The Work of Leisure: The Figure of Empty Time in the Poetics of Holderlin and Mandelshtam

1. Surplus-Time

The modern notion of history was definitively formulated in the eighteenth century, when Rousseau and Kant restricted the access of humans to their own supersensible, substantial nature (essence). Man appeared as a historical being, one whose definition lies in his development (or, in the case of Rousseau, fall), in his negativity. As soon as this vision of human nature was made public, a question arose, which dominated the subsequent tradition of the philosophy of history up to our days. Namely, the question of the access of humans to historicity as such—to pure historicity or pure temporality, apart from this or that particular historical development. Such access would permit humans both knowledge of themselves and spontaneity of action. Even blocked from the transcendent, God-like, absolute freedom, humans may still be free historical actors if they can deliver themselves from the determination of past and future, which forces them into the alienated labor of development, or into the labor of mourning. They would still act and produce, but do so as free subjects, out of nothing.

If human essence lies in human history, then why does it move forward, what is the principle of its movement? Such a principle, for human history, may only be human freedom, human spontaneity and negativity, the capacity to abstract oneself from the past and to create the new out of nothing.

Thus, Rousseau, in his Letter to d'Alembert on the Spectacles, speaks, paradoxically, of the "laborieuse oisiveté," ¹ the laborious idleness of Spartans who, while not present at the lost origin of history, enjoyed an "exceptional" place within it. Kant considered time and space to be the "pure forms" of intuition. However, he was ambiguous as to the possibility of a direct access to them, without any intuited object. Kant alluded to the possibility of directly perceiving time, this "pure intuition," in two places: first, in the famous section on the schematism in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, ² and second, in the analytic of the sublime of the Critique of Judgment. ³ Both the scheme of the category of substance (the first case) and the failure of imagination to represent and grasp the enormity of time and space (the second case) hint at the possibility of perceiving not what moves in time, but the empty form of time itself. The philosophers of Kantian lineage almost unanimously developed these hints in the direction of searching human freedom and self-knowledge in the contemplation of pure time, in the time of leisure.

Thus Schiller, who displaced human liberty into the intermediate space of aesthetical play, a game which would allow one to "cancel (aufheben) time within time." ⁴ Even Hegel, who, in spite and because of his identification of history with the labor of the negative, still speaks of the periods of happiness as the "blank pages" of history. ⁵ Thus, finally, Marx, whose theory of capitalism is built upon the notion of surplus labor, the labor performed by the worker during the "free," "disposable" time, "leisure time." ⁶ For Marx, this leisure activity is "antithetic." It constitutes the only free, authentic human action—but at the same time the cunning exploitation of it by capitalism (paying for your free labor) makes possible the cyclic, infinite, and frenetic increase of capitalist production. ⁷ The more technical progress succeeds in reducing necessary labor, that is, in liberating time—the more vigorously does capitalist economy "convert" this free time into "surplus labor." Such exploitation of the overabundant, surplus force would, according to Marx, lead capitalism into the crisis of overproduction and allow working masses to "re-appropriate" their surplus labor for their free development. In our century, George Bataille further developed this theory, inverting the concept of economy and grounding it in surplus and festive expense, rather than in lack and...