Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death

Abiding Grace

RELIGION AND POSTMODERNISM

A series edited by Thomas A. Carlson

RECENT BOOKS IN THE SERIES

GOD BEING NOTHING: TOWARD A THEOGONY

by Ray L. Hart (2016)

THE MYSTIC FABLE, VOLUME TWO: THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

by Michel de Certeau (2015)

NEGATIVE CERTAINTIES

by Jean-Luc Marion (2015)

HEIDEGGER’S CONFESSIONS: THE REMAINS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE IN BEING AND TIME AND BEYOND

by Ryan Coyne (2015)

ARTS OF WONDER: ENCHANTING SECULARITY—WALTER DE MARIA, DILLER + SCOFIDIO, JAMES TURRELL, ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

by Jeffery L. Kosky (2012)

GOD WITHOUT BEING: HORS-TEXTE, SECOND EDITION

by Jean-Luc Marion (2012)

Abiding Grace

Time, Modernity, Death

MARK C. TAYLOR

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56892-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56908-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56911-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226569116.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Taylor, Mark C., 1945– author.

Title: Abiding grace : time, modernity, death / Mark C. Taylor.

Other titles: Religion and postmodernism.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Series: Religion and postmodernism

Identifiers: LCCN 2018012511 | ISBN 9780226568928 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226569086 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226569116 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Postmodernism—Religious aspects.

Classification: LCC BL65.P73 T37 2018 | DDC 200—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012511

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for Dinny Stearns Taylor

The last look is over. Nevermore will I be able to say thank you. Thank you for this or that, for this miracle, for the turbulent sea and the fuzzy horizon, for the clouds, the river and fire, thanks for heat, fire, and flames, thanks for winds and sounds, for the pen and the violin, thanks for the enormous meal of language, thanks for love and suffering, for sadness and for femininity . . . no I’m not done yet; I’m just beginning to remember who must be thanked; I’ve barely begun my hymn of thanks and my turn is over.

—MICHEL SERRES

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

ONE / Ending (the) Series

TWO / Mirror Stage

THREE / Constructing Modernism-Postmodernism

FOUR / Ghosts Haunting Modernism-Postmodernism

FIVE / Recollecting the Future

SIX / French Hegels

SEVEN / Being Timely

EIGHT / Abiding

NINE / Ending Ending

Notes

Index

Footnotes

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1  Cyclical/Circular Time

2  Chiasmic/Complex Time

3  Mark C. Taylor, neχus

4  Mark C. Taylor, The Pit and the Pyramid

5  Tokens of Exchange

6  Hegel’s Trajectory

7  Kierkegaard’s Trajectory

8  Theological Genealogy of Deconstruction

9  Hegel’s System of Fractals

10  Observing/Observed Consciousness

11  Phenomenological Journey

12  Derrida’s Metaphysics of Presence

13  Double Negation of Space-Time

14  God-Man

15  Time and Concept

16  Alexandre Kojève, Eternity, Time, and the Concept

17  Time, Desire, Death

18  Imagination

19  Negation and Nihilation

20  Martin Heidegger, Sketch (Grundriss) of Time

21  Mark C. Taylor, Point of the Pit

22  Kierkegaardian Decision

23  Genealogical Matrix

TABLES

1  Modernisms and Postmodernism

2  Greek, Jew, Christian

ABBREVIATIONS

These works are noted in the text and identified by the following abbreviations:

In checking and adjusting translations, I have used the following editions:

G. W. F. Hegel. Werke in zwanzig Banden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971.

Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970–2014.

Søren Kierkegaard. Samlede Værker. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Bohandel, 1901–6.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ending sometimes brings clarity that is missing when you are in the middle. The late 1980s was a time of considerable social, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual foment. The Reagan revolution, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of neoconservative politics and neoliberal economics were reflected in the flourishing of postmodernism and poststructuralism in the arts, architecture, and literary criticism. The decision to launch the Religion and Postmodernism series in 1987 was controversial and was met with considerable skepticism. Many literary critics insisted that postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction had nothing to do with religion, and many scholars in religious studies argued that contemporary French thought represented Left Bank nihilism and should be avoided at all costs. In this highly charged environment, the University of Chicago Press had the courage to launch a venture others resisted. I am grateful to members of the press’s faculty board of publications for supporting the series over the years. I also appreciate the interest and support of all the people who published books in the series. These important works have shaped critical and scholarly debate not only in religious studies, but also in the humanities more generally.

