A History of Diminishment

An opening framed by the remnants of an ending, and now reprised. Arms outstretched, but necessarily encrypted. This is the horizon which masks its own possibilities. Uprooted from an undiscovered past and plunged into the present. Suddenly a whole past, as yet unknown, comes to the fore. Other rooms which come from a great distance, disrupting the doors which embrace us in the present. In the elsewhere, far from that which has ceased to belong. Isn’t this how it is with doors: they hold what memory has forgotten?

As to the doors which frame the memory of different times: since Christmas is the oldest of childhood memories, the most ancestral, it is also the most obscure. Today, from the standpoint of time, it is only possible to speak of a history of diminishment, of the erasure of presences. Alongside its ancestry, the memory of Christmas remains locked within a region of negation. Today, Christmas survives as an event reanimated by the desire and disappointments of others. An event experienced in proxy. Things mark their presence, it is true. But is only inasmuch as discontinuity gives room for the past to articulate a sigh. And now: what is remembered, vague and exact simultaneously, is only defined by what is no longer present.

Memory does not belong in the past. There is no landscape in which the past resides, able to be travelled to on demand. Remembering is not a return, but an opening in which traces stretch into the present. Particular objects, sensuous and symbolic, encounter us, superimposing a history upon the present which is otherwise dormant. Time regained is time disrupted. Simple delight, then, in experiencing ourselves as subjects to the autonomy of our own history. Does the diminished past survive irrespective of its apparent ending? A synthesis is born: the remote reverberations of memory gain a resonance in the present only by rising up through the body, which experiences it as difference.


Today, Christmas repeats itself a side-effect of memory. As the archetypical homely event, it has a simultaneous existence as its destitute other. A reality without fixed appearances, an experience unable to be situated in time, an event marked by its own effacement. Together, its de-animated (dis)appearance forces the deepest residues of body memory to seek a lived counterpart. But in its autonomy, the body remembers what the mind cannot bring forth. As doors contain points of departure, so Christmas leaves a trail of shadows in its arrival. Leaking into time, it deposits a residue of unburied time in the present, until finally it comes to resemble an involuntary memory frozen before time.

Meta-Nostalgia: Downbound Train

What is Place (5): Rhythm of Duration

A place gives itself over to appearances. In that formation, appearance becomes inscribed with experience, which itself gathers a measure of distance through the work of history. Is it by this formula that place, in distinction to space, gains a history? To phrase the question differently: how is it that place becomes a receptacle for memory? Perhaps it is helpful to think here of a pre-place: a geometrical site yet to contain a past. Would it not be the case that the transition from site to place necessarily involves an exposure to the texture of time and movement? What would be significant about that texture is the relationship between the lived body and the positions which are established as that body discovers its place. The experience would differ from one marked by abstract coordinates. Already, to refer to near and far, left and right, even within the most homogenous zone, would be to bring in an undercurrent of time and memory.

Ricoeur rightly refers to analogy between the construction of time and the construction of place. Both aspects involve “rupture and suture of two levels of apprehension: constructed space is also geometrical, measurable, and calculable space” (2004, p. 150). The experience of place is a “superimposition” upon geometrical site, so that “constructed space consists in a system of sites for the major interactions of life” (Ibid.). I don’t think we have to worry too much about the synthetic construction of time and experience. The synthesis forges an incursion in which lived time, through puncturing geometrical space, is momentarily able to be dynamically experienced. More importantly, in the absence of this synthesis, place would be disembodied.

The synthesis between place and experience appears to render time (dis)continuous (the (dis) will prove its necessity in turn). Two illustrations confirm this. Bachelard’s classical formulation of place memory, outlined in The Poetics of Space, together with his oneirism privileges the continuity of the past, as giving presence to the present. This is how place is discovered in its appearance: as already lived (no mention, however, of the uncanny in Bachelard: place as reanimated, hauntologically structured, etc). Instead, again and again, Bachelard makes the point that originary place, through the dual work of memory and imagination, gives rise to identity and dwelling in the present. The point is worth re-emphasising many times over. Bachelard will even go so far as to prioritise the model of place as a container as ontologically prior to Heideggerian thrownness (Bachelard, 1996, p.7). Because of this ontological reversal, place becomes a transcendental category: a condition of the possibility of experience. The importance of this is such that place becomes elemental in the determination of time. Thus Bachelard’s claim: “The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretised as a result of long sojourn, are able to be found in and through space” (Ibid., p. 9).

