Reflections on Time and Politics
by Nathan Widder
A bazar mix of subjects. Widder brings the together in a subtle way. To sum it up: Otherness in the terms prescribed by will to
truth – as either an oppositional
difference compatible with identity or an excessive, unmediatable difference
that may be elevated to divinity or reduced to chaos and materiality, but in
either case is treated as a difference lying outside the boundaries of identity –
this sense presents itself as the immanent differentiator that disjoins
differences, folding together heterogeneous but mutually imbricated
domains. This untimely excess arises
with discursive practice. In functioning
this way however this excess can also help us modify our practices and ourselves. All is wrapped up with discourse around Heidegger’s
thesis that temporality is the horizon of being. Where I've been exposed to it through Landmarks Forum (EST of the 70's)
The following are ten pages of extract notes touching on metaphoric descriptions of the reality of TIME as the surface tension of temporal man and his relations t to the material world around him as the surface tension of water where the deeper you go the less tension there is.
NOTES:
1.
Page 5: Heidegger’s
thesis that temporality is the horizon of being and Deleuze’s
declaration that repetition in the eternal return is the “for-itself” of
difference invert the standards priority so that instead of time being modeled
on movement, movement is modeled on it.
The feeling we have is that the
present disappears into the past without bein able to prevent it.
2.
Page 7: The inversion of time and movement
relates to another contemporary philosophical project: the achievement of immanence.
3.
Page 10: And for Freud and Nietzsche, it I the
domain of unconscious drives of instincts that function with no notion of
linear time.
4.
Page 12:
In all these areas, time’s structure is the guarantor of the thinking
and novelty that Nietzsche associates with the revelation of values.
5.
Page 13: The “now” in this sense, pertains to
time, but is not part of time. On the
other hand Aristotle holds the “neither time be
if there were no ‘now’ nor would ‘now’ be if there were no time … time
owes its continuity to the “now” and yet
is divided by reference to it. Here the
“now” is essential to time’s being.
Taken together, these claims suggest a fundamental metaphysical aporia (a
logical impasse or contradiction), whereby time does both and does not exist
and the present “now” functions ambiguously as both limit a transition,
dividing and connecting sequence past and future “now”
6.
Page 15: Despite certain interpretations, then,
finite periods of any continuum, spatial or temporal, are not infinitely divisible
but only potentially infinitely divisible.
7.
Page 17: like a cut made into flowing
water. Time being perceived only with
movement of change, but unlike movement, existing everywhere rather than
relating only to a particular moving thing, indicates that “time is neither
identical with movement nor capable of being made separated from it.”
8.
Page 20: Aristotle upon the precise and
identifiable limits of time, one relating to the process of change – and the
other concerning the structure of time itself.
With respect to the first , Aristotle maintains that change terminates
an an individual instant, but no instant can be identified when it begins. A divisible segment of time during which a
change is completed contains a period when change is still taking place and one
when it has already finished. This segment can be divided into smaller segments
until reaching a “now’ that no longer contains both states.
9.
Page 21:
while nothing can move or be at rest in the present “now” it is
undeniable that the passing of future into the past does not indeed occur
there.
10. Page
23: Thus, the infinite divisibility of space gives no ground for denying that
space is composed of points.
11. Page
25: While “resort to geometric
intuition” is exceedingly useful Dedekind argues that is bases irrational
numbers directly upon the conception of extensive magnitudes – which itself is
nowhere carefully defined – and explains number as the result of measuring such
a magnitude by another of the same kind.
The lack of correspondence between the rational number set and the
points on a straight l has led to the recognition of the existence of gaps, of
a certain incompleteness of discontinuity of the former compelling an account
of completeness able to provide a scientific basis for investigation of all
continuous domains. The incompleteness
of rational numbers may be indicated geometrically, but to avoid introducing
non arithmetic notion, we must endeavor completely to defining irrational
numbers by means of the rational numbers alone.
12. Page
33: Concepts are syntheses whose components are distinct, heterogenous, and yet
not separable. Moreover, contra Russell,
these irrational point-folds organize the domain: Concepts are the archipelago
or skeletal frame, a spinal column rather than a skull, where as the plane is
the breath that suffused the separate parts.
In relation to continuous time and space, the concept’s intensive
movements seem to travel nowhere, but only demonstrates how they cannot be
fully localized in terms of these continuities.