While nothing lasts forever, those who remember the past can discern abiding patterns that inform the present and shape the future, and can recognize the way the future repeatedly shatters the present and transforms the past. While postmodernism might be a thing of the past, understanding the issues it raised prepares us for the perilous future that is approaching too fast to be grasped.

None of this would have been possible without the tireless efforts of Alan Thomas and Randolph Petilos, who have overseen the Religion and Postmodernism series since its inception. More recently, the series has thrived under Thomas Carlson, whose keen editorial eye and important contributions have been important to the ongoing success of the project.

Jack Miles, George Rupp, Gil Anidjar, and John Chandler read the manuscript and made very helpful suggestions for revision. This book would not have been possible without the contribution of Doha Tazi Hemida, who translated the pivotal essay for my argument. Jeffrey Kosky generously reviewed the translation.

I would also like to express my continuing gratitude for the patient support of Margaret Weyers, without which many of the books I have written never would have been completed.

Finally, thanks hardly seem sufficient to express my debt to Dinny, who has been there before the beginning and will be there after the end.

June 22, 2017

ONE

Ending (the) Series

That all essential thinkers at bottom always say the same thing does not mean that they take over the identical thing from each other, but rather that they transform their own primordial thought which is different back to what is essential and to the origin. And for this reason one can find that what became known only in later ages—after it became known and could thus be seen—was also found in traces in the earlier thinkers without being able to say that the earlier thinkers already thought and knew the same thing in the same way. What was just said must be noted with regard to the concept of freedom, too.

—Martin Heidegger

Beginning Ending

. . . Beginning . . . Ending . . . When to begin? Where to begin? How to begin? When to end? Where to end? How to end? What is or is not before (the) beginning? What is or is not after (the) ending? If (the) beginning is always already past, does anything or anyone ever begin? If (the) ending is always yet to come, does anything or anyone ever end? What does it mean to pass? Might passing be the future that holds the present and past in suspense?

What is a series? Series—which derives from ser, to line up, and the Latin serere, to arrange, attach, join—means a group of events, or objects corresponding to such events, related by order of occurrence, especially by succession; a group of thematically connected works or performances. A group of objects related by a linearly varying morphological or configurational characteristic. The indicated sum of a finite or of a sequentially ordered infinite set of terms.¹ What does it mean to be a member of a series? What holds the members of a series together? What holds them apart? From point to line, but not yet to plane.² Two dimensions, perhaps three, but not yet four. What might be the fourth dimension?³ How does a series begin? Can the members of a series be numbered and counted? Can they be calculated? Are they interrelated? Is there a progression in a series? Is there a regression? Does the series have a future? Has the time of the series passed?

The series. Not just any series, but the series known as Religion and Postmodernism . . . 1987 . . . 2018 . . . covering almost three decades—three crucial decades bridging (which is not to say joining) the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From the deconstruction of one wall to the construction of others. Thirty-five books plus one, which might or might not be a conclusion. Why did the series begin? What was before the series? Why is the series ending? What will be after the series? Before—behind or in front of, past or future? After—in pursuit of or subsequent to, future or past? Before—a past that is a future, and a future that is a past. After—a future that is a past, and a past that is a future. In this interplay of past-in-future, and future-in-past, where is the present? What is the present? When is the present? Past, present, future. Future, present, past.

The question of the series is the question of time. Virtually every question probed by the books in this series can be traced to the problem of time. Is time real or unreal? Postmodernism poses and reposes the question of time—real time. What is postmodernism after? What was modernity? When did it begin? Has it ended? Does postmodernism have a future, or has its time passed? Might this passing be the impossible possibility that disrupts the presence of every present? Time. Modernity. Death.

