Sad Mondays #8
Author: Magda Wisniowska - July, 2020.
Last time, admittedly a while back, I wrote about how the question of time arises in Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s aesthetic judgment, especially in his late essay, “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy.” This short text was originally written as a later preface to Deleuze’s earlier work on Kant, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, but it is unique in that within this text, Deleuze uses the concept of time to summarise Kant’s key insights. As his final point, Deleuze looks at the Third Critique’s definition of aesthetic judgement and submits it to this prism of time, arguing,
It is an aesthetic of the Beautiful and the Sublime, in which the sensible takes on an autonomous value for itself and is deployed in a pathos beyond all logic, and which will grasp time as it bursts forth [dans son jaillissement], at the very origin of its thread and its vertigo. (Essays Critical and Clinical, 34)
In turn, I argued that to understand something of what Deleuze means by “time” here we need to return to the definition given in Kant’s First Critique, where it is a defined as one form of intuition, a means of sensibility. The same way I would not be able to navigate the outer world successfully if I did not have a prior sense of space, my impressions of this world would not be coherent if I did not have a way of ordering them in time as a succession of presents. Whatever sensory impression or thought that I may have, affects my mind and within my mind, one affect is always replaced by another. Which means that when I think of time in this Kantian fashion I do not really think of “time” itself, but the “present,” or rather a series of presents, an endless chain of “nows” that bind me to the world. I think it is highly significant that when Kant chooses to illustrate his argument he describes a line. For him, to think of time, is to draw a line in space, horizontally, from one point to another. The act of drawing this line is supposed to visualise the passage of time, time thus also being intimately connected to the body, to movement and to measurement (Critique of Pure Reason B155).
This kind of time has a name given to it and it is Chronos. We grasp it as a “living present in bodies which act and are acted upon” (Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 5). It extends infinitely, and past and future are merely part of it, bracketing either end. But from this Deleuzian reading of the Stoics we also learn that there is another way of grasping time, complementary to Chronos but nevertheless distinct from it. In this alternative approach, time consists of only past and future, the “present” being replaced by “the instant,” described by John Sellars as “the mathematical limit without thickness or extension that stands between past and future” (“Deleuze and the Stoic Reading of Time,” 5). Deleuze calls this time of the instant, Aion. In contrast to the time of Chronos, the time of Aion is incorporeal, always already passed and always about to come. It is the eternal truth of time, “its pure and empty form” (Logic of Sense,165).
What then is at stake in Deleuze’s reading of Kant in Essays Clinical and Critical? Which kind of time are we confronted with in this definition of the aesthetic experience? Is it the time of the present, regular and measurable, the time we live in, corporeal? Or is it this more mathematical idea of a limit, cutting across vertically the two expanses of past and future? Any answer must take into account that Chronos, the time of the present, is far less orderly than it might initially seem. While Kant elegantly traces the straight line of time by moving his finger horizontally through space, Deleuze creates a new mythology of the complex relationship between two personifications of time, in which Chronos gives way to Aion by succumbing to a madness he harbours within.
In a chronological reading of time, the one present is always superseded by another. Time is constructed out of these series of presents. There is no past or future, except in relation to this all-encompassing sense of now. However, if one present is always following another in a straight line — how can a reading of time that only knows the present express this? When the one present becomes another, it is no longer present. The present is, as it were, “sidestepped” (Logic of Sense,164). Yet, at the same time, the one present becomes another now, in the present. Thus at the same time, we cannot step aside from the present after all. It is as if there are suddenly two presents, the one good, measured present, the other, the bad, evasive one, constantly shifting from side to side and, in that sense, also measureless. This bad Chronos always threatens the good, Kant’s line always about to unravel. And so Chronos, the “schizophrenic”, the “manic depressive” wants to die (ibid.). Chronos has become a deep break.
The feeling of pleasure accompanying the indeterminate judgment of taste—a pathos, not logic—grasps time as it bursts forth, at the very origin of its thread and its vertigo. This cannot be the ordered time of Kant’s first critique, for such a time could never be described as vertiginous. It must be time at the point of madness. Bad Chronos overtaking the good.