As to the danger of time fragmenting in place, Bachelard’s oneiric house retains enough ambiguity in order to be reapplied elsewhere. This is a brilliant move: the archetype is also its shadowy other, so securing its presence even through its absence. As a result, “all we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectivity” (Ibid., p. 13). Incidentally, I love this book for this methodology, despite disagreeing with the majority of the conclusions. The work of ambiguity and concrete particularity reinforces the notion of place as able to contain an immemorial past, so pre-empting movement from one place to the next. As already lived, the coherence of time in place carries with it an immanent duration, which exceeds the appearance of place.

An aside: why is Bachelard at ease with this language of continuity and spatial duration while he criticises it so vehemently in The Dialectic of Duration? Between these two books ontological priorities alter. “The first clear thought is the thought of nothingness,” thus he writes in The Dialectic of Duration. Here nothingness refers to possibility, to contingency, and not simple negation. In The Poetics of Space, place is given, not produced. Yet central to his effective attack on Bergsonian duration is the notion of duration as cohering together the superimposition of habit and affect. Bachelard’s original project was to develop a “discontinuous Bergsonism,” a fine project. But would it not be beneficial to think here of a discontinuous Bachelardism, which encompasses the discontinuity of time before coupling this with a critique of the continuity of space?

Concerning the temporal discontinuity of place and experience. In Bachelard, we only learn of the preservation of the past, as place becomes the vessel for memory to be reanimated. In this way, time and place become levelled-out by memory. Place as continuous means place as continually present. I see this as a problem, not only because it fails to reconcile with Bachelard’s later views, but because the critique of time as discontinuous in The Dialectic of Duration to me seems fundamentally correct. No space to do justice to Bachelard’s critique here, but the salient points are: (1). Energy is temporally finite. (2). That time therefore involves hesitation. (3). The re-continuity of time occurs from the standpoint of nothingness. (4). Because of this interval, movement in time, understood as rhythmic, is able to be experienced. (5). That in light of the interval between rhythms, duration is “a work we create.” (6). That, finally, duration coheres together through the simultaneous work of habit and affect.

What emerges from Bachelard’s reworking of Bergson is a dynamic model of time, charged by difference and discontinuity: “there is no date without a dialectic, without differences.” (And here contain perhaps the kernels of a response to Fido’s question: “Is the cogito a creature of habit?”). Bachelard seems absolutely correct to suggest that rhythm disrupts habit. But there is more. Applied to place, as duration becomes an experience disclosed as produced, the experience of time-in-place becomes amplified. In place of oneiric memory levelling-out the past, the subversion of “originary” place indents the habit and familiar affectivity of place in temporal terms. In Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, the author returns to his father’s house after he has died. A poignant passage follows: “When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. They are there and yet not there: tangible ghosts, condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to” (1982, p. 10). Here, we witness an inversion of Bachelard’s oneirism: sameness and difference fuse, but only now as a movement which withdraws into unfamiliarity, rather than toward plenitude and continuity.

Auster’s reflections mark a fundamental point: loss is emblematic of the heterogeneous experience of time and place. Without loss, without disappointment, without the negative, and without the literal room for place to haunt the present, experience is assimilated into the same pre-given category. The rhythm of negation is thus a rhythm of engagement and disruption. Heterogeneous time comes up against its other, and in doing so becomes aware of its own temporal limits. Only as moments of discontinuity are being reconstituted (the writing of The Invention of Solitude is surely a case for this) is presence brought back to what was disrupted. The spectrality of Auster’s passage (“tangible ghosts”) confirms that the movement from differing durations thus entails the overlapping of layers of place and site. As I have reiterated time and again, the return to old place, compounded with the failure of memory to hold time and place together, creates a privileged temporality, whereby time is shown to be necessarily morphological. These objects, Auster’s tells us, are “condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to.” The survival is untimely. Not only is the loss of Auster’s father experienced, but so too the loss of place, animated by the frame in which old place was situated. And isn’t it in this way, finally, how place becomes a receptacle for memory: through giving form to what was once remembered and experienced in time, but is now defined by a logic of disruption, cessation, and oblivion?

