[Francoise Dastur] Telling Time

7/27/2019 [Francoise Dastur] Telling Time

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Teling TmeSketch o a Phenomenological Chrono-logy

FRANIE DATUR

tranated by Edward Buard

,

IM v S VFOTOPHNE

R O7b5O-

1f /-A5'.

THE ATHONE PRELONDON NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ


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First pubished i the United Kingdom 2000 byTHE ATHLONE PRESS

1 Park Drive, London NW11 7SGand New Brunswick, New Jersey

2000 The Athone PressOriginay pubished as D I m Encre Marine 1994

Pubisher's NoteThe pubishers wish to record their thanks to the French Ministry of

Cuture for a grt towards the cost of transation.

British Library Cataoguing in Pubication Data h k v

m h Bh

ISBN 0 485 11520 4

Lb of Cong Ctogng-n-ubctonDaaDastur, Frnoise, 1942-

[Dire e temps. Engish]Teing time: sketch of a phenomenoogica chronooy /Franoise Dastur: transated by Edward Buard.

p. cm.Incudes bibiographica references and index.ISBN 0485115204 (ak. paper)1. Time. 2. Phenomenoogy. 3. Heidegger, Marti, 18891976

Tite.BD638.D35413 2000

115dc21 9936615CIP" iieH SCda and South America by: : /' 'NSy 08873

ig

stored in a retrieva system, o tras in any form or by any means,eectronic, mechanica, phtocopying r otherwise, without prior pmissioninitingro the pubisher.

Typeset by Coumn Design Limited, ReadingPrinted and bound in Great Britain by

Cambridge University Press


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To th mmory ofAlxandr, Anna and Frnand


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Contents

Autor Not x

Pogu X

Gossa X

1 Th da o a Phnomnological Chronology 1Th tim o discors

ogic and hilosohyTh tmstosnss o th stch

2 Phnomnology and Tmorality 17Phnomnon and hilosohyPhnomnology and idalism

Th invisibility o tim and th hnomnologyo th inaarnt

3 ogic and Mtahysics 37Th ontology o rsnsTh ontological

Th voic and th world4 Th ogos o Mortals 57

ialctic and diachronyogic and otry


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Contnts

Epiogu

A Not on t BibiogpyAppndix: Cnoogis

Nots

ndx

69

737

91

171


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By way of an epgraph allow me to quote from Flx

Ravassons Dessn n Dictionnai d Pagogi(Ferdnand Busson 1882) ths sentence apt also forthe art of wrtng from the author ofD abitud, awork n whch I have always seen the very model ofthe thess

T st of t at of dwing to discov in acobjct t paticua mann in wic a ctain xuous in its gnativ ax as it w advancsacoss its ngt and badt ik a wav baking upinto ipps

and ths remark of Hedeggers reported by RogerMuner n St pou Hidgg (Pars Arfuyen 1992)p 17

Tn wn ask Hidgg wat anguag wi v

b capab of xpssing tis cstatic Dnkn:A vy simp anguag pis Ein ganzinc Spac wos igou wi const ss in tvbiag Gd of an appant tcnicity tan int absout nakdnss of xpssion And Hidggad wit a smi:

- n t futu piosopica books wi no ongb v books

X


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Author' Note

he followng text reproduces wthout sgncantalteratons (wth the excepton of the eplogue, addedsubsequently) the prncpal argument of a thess sub-mtted at the Unversty of Louva (Belgum) n June1993

o clar the context of ths argument, t seemeduseful to add as an appendx the paper read at the tmeof the submsson of the thess

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Prologue

'Wir kommn ni zu Gdankn Si kommn zu uns We

never come to thoughts They come to us,' wroteHeidegger in one of the pages bearing witness to theexperience of thinking, brought together in a work ofhis signicantly entitled dr Erung ds Dnkns,'From the Experience of Thinking'

It is the coming in its pure nakedness, not the com-

ing of something or of someone, but the coming itsand its inapparent even which will be in questionhere

That what comes in the coming is always the claring [clairci of a thought that can provide, for beingscapable of death, the space of a habitable claring

[clairir, this is something that did not await the birthof philosophy to be told in myth or poemFor thought, as Heidegger recalls at the beginning

of the "Letter on Humanism, is, in the double senseof the genitive, thought of the vrbum innitivum thatis in the grammar of our languages the word "to be

[r It is the gift that comes from being and is at tsam tim taking care of it and giving the responsewhich is its due

But how can the very vnt of thought be thought,this simultanity in which two movements of opposite

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direction are one? How can as ofligtning which

at once unites and disjoints world and thought betold?