Or put differently, their location is always revealed to be the state of
discontinuous excess and plurality, These characteristics mark concepts as
events.
13. Page
35: the transition from the temporal and historical dialectic of the
phenomenology to the eternal becoming of logic – clears the path for a positive
nondialectical difference able to complete immanence and underpin a concrete
ontology of sense….. Sense is the wonderful word which is used in two opposite
meanings. On the one hand it means the
organ of immediate apprehension, on the other hand we mean it by the significance,
the thought, the universal underlying the thing. And so sense is connected on the one hand
with immediate external aspect of existence, and on the other hand its inner
essence.
14. Page
37: The first is the transition to self-consciousness, which completes the
dialectic of consciousness. Here upon
reaching the stage of Understanding, consciousness remains detached from the
world…thereby finding itself in its object …. When consciousness is no longer burdened
by some alien other.
15. Page
39: the relation between ontology and empirical man is perfect lt determined,
but not the relation ontology and historical man. …Logic is not concrete truth, that of the
Idea nature or in spirit, but pure truth, the development of the concept in its
actuality and of actuality in its concept, the life of the concept..
16. Page
40: From Aristotle to Bergson. Time’s continuity is consistently derived
through analogy with local motion: the simple undivided movement of an object
tracing a line, the lifting of a hand.
Conversely, the metaphor of music – with its varied layers of rhythm and
tempo, melody and counterpoint, staccato and legato – renders fullness the
effect of hatched lines discontinuity.
17. Page
42: Creativity coming from the impulse of elan vital (Élan vital refers to the creative force within an
organism that is responsible for growth, change, and necessary or desirable
adaptations.) of the
virtual past compressed and propelled forward, allows no independent role for
the present instant. The present can do
nothing.
18. Page
43: But Bachlard’s instant is not a marker of a continuum. It is an immanent as against a transitive time
and a time of thought and choice running perpendicular to durational time. …time has several dimensions. Time seems continuous only in a certain
density, thanks to the superimposition of several dependent times. The instant contains a dialectic of duration,
which is not logical but temporal and which is littered wit lacunae populating
both lived time and the higher orders of thought time.
19. Page
47: relativity exposes an essential discontinuity between the two times, and so
the irreducibility of one to the other.
The result: quanit does not rest on quality: one is not relative and the
other absolute. …A counted time
perceived through movement is used to measure movement; but local motion also
points beyond itself to an image of duration as an ever-changing open whole.
20. Page
48: time is no longer the measure of movement but movement is the perspective
of time. Time now becomes an unchanging
form of what moves or change. The direct
time-image duration is that of coexistence of virtual past and actual present
21. Page
48: time: It concerns the series of time, which brings together the before and
the after in a becoming instead of separating them.
22. Page
55: Reminiscence too depends on this order of time, which connects memory specifically
to the past, its basic premise being “that what we call learning is really
recollection … what we recollect now we must have learned at some time
before.” Yet the role of reminiscence is not to recall
past memories – an operation representing at best only its most generic sense –
but rather to provide a route a route beyond time to the eternity that time
copies.
23. Page
56: and as absolutes are not given to the sense’s knowledge of both physical
truths and absoluteness requires recollection of knowledge the soul had before
embodiment. … Precisely because the
body, which is lacking, cannot apprehend its refilling, desires basis must be
found in the soul, which apprehends the replenishment, and does so obviously
through memory.
24. Page
64: Speculative difference, however,
must take the form of contradiction. The
Absolute can only express itself only by sustaining its unity through diverse
forms to be self determining, it must distinguish itself from the opposition
without becoming one pole of this opposition.
Negation must be compatible with identity, and opposition alone sustains
both genuine diversity and identity, because a thing is individual only by differing
from everything it is not, Opposition is inevitable … because each is in
relation with the others or rather with all the others, so that distinction is
its distinction. ….. Only then can
speculative thought raise the Absolute from substance, becoming the self-expression
of being
Speculative knowledge can be
simultaneously knowledge of self being ;and self-knowledge only because to know
oneself is to contradict oneself, only because these two moments that we
ordinarily separate in order to attribute one to the object, the other to the
subject, truth and reflections, being and the self, are identical. Their identity in their contradiction is the
very dialectic of the Absolute.