Schopenhauer and Phenomenology

Along the way to Husserl, I’ve been thinking back to transcendental idealism. It is a long retracing, a different place. During this pathway, I’ve been rediscovering Schopenhauer’s idealism. Some questions I have asked myself: How does Schopenhauer stand in relation to Husserl? Is Schopenhauer’s idealism, together with his critique of Kant, a neglected dimension of pre-Husserlian phenomenology? If so, what could Schopenhauer bring to an understanding of Husserl’s own critique of Kant in The Crisis of European Sciences? Some scattered notes follow.

“The world is my representation,” so marks the opening of Schopenhauer’s idealism. Schopenhauer goes on. All that is immediately given in this representation is consciousness itself, which “conditions” the world as it apprehends it (W2, p. 5). The conditioning is a twofold act, which occurs in relation to the materiality (qualitative) and formality (quantitative) of the object. Only consciousness has immediate access to the world, and in the absence of that world consciousness ceases to be. Thus the transcendental unity of the subject: “intellect and matter are correlatives” (p. 15). As transcendental, perception individuates appearances from undifferentiated matter. In contrast, realism, Schopenhauer argues, takes it for granted that the subject has direct access to the world, already formed. No object without a subject, and, more importantly, no subject without an object. Agreed. Indeed, in the second of the Manuscript Remains, Schopenhauer cites a lack of recognition of this fact as being Kant’s “fundamental mistake” (MR2, p. 462). And as Hume argued before Schopenhauer, the self is comprised from essentially discontinuous aspects, meaning that consciousness is an “accomplishment” in Husserl’s reading of Hume (Crisis, p. 90).

Given the mediation of the intellect between object and appearances, Schopenhauer will now make a distinction between intuitive and abstract representations. Concerning the latter, “on earth,” Schopenhauer writes, “these are the property of man alone” (W1, p. 6). Intuitive representation, meanwhile, takes in the conditions of the possibility of experience: space and time, of which I don’t have time to discuss at present. Suffice to say, that the main “action” of Schopenhauer’s account of the principle of sufficient reason is the giving-form of succession and individuation, and that in light of this giving-form, Schopenhauer’s metaphysical epistemology gains its clearest articulation through the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, whereby the giving-form is suspended. In the meantime, however, phenomenal appearances merely approximate an image of the world beyond appearances.

Throughout this first book, and later on in his essay on the “History of the Ideal and Real”, Schopenhauer repeats the point: transcendental idealism does not deny the existence of the objective world. Instead, it asserts that the objective world is the production of understanding. Irrespective of the innate realism, which gives itself over to a view of the world as independent of subjectivity, for Schopenhauer, to posit the existence of the objective world as such is to overlook a fundamental presupposition: “the subject who forgets to take account of himself” (W1, p. 13). This, of course, would become a central argument of Husserl’s critique of Kant. More of that later.

The Ungiven (1)

If the phenomenology of memory proceeds from the givenness of what is intuitively apprehended by consciousness, so establishing a unity between experience and recognition, then how does “unclaimed experience,” emblematic of the memory of trauma, present itself as given to consciousness? The answer, in short, is that it doesn’t. And this is why the temporality of trauma is fundamentally atemporal. Unlike dissociated, altered, or foreign memories, each of which presupposes the givenness of disappearance, remembering trauma is met with an impasse in which negation itself comes into question. It would seem that phenomenology reaches a limit where trauma is concerned. And yet: through the emergence of symptoms and concealed possessions, we are made of aware of the traumatic event as having occurred. In order to phenomenologically approach this impasse, attention to the void between the pre and post-traumatic self would need to be articulated.

