Time as a refusal of refiguration

Paul Ricœur's Temps et récit trilogy¹ is undoubtedly one of the most impressive contemporary undertakings philosophical tradition that goes back to Aristotle and Augustine, and the phenomenological overcoming of this tradition by Husserl and Heidegger. To achieve this vast synthesis, Ricoeur turns to literature and to what, in his view, is the essential driving force behind the creation of fiction: narrative. Our apprehension of time would always be a matter of narrative, that is, of a narrative configuration of our experience of time.

Ricœur first contrasts two modes of configuration, that operated by history, based on a reconstitution of the intelligibility of events, and that operated by literature, based on the structural elaboration of a plot. Whereas historical narrative aims to establish a linear understanding of time, what Ricoeur calls cosmic time, plot constructs a fictional world, i.e., a reconfiguration of history into a world, or in other words, a second configuration. A third dimension of the experience of time then emerges, that of putting the story to the test in reading: the experience, the understanding of the story, brings about a third configuration of time. These three levels, which according to Ricœur define the three levels of mimesis, enable him to make the fundamental shift from a phenomenology of time, deemed aporetic, to a hermeneutics.

The key concept in Ricœurian hermeneutics of time is the concept of configuration, or rather of refiguration, since the material we are concerned with configuring is, as soon as we move from history to the making of fiction, and a fortiori from poetics to reading, already a configuration of time. Narrative refiguration places the figure at the heart of the conceptual device that enables us to think about time, at the very moment when Genettian narratology is unfolding around the three Figures, and mobilizing a literary corpus very circumscribed in time : Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (1906-1922), Thomas Mann's La Montagne magique (1912-1923), Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925). The era of this corpus can be characterized as one of a certain crisis of interiority² : the somewhat desperate effort to refigure the self and the world with which this literature is concerned proves particularly suited to the Ricœurian hermeneutic project. But what of the literary experience of time before Proust and after Woolf ? On the other hand, the great advances of contemporary physics in the modelling of time, and in particular Einstein's postulation of a space-time that renders the notion of cosmic time obsolete, are not taken into account by Time and Narrative  yet the very notion of aporia, which plays a fundamental role in Ricoeur's demonstration, rests on this linearity of cosmic time whose limit it experiences.

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We will show here, based on Diderot's work and practice, that it is possible, and even necessary, to think of time outside the paradigm of narrative. For Diderot, the concept of figure is irreducible to the experience of time, which is first and foremost the testing of a vicissitude  speech, discourse, i.e. everything that implements the configuration of a narrative, are based on a thought without duration, so that they certainly don't aim at the representation of time, but rather of the idea, or of truth, and that time only manifests itself in a second way and as falsification  finally, an apprehension of time that is based on the concept of the figure, which is irreducible to the experience of time, is based on a thought without duration. /// time that would not be enclosed in the subject's experience of its own interiority requires us to posit the exteriority of an outside-time: what constitutes a logical impossibility in the Augustinian-Aristotelian conceptual framework becomes possible with the space-time of contemporary physics. Diderot had certainly not anticipated the discoveries of relativity and the theoretical possibilities of quantum physics. But the practice of the thought experiment and the observation of catalepsy enabled him, using a method that we would perhaps characterize a little hastily today as pre-scientific, to think the simultaneous plurality of times and the work of negativity that underlies this plurality.

This case study is not intended to pit Diderot against Ricoeur, nor even to identify the modernity of a thought : rather, it is intended to effect a decentering. The radical disorientation into which Diderot plunges us could help us take the step towards a post-hermeneutic theorization of the human sciences.

I. The experience of time

First, we need to start again from a Diderotian phenomenology of time : the experience of duration, in Diderot, is not that of an unfolding of events, but rather of an accident leading to vicissitudes. This is the Lucretian materialist model of the clinamen.

The originary catastrophe

At the beginning of Essais sur la peinture, Diderot describes the work of time on the face of a woman who, in her youth, has lost her eyes :

" The successive growth of the orb no longer distended her eyelids. They returned to the cavity that the absence of the organ had hollowed out  they shrank. The upper eyelids pulled down the eyebrows; the lower eyelids pulled up the cheeks. The upper lip was affected by this movement and lifted. The alteration affected all parts of the face, depending on whether they were further away or closer to the main site of the accident. But do you believe that the deformity was enclosed in the oval ? " (Ver, IV, 467 ; DPV, XIV, 343³.)

