the memory” (vol. 1, no. 220, page 45). 11. Charles Péguy, Clio: Dialogue de l’ histoire et de l’ âme païenne, in Oeuvres en prose complètes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 3:1177. 12. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1971), 142. 13. See Romano, Event and World, §17a, 114–21. 14. Péguy, Clio, 1176. 15. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 310; Being and Time, 357. Notes to pages 139–69

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16. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, II, art. 72, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1:353. 17. Plato, Philebus 36e. 18. Aristotle, Metaphysics A.2.983a14–20; Aristotle, Basic Works, 693. 19. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, II, art. 73: “[T]he whole body remains as immobile as a statue”; in Philosophical Writings of Descartes 1:354. 20. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, Ak.V.365, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 238. 21. Ibid., Ak.V.272, 154. 22. Aristotle, Metaphysics A.2.983a13–14; Aristotle, Basic Works, 693 (translation modified). 23. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, Ak.V.272, 154. 24. Descartes, First Set of Replies, in Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, rev. ed. (Paris: Vrin and CNRS, 1964–76), 9:90. 25. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, II, art. 53, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes 1:373. 26. “It [wonder] has no opposite, for, if the object before us has no characteristics that surprise us, we are not moved by it at all and we consider it without passion”; ibid., 1:350. 27. On despair, see Romano, Event and World, §16b, 104–9. 28. Ibid., §16c, 109–14. 29. Valéry, Cahiers 1:1286. 30. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction (New York: Bantam), 1981, 332. 31. Ibid., 366. 32. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 261; Being and Time, 306 (translation modified). 33. Ibid., 262; 307. 34. Vladimir Jankélévitch’s formula: see Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien, vol. 3, La volonté de vouloir (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 50. 35. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, GA 24:392; Basic Problems, 277. 36. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 325; Being and Time, 373. 37. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, GA 24:375; Basic Problems, 265. 38. Heidegger, Die Grundbegriff e der Metaphysik, GA 29–30:527; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 363: “in projecting, this occurrence of projection carries whoever is projecting out and away from themselves in a certain way, but . . . in this being removed by the projection, what occurs is precisely a peculiar turning toward themselves on the part of whoever is projecting.” 39. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, GA 24:375; Basic Problems, 265. We find here, moreover, the difficulty that has already been underlined (see above, §7): since the future designates an “existential concept,” temporality seems to be conceived 260

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in terms of the Being of Dasein, and not in terms of a “beyond of Being” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας), and thus of the meaning of Being as such. 40. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 307; Being and Time, 355. 41. For Heidegger, surprise is the reverse of awaiting (expectation) and always belongs to an inauthentic way of Being of Dasein. As for the resolute Dasein, it can be surprised by nothing: “In the not awaiting of the making-present which is lost, the ‘horizontal’ leeway within which one’s Dasein can be assailed by something surprising is first disclosed”; ibid., 355; 407. 42. See Romano, Event and World, §14, 82–91. 43. Franz Kafka, letter of August 4–5, 1920, in Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. Tania Stern and James Stern (New York: Schocken, 1953), 150. 44. See Romano, Event and World, 175–76. 45. William Faulkner, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms] (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 41. 46. Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Merline, 22 February 1921, in Rilke, Letters to Merline, trans. Jesse Browner (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 79 (translation modified). Rilke attributes this citation to Bonsels. 47. Octavio Paz, Selected Poems, trans. Eliot Weinberger and G. Aroul (New York: NewDirections, 1984), 21. 48. Henri Michaux, “L’avenir de la poésie,” in Michaux, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1:986. 49. Rilke, “Testament,” trans. Pierre Joris, Sulfur, no. 30 (Spring 1992): 96. 50. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. Daniel Slager (New York: Archipelago, 2004), 56. 51. Quoted and translated by J.-F. Billeter, in L’art chinois de l’ écriture (Geneva: Skira, 1989), 127. 52. Braque, Illustrated Notebooks, 80. 53. Aristotle, Physics II.197a8; Aristotle, Basic Writings, 245, translation modified. 54. Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, GA 13:78; Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 6. 55. Valéry, Cahiers 1:1335. 56. “Un-assumable,” in the sense of what cannot be “taken over” (referring to Heidegger’s übernehmen). 57. Cézanne, Conversations with Gasquet, in Conversations avec Cézanne, ed. Michael Doran (Paris: Macula, 1978), 114; Michael Doran, ed., Conversations with Cézanne, trans. Julie Lawrence Cochran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 115. 58. See Romano, Event and World, 89–91. 59. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 2:166. To the esthete’s absence of choice and loss of himself, Kierkegaard opposes the absolute choice by which man enters into the ethical sphere: “the point is not the reality of that which is chosen but the reality of choosing” (176), for the alternative that lies beneath it is that Notes to pages 178–88

