Reflections on Time and Politics

16. Time, Guilt, and Overcoming

16 Time, Guilt, and Overcoming one does not need freud to understand how trauma initiates a repetition operating beyond any reference to pleasure or the pleasure principle. The death of a loved one, the breakdown of a marriage, or even a minor public embarrassment—regardless of whether these occur quickly or develop gradually in chronological time—easily result in a compulsion to replay in memory and behavior the events and the context that produced them. Freud asserts that through repetition the trauma of the event can be mastered, allowing the psychic system to repair itself and the pleasure principle to return to dominance.1 Yet nothing in bare repetition compels this result. Moreover, even while none of these repetitions are identical, just as no two grains of sand or drops of rain are the same, this difference is not enough to move beyond the event and create something new. Is it any wonder why Deleuze says that difference without concept—the indifferent difference that distinguishes otherwise identical repetitions without affecting their fundamental identity—is not the essence of repetition?2 Everyone has expe1 . ‘‘We may assume, rather, that dreams are here helping to carry out another task, which must be accomplished before the dominance of the pleasure principle can even begin. These dreams are endeavouring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis. They thus afford us a view of a function of the mental apparatus which, though it does not contradict the pleasure principle, is nevertheless independent of it and seems to be more primitive than the purpose of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure’’ (Freud 1957a, 32). 2. ‘‘When we define repetition as difference without concept, we are drawn to conclude that only extrinsic difference is involved in repetition; we consider, therefore, that any internal ‘novelty’ is sufficient to remove us from repetition proper and can be reconciled only with an approximative repetition, so-called by analogy. Nothing of the sort is true. For we do not yet know what is the essence of repetition, what is positively denoted by the expression ‘difference without concept,’ or the nature of the interiority it may imply. Conversely, when we define difference as conceptual difference, we believe we have done enough to specify the concept of difference as such. Nevertheless, here again we have no idea of difference, no concept of difference as such. . . . We therefore find ourselves confronted by two questions: 166 Reflections on Time and Politics rienced the rut of being absorbed in such repetitions and their meaningless differences. This malaise would be inescapable—is that not genuine nihilism ?—if there were not something literally coming from the ‘‘outside’’ that could compel change. ‘‘God’’ is one answer to the question of what this outside force might be. But another answer is time—or, rather, that dimension of time’s structure that conditions the movement or change of entities ‘‘in time.’’ This dimension, contra Bergson, cannot be linked to the past and memory: the past is not the ‘‘outside’’ that orients time and things in time. Heidegger’s Being and Time proposes an existential analytic of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, which, worked out in temporal terms, lays the groundwork for addressing the question of the meaning of Being and its temporal horizon. Temporality does not mean ‘‘being in time’’ but refers instead to the ecstatic structure of Dasein’s Being (see Heidegger 1962, 39–40, 375) and ultimately to the structure of Being as such. When Dasein’s structure as care—the form of Being-thrown-ahead-of-itself and Being-alongside-entities -encountered in-the-world,3 which accounts for Dasein’s relations to the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, its Being-with-others, its states of mind, moods, and understandings, and its falling and absorption into the world of the ‘‘they’’—is recast in temporal determinations, it becomes clear that ‘‘the future has a priority in the ecstatical unity of primordial and authentic temporality’’ (378). Anxiety, the state of mind arising from the uncanniness experienced when the world loses its significance (393), indicates authentic Being-towards-death to be Dasein’s fundamental comportment toward its utmost potentiality-for-Being. The event of death, which is the possibility of radical nonexistence (307), is futural, not in the sense of being ‘‘not yet’’ in time (373) but as something ever present yet seemingly coming from nowhere (231). It is possible because ‘‘Dasein...