Time is marked by an absence⁴ : the eye is missing. From this liminal hole, successive deformations can be seen at the edge of the accident. Time manifests itself as an alteration on the threshold of the unrepresentable. This alteration is irrepressible, extending beyond the oval of the face, insensitively contaminating the entire figure, shoulders, throat and right down to the feet for the second example summoned, that of the hunchback.

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It's a question of seeing the missing eye, but of seeing it outside this lack, far from the hollow orbit : in the marvelous spectacle of a woman's throat, in the enigma of an uncovered foot protruding from a veil that covers the figure, we should perceive the original lacuna, the defect that explains everything, the principle of alteration that is also the principle of singularity. Time has disfigured the figure, but by disfiguring it, it has made it absolutely singular, unique from the point of view of nature, which, when summoned, will make no mistake. Time has constructed the figure as a disfigurement, but as an insensible, invisible disfigurement. The very notion of the figure, from which Diderot could build a Traité de peinture, slips away and unravels : there will be no traité⁵. Time thus not only imprints the contagion of a vicissitude⁶ : it is seized in the work, at its heart, as a refusal of refiguration  the work's device prevents the refiguration of what, through the play, the contest of time, slips away as disfiguration, as originary catastrophe.

Ruine and vicissitude

In front of three /// landscapes by Julliart, at the Salon of 1767, Diderot despaired at the painter's flat alignment of trees, water and mountains. And to describe the poetry of a beautiful landscape :

" you have to know how to [...] give mountains an imposing aspect  half-open them, suspend their ruinous tops above my head, dig caves in them, strip them in this place, in that other, clothe them with moss, bristle their tops with shrubs, make poetic inequalities (Ver, IV, 644  DPV, XVI, 252).

The landscape is not just a spatial arrangement : it must " be touched strongly ", implement " a certain poetry ", produce a sublime effect that Diderot identifies with that of " the ravages of time ". But how do we infuse this poetry of destructive time into what is initially a simple topography of places? Diderot cracks open the mountains, threatens their "ruinous tops" with collapse, pierces them with holes, strips them bare: he disfigures them, ruins them, undermines them. The poetization of the landscape is a veritable enterprise of destruction, placing vicissitude at the heart of the painting. The description dynamites its object; it makes time visible through this alteration. This movement is exactly the opposite of a refiguration  on the contrary, Diderot started from a full landscape, an ordered arrangement of places, the countryside produced by Julliart. To give a sense of the depth of time implies introducing the hollow, the unstable, the ruinous into this fullness of naive matter. Julliart prepares us for the ruins of Robert :

" The effect of these compositions, good or bad, is to leave you in a gentle melancholy. We fix our gaze on the debris of a triumphal arch, a portico, a pyramid, a temple, a palace, and we look back on ourselves  we anticipate the ravages of time ; and our imagination scatters across the earth the very edifices we inhabit. Instantly, solitude and silence reign around us. We are left alone with a nation that is no more. And here is the first line of the poetics of ruins⁷. " (Ver, IV, 699 ; DPV, XVI, 335)

Again, time makes itself felt through its ravages. But here again it imposes a projection from an unstable support : " we attach our gaze to the debris " ; we must emphasize the antinomy of attachment and debris, of what the gaze seeks to fix and what, as ruin, presents itself as impossible to fix.

But above all, to the image of ruin, deployed on the canvas in all its plastic materiality, comes to be superimposed a second, virtual image, that of " the very buildings we inhabit ", which we ruin in imagination⁸. The painting becomes an interface: in its depth - the buildings whose ruin it presents on the surface; in its projection - the same ravage of time, but wrought in the future on our own dwellings. The motif of vicissitude, the theme of devastation, should not delude us: it does not reveal a Diderotian conception of time, a kind of pessimism in the face of the ineluctable alteration of things  devastation organizes imaginative superimposition. The introduction of time into painting enables this superimposition: on the one hand, the real image, the plastic materiality of the image, luring, opaque, interposed as a screen  on the other, extrapolated from this lure, projected by the imagination, the virtual image of an impossible disfigurement (the blind man's eye), the dissemination of a catastrophe (our scattered dwellings), the generalized destabilization of a landscape. Time thus manifests itself in the dual interplay of the plastic and the virtual, of that which has the consistency of a screen and that which has the consistency of an image. /// the inconsistency of ruin.