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between the choice and its opposite, the absence of choice: “The Either/Or I have advanced is, therefore, in a certain sense absolute, for it is between choosing or not choosing” (177). In thus taking up the possibility of choice, the ethical individual at the same time grasps himself as guilty (216–17), so that “this choice is identical with the repentance” (251). Heidegger was largely inspired by these analyses when he establishes the solidarity of resoluteness, as “choosing of choice” (Sein und Zeit, 268; Being and Time, 313), and the ontologico-existential concept of fault (Schuld), even if the ontological formalization of this concept removes it, in his view, from every merely ethical meaning. Anticipatory resoluteness, too, is a choice that chooses nothing, except to choose, and that thus takes up a possibility that was alienated by the “they”: “The ‘they’ has always kept Dasein from taking hold of these possibilities of Being. . . . So Dasein make [sic] no choices, gets carried along by the nobody, and thus ensnares itself in inauthenticity. This process can be reversed only if Dasein specifically brings itself back to itself from its lostness in the the ‘they.’ . . . When Dasein thus brings itself back from the ‘they,’ . . . this must be accomplished as recovery of a choice. But recovering a choice signifies choosing to make this choice— deciding for a potentiality-for-Being, and making this decision from one’s own Self. In choosing to make this choice (im Wählen der Wahl), Dasein makes possible, first and foremost, its authentic potentiality-for-Being”; Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 268; Being and Time, 312–13, translation modified. 60. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 322; Being and Time, 369. 61. Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik, GA 26:257–58; The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 199. 62. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 307; Being and Time, 355. 63. See Romano, Event and World, §§3 and 18. 64. See Heidegger, Grundprobleme, GA 24:438; Basic Problems, 308: “All origination and all genesis in the field of the ontological is [sic] not growth and unfolding but degeneration, since everything arising arises, that is, in a certain way runs away, removes itself from the superior force of the source.” 65. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 145; Being and Time, 186. 66. See above, §7, n. 38. 67. See Romano, Event and World, §15. 68. Ibid. 69. Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe, GA 26:257–258; Metaphysical Foundations, 199. 70. See Romano, Event and World, “Introduction” and §13, 1–21, 69– 82. 71. Paul Klee, “On Modern Art,” in Modern Artists on Art: Second, Enlarged Edition, ed. Robert L. Herbert (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2000), 113 (translation modified). 72. Braque, Le jour et la nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 29; Braque, Illustrated Notebooks, 87. 73. Stendhal, Correspondance (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1967), 2:7.

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74. Rilke, “Seventh Elegy,” in Duino Elegies, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 45. 75. Le Congrès de psychiatrie et de neurologie de langue française, Le traumatisme psychique, rencontre et devenir (Paris: Masson, 1994), 112. 76. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 211 (Lafuma, fr. 641; Brunschvicg, fr. 129). 77. Congrès de psychiatrie, Le traumatisme psychique, 113. 78. Otto Fenichel, La théorie psychanalytique des névroses (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), quoted in Le traumatisme psychique, 114. 79. Maldiney, Penser l’ homme et la folie, 66. 80. Claude Barrois, Les névroses traumatiques (Paris: Dunod, 1988), 114. 81. Le traumatisme psychique, 115. 82. Ibid., 120. 83. Ibid., 114. 84. Ibid., 109. 85. Schelling, Die Weltalter, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1946); Schellings Werke, Nachlassband, 81; French translation by Pascal David: Les âges du monde (Paris: 1992), 100 [translated into English]: “Each possible time contains all time; for that which it does not contain as present, it nevertheless contains as past or as future.” Whence comes what Schelling calls the “organic” character of time. 86. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Complete Poems and Plays, 117. 87. See above, §12. 88. See Romano, Event and World, §12, 65– 69. 89. Pascal, Pensées, 130 (Lafuma, fr. 427, Brunschvicg, fr. 194). 90. Samuel Beckett, “Fizzle 4,” Fizzles, in The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 234 (emphasis added); Beckett’s French version of this passage (emphasis added) reads, “J’ai renoncé avant de naître, ce n’est pas possible autrement, il fallait cependant que ça naisse, ce fut lui, j’ étais dedans, c’est comme ça que je vois la chose, c’est lui qui a crié, c’est lui qui a vu le jour . . . ce n’est pas possible autrement”; Pour finir encore et autres foirades (Paris: Minuit, 1976), 26–27. 91. Of course, birth “is the original and inaugural event from which and in light of which all other events can in turn be characterized” (Romano, Event and World, 70); but it in no way follows from this that birth is not a sui generis event, situated as a consequence on another plane than other events. 92. Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (1955; repr., Paris: Gallimard “Folioessais,” 1988), 130 and 202; Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 104, 154–55. 93. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 248; Being and Time, 292. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 256–57; 300–1. 96. See Romano, Event and World, §16(b), 104–9.