Post Ages

In the first volume of Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author observes, Experience shows that it is not at all difficult for philosophy to begin. Far from it. It begins, in fact, with nothing and therefore can always begin. But it is always difficult for philosophy and philosophers to end (EO, 1:39; translation modified). And so it goes, on and on and on. Uncertain of what comes next, the series becomes a series, perhaps an infinite series of post ages: postwar, posthistorical, postindustrial, posthumous, posthuman, post-God, postreligion, post-Christian, post-Western, post-real, post-truth, postbiological, postmodern. What is postmodernism? What will postmodernism have been? What comes after the Post Age? What might a post–Post Age be?

The question of the post is the eternally returning question of time—being after, belatedness, afterward, afterword. What understanding of time do post ages presuppose? Is the time of postmodernism modern or postmodern? The question of time is ancient, as ancient as thought itself. When thinking is serious, it inevitably takes time. If thinking takes time, what or who gives time? If time is given, it is never ours to spend, save, or waste; rather, it is a gift, a present. A present that is always already pre-sent and thus never fully or totally present. If the present is never present, can it ever pass, be past? Can it ever arrive? If past, present, and future are never present, what, then, is time?

The question is not my own (it never is). Rather, the question was first posed by an other: Saint Augustine in The Confessions (397–400), which is considered by some to be the first autobiography ever written. In the legendary book 11, he asks, What then is time? I know what it is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to someone who has asked me, I find that I do not know. Nevertheless, I can confidently assert that I know this: that if nothing passed away there would be no past time, and if nothing were coming there would be no future time, and if nothing were now there would be no present time.⁴ The longer Augustine ponders the question of time, the more perplexing it becomes.

Augustine had been driven to question time by his quest to understand himself. Like Kierkegaard and Freud centuries later, Augustine realized that self-knowledge presupposes the relation to an Other that can never be known. What then am I, my God? What is my nature? A life various, manifold, and quite immeasurable.⁵ As Augustine continues to reflect, he becomes even more enigmatic to himself, until he finally experiences a moment of illumination:

It is now, however, perfectly clear that neither the future nor the past are [sic] in existence, and that it is incorrect to say that there are three times—past, present, and future. Though one might perhaps say: There are three times—a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future. For these three do exist in the mind, and I do not see them anywhere else: the present time of things past is memory; the present time of things present is sight; the present time of things future is expectation. If we are allowed to use words in this way, then I see that there are three times and I admit that there are.⁶

In this seminal passage, Augustine expresses two interrelated insights that were indirectly and directly influential for virtually all later theology and philosophy. First, time is inseparable from human self-consciousness, and second, time is best understood in terms of presence and self-presence. Insofar as self-consciousness is inescapably temporal, self-knowledge is inseparable from memory, or, more precisely, recollection and expectation. To know himself, Augustine must enter into the belly of the mind, the cavern or cave of the mind, or the huge court of his memory. There, he confesses, I encounter myself; I recall myself—what I have done, when and where I did it, and in what state of mind I was at the time. . . . I can myself weave them into the context of the past, and from them I can infer future actions, events, hopes, and then I can contemplate all these as though they were in the present.⁷

The Confessions is the product of Augustine’s recollection. He artfully weaves dispersed moments into a coherent narrative that reveals the fabric of his life. But he cannot stop with this work, because his story is part of a larger story that is unfolding under the watchful eye of God. The individual, he believes, cannot be understood apart from the universal, and therefore The City of God must be written to complete The Confessions. Augustine cannot know where he came from or where he is heading without knowing where history as a whole is going. It is important to stress that for Augustine, neither self-consciousness nor the historical process is self-grounded or autonomous. In the depths of his soul, Augustine discovers an Other he cannot recollect but to whom or to which he is eternally indebted: If I find you beyond my memory, I can have no memory of you. And how shall I find you if I do not remember you?⁸ Augustine names this immemorial other God; later writers have other names for such radical altarity.⁹

Augustine’s timely meditations established the parameters that define what Heidegger describes as the Western ontotheological tradition. From Aristotle and Augustine and Hegel to Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Derrida, two metaphors have governed notions of the presence of the present: the line and the circle. Accordingly, time has been interpreted as either linear or cyclical. From the former point of view, time appears to be a series of now-points that have no necessary connections to one another. These discrete points can be identified, quantified, counted, and calculated. As we will see in chapter 7, Heidegger concludes Being and Time by drawing on the insights of Saint Paul, Luther, and Kierkegaard to criticize Hegel for supposedly perpetuating the misguided serial notion of time. While Heidegger’s claim is not incorrect, it is one-sided. Hegel does view natural time as serial, but he interprets historical time as cyclical. Hegel maintains that when time is properly comprehended, it is, in Derrida’s terms, an archaeo-teleological process in which the end, implicit in the beginning, becomes explicit at the end of history, and the beginning becomes intelligible as the logical outworking of the end. In the poetic words of T. S. Eliot,

In my beginning is my end . . .

