Said of the radical past, self-immanence of time, its identity through and through which does not exist nor has existed, which is, but negatively or without being. It determines-in-the-last-instance a transcendental and subjective temporality that it clones from the philosophical mixture of the time and temporality proper to Being or the Other–of the present as time-world. This pure transcendental temporality constitutive of the subject-Stranger is the “mobile” clone of the present-world under the condition of the “immobile” Past: non-Platonism.
It is useless to systematically categorize the philosophies of time. Their aporias (thinking time or the unstable, temporally or not) stem from the unitary opposition between metric, chronological, or ontic time and ontological time (or not: Judaic diachronics). Hence the doublet of a “temporal time” or “(self)-temporalizing,” of a temporalized time and a temporalizing time, which testifies to a failure of the identity (of) time conceived as mixture.
Temporality is more often an interpretation by philosophy of the scientific theories of time (for example, physico-cosmological time conceived as linearity and irreversibility, cf. the second principle of thermodynamics). Contemporary philosophy wishes to avoid this overly passive course and reattaches temporality to Being or the Other. Already in Kant, time, as a priori form of sensibility, enjoyed a privilege in relation to space, understood in a more originary way (cf. Heidegger). Heidegger radicalizes exiting the Husserlian circle of objective or metric time by opposing it, in an almost Bergsonian way, to subjective duration: the originary lived time said of intimate consciousness. Husserl, through the opposition he establishes between constituting time and constituted time, reveals the originary autoconstitution of time in its different modalities (retention, protention, presentation, representation). It is through these latter that the autoconstitution of the so-called “immanent” temporality of consciousness effectuates itself. Heidegger displaces this problematic by radicalizing it with the three ekstases of time as Dasein’s modes of temporality. If temporality–as question–exists, it signifies the sense of Being as veiling and unveiling of Dasein’s ek-sistence; but as manifestation of Being in its triple and unique dimension.Unlike the philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries, of Nietzsche and Heidegger after Hegel, non-philosophy renounces to make of time (of history or even becoming) the essence of the Real, to desubstantialize the latter by the former. These operations are so diverse that they repeat the philosophical gesture of the search for an originary and hierarchizing essence which is the “time of time,” an originary temporality, indeed a transcendental or existential temporalization, etc. Recent philosophical decisions multiply the forms of the doublet of time and temporality, deviating it, bringing time back to the alterity of a diachrony, but still not finding the cause of time, nor the subject (of) temporality, nor the identity of this time-world which is philosophical time, precisely because they temporally transcend towards the essence of time on the basis of the presupposition of the (empirical) time-of-the-World and only posit this essence of time as sufficient or mixed essence. The time-world on the contrary can only be a material or occasion for naming, indicating, and effectuating the vision-in-One (of) time. This time-seen-in-One can only be on its side the radical past of pure immanence and identity, a past which not only has never been present but also will never be in the future (and for the future) as trace, but which will remain immanent past even in the future when it clones from the present of the time-world.
It can also not be a question of understanding time-according-to-the-One via the onto-chronological model of Being or that of its semi-specular image (Judeo-philosophical: the infinite Other whose structure takes on the simply inhibited unitary autoposition: temporality as memory or even diachronic past). It is no longer a question of connecting with a particular scientific theory (Einsteinian space-time, for example). It is instead a question of employing a theory and pragmatics (of) the essence of identically philosophical and scientific time (in the cosmological sense, for example), but as determined in-the-last-instance by the One-past.
Hence the clones or instances, rather than dimensions or ekstases, that form the theory of temporality. We shall remark that it implies new conceptions of the “past,” the “present,” and the “future,” i.e. three symptoms of time-in-One or according-to-the-One.
- Time as Given or Past-without-temporalization, as seen-in-One or “in-time,” etc.–these first names of time symbolize not a past time but a past which simultaneously possesses a primacy over synchrony and diachrony and determines these transcendent dimensions themselves at least as comprising the object of philosophical interpretations. The radical past is uni-versal immanent time, of which one could say that it is-without-existing or even that it is a non-temporal time. It is less a question of a memory capable of forgetting and anamnesis than of a past which cannot be forgotten and which, precisely for this reason, is foreclosed to memory which itself, in its sufficiency, believes to be able to forget and repeat by anamnesis. This One-time, even effectuated as future, remains in its necessary sterility and in no way participates in the present-world such as non-philosophy conceives it and no longer–this is what distinguishes it from the Levinasian Other, and from the “trace”–in the ontological present or the “Same.”
- The mixture of time and the World–the sense or identity of this mixture–elevates time to the form of the World under the authority of philosophy: it is the time-world, which is not simply a regional time nor even the time of the world, but the philosophical experience of time insofar as it structures a “world” whose sense is foreclosed in turn to the One-time of the past. In its non-philosophical sense, the “present” is no longer a dimension nor even ekstasis of time, but the entirety of the decisions-of-time already operated or still to come according to the World. It is the time-material, the time-occasion in which nonphilosophy extracts its language from time.
- Finally, from the past-in-One to the Present-world is deployed the instance of the transcendental future or the temporalizing force. The future is the identity cloned or produced on the basis of the time-world as One. The way of the future is to be an effectuation of the uni-versal past under the conditions of the time-world. This effectuation signifies that, by definition and in distinction with the past which does not exist, the future exists in the sense that it is transcendental identity turned towards the present of the time-world. Instead of disposing the three instances in the ekstatic or universal-through-transcendence element that generalizes the so-called linearity of time, non-philosophy produces the experience of a time of exteriority or the stranger, existing-Stranger for the present, addressed to rather than thrown into the time-world. The subject-Stranger with which the transcendental future is confused “aims” at the World in its identity, aims at it in a non-phenomenological or non-intentional sense without fulfillment, simply sufficing for it to aim at it to completely assure its possible relation to it. If the future is subject (of) time or temporalizing force (indicated, named, effectuated on the basis of the present of the time-world), it is turned towards the latter which it transforms or from which it extracts itself through the power of the past. The future is the clone obtained by the radically “immobile” past on the basis of the mobile time of the World. The existing-subject-Stranger liberates time from its Platonic as well as Bergsonian and Heideggerian images. It brings about the manifestation of the phenomenon of time, prohibited from applying the structure of a philosophical Decision to it but instead proceeding to a theory and a pragmatics of philosophical time on the basis of the past as radical immanence (of) time to itself. It is heretical time or the heretical conception of time, without history or becoming.
(Translated by Taylor Adkins)