II. Time of speech, time of thought

The game is the same in language. With language, we should slide from a phenomenology to a hermeneutics of time : we might think that one of the functions of speech is to formulate the experience of time, and thereby to configure it, to interpret it. In Diderot, however, the original depression that manifests itself every time he is confronted with the experience of time forbids this configuration.

Negation and projection

This is, in the Lettre sur les sourds, Cicero's example at the beginning of the Pro Marcello :

" When Cicero begins the Oraison for Marcellus with Diuturni silentii, Patres Conscripti, quo eram his temporibus usus, etc. we see that he had had in mind prior to his long silence an idea that was to follow, that commanded the ending of his long silence [...]. What was it that determined Cicero to write Diuturni silentii in the genitive, quo in the ablative, eram in the imperfect, and so on from the rest, than a pre-existing order of ideas in his mind, quite contrary to that of the expressions, an order to which he conformed without noticing it, subjugated by the long habit of transposing ? " (Ver, IV, 25 ; DPV, IV, 154-155.)

Like Robert's Ruine, Cicero's sentence functions as an interface between an anteriority that programs it syntactically and an idea that must follow, whose suspense the sentence expresses. The sentence is inscribed in a temporality because it superimposes an analepsis and a prolepsis, a silence and a syntax that precede it, a position and a political strategy that will follow. The long silence of Cicero, a defeated republican in a Senate now controlled by Caesar's supporters, sets up, before the sentence, and starting it off, the liminal political catastrophe, the verbal nothingness, the abyss of a speech that now seems impossible⁹. Here again, the original knot from which the expression of time is knotted, is a lacuna, a collapse : diuturni silentii, of the long silence to which I, the greatest of all orators, have been reduced.

There is a syntactic order of unfolding, a sentence structure, framed by the play of cases. In relation to this structure, the order will be natural or reversed. But, in the order of thought, this succession of unfolding is irrelevant : thought functions by scene, global and simultaneous¹⁰.

" I picture Cicero going up to the rostrum at the harangues, and I see that the first thing that must have struck his listeners was that he had been a long time without going up ; so diuturni silentii, the long silence he has kept, is the first idea he must present to them, though the main idea for him is not that, but hodiernus dies finem attulit ; for what strikes an orator most as he ascends to the pulpit is that he is going to speak, not that he has kept silence. " (Ver, IV, 26 ; DPV, IV, 156.)

This time it's no longer the sentence, but the figure that in the scene interfaces between two points of view, that of the spectator on the past silence and that of the speaker on the speech to come. The shift from temporality to point of view paves the way for the abolition of temporality: caught in the chiasmus of a double gaze, the scene stops, becomes a tableau in the suspense of the genitive. Time is abolished, even though it is only a question of time, diuturni. This time is identified with the figure of the orator caught between silence and speech : " Je me figure Cicero... " But this refiguration of a scene as a substitute for the sentence from which it is extrapolated soon proves impossible : the points of view of the speaker and the spectators are irreconcilably irreconcilable, fall within two /// disjointed temporalities. The figure superimposes this disjunction: a time of silence underlies the time of speech, an original negation¹¹ (" he has been a long time without going up "), preceding the opening of speech (" what strikes an orator most is that he is going to speak "). Cicero's speech will not refigure silence, but on the contrary place it in the suspense of the genitive, diuturni silentii, in the projective instability of this suspense, identifying it with the figurative interface of the scenic device : a word screens a silence, Cicero speaking disfigures Cicero who is silent.

In this dynamic clash of temporalities, then, there are not simply two heterogeneous images confronted, but the three terms of a device¹² : between the original negation of the diuturni silentii and the representative projection of the finem attulit is interposed the figure, the interface of Cicero ascending to the tribune. The interplay of heterogeneities constitutive of Diderotian temporality is a game of three terms: negation, projection and figure. This play gives form to the refusal of refiguration.