Here, void means: the disruption of subjectivity, as experience becomes neutralised in and through time. The void thus gains the distinction of demarcating differing sets of identities, contained by a singular body (to paraphrase Locke). By bridging time through creating a void in the midst of temporality, the relationship between the subject and the void occupies a parallel relationship to the ungivenness of death and the possibility of survival. The association between death and trauma refers to more than the neutralisation of subjectivity. It takes in an event which is both inaccessible and immanent simultaneously. “The unknown of death,” writes Levinas in Time and Other, “signifies that they very relationship with death cannot take place in the light, that the subject is in relationship with what does not come from itself. We could it is in relationship with mystery” (p. 70). Against this mystery, the subject is “passive” to the mastery of death. As fundamentally exterior to the subject, Levinas’ account of death, in contrast to Heidegger’s model of death as redemption (complete with “supreme virility”), pushes ungraspability to the fore, meaning that “we are no longer able to be able” (p. 74).

Death in Levinas, then, becomes a case of the ungiven: the recognition of an event which takes place in estrangement from the subject who undergoes it. It is in this sense that experience becomes unclaimed, thus mystified: “How can the event that cannot be grasped still happen to me?” writes Levinas (p. 77). If identity is neutralised during the traumatic event, then can the experience said to belong to the subject? Freud’s famous case of the train accident in Moses and Monotheism establishes the role latency plays in recognising an experience which initially presents itself as ungiven to consciousness. That the possibility of re-claiming the traumatic event is even possible thus testifies to the futural dimension of trauma. “How can the event that cannot be grasped still happen to me?” Pushing this question in the direction of trauma, the avoidance of the transcendental ego becomes increasingly problematic. Levinas is puzzled: “If in the face of death one is no longer able to be able, how can one still remain a self before the event it announces?” (p. 78). In response, I re-quote a passage from Charlotte Delbo:

I have the feeling that the ‘self’ who was in the camp isn’t me, isn’t the person who is here, opposite you. No, it’s too unbelievable. And everything that happened to this other ‘self,’ the one from Auschwitz, doesn’t touch me now, me, doesn’t concern me, so distinct are deep memory and common memory.

Does the Cogito Remember?

Fido the Yak has a typically interesting post asking if the cogito sleeps. I would speculatively ask in response: does the memory of dreaming constitute a disruption in Descartes’ stream of consciousness? The question is particularly pressing given the sceptical dialogue in the Meditations, where thought is destructed before being built anew as the curiously atemporal cogito. At first, the memory becomes a topographical device in Descartes’ Meditations: “How many times have I dreamt at night that I was in this place, dressed, by the fire, although naked in my bed?” (p. 96). Two questions follow: Who is the “I” in this instant? And why does Descartes not tell us of the interval between the experience of the place and the dream of it? The question seems important, since it raises the question remembering oneself in the past as distinct from oneself in the present.

An extraordinarly rich passage in the Tenth Book of Augustine’s Confessions is helpful in understanding the relationship between the recession of memory and the persistence of consciousness. With a heavily spatial predisposition, Augustine is discussing the various attributes of memory. Terms such as “vast,” “storehouse,” and “spacious palace” abound, so that Augustine is obliged to say that “each [category] is admitted through its own special entrance” (p. 214). The role placing memory plays in Augustine’s account becomes clear when he turns to the confused memory. In a peculiarly Heideggerian passage, he writes:

When we give [confused memories] our attention, we see to it that these facts, which have been lying scattered and unheeded, are placed ready to hand, so that they are easily forthcoming once we have grown use to them (p. 218).

Placed ready to hand means giving memory back its presence. This can occur as both habit memory and episodic memory. Augustine seems to be referring to the former. In any case, giving back a presence to memory means reconfiguring and reconstituting it in and through time. Indeed, Augustine goes on to say that he is compelled to “shepherd them out again from the lairs” (Ibid.). Unity is thus established through the immanence and transcendentalism of the past, allowing Augustine to conclude that:

This is the derivation of the word cogitare, which means to think or to collect one’s thoughts. For in Latin the word cogo, meaning I assemble or I collect, is related to the cogito, which means I think (pp. 218-219).

