Reflections on Time and Politics

1. The "Vulgar" Aristotle

1 The ‘‘Vulgar’’ Aristotle aristotle is often credited with the first rigorous formulation of the ‘‘vulgar’’ conception of time as an infinite series of ‘‘nows’’ stretching from future to past. For many, this ordinary, chronological conception—which reduces time to space,1 unfolds it in a linear succession,2 or subordinates it to movement3 —is a baseline of what contemporary thinking must surpass. Certain difficulties, however, must be negotiated to ascribe this position to Aristotle fully. On the one hand, the discussion of time in Physics, book 4, opens by stating that not only are past and future nonexistent, but ‘‘the present ‘now’ is not part of time at all, for a part measures the whole, and the whole must be made up of the parts, but we cannot say that time is made up of ‘nows’’’ (Aristotle 1934–57, 218a). The ‘‘now,’’ in this sense, pertains to time, but is not part of time.4 On the other hand, Aristotle holds that ‘‘neither would time be if there were no ‘now,’ nor would ‘now’ be if there were no time . . . time owes its continuity to the ‘now,’ and yet is divided by reference to it’’ (219b–220a). Here, the ‘‘now’’ is essential to time’s being. Taken together, these claims suggest a fundamental metaphysical aporia, whereby time both does and does not exist and the present 1. This is Bergson’s primary critique. See Bergson (1910, chapter 2; 1998, 318–19). 2. Heidegger (1982, 242–44, 255) reproaches Bergson for accusing Aristotle of reducing time to space but criticizes Aristotle’s conception for ascribing to time a linear and unidirectional succession: ‘‘Time as Aristotle expounds it and as it is familiar to ordinary consciousness is a sequence of nows from the not-yet-now to the no-longer-now, a sequence of nows which is not arbitrary but whose intrinsic direction is from the future to the past’’ (260). 3. Despite his debt to Bergson, Deleuze’s criticisms of the ordinary conception of time focus on its treatment of time as the measure of movement, making little reference to time’s being spatialized. The transition made from the first to the second cinema book (Deleuze 1986 and 1989), for example, is governed by Deleuze’s claim that insofar as time is read off of movement, we are given only an indirect image of what it is. 4. ‘‘Thus we have shown that there is a something pertaining to time which is indivisible , and this something is what we mean by the ‘present’ or ‘now’’’ (Aristotle 1934–57, 234a). 14 Reflections on Time and Politics ‘‘now’’ functions ambiguously as both limit and transition, dividing and connecting the sequence of past and future ‘‘nows.’’ Aristotle is thus taken to articulate an ordinary conception of time that Hegel’s dialectical mediation of time’s dimensions through the present ‘‘now’’ completes.5 Aristotle, however, seems to give not one account of a ‘‘now’’ with divergent but essential functions, but two very different accounts, one analyzing time in relation to perceived change and another analyzing time itself, without reference to this essential relation.6 The first gives the ‘‘now’’ a central standing, but not as part of time. In the second, the present ‘‘now’’ constitutes time, but its function conflicts with the nature of indivisibles articulated in connection with the first depiction. Both accounts are necessary for Aristotle’s physics, the science of moving things,7 but rather than articulating the common conception of time, they exceed it while giving it ‘‘its rightful due.’’8 Already with Aristotle, then, time is disengaged from any subordination to movement, space, and continuity. The instant corresponds to the spatial point insofar as ‘‘time is divided or undivided in the same manner as the line’’ (Aristotle 1984b, 430b), yet these indivisibles cannot be components of what they divide because they are inconsistent with the nature of a continuum. Aristotle works out the 5. See Hegel (1970, §§257–59). Heidegger holds that with Hegel ‘‘the sequence of ‘nows’ has been formalized in the most extreme sense’’ (1962, 484) through a ‘‘levelling off’’ that allows the now to ‘‘be intuited as something present-at-hand, though present-at-hand only ‘ideally’’’ (483). Moreover, Heidegger maintains that ‘‘the priority which Hegel has given to the ‘now’ . . . makes it plain that in defining the concept of time he is under the sway of the manner in which time is ordinarily understood. . . . It can even be shown that his...