The beam of thought

Diderot proposes a more abstract and general formulation of this in the Éléments de physiologie, in chapter II of part three, " Phénomènes du cerveau ", " Entendement " :

" Objects act on the senses  sensation in the organ has duration ; the senses act on the brain, this action has duration : no sensation is simple or momentary, for if I may express myself thus, it is a bundle. From this is born thought, judgment " (Ver, I, 1284 ; DPV, XVII, 462.)

The formulation is abrupt  it's about thinking thought. To do this, Diderot begins by positing a double duration, or, if we prefer, a double temporality¹³ : first there is the time of " sensation in the organ ", of the imprint that objects make on the senses. Then there's the translation of this imprint in the brain, the transposition of sensation into intellection: a time to feel, a time to understand. But Diderot doesn't see these two durations, these two temporalities, as successive and interrelated. For him, they form a bundle¹⁴ : the whole that constitutes sensation, in the organ and in the brain, is made up of reactive traits, nerve flows that, persisting slightly after their emission, interact with each other, not only as multiple understandings rubbing off on each other, but as a heterogeneous mixture of raw reception and elaborated message. This bundle of competing traits, of mingled perceptions and intellections, constitutes the device of thought : the conjunction from which it results is also a conjunction of temporalities.

Thought, judgment, are the interface of the bundle of sensation, the third term between perception in the organ and intellection in the brain, between catastrophe or perceptual negation (sensible experience as self-negation, the sensation that overwhelms and annihilates) and virtualization, imaginative projection (the recapture through the construction of meaning, the conceptualization of sensation). Diderot doesn't speak of interface, but of coexistence:

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" By the reason that they are durable, there is coexistence of sensations. The animal senses this coexistence. To feel two coexisting beings is to judge. This is the judgment formed " (Ibid., Ver, I, 1284 ; DPV, XVII, 462).

Here we touch on an essential paradox : Diderot began by positing a double duration of sensation. This double /// duration enables him to think of thought as the coexistence of sensations. Duration conditions, produces coexistence  yet this coexistence, which Diderot hypothesizes as early as the Lettre sur les sourds, enables him precisely to abolish duration in the representation of thought. What we state successively, we have thought simultaneously. Better still: simultaneity, i.e. the coexistence of the sensations that constitute thought, defines the out-of-time, non-successive, non-durable nature of thought. It's a bundle, i.e. a device : an instantaneous conjunction¹⁵.

Here we see more clearly what we saw at work more intuitively in the Salons : the experience of time always comes back, in Diderot, to a duration or a system of durations, articulated to a negation of duration, or a void, an absence, a catastrophe : on the one hand, the alterations, the vicissitudes, the ravages of time, the shrinking of flesh on the face of the blind woman, the ruin of a mountain that time digs holes in, the dispersion of the buildings we inhabit, all experiences that dilate time  on the other hand, the missing eye, the obsolescence of the world, the solitude and silence around us : an experience of bareness, a reduction to the one and the bare that is an abolition of duration, the loop of a return on oneself in the abyss.

III. Paradoxes of out-of-time

To grasp the vicissitude of time, Diderot posits the exteriority of an out-of-time of thought. It's not just the simultaneity of the hieroglyph in the Lettre sur les sourds, nor of the tuning of the harpsichord-philosopher's strings in Le Rêve de D'Alembert ; it's the out-of-time of thought-experience that will make up for the physical experimentation that Enlightenment science can't practically implement. Off-time enables a decisive shift from a problematic of the figure (refiguration / disfiguration) to a logic of the device: off-time is the off-stage of the device, which takes us out of the epistemological framework of hermeneutics. From the hors-temps, there is neither je, nor relation. And yet it is he who makes it possible to think of time as relation, as liaison.

The latus of temporalities

In fact, between the dilation of time into vicissitude and the reduction of time into abyss, a liaison must be posited, a latus. Thus, in Le Rêve de D'Alembert, when Diderot reduces Falconet's group to powder :

" When the block of marble is reduced to impalpable powder, I mix this powder with humus or vegetable earth ; I knead them well together ; I water the mixture, I let it putrefy one year, two years, a century, time does nothing to me. " (Ver, I, 613 ; DPV, XVII, 94.)

