Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (review)

Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence. By Ned Lukacher. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. xv + 176 pp. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

In Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (1986) Ned Lukacher drew a parallel between Freud's concept of the traumatic primal scene and Heidegger's account of Western metaphysics as a forgetting of Being. Moreover, Lukacher noticed that if one thought these very different primal scenes in relation to one another, one would immediately encounter the question of temporality that is fundamental to each. In Freud, of course, time is constitutive of trauma, since trauma works retroactively through time. But can the same be said of time in Heidegger? Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence reconfirms that it can. Of course, those who abhor psychoanalytic readings of philosophy will probably take little interest in Lukacher's project. But Lukacher has made a strong case for the idea that Western tradition is haunted by a trauma eternally acted out instead of worked through. Time-Fetishes further argues that the symptom of this acting out is the construction of a temporal fetish (or simulacrum) in the place where the trauma has been reencountered in the history of philosophy, literature, and the arts.

Indeed, Time-Fetishes is largely an account of a basic metaphysical problem--the difference between Being and becoming--that Lukacher revisits in terms of its eternal traumatic recurrence. Importantly, the book's subtitle emphasizes Nietzsche's well-known doctrine of eternal return, which complements a Freudian emphasis on traumatic repetition and its phantasmic effects. The recurrence of the time-fetish as fantasm constitutes a surreptitious spectral history exposed most significantly by Nietzsche, who, according to Lukacher, was more intrepid than his predecessors in confronting the traumatic primal scene associated with the metaphysics of Being and becoming, namely, the trauma of what Georges Bataille called "le fond impossible des choses" [the impossible depth of things]. ¹

In On Nietzsche Bataille explains that the "inner experience" is a "separation experience" related "to a vital continuum" to which we may hazard to return through laughter, sexual feeling, and ecstasy. Yet, being separated, we never possess clear recollections of that return and therefore must resort to various objectifications to "reach the core of the being that we are" (186). Writing in the early 1940s, Bataille summarizes the central problem that concerns Lukacher: consciousness is an anguished separation experience that cannot marry Being and becoming. For Bataille, the leap into becoming is Dionysian (intoxicating, erotic, ecstatic, frenzied): "I dissolve into myself like the sea" (184). Afterward, however, one necessarily returns to a state of individuality and separateness: to a condition of particular Being denied access to Dionysian experience except by way of contrivances like art (lyric poetry, painting, symphonic music, etc.). Experience, then, is a consciousness of the difference between Being and becoming that is reminiscent of Jacques Lacan's concept of alienation, in which having one thing comes at the price of not having another. For Bataille, alienation either from Being or from becoming is traumatic, since both conditions lack something. The Dionysian consciousness experiences ecstatic feelings but lacks their objectification and recoverability; the Apollonian consciousness experiences self-objectification and knowledge but lacks emotional dynamism and continuity. Bataille argues that to be suspended in this difference is suffering, because Being and becoming are fundamentally wedded, despite our inability to experience them as such.

Lukacher touches on this aspect of suffering when he discusses Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (1523), handsomely reproduced on the cover of Time-Fetishes. A detail depicts Bacchus leaping rather awkwardly from his chariot to make his way to Ariadne, who has just been abandoned by Theseus. According to Lukacher, Titian's painting was known to Nietzsche and may have been fateful for the theory of eternal return. The painting is an allegory of the rapprochement between Being and becoming in which Bacchus is the personification of Being...