Time in Exile

In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lispector

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438478197
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Fenomenología en filosofía

This book is a philosophical reflection on the experience of time from within exile. Its focus on temporality is unique, as most literature on exile focuses on the experience of space, as exile involves dislocation, and moods of nostalgia and utopia. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback proposes that in exile, time is experienced neither as longing back to the lost past nor as wanting a future to come but rather as a present without anchors or supports. She articulates this present as a "gerundive" mode, in which the one who is in exile discovers herself simply being, exposed to the uncanny experience of having lost the past and not having a future. To explore this, she establishes a conversation among three authors whose work has exemplified this sense of gerundive time: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot, and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The book does not aim to discuss how these authors understand the relation between time and exile, but presents a conversation with them in relation to this question that reflects new aspects in their work. Attempting to think and express this difficult sense of time from within exile, Time in Exile engages with the relation between thought and language, and between philosophy and literature. Departing from concrete existential questions, Sá Cavalcante Schuback reveals new philosophical and theoretical modes to understand what it means to be present in times of exile.

Chapter 1

Exile as Postexistential Condition

Was geschieht, ist Abschied

—Werner Hamacher

Times of Excess, Times of Exile

In which time do we live today?1 This question is a concern to everyone. This question pierces the world. It became common sense to question in academic discourses the use of the pronoun “we.” Which “we”? From which viewpoint can we say “we”?—these questions have of course their legitimacy and necessity, but, in asking “In which time do we live today?” what is being addressed is the question about the awareness of the world today. Saying “the time we live today,” the “we” indicates how the today is experienced as a common moment of history. Whatsoever “we” pronounced today experiences the world of today as what overwhelms differences and particularities, indeed as the “global” world. Global is the experience of a world, on the one hand, too heavy of world and, on the other, of a world without world. Without any attempt to give a definite answer to the question “in which time do we live today?,” it can at least be said that our time is a tired time, a tired time of the “too much”: too many things, too much information and disinformation, too much dispersion, too much despair, too much ambiguity, too much velocity, too much for few, too little for many, too much too much, too much too little. Indeed, our time is a time of excess: excess of the capitalism of excesses, of the capitalism of misery, of war, of segregation, and of ambiguity. Looking at the Oxford English Dictionary for the origin of the word “tired,” we find its oldest Celtic form tirian, also spelled as teorian, which, in an unscientific and associative manner, brings us to the Greek word theoria, theory. Tired of theories, the world is as well. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s question What Is to Be done?, posed by Lenin, is screaming everywhere, from the most extreme to the most conservative positions, in the West and in the East, in the South and in the North, and in their many middles. The misery of theories haunts us even in attempts to develop sophisticated theories of contemporary misery. The times promise no rest. But this promise of no rest should be taken seriously, and the face of impotence that frightens the world should be confronted with the force of existence itself, as Jean-Luc Nancy appeals us to do when discussing anew the question about what to do.2 “We,” at least we readers of the world, should take this promise seriously and rest in this lack of rest, remaining in this arrest of the times. Rather than looking for a way to escape the exhaustion of having no rest, of having no place or time to rest in a time of excess, we should dwell the question about this time of excess and try to listen attentively to its “cardiography,” that is, to how the passions of the “wild heart” of time beats in these times of excess.