It's a question of articulating two heterogeneous, inert matter, the block of marble, and thinking matter, me, the one who waters, the philosopher. These two substances themselves refer to two temporalities, humorously highlighted by the phrase " time doesn't do anything to me " : for while a priori time does nothing to the block of marble, which is assumed to be eternal, it is not indifferent to the philosopher who waters and cannot afford the luxury of eternal watering¹⁶.... Between the two materials to be brought together, the inert and the thinking, there is the difference between a time of life and an out-of-time of stone, a difference that Diderot mischievously likes to invert: indeed, through the virtual experience he imagines, pulverized marble enters into vicissitude, alters, produces humus, on which we sow peas, beans, cabbage, which we eat.

" True or false, I like this passage from marble to humus, from humus to the vegetable kingdom, and from the vegetable kingdom to the animal kingdom, to flesh. " (Ver, I, 613 ; DPV, /// XVII, 95.)

It's marble that stands the test of time, transforms itself in time. For Diderot, the watering philosopher, on the contrary, " time does nothing to me ", I am in the timelessness of the experimenter, in the timeless exteriority of the observation device.

From this reversal of living duration and the out-of-time of skepsis, this chiasmus of vicissitude and sensibility, it's a matter of introducing the third term, the latus that will make the link " between humus and me " : " to make marble edible ", " I thus make flesh or soul, as my daughter says, an actively sensitive matter [...] for you will confess to me that there is much farther from a piece of marble to a being that feels, than from a being that feels to a being that thinks " (ibid.).

You have to appreciate here the transgressive jubilation of a Diderot very proud of his delirious reasoning. But, and this is the whole game and balance of Rêve de D'Alembert, the delirium of reasoning lays the serious foundations, the forms of the materialist thinking machine. " It's much further from... to..., than from... to... " : these are indeed two durations, two vicissitudes that are posited, as, in the Elements of Physiology, those of the two sensations from which to think thought. Between the two, the latus, the liaison is the interface that orders time as the exclusion of time : to me, the philosopher, the gardener, the experimenter, " time does nothing to me ".

And Diderot will return to this negation a few pages later :

" Diderot. Would you allow me to anticipate the times  by a few thousand years?

D'Alembert. Why not? Time is nothing to nature¹⁷. " (Ver, I, 615 ; DPV, XVII, 98.)

This constitutive negation can no longer be thought of here, as in the example of the Diuturni silentii, simply as coexistence, simultaneity of a temporal device that would substitute for the discursive model of successive, continuous and concatenated time. It opens up a disproportion and implies an absence, the position of exteriority of the operator of thought: nature, like the philosopher who waters, is in fact the instance that thinks vicissitude, and can only think it by excluding itself from it. The off-time of the thought of time is a negation but also a totalization¹⁸. Time is nothing to nature, time does nothing to me because the operator of thought is not immersed in it but totalizes it. But this totalization implies immersion: nature is not outside nature to observe its vicissitudes, just as I am not outside time to water my marble block. The out-of-time position, constitutive of the temporality device, abolishes, includes by totalization the out-of-time, and undoes what it has instituted.

Catalepsies : insensible time

This logical circle, of which the chiasmus is a first figurative approach, gives the paradoxical form of the essential discontinuity of Diderotian time, and posits the principle of the refusal of refiguration. The position of refiguration is the off-time position, to which time does nothing, for which time is nothing. Yet this position makes the out-of-time fall into time by totalizing the process it allows to be observed.

Diderot gives a striking example of this in the Voyage de Hollande :

" A minister from La Haye goes up to the pulpit, preaches, stops in the middle of his sermon, thinks he's in his stall, intones a psalm, the people respond ; the psalm over, he resumes his speech precisely where he was interrupted, continues it and completes it ; and when he has come down from the pulpit, he has not the slightest awareness of what has happened. " (DPV, XXIV, /// 161-162¹⁹)

The mystic priest jumps from preaching to singing the psalm, then jumps again from psalm to preaching. From the preaching, he is unaware of the psalm's gap, whose duration has been zero for him. He thus experiences the coexistence within him of two mutually exclusive temporalities, each denying the other. The observation of a third party is needed to observe, think about and formulate this dual temporality of preaching and psalm, of public, singular speech and communal singing from one's stall. But is such a third party possible? The people, drawn by the mystical impulse of the priest, respond to the call of the psalm. The leap from one temporality to another triggers a contagion, a totalization, which excludes de facto the observing exteriority of a witness.