The gathering of memory hence becomes central to the work of the cogito. To collect one’s thoughts is to find a place for them. Thought belongs to time insofar as it retains a (ready to hand) presence in time. And isn’t this act of gathering memory constitutive of Cartesian continuity in the same way that the Bergson durée is transcendentally seamless? At the end of the Second Mediation, Descartes makes the passing comment that it is memory which “imprints this new knowledge” to the mind. The remark suggests that memory assumes the role of fortifying against the interruption of conscious (an aspect wholly endorsed by Bergson). Does the cogito remember, then? Perhaps only in that it guards against dispersion of temporal continuity. The memory of thought—I was thinking, therefore I continue to be—has no place (literally) in the Cartesian scheme, resulting in the constriction of an enclosed but hyper-vigilant consciousness.

(One could make various tentative suggestions here concerning Descartes’ “stove-heated room” as exemplary of the Bachelardian model of compressed time in relation to the (a)temporality of the cogito. Uninterrupted place. Importantly, Descartes died from waking too early, having been summoned to lecture Christina of Sweden at 5am in the freezing cold. What does this tell us about temporality of interruption in relation to place?)

Night of the Il y a

The articulation of phenomenology through the experience of insomnia has a rich lineage. In Levinas, insomnia becomes a privileged, metaphysical moment. Already in Time and the Other, the fundamental concern of “existing without existents,” Levinas’s terminology for Heidegger Being and being, is approached through a phenomenology of insomnia. Levinas makes clear his divergence to Heidegger by even positing the question. A strange passage follows, in which Levinas turns to Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” to elicit the notion of an existentless existence: “It is as if the existent appeared only in an existence that precedes it, as though existence were independent of the existent, and the existent that finds itself thrown there could never become master of existence” (p. 45). Thrown existent takes place, then, against a spectral, disrupting backdrop, which Levinas terms the “il y a.”

This “impersonal ‘field of forces’ of existing” presents itself as anonymous immanence in Levinas, countering negation, through invoking an “ambience of being” in terms of what reappears through negation (p. 48). As impersonal, the “experience” of the “there is” is also dynamic. It appears as a residue, determined in its form by a prior event. It is at this juncture that the peculiar silence of insomnia comes to the foreground. Interestingly, in Ethics and Infinity states the following concerning the origin of the “there is”:

My reflection on this subject starts with childhood memories. One sleeps alone, the adults continue life; the child feels the silence of his bedroom as “rumbling.” […] It is something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise. […] in the absolute emptiness that one can imagine before creation — there is (p. 48).

“One sleeps alone”: the centrality of solitude is clear. The continuity of the adult (Bachelard would no doubt speak of the adult as being downstairs) is an event of discontinuity for the child. “Rumbling” takes form as a past which refuses to be remembered. Instead, the rumbling silence comes into the bedroom, giving presence to the room, but the presence of what is no longer there. Levinas goes on: “It is something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear.” Here too silence is given a form, articulated through a contained absence. But the experience is not sanguine. The impersonality of encountering the empty shell carries with it a sense of horror: the horror of impersonal (dis)continuity.

The horror of the “there is” is crystallised in the unending night of the insomniac. Levinas does not have in mind any such existentialist “angst,” in which consciousness is faced with its own nullity in the still nothingness. Nor does this entail Heidegger’s “the Nothing,” which becomes an ontic mode experienced (falsely) in anxiety. Such a mode is undermined through Levinas’s analysis insofar as the “I” is called into question. At first, insomnia appears to presence consciousness as a remainder, a force which resists its closure. Yet consciousness is not simply “here” waiting for the night to end and for sleep to begin. In Ethics and Infinity, he writes: “The impossibility of escaping wakefulness is something ‘objective” […] This impersonality absorbs my consciousness; consciousness is depersonalized. I do not stay awake: ‘it’ stays awake” (p. 49).

Where is the “I” in this ontological rupture? It seems as though consciousness has become apprehended by the “there is,” has become the space in which the “there is” takes form. Further still: there is no temporal distance to this space: the night loses definition, compelling Levinas to remark (perceptively) in Time and the Other: “A memory would already be a liberation with regard to the past” (p. 48). Is this not the final horror of the il y a: that it presupposes the claustrophobia of disrupted time, yet retains enough temporal distance for consciousness to catch sight of its past self being animated through the impersonality of the immanent il y a?