One can hardly deny that the times are now times of excess. Excess, however, does not mean merely too much. It means a “too much” that goes beyond all measures. It also means outrage. Indeed, the primary meaning of the word “excess” and of the verb “to exceed” is precisely the violence of going beyond limits. To go beyond limits is also the meaning of another verb that also comes from Latin, namely, “to transcend.” Addressing our time as a time of excess is, however, not the same as addressing it as a time of transcendence. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around; thus, these times of excess, that we recognize as “our” time, the hour in which different “ours” attest and bear testimony of the excess and lack of the world in the world, are times of total immanence, times without any horizon of a beyond, times without a way out, that are not only times without an outside but also without a without. Thus, to transcend—either a state of mind, a situation, or a condition—means to get out of it and, hence, to get to be without it somehow. Trance states are states in which one is out of oneself, without oneself, or to be more precise, states in which one is with the without of oneself.3 The anxiety of these times of excess is the anxiety about the impossibility of even glimpsing a way out, about the disappearance of the horizon of transcendence. One could, therefore, speak about times of excess without transcendence, indeed of times of un-transcendental excess. Speaking in this way, it is acknowledged that this excess of the times, of “our” time, has a lack, and thereby that this excess of “our” times is lacking, lacking something even in its excess. Indeed, and despite the strangeness of this affirmation, something is lacking in these times of excessive excesses. What is lacking is the lack. However, “our” times can be considered times of excess not only for being experienced as times without a way out, without a without, of times lacking a lack, but above all for being times in which the excess of being appears “at the flower of the skin,” to translate literally a common expression in French and Portuguese, à fleur de peau, à flor da pele, used to express how an overwhelming experience comes to be not only under our skin but to be our own skin. In which sense do the times, “our” time, experience “in the flower of every skin” the excess of being? The excess of being appears when to be means to become whatsoever, whenever and wherever, for the sake of being capable of being used, abused, misused by who- and whatsoever, whenever and wherever. This capability to be used is often called today “empowerment.” In times of excess, the excess of being appears when being means nothing for being whatsoever. Everything must lose ontological determination for the purpose of receiving any ontological determination whatsoever, depending on the “demand.” In this sense, excess of being means continuous dis-ontologization, which renders possible continuous re-ontologization. The excess of being in times of excess does not mean simply that a certain meaning of being becomes empty, as Husserl indicated when discussing the meaning of technique in the Crisis of European Sciences4 nor that a certain meaning of being becomes omnipresent, as Herbert Marcuse claimed in his discussions of the One Dimensional Man.5 The excess of being in times of excess means rather the emptiness of omnipresence, the entropic dynamics of the more beings, the less being.

Excess without transcendence shows itself as the times of a suspension of movement when movement cannot stop moving. If “our” time identifies itself as the time of the excess of the capitalism of excesses, it is not merely because capitalism relies on movement measured by time, but because it relies on untiring, constant, and restless movement, that is, on a movement that cannot stop moving, a movement that, while moving everything, does not move itself. Excess is not a state beyond but the dynamics of beyond, indeed a dynamics of movement insofar as every movement implicates a beyond; that excess is a dynamics of moving beyond is something that was already grasped by Greek philosophy, and more specifically by Aristotle and his concept of the “unmoved mover,” οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ,6 and that Marx recognized as the thermo-dynamics or, as we could say today, the “global warming” of capitalism. Thus, what is capitalism if not the mover of everything that remains itself unmoved? Indeed, in capitalism, capital is the untiring movement of everything, so that everything can be anything and anything can be everything precisely on account of its being nothing. Indeed, capital rests on the assumption that being is nothing, nothing that could not be something else and otherwise.7 Formulated in these terms, the excess is not merely the too much but a strange reversal of itself. It reverts itself becoming terror, reverting all creative force against creation, as the modern history of revolutions has showed. But it also reverts itself, rendering movement unmoved. Not a reversal in the sense that a countermovement would force movement in a certain direction or would resist movement; it is a reversal of movement inside movement, a point or layer of intensity in which the movement moves against itself. In its utmost intensity, movement does not cease to move but remains moving, and hence moving without moving the movement itself. In the excess of movement, movement is reversed into its own suspension.