Notes to pages 202–21

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263

97. Rainer Maria Rilke, 6 January 1923 letter to the countess Margot SizzoNoris Crouy, in The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer (New York: Modern Library, 2005), 111. 98. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’ être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, (1943; repr., Paris: Gallimard “Collection Tel,” 1976), 555; Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (1953; repr., New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), 655. Sartre specifies that this fact “can not be deduced from the ontological structure of the for-itself ” and, consequently, “does not evolve from [its] facticity” (557; Being and Nothingness, 656). 99. Ibid., 557; 656 (trans. modified). 100. Ibid., 571; 674. 101. Rilke, from Das Testament, English translation in The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer, 112. 102. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à- l’autre (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 193; Entre nous: Thinking- of-the- Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshaw (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 174 (modified). 103. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik?, in Wegmarken, GA 9:120; Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, 2nd ed., 108. 104. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Wolfgang Wieland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1966), 22; The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 59: “Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.” 105. It is worth remembering that “to die,” from the existential point of view, signifies strictly, and signifies nothing other than to be anxious for the ultimate and unsurpassable possibility of one’s Being, to exist resolutely this possibility: “dying” (Sterben) is not synonymous, to this extent, with the event of decease (Ableben). 106. Cf., for example, Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, GA 31:136; The Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Ted Sadler, 94. 107. Th is problem has been raised on several occasions: cf. Henri Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” Revue internationale de philosophie 14 (1960): 154: “In wishing to stress the primitiveness of finitude too much, we greatly risk surreptitiously transforming this finitude into infinity”; see also Françoise Dastur, Heidegger et la question du temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 112: “The fi nitude of Being, in the texts of 1929 . . . , is still thought in relation to the transcendence of Dasein, whose Being is the finite horizon, that is to say, in relation to the in-finitude of a self-projection that closes in on itself.” 108. Wilhelm Schapp, In Geschichten verstrickt: Zum Sein von Mensch und Ding (1953; repr., Wiesbaden: B. Hermann, 1976). I translate “verstrickt” in a more neutral manner as “involved,” rather than “entangled.” 109. A phenomenological study of “History” in the supra-individual sense is beyond the scope of the present study. It would bring in epistemological problems that have no bearing here: for example, the problem of all the mediations through 264

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Notes to pages 222–29

which the historian relates to supra-individual events, not only in order to interpret them, but in order to establish their reality and their exact circumstances in the first place. 110. Taken from a lecture given at the New School for Social Research in 1954, quoted by Paul Ricoeur in his preface to the French translation of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition: Condition de l’ homme moderne, trans. Georges Fradier (1961; repr., Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1983), 10; see Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 319. 111. See Romano, Event and World, §12, 65– 69.

Notes to pages 229–37

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265

Index

Albert the Great, 252 Arendt, Hannah, 229, 265 Aristotle, xii, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 16, 18, 27, 35, 38–45, 47–52, 54–64, 65–67, 68, 73, 74, 77, 78–79, 82, 90, 95, 96, 109–10, 113, 129, 145, 172, 173, 183, 212, 241, 244, 245, 246, 247–48, 249–50, 252, 256, 257, 260, 261 Aubenque, Pierre, 64, 250 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, xiii, 3, 4, 6, 18, 52, 66, 67–93, 98, 101, 109, 197, 211, 227, 251, 252, 253 Baran, V. Neculai, 252 Barrois, Claude, 263 Beckett, Samuel, 213, 263 Beierwaltes, Werner, 251, 252 Benjamin, Walter, 191 Benveniste, Emile, 257–58 Bergson, Henri, xii, 4, 9, 15, 16, 17, 24, 52, 66, 87, 96, 97, 110, 129–30, 145, 159, 242, 248, 250, 257, 258, 259 Bernet, Rudolf, 103, 254 Birault, Henri, 264 Blanchot, Maurice, 218, 263 Bonaventure, Saint, 253