25. Page
66: More profoundly, contradiction and negativity are false problems whose
expression does not respect differences of nature. They are retrospective illusions and merely
external views of this internal difference but also rise from this difference.
26. Page
67: force designates the movement from unity to multiplicity and back into the
object of perception dissolves. At stake
is how the object can have meaning or sense given that it supposedly has its
own content, yet it is defined through its properties, which relates to others. A as substantive unity, a being-in-itself, the
object relates to others, expressing itself in multiple properties, but as
these properties interpenetrate and define a substantial whole, the plurality
constitutes the unity.
27. Page
67:This plurality of reciprocally determining, internally related forces
reverses the priority of being itself over being another: since force atain
unityonly through the relations to other forces, unity becomes a mere moment in
a more encompassing movement of being-fof-itself through being-for another.
28. Page
76: Demand, in turn reconfigures every satisfaction of need into proof of love
and there by “ annuls the particularity of everything that can be granted,
“while it constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege of satisfying
needs.
29. Page
77: A subject gets a sense of itself through an image conveyed from without, so
that unity always comes paradoxically from a passage through an outside and
relation to others.
30. Page
78: Trauma suggests an original unity that has been fractured – the castration
complex thus retroactively gives meaning
to the mirror stage, even while the latter prepares for the former- but
this imaginary unity never actually existed. … Metaphor thus “occurs at the
precise point of which sense emerges from non-sense.”
31. Page
79: Tere are thus instabilities internal to language, insofar as its signifies
refer outside themselves to other signifiers, so that each one assumes its
precise function by being different from the others.
32. Page
81: Lacan, in contrast, maintains that if feminine desire exists, it remains
unrepresentable; hence neither women patients no analysts have ever been able
to say what it is.
33. Page
83: The commodity thus inhabits two positions; one involving an abstract( but
representative) value in a dialectic of exchange and the other involving an enigmatic value that makes
commodity stand for the promise to satisfy an impossible, insatiable desire.
34. Page
84: Masculine logics, maintains abstract the curvature from the mirrors,
reconfiguring the difference and making it reappear as the excluded remainder
of a reflexively constituted identity.
The result is a feminine conceived in terms of lack, absence, and
failure.
35. Page
85: …in this regard razes these
abstractions by weaving second-order difference into another form of meaningful
synthesis, one that links differences without drawing them into unity, thereby
securing a place for the feminine withing sexual differences.
36. Page
88: … passive synthesis of habit, is an empirical repetition. contraction of
instants into a line of time, with past and future figuring as dimensions of
the present.
37. Page:
89:Regardless of weather time is considered the objective measure of movement
or the subjective counting of the soul, the self is the site where this
synthesis occurs.
38. Page
88: However, the pur past and its coexistence with the present also constitute
the present and its passing, and for this reason the pastfar from being a
dimension of time, is the synthesis of all timeof which present and future are
only dimensions
39. Page
91: To the degree that virtual past and actual present are distinct dimensions
of time, they remain unsynthesized, allowing the past to assume transcendand status. Duration is the concrete time of the cocrete
ego, but it is neverthe less abstract with respect to ontology treats the ego,
and identity more generally, a a simulation.
40. Page
91: While the coexistence of past serves as the transcendental ground of time,
resonance around fracture continues time’s undergrounding in the third synthesis
41. Page
99: Nietzsche says, is to transform every “it was” into “thus I willed it”,
more profoundly, “thus I will its return,” thereby expressing the transmutation
that makes us worth of what happens to us
…. The ethical transmutation of the eternal return, therefore, is not
meant to secure an “I” who wills. On
contrary, the condition of this ethical affirmation is that the “I”, the ego
must be taken far less seriously.
42. Page
100: An Ontology of sense invokes a surface that brings together a coordination
divergent realms and becomigs. It
thereby opposes traditional appeals to transcendent Ideas or external teli seeking
imminent principles instead
43. Page
101: Causation refers specifically and solely to the interaction of bodies, but
in a specific way. Causes are not of
each other, but are causes to each other.
Causes are corporal and relate to plural bodies.
44. Page
102: Incorporeal effects are impassive, not of a nature either to act or be
acted upon
Effects on the other hand, are attributes
having the form not of stbstances, but of happenings.
The actions of external bodies
affect or impress themselves on the soul creating thoughts, conceptions, and cognitions
which are corporal dispositions of the mind.