The difficulty of seizing such an excess of movement that suspends movement lies in the deep-rooted idea of movement as change from one place to another, from one time to another, from one state to another—in short, in the idea of movement as a change from-to, which implies a thought of the beyond. This “from-to” defines what can be described, following Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussions on mimesis,8 as the “arche-teleological” structure of movement, which has been moving centuries of theories on practices and of practices of theory. “From,” is said in Greek with “ek/ex” and “to,” “onto” with “eis.” The Greek word that condenses both and expresses this arche-teleological structure of movement as change from-to, ex-eis, is “ecstasy.” That is why in the Physics, Aristotle defines every change, metabolé, as what is by nature ecstatic: Metabolé dé pása fúsei ekstatikon.9 In this Aristotelian framework, “ecstasy” does not deny the arche-teleological structure of movement in which movement is defined as dislocation from a place to another but determines this structure. If in its current meaning ecstasy names what disturbs or subverts the teleology of movement, it is because in ecstasy the from-to reveals itself as a structure beyond the places from where and to where the movement moves. As change from-to, movement is in its nature ecstatic, this is the Aristotelian position, because moving things exit their original and/or natural positions. What allows Aristotle to describe movement as change and change as in its nature ecstatic is the viewpoint from which movement is “read” from things exiting positions. It is thereby seized upon as way out into the beyond, and as such as an expulsion, what in Greek is said with the word exodos and in Latin with exilium. As the arche-teleological structure of a from-to, movement is in itself ecstatic, exodic, exilic, insofar as it shows an exit towards. Therefore, assuming that what defines exile is ecstasy, that is, a moving beyond frontiers, a getting out of, a going away from, an exit, it can be said that it is exile that defines movement rather than movement that defines exile. If movement is ecstatic, exodic, exilic, how are we then to grasp the excess of movement? This would be an excess of ecstasy, of exodus, of exile, in which there appears to be no exit from continuous exiting. What is generated by this exit without exit, by this continuous exit or transformation is the status quo.10 Thus, in order to be continuously exiting or transforming, transformation cannot transform itself. The Greek word for status quo is stasis, a word that also means civil war, the war of the self against itself, of the same against the same.11 The excess of ecstasy, of exodus, of exile, of excess generates stasis; in excess, ecstasy becomes stasis, and the ecstatic is rendered static. At this point, it becomes possible to ask if the figure of ecstasy and its excess, as the only imagining that remains of transcending a state without exit, is still the proper figure to think “our” times of excess and exile, indeed of the excess of exile.

Exile and the Afterness of Existence

The connections among exile, ecstasy, and excess that orient most literature and philosophies of exile are grounded on the understanding of exile as the condition of existing after a cut or interruption of a world. With the cut and interruption of existence that marks exilic condition, the past and the future no longer appear as what follow naturally one from the other but as a cut past and a cut future, and as such as estranged past and future. In exile, the natural feeling that one belongs to a past and that a future belongs to such a past becomes deeply questionable. The whole existence is pervaded by questions such as “Where do we come from? Where are we? Where are we going?”

These questions, which entitle a beautiful painting by Paul Gauguin, are repeated today by millions of tired and hungry mouths without recourse. These are questions shared by more and more people, but they are also questions that more and more divide the world into several forms and registers of “we” and “they.” A discursive wall is being built around these questions that do not only divide “the own” and the “foreign,” but also the ownness of strangers and the stranger’s ownness and, further still, the ownness of the own and the strangers’ strangerness. In countless refugees’ stories, the mythological figure of the deluge is repeated, in different languages and dialects, yet with an important variation. The variation is mainly that one is no longer expelled from paradise but from war and poverty, and this without having committed any fault, without any guilt. What is repeated is the constant exile and the search for asylum, which coincides today with searching for entry into a system of debt and guilt. (Thus, what is the West today if not a global system of debt and guilt?) Exile describes a disruption that does not only disrupt all of existence and its concrete conditions but that disrupts, above all, the sense of what it means to exist. It produces a caesura within existence by which not only the past and the future have to be reinterpreted and reevaluated, but according to which even the actual perceptions of time and space demand to be rephrased and reintuited. In exile, existence is not only the exit from previous existence or from nonexistence, as the Latin word ex-sistere expresses, but is existence after having existed. It is after-existence. Exile puts existence in a condition of postcondition.

In Latin, the adverb “after” is post. Exile can be considered the condition of postexistence. Rather than a postmodern condition, the world experiences today a postexistential condition. This expression differs from the recurrent tropes of postisms within humanities: post-modernism (Lyotard),12 posthumanism (Foucault),13 postcolonialism (Young, Spivak, Bhabha),14 postcommunism (Boris Groys),15 etc. It differs because it aims to describe the sense of existing in a postcondition and not only to summarize diverse narratives and nonsystematic knowledge conducted within humanities and brought forward by different kinds of art.16 In the expression “postexistence,” what is central is not so much the question of what it means to exist after a certain event—after a separation, a cut, a catastrophe, a disaster, or after a trauma—but rather the sense of existing as “afterness” itself.

The expression “afterness” translates the German word Nachheit and was coined as a culture-critic concept by the German literary scholar Gerhard Richter.17 In German, Nachheit not only means afterness but also implies nearness [Nah-heit], since in German nach—after—and nah—near—almost sound the same. They sound as a lingerin...