[francoise dastur] telling time
TRANSCRIPT
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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
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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