Bouissou, G., 86 Brague, Rémi, 41, 42, 245, 249–50 Braque, Georges, 30, 183, 201–2, 244, 261, 262 Brentano, Franz, 76, 100 Callahan, John F., 82, 251, 252 Čapek, Milic, 256 Cézanne, Paul, 261 Chantraine, Pierre, 249 Cheng, Anne, 258 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 259 Cicero, 252 Clarke, Samuel, 242, 256 Cleanthes, 250 Conen, Paul F., 246 Costa de Beauregard, Olivier, 256 Damascius, 29, 35, 67, 243, 244, 248 Dastur, Françoise, 264 Debussy, Claude, 120 Derrida, Jacques, 246, 247, 258 Descartes, René, 2, 106, 172, 173, 174, 260 Diano, Carlo, 95, 254 Diels, Hermann, 243, 249, 251 Diès, Auguste, 20, 35, 243, 244 267

Einstein, Albert, 55, 115–18, 248, 256, 257 Eliot, T. S., 209, 259, 263 Faulkner, William, 181 Fenichel, Otto, 263 Fink, Eugen, 247 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 232, 261 Flasch, Kurt, 86, 87, 88, 252, 253 Flaubert, Gustave, 133–34, 258 Galpérine, Marie-Claire, 244, 249 Gilson, Étienne, 72, 251–52 Gödel, Kurt, 256 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2, 241 Grünbaum, Adolf, 115, 116–19, 256 Guitton, Jean, 75, 252 Guo Xiang, 132, 258 Hegel, G. W. F., 4, 42, 51, 181, 189, 226, 250, 264 Heidegger, Martin, xii, xiii, 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 38, 39, 43–44, 45–49, 50, 54, 57, 66, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 105–8, 130, 141, 173, 178, 184, 188, 190, 196, 197, 211, 219–20, 226, 227, 238, 241, 245–46, 247–8, 251, 254–55, 257, 258, 259, 260–61, 262, 263, 264 Heraclitus, 22, 27, 31, 33 Husserl, Edmund, xii, xiii, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10–12, 15, 16, 17, 32, 38, 45, 52, 55, 66, 76, 84, 85, 87, 89, 96, 97, 98–103, 105, 115, 119–21, 152, 161, 238, 242, 244, 248, 252, 253, 254 James, Henry, 175, 260 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 260 Jeck, Udo, 253 John of the Cross, Saint, 132 Kafka, Franz, 181, 261 Kant, Immanuel, xii, 4, 6, 16, 55, 96, 97, 101, 109, 172, 242, 260 Kierkegaard, Søren, 131, 188, 190, 197, 258, 261–62 Klee, Paul, 201, 262 Largeault, Jean, 256, 257 Leibniz, G. W., 114, 242, 256 268

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Index

Levinas, Emmanuel, xii, 130, 183, 224, 241, 264 Liszt, Franz, 120 Liuzzi, T., 253 Maldiney, Henri, 63, 133, 204, 243, 244, 248, 249, 257, 258, 263 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 258 McTaggart, J. M. E., 256 Meijering, E. P., 78 Michaux, Henri, 261 Michelangeli, Arturo Benedetti, 120 Minkowski, Hermann, 116, 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 122, 132, 257, 258 Ovid, 252 Parmenides, 19, 20, 27, 34, 244 Pascal, Blaise, 204, 213, 263 Paz, Octavio, 261 Péguy, Charles, 149, 160, 166, 259 Pindar, 190 Plato, xii, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 18–31, 33–34, 37–39, 58, 60, 66, 67, 95, 239, 241, 242, 243, 251, 260 Plotinus, xii, 54, 66, 67–68, 72, 76, 77, 78–79, 81, 88, 89, 93, 244, 251, 252, 253 Proclus, 244 Quine, W. V. O., 117 Racine, Jean, 150, 256, 259 Reinhardt, Karl, 258 Ricoeur, Paul, 78, 84, 252, 253, 265 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 182, 183, 202, 222, 224, 261, 263, 264 Rodin, Auguste, 183 Romano, Claude, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 222–23, 264 Schapp, Wilhelm, 228, 264 Schelling, F. W. J. von, 65–66, 142, 209, 250, 259, 263 Seguy-Duclot, Alain, 244 Seneca, 252

Simplicius, 39, 41, 45, 62, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 251 Socrates, 22 Solignac, Aimé, 253 Solon, 64 Stendhal, 202, 262 Stenzel, Julius, 249 Strabon, 249 Straus, Erwin, 159 Su Shi, 183