That synthesis is always also diaeresis, that gather-ing is at the same time separation, however, is what issaid without becoming apparent in the double phonet-ic and semantic articulation of every saying

For this lash is t v1Y vnt of languag whichdoes not mean that human beings are anachronicallythe measure of all things but, on the contrary, thatthere is no assignable origin of the dialogue thatimmemorially w are

uXTe En AOrOe Eau'ov auv:l it is proper to

breathe to be a AOrOe that increases of itself, Heraclitussays, and elsewhere adds that it is the depth of thisAOrOe regarded by him as inseparable from the vast-ness [vastit of the world, which renders the limits ofbreath unlocatable Aristotle also understands \XTas an Et8ote Ete auo,3 a growth into itself, thus

granting to what he elsewhere names cVT E).av-n4 (a meaningful sound) an internal transcendencewresting it from the start out of the immanence of self-presence This is the foundation of the intrinsic his-toricity of speech, which, through a process of conser-vation that is at the same time an overcoming, renders

speech, like history, the knowledge and the result ofitself and not the monotonous iteration of the identi-cal

This internal dialectic of language, which alwaysspeaks at the same time of something else and of itself

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and which is related to the structural intersubjectivi-

ty of discourse, is that of an origina spontanity whichtakes on its full sense only when thought on the basisof mortality. For it is and it is not our own, it precedesus whilst coming to pass only in us in a difference thatis also homology. And, above all, it "produces onlythe niil originarium of the world. It creates there-

fore, according to the taKo0< OtK01a6 thatParmenides already saw coming to pass in naming,only this jewel of nothing for which death is thecasket.

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Gloary

The original thesis used, and this translation retains, anumber of foreign words taken from Greek andGerman. This short glossary is merely a guide to themeanings of the principal terms so used.

ErignGgnt

Gsprc

statement, account, reasonsayg

event of appropriationregion, open domain in which a being canbe encountered, free expansedialogue, conversation

In addition, an original French term has on occasionbeen quoted by the translator in square brackets fol-

lowing its English translation.

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1

The Idea of a PhenomenologicalChrono-logy

Judgmnt is our oldest belief, our most habitualholdingtrue or holdinguntrue. . . . If I saylightning ashes' I have posited the ash once asan activity and a second time as a subject I havethus presupposed a being uderlying the event, abeing that is not identical to the event but ratherrmains, , and does not 'bcom. (Nietzsche)

Can we tell time? This question might initially seempointless, if we consider that every language, and a

fortiori the languages of the IndoEuropean family,whose morphology rests on the distinction between

noun and verb and which are characterised by thedevelopment of verbal forms, is given not as a simplesemiotic' practice that would establish the inventoryof already given objects' but as an activity' of thearticulation of the presence in the world of a subject'who can be separated from it only in the . ,7magaton .

et the question of the temporality of discourse hanot ceased to haunt secretly the entire Western philo-sophical tradition that can be said to have been bornof the reection of the Greek thinkers upon their

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Ting Tim

idiom Wihout undertaking here an inventory of the

steps that led to the nominalist' ontology of thePlatonic theory of ideas, we must nevertheless brieyrecall the part played by the grammatical' awaken-ing in the elaboration of the mode of thought termedphilosophy' in Greece Bruno Snell, in his collectionof studies devoted to the birth of European philoso-

phy', entitled Di Entdckung ds Gts (TDiscovY of t Mind), notes the decisive character ofthe transformation of the demonstrative pronoun intothe denite article for the formation of philosophicalthought and emphasises Cicero's difculty in translat-ing the Platonic idea into a language which lacked it

But one must also recall the accent placed in the gene-sis of philosophical thought, from the singularity ofthe Parmenidian o (being) to the Platonic

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[Francoise Dastur] Telling Time