Diderot returns to this anecdote from the Voyage de Hollande in the Éléments de physiologie :

" Point de penseurs profonds, point d'imaginations ardentes qui ne sont sujets à des catalepsies momentanées. A singular idea presents itself, a bizarre report distracts, and there goes the head, one comes back from there as from a dream : one asks one's listeners, where was I ? What was I saying? Sometimes you follow what he's saying, as if he hadn't been interrupted. Witness the Dutch preacher " (I, 3, " Homme " ; Ver, I, 1279 ; DPV, XVII, 328-329.)

Catalepsy is temporal depression, the manifestation of a defection, the opening of a lapse through which, at the edge of the abyss, the device of time is revealed. Diderot no longer identifies this catalepsy with the dubious pathology of a mystical preacher, but makes it a symptom of genius: it's the mark of the profound thinker, of the ardent imagination. It is therefore the exacerbated form of thought in general²⁰. The leap from one temporality to another is no longer described as a simple rupture between two heterogeneous ones, but as the establishment of " a bizarre "  relationship: the disjunction is a liaison, the stall is a rapport²¹. This connection, this relationship, manifests the emergence of thought, but manifests it as original negation, as wandering into the abyss : " et voilà la tête perdue, on revient de là comme d'un rêve ".

Diderot gives another example in chapter 2 of Part III :

" Intellectual actions interrupted and resumed after a long interval ; phenomenon to be explained. I don't know if I mentioned this man, who receives in the temple the blow of the arm of the lever of a wine press ; he remains six weeks without consciousness, at the end of this time he returns from his state as from sleep ; he finds himself again at the moment of the accident, and continues to give orders for his wine. We know the story of the woman who continues her speech interrupted by an attack of catalepsy²². " (III, 2 ; Ver, I, 1286 ; DPV, XVII, 465-466)

Diderot insists on the real continuity of each experience of temporality, which the coma, the cataleptic accident, the leap to another temporality seem to break. There is no rupture of time, but superimpositions of duration revealed by manifestations of absenteeism from oneself.

" A laborer, whose spectacle was all the amusement of his days off, is attacked with a hot fever occasioned by the juice of a poisonous plant that he had been carelessly administered. This man then began to recite entire scenes from plays he had no memory of in his state of health. And there's more. He still has an unfortunate disposition for versification. He doesn't know the first of the verses he spouted in his /// fièvre, mais il a la rage d'en faire. " (III, 3 ; Ver, I, 1289 ; DPV, XVII, 469-470.)

In this example, the time of life is superimposed on the time of theater, of which the worker is particularly fond. But Diderot takes the trouble to describe the causes of the attack : " the juice of a poisonous plant " makes the link between the two temporalities ; it instills the fever that awakens the buried memory of verses heard at the theater. Nous n'oublions rien  it was his social humility that persuaded the worker of his lack of knowledge, that threw up for him the screen of forgetfulness between the time of the theater and the time of life, a screen whose inhibition is lifted by the fever. The venomous juice is the third term, the revealer of the temporal device: it activates the social interface between the worker's life and the culture of the theater, between these two temporalities that ignore each other. Poison is the external agent, the out-of-time position that establishes the temporal relationship. But this exteriority is mortal, or in any case threatens the worker with death, and can only be resolved by death or assimilation (the totalization of what is observed). The result of assimilation is the fusion of temporalities. The worker again forgets the verses he heard at the theater, but " he has the rage to make²³ ". Formally, this rage constitutes, on a new level, a remanence of the fever from which he emerged ; substantively, the rage to make verse transposes the original poetic desire and seeks to fray a latus between the other world of theatrical temporality and the practical world of the worker, his active temporality, the faire that characterizes it. The worker-poet becomes an oxymoronic figure, the interface figure of a permanent scene that, in eccentric, comical form, represents the universal scene of the temporality of thought : theatricalizing the social screen of his inhibition, the worker-poet unites the heterogeneities of his condition and desire in a propensity to figure that disfigures, a rage to make verse that supplements the inhibited recollection of verses heard in the theater.