45. Page
103: While incorporeal propositions can be true, truth itself is corporal, referring
to the disposition of the wise man’s
soul.
46. Page
104: Time is also more than an affect on bodies… time is a dimension or
interval motion….. a dimemnsio of interval specifically of world’s motion…time
that is the structure, not the measurement, of the world’s movement so of movement
and change in general.
47. Page
105: Time is not a cause and does not determine beings or events. It is rather an empty form that contours
beings and their surface events. Giving them their sense.
The whole of substance is unified
by a breath which pervades it all, and by which the universe is sustained and
stabilized and made interactive with itself.
Since rational concepts arise from
the traces of real beings impressed on the mind, the two sides can correspond;
because the surface events of real bodis and the logical incorporeals embedded
in language and thoughts are neither bodies nor qualities, thy can completely
coincide.
48. Page
107: the affirmation of a disjunctive synthesis of differences and a fractured
structure of time, which together allow sense to merge from nonsense.
49. Page
109: Events are therefore always submitted to a double relation: the sense they express derives not only from
other bodies and interactions that produce them but also from their relation to
other meanings or meaningful events. The
surface therefore retains an independence from the depth it covers. Events remain autonomous only insofar as the
relate to one another distinctly from their relations to bodies.
50. Page
110: Through the event of sense, the surface of bodies and the surface of
thought interact.
51. Page
111: here speaks of three syntheses of time, analogous to the three synthesis
of time, that together form the field of sense: conjunctive, conjunctive, and
disjunctive.
52. Page
113: Indeed, the paradoxical sign is not one surface sign among others, but is
rather a crack on the surface. The time
of this crack is the eternal return, through which difference and divergence
return
53. Page
116: Dispersion thereby indicates a
difference withing the convergence of heterogenous materials. It is a synthesis of differences but, unlike
the commonly accepted synthesis, it does not collapse differences into unity
but rather forms the intersection where unities can appear
54. Page
117: A discursive formation, then, does
not play the rols of a figure that arrests time and freezes it fo decades or
centuries; it determins a regularity proper to temporal processes; t presents
the principle of articulation between a series of discursive events and other
series of events….its not an atemporal form, but a schema of correspondence
between several temporal series as the linkage itself is in motion, the
regularity must be seen as a consistency
arising from the continuing synthesis of moving series.
55. Page
119: The study of discursive
information, Focault says, is the study of its rarity, making it a study of
both power and politics.
56. Page
125: W world without essences or
stabilities beneath appearances is “essentially a world of relationships” in
which the sum of forces and resistances emanating from every point “is in every
case quite incongruent”. Understood in
these terms, drives are relation that do not refer to prior, related terms, and
their order of rank is not a fixed hierarchy but “ a pattern of domination that
signifies a unity but is not a unity,”
57. Page
129: The principle grounding this entire
dynamic and its accompanying illusions is the eternal return, the
dissymmetrical structure of time and that which changes in time.
58. Page
143: IN its out-of-sync character,
nihilism expresses more generally the formal structure of time. But arises only when realization of this
condition combines with the failure of will and the inability to fine meaning
and sense in this time out of joint.
59. Page
145: … that truth is simple, that it is
pure; that the the truth of something is that which remains constant over time,
unchanging and universal; that truth is good, and that what is good is true.
60. Page
146: WE simply need to entertain the
possibility that truth is not always good, that evil is sometimes useful, and
that purity and endurance are merely similations, in order, to see the danger
of this dogmatic stance.
61. Page
148 Whatever force true discourse now carries comes from nothing other than its
truth so that to truth becomes an internal limitation by compelling discourse
to tell the truth about itself independent of any attachment to power or a
powerful speaker.
62. Page
149: Plato locates truth in the realm of timeless Form.. He thereby invests truth with a positive and
transcendent identity and understands difference in terms of falling away from
this identity into opposite, so that ugliness is no more that a lack of beauty
and the the realm of becoming is a mixture of Being and its opposite,
nothingness.
63. Page
153: Critical work and political struggle must either be sold or become
isolated, compelling frantic optimism in workers’s movements.
64. Page
155: Only he … who would have used his
own strength, which eh owes to identity, to cast off the façade of identity –
would Truely be a subject. Instead if
identity, there is togetherness of diversity – a structure of differences
corresponding to time understood as unchanging form.
65. Page
156: Artists do not sublimate. That they
neither satisfy nor repress their desires, but transform then into desirable achievements,
their works, is a psycho-analytical illusion.
66. Page
166: “God”is one answer to the question
of what this outside force might be. But
another answer is time – or rather that dimension of time’s structure that conditions
movement or chanche of entities in time.
This dimension contra Berson cannot be linked to the past is not the
outside, that orients time an things in time. … time proposes an existential analytic
of Dasein’s Beingin-the-world, which, worked out in temporal terms, lays the
groundwork for addressing the meaning of of Being and its temporal horizon. Temporality does not mean “being in time” but
refers instead to the ecstatic structure of Daseins Being and ultimately to the
structure of Being as such. When Daseins’s
structure as care – the form of Being- thrown-ahead-of-itself and Being-alongside-
entities encountered in-the-world, which accounts for Dasein’s relations to the
ready-to-hand and the presen-at-hand, its Being-with others, its states of
mind, moods, and understandings, and its falling and absorptionin to the world of
“they” – is recast in temporal determinations, it becomes clear that “the future
has a priority in ecstatical unity of primordial and authentic
temporality. Anxiety, the state of mind
arising from the uncanniness experienced when the world loses its significance,
indicates authentic Being-towards-death to be Dasein’s fundamental comportment
toward the upmost potentiality-for-Being.
The event of death, which is the possibility of radical nonexistence, is
fitural, not in the sense of being “not yet” in time but as something
everpresent yet seemingly coming from nowhere.
It is possible because Dasein as being, is always coming toward itself-
that is to saying so far as it is futural in its Being in general. Dasein’s Being-towards-death means that its
structure is “whole” bu virtue of including the nullity within it. In Being-towards this absolute limits Dasein’s
Being becomes an issue for it. It is
future-albeit not the future of linear, chronological time -that orients Dasein’s
Being.
67. Page
168: Authentic Being towards-death is also freedom towards death.
68. Page
169: The articulate the vulger conception of time, the various ways that past
present and future rathr than being “not yet” and “no longer existing instants extending from the present “now”,
both have presence in Dasein’s three-dimensional temporality.
69. Page
169: … the unity of time’s three dimensions consists of interplay of each
toward each. The interplay proves to be
the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so
to speak – not only so to speak, but in the nature of matter True time is
four-dimensional.
70. Page
169: The event of appropriation is tha realm vibrating within itself, through
which man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active by
losing qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them.
71. Page
172: In this way the eternal is defined not as an infinite sequence of “nows”
but as a moment of vision that, bending back on itself brings together times
three dimensions; past, present, and future and makes them return.
72. Page
173: Moreover, there arises with this decentered becoming a simulation of
identity by which the differentiator disguises itself. The eternal return is thus a structure in
which identity and continuity always float on the surface of dynamic and
dispersive becomings of difference.
73. Page
174: This second move resores innocence to becoming by affirming all existence as
worthy of returuning – which is not the same as finding transience unacceptable.
74. Page
175: As a resonance of series through differentiator, the eternal return
effects, a forced movement the amplitude of which exceeds that of the basic series
themselves.
75. Page
175: If the imperative to become what one is has any meaning, it cannot take
the form of finding authentic self. In
rejecting such authenticity, the thought of eternal return presents the self as
an out-of-sync and dissymmetrical multiplicity that generates illusion of
stability and centeredness.
76. Page
176: But this reworking is the self’s and the world’s differences and
discontinuity. But this reworking is
possible only with a revaluation of values, a move beyond morality of good and
evil, and redemption from guilty conscience.
For one thing is needful Nietzsche writes: the human should attain satisfaction
with himself, whether by means of this or that of poetry and art.
77. Page
184: This regularity is found in the schema of correspondence connecting the
heterogeneous domains of desire and truth, which constitutes desire as a hidden
source of truth about self.
78. Page
185: Otherness in the terms prescribed
by will to truth – as either an oppositional
difference compatible with identity or an excessive, unmediatable difference
that may be elevated to divinity or reduced to chaos and materiality, but in
either case is treated as a difference lying outside the boundaries of identity –
this sense presents itself as the immanent differentiator that disjoins
differences, folding together heterogeneous but mutually imbricated
domains. This untimely excess arises
with discursive practice. In functioning
this way however this excess can also help us modify our practices and ourselves.