Valéry, Paul, 1, 116, 157, 175, 184, 241, 256, 259, 260, 261 Vuillemin, Jules, 250

Teske, Roland J., 253 Tréhorel, E., 86

Zeller, Eduard, 247 Zeno, 19, 27–28

Wang Bi, 132, 258 Weyl, Hermann, 116, 256 Whitrow, G. J., 115–16, 256 Wieland, Wolfgang, 247, 248, 249, 250 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 160, 259

Index

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269

Perspectives in Continental Philosophy John D. Caputo, series editor

John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard— From Irony to Edification. Michael D. Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. James H. Olthuis, ed., Knowing Other- wise: Philosophy at the Th reshold of Spirituality. James Swindal, Refl ection Revisited: Jürgen Habermas’s Discursive Th eory of Truth. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern. Second edition. Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation— Essays on Late Existentialism. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Second edition. Francis J. Ambrosio, ed., The Question of Christian Philosophy Today. Jeffrey Bloechl, ed., The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds., Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology. Trish Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science. Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy. Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Second edition. Dominique Janicaud, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate.

Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt. Introduction by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated with an introduction by Thomas A. Carlson. Jeff rey Dudiak, The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology. Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith. Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Eric Boynton, eds., The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice. Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross. Translated with an introduction by Jacquelyn Porter. Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Peter H. Spader, Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For. Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl. Don Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. Phillip Goodchild, Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy. William J. Richardson, S.J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. Translated with an introduction by Stephen E. Lewis. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response. Translated with an introduction by Anne Davenport. D. C. Schindler, Han Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation. Julian Wolfreys, ed., Thinking Diff erence: Critics in Conversation. Allen Scult, Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An Ontological Encounter. Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein. Jolita Pons, Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible. Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raftery-Skehan. Charles P. Bigger, Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor’s Metaphysical Neighborhood.

Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology “Wide Open”: After the French Debate. Translated by Charles N. Cabral. Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy, eds., Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, eds., The Phenomenology of Prayer. S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler, eds., Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God. Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall, eds., Th e Experience of God: A Postmodern Response. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy. John Martis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image. Edith Wyschogrod, Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others. Gerald Bruns, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly. Brian Treanor, Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate. Simon Morgan Wortham, Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University. Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life. Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida. Translated by Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith. Jean-Luc Marion, On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. Jean-Luc Nancy, Philosophical Chronicles. Translated by Franson Manjali. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. Andrea Hurst, Derrida Vis-à- vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body. Translated by Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. Jean-Luc Marion, Th e Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner and others. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology. Translated by Scott Davidson. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. Joshua Kates, Fielding Derrida. Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On.

Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt, eds., Difficulties of Ethical Life. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand, Introduction by Marc Jeannerod. Claude Romano, Event and World. Translated by Shane Mackinlay. Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being. B. Keith Putt, ed., Gazing Through a Prism Darkly: Reflections on Merold Westphal’s Hermeneutical Epistemology. Eric Boynton and Martin Kavka, eds., Saintly Influence: Edith Wyschogrod and the Possibilities of Philosophy of Religion. Shane Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics. Kevin Hart and Michael A. Signer, eds., The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, eds., Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology. William Robert, Trials: Of Antigone and Jesus. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema, eds., A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur. Kas Saghafi, Apparitions— Of Derrida’s Other. Nick Mansfield, The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida. Don Ihde, Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives. Françoise Dastur, Questioning Phenomenology. Translated by Robert Vallier. Suzi Adams, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation. Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, eds., Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality. Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media. Alena Alexandrova, Ignaas Devisch, Laurens ten Kate, and Aukje van Rooden, Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy. Preamble by Jean-Luc Nancy. Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection. Translated by George Hughes. Scott M. Campbell, The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being, and Language. Françoise Dastur, How Are We to Confront Death? An Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Robert Vallier. Foreword by David Farrell Krell. Christina M. Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy. Ben Morgan, On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self. Neal DeRoo, Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida.

Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline R. Lundquist eds., Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering. Thomas Claviez, ed., The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible. Roland Faber and Jeremy Fackenthal, eds., Th eopoetic Folds: Philosophizing Multifariousness. Jean-Luc Marion, The Essential Writings. Edited by Kevin Hart. Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object- Oriented Theology. Foreword by Levi R. Bryant Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality. David Nowell Smith, Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics. Claude Romano, Event and Time. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Frank Chouraqui, Ambiguity and the Absolute: Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty on the Question of Truth. Gregory C. Stallings, Manuel Asensi, and Carl Good, eds., Material Spirit: Religion and Literature Intranscendent.