L'énergumène is the image of the creator in general, and carries within him the chemistry of any emergence of thought. This emergence introduces the dissonance of an impossible relationship of disjointed times, it springs forth as a revolt against a social order, as the lifting of an inhibition, as the opening up of a memory and temporality that it nonetheless empties, as the refusal of refiguration.

 

What is this post-hermeneutics of time to which Diderot invites us, in a cultural and epistemological context where neither literature nor fiction have yet conquered an autonomy that would enable them to produce separate operative concepts such as those of narrative or narrative configuration ? The chapter of Elements of Physiology devoted to memory provides, following the anecdote of the poet-worker, the beginnings of an answer :

" To explain the mechanism of memory we must look at the soft substance of the brain as a mass of a sensitive and living wax, but susceptible to all sorts of forms, losing none of those it has received, and constantly receiving new ones which it keeps. That's the book. But where is the reader? The reader is the book itself. For this book is sensing, living, speaking or communicating by sounds, by strokes the order of its sensations, and how does it read itself ? by sensing what it is, and manifesting it by sounds. " (Ver, I, 1289 ; DPV, XVII, 470.)

The metaphor of the book designates the hermeneutical basis of the understanding of time that is surpassed here : the book of memory, through which the experience of time is made, is its own reader ; that is, the third configuration of time (through the reader) collapses into the second configuration (through memory made book), itself undifferentiated from the first configuration (of the /// raw, denotative memory, identified with " a mass of a sensitive, living wax ").

Diderot suggests, in the tradition of Aristotle and Augustine, the three levels of mimesis (the wax / the book / the reader), but to immediately substitute them with the living book, which takes value not from figures where it would fix itself, but from the mutability of figures of which it is susceptible, by which it always escapes configuration. The living book is placed under the out-of-time gaze of the observer assumed by the thinking device : " To explain... you have to look... "

" Communicating through sounds ", " manifesting [its presence] through sounds ", this book exists only in the interaction it establishes, through which it enters into vicissitude and abolishes itself as a book : the refusal of refiguration could constitute the promise and positivity of a well-understood era of communication freed from the alienation of figures.

Notes

This defect of presence is essential, as it constitutes the prerequisite for the activity of the understanding : " Now what is done in the presence of objects, is performed in the same way in their absence, when the imagination supplements them. " (III,2 ; Ver, I, 1284 ; DPV, XVII, 462-3.)

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There are therefore in her two successions ; that of impressions made on the organ, and that of sensations which are recalled to memory. " (Traité des sensations, 1754, I, 4, " Des idées d'un homme borné au sens de l'odorat ", online edition by J. M. Simonet on the text of the Paris edition, Ch. Houel, Imprimeur, 1798, p. 45.)

At Condillac, the two durations are of impression and recollection  at Diderot, the action on the /// brain is not referred to as memory, but the chapter that follows " Entendement " is entitled " Mémoire ".

In Le Rêve de D'Alembert, the bundle of threads, or strand, referred to the primitive cells of the embryo. Diderot made the bundle and its virtual manipulation the object of a thought-observation experiment in which we find original neantization as the principle and motor of the process of self-representation, of figuration : " First you were nothing. You were, at first, an imperceptible point [...] ; this point became an untied thread, then a bundle of threads. " (Ver., I, 640-641 ; DPV, XVII, 145.)

But immediately the figuration of self turns into disfiguration, and we return to the impossible face-to-face with the blind man that opened the Essais sur la peinture : " Do by thought what nature sometimes does ; mutilate the bundle of one of its strands ; for example of the strand that will form the eyes ; what do you think happens ? " (Ver, I, 643 ; DPV, XVII, 149.)

From the man without eyes, we move on to the man without a nose : " Remove another strand from the bundle, the strand that is to form the nose ; the animal will be without a nose. " (Ibid.) The removal of the nose, meanwhile, echoes the fantