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.