In my end is my beginning.¹⁰

Hegel presents his clearest and most influential formulation of this line of analysis in the preface to the final book he published, The Philosophy of Right (1821). The Trinitarian structure of the Hegelian dialectical system is a philosophical appropriation of a theological interpretation of history that dates back to the medieval theologian Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135–1202). The ages of the Father (ancient) and the Son (medieval) culminate in the age of Spirit (modern), which Hegel claims to fully grasp and present in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. To comprehend what is, Hegel maintains, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason. Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.¹¹ The present, however, can only be understood when it has passed; full comprehension can occur only after death or after the end of history. Using what is perhaps the most famous phrase in his entire corpus, Hegel avers: The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of twilight. Looking back, time no longer appears to be a series of disconnected points, but becomes a coherent narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. In this apocalyptic vision, the crucifixion and resurrection of the Logos appear as the process of the self-negation and sublation of all singularity through which time is taken up into eternity. To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to enjoy the present, this is the rational insight which reconciles us to the actual, the reconciliation which philosophy affords to those in whom there has once arisen an inner voice bidding them to comprehend, not only to dwell in what is substantive while still retaining subjective freedom, but also to possess subjective freedom while standing not in anything particular and accidental but in what exists absolutely.¹² Once again, the poet translates the philosopher’s Begriff into an effective and affective Vorstellung:

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.¹³

Hegel never lost sight of the theological roots of his philosophical vision. As we will see, the modern world is for him the logical conclusion of Lutheran Protestantism: "It is a sheer willfulness [Eigensinn], the willfulness which does honour to mankind, to refuse to recognize in conviction anything not ratified by thought. This willfulness is the characteristic of our epoch, besides being the principle peculiar to Protestantism. What Luther initiated as faith in feeling and in the witness of the spirit, is precisely what spirit, since become more mature, has striven to apprehend in the concept in order to free and so to find itself in the world as it exists to-day" (translation modified).¹⁴ When what is, is what ought to be, the kingdom of God has come to earth and history is over.

Indirectly commenting on Hegel, Derrida reminds us: A dialectic always remains an operation of mastery.¹⁵ But what if time cannot be mastered? What if the kingdom never comes, but is always deferred, delayed? What if history is never over? What if (the) work is not complete?

Hegel died in 1831. While the circumstances of his death remain uncertain, he appears to have died unexpectedly from cholera, which was raging throughout Europe at the time. He was buried along with his wife in Berlin’s Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof und Friedrich-Werschen Gemeinder beside Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). At the time of his death, Hegel was at the height of his fame; hundreds attended his lectures, which were edited from student notes and eventually published. During the last decade of his life, he did not publish a single book. Though he could not have known it at the time, the preface to The Philosophy of Right was the preface to his last work. Throughout his writings, Hegel was always preoccupied with the problem of prefaces. His first published work, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), is nothing more and nothing less than a preface to his entire philosophical system. Hegel realized that prefaces pose a problem for systematic philosophy. Is the preface part of the work, or is it pre-liminary? If it is preliminary, then when and where does the work proper begin? If it is part of the book or system, then it is not really a preface. Neither inside nor outside the system, prefaces appear to be promissory notes that might or might not be redeemed.

Beginning, it seems, is as much a problem for the philosopher as ending. In an essay on prefaces, entitled Hors livre, Derrida writes, "Prefaces, along with forewords, introductions, preludes, preliminaries, preambles, prologues, and prolegomena, have always been written, it seems, in view of their own self-effacement. Upon reaching the end of the pre- (which presents and precedes, or rather forestalls, the presentative production, and, in order to put before the reader’s eyes what is not yet visible, is obliged to speak, predict, and predicate), the route which has been covered must cancel itself out. But this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it."¹⁶ Always written after the work it nonetheless precedes, the preface is actually a postface or postscript whose erasure leaves the work incomplete. If the end is always missing, the work cannot come full circle to reach closure and secure a certain conclusion. Rather, it remains open and must be supplemented by postscript after postscript after postscript. Prefaces and postscripts are nonreflexive images of each other, which disrupt systemic and structural closure. This is Kierkegaard’s point in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where, writing under the guise of Johannes Climacus (aka JC), he explains,

When the dialectician has finally emancipated himself from the domination of the orator, the systematic philosopher confronts him. He says with speculative emphasis: Not until we have reached the end of our exposition will everything become clear. Here it will therefore be necessary to wait long and patiently before venturing to raise a dialectical doubt. True, the dialectician is amazed to hear the same philosopher admit that the System is not yet completed. Alas! everything will be made clear at the end, but the end is not yet there. . . . For it is ridiculous to treat everything as if the System were complete, and then to say at the end, that the conclusion is lacking. If the conclusion is lacking at the end, it is also lacking in the beginning, and this should therefore have been said in the beginning. A house may be spoken of as finished even if it lacks a minor detail, a bell-pull or the like; but in a scientific structure the absence of the conclusion has retroactive power to make the beginning doubtful and hypothetical, which is to say: unsystematic.¹⁷

Hegel labels the unsystematic series of posts the mathematical, quantitative, or bad infinite. In such a series, each point (space) and each moment (time) is separate and bears no necessary relation to its predecessors or successors. Since a definitive conclusion is perpetually deferred, this linear series remains open and thus incomplete: . . . 1 → 2 → 3 . . . The good infinite, by contrast, is circular. Points and moments are interrelated in such a way that past and future are gathered together in the present to create a progressive movement that is determined by nothing other than itself. These points and moments form a system that is closed and eventually reaches completion even though the movement that both creates and destroys them continues. The circular pulsation of this movement gathers together the serial points and moments of the line in a way that purportedly reconciles time and eternity. (See fig. 1.) Hegel lays bare the structure of this movement in the Science of Logic:

Thus, both finite and infinite are this movement in which each returns to itself through its negation; they are only as mediation within themselves, and the affirmative of each contains the negative of each and is the negation of the negation. They are thus a result, and consequently not what they are in the determination of their beginning; the finite is not a determinate being on its side, and the infinite a determinate being or being-in-itself beyond the determinate being, that is, beyond the being determined as finite. . . . They occur . . . only as moments of a whole and . . . come on the scene only by means of their opposite, but essentially also by means of the sublation [Aufhebung] of their opposite. (SL, 147)

Figure 1. Cyclical/Circular Time.

Line or circle. Open or closed. Time or eternity. Line and circle. Open and closed. Time and eternity. Is it possible to conceive time as neither linear nor cyclical?

Contretemps

Contretemps: Old French, contravenir, from Latin, contre, against + temps, time.

An unforeseen event that disrupts the normal course of things; an inopportune occurrence.

What is the place or the nonplace of unforeseen events and inopportune occurrences within linear and cyclical notions of time? Is it possible to think of time against time within time?

The conception of time that informs modernity as well as modernism is actually ancient. Modern derives from the Latin modernus, which, in turn, comes from modo, just now. Modern means of or pertaining to the present and recent times, as distinguished from the remote past.¹⁸ Like Aristotle and Augustine, modernity privileges the now, the present. The heart of modernism is, in Roger Shattuck’s apt phrase, a preoccupation with a full aliveness to the present moment.¹⁹ The aim of diverse modernist practices in art, architecture, and theology is the enjoyment of total presence here and now. The desire for presence is nowhere more vividly portrayed than in the closing lines of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:

Lff! So soft this morning ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair. If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the²⁰

Within the modernist economy, the immediate presence of Lff, taddy . . . ici et maintenant provides the keys to the kingdom that dawns here and now. For true believers, modernity is, in effect, the realization of the kingdom of God on earth. Fulfillment is not delayed or deferred, but is available in the present as a presence that knows no absence and a fullness that knows no lack.

It would appear that post ages break with modern religious, philosophical, political, and artistic eschatologies by resisting completion and closure. But, as always, appearances are deceptive. The line of post ages, like the circle of modernity and modernism, privileges the presence of the present. As will become clear in the next chapter, postmodernism does not disrupt or subvert modernity and modernism; to the contrary, it extends and perhaps even completes them. To move beyond—while staying within—modernity and postmodernity, it is necessary to conceive time otherwise by thinking contretemps.

In the 1930s, Maurice Merleau-Ponty—along with others who would shape philosophical and critical debates in France and beyond for the remainder of the century and down to the present day—attended Alexandre Kojève’s immensely influential lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The heart of Kojève’s reading of Hegel is his interpretation of the master-slave relationship and the end of history. Kojève convinced Merleau-Ponty of the abiding significance of Hegel, even if his claim that Hegel’s system marks the end of history in which oppositions are reconciled and temporal fragmentation and dispersion give way to eternal integration remains questionable. In a 1946 essay entitled Hegel’s Existentialism, Merleau-Ponty writes,

All the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel; it was he who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason which remains the task of our century. He is the inventor of that Reason, broader than the understanding, which can respect the variety and singularity of individual consciousnesses, civilizations, ways of thinking, and historical contingency but which nevertheless does not give up the attempt to master them in order to guide them to their own truth. . . . There would be no paradox involved in saying that interpreting Hegel means taking a stand on all the philosophical, political, and religious problems of our century (emphasis added).²¹

But Merleau-Ponty realizes that there are several Hegels, and even the most objective historian will be left to ask which of them went furthest.²² The multiplicity of Hegels makes it possible to read him in several ways. Merleau-Ponty argues that in an effort to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason, Hegel, perhaps inadvertently, exposes the irrationality that is always already concealed in rationality. Merleau-Ponty’s complex argument suggests an alternative interpretation of time that is neither linear nor cyclical, but is chiasmic.

Chiasmus derives from the Greek khiasmos, which in turn comes from khiazien, meaning to mark with the letter χ. In grammar, a chiasmus is a figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other. For Christians, χ is the sign of the cross.²³ Merleau-Ponty develops his most complete analysis of the chiasmus in an essay entitled L’entrelacs—le chiasme. An entrelacs (entre: between, betwixt; lacs, string, noose, trap) is an ornament consisting of interlacing figures. Entrelacer is to interlace, interweave, or intertwine, and s’entrelacer is to entwine or twist around each other. When understood in terms of l’entrelacs, the chiasmus figures a complex structure of implication (im-pli-cation: plier, to fold), enfoldment (enroulement), and envelopment (enveloppement). In sum, the chiasmus is a complex structure of implication in which everything is completely reversed or turned inside out [retourné].²⁴

In this essay, Merleau-Ponty uses the notion of chiasmus to reconfigure the body in a way that exposes its porosity. Far from a closed system, the body is incomplete and gaping open. As such, the body is irreducibly liminal and forms the matrix for all exchanges between interiority and exteriority. He labels the body flesh: "What we are calling flesh, this interiorly worked-over mass, has no name in any philosophy. As the formative medium [emphasis added] of the object and the subject, it is not the atom of being, the hard in itself that resides in a unique place and moment: one can indeed say of my body that it is not elsewhere, but one cannot say that it is here or now in the sense that objects are."²⁵ It is essential to understand that as the condition of the possibility of both presence and absence, this fleshy tissue (le tissu), which forms the fabric of life and death, is the hollow (le creux) that is the empty center allowing beings to be or not to be.²⁶ This interval is the spacing of time.

While Merleau-Ponty elaborates his notion of flesh in relation to the body—which is always spatial—several of his formulations suggest a temporal dimension of spacing. In an effort to explain the inseparable interplay between synchronicity and diachronicity, he describes the visual experience of the color red as "a certain node or knot [nœud] in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the tissue of the visible, and thereby onto a tissue of invisible being. . . . A naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being [i.e., a separate point], offered all naked to a vision which would be only total or null, but is rather a sort of channel [détroit] between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open" (translation modified).²⁷ This gaping hole punctuates every whole by perpetually deferring the fusion or coincidence of inside and outside as well as subject and object. In this way, the spacing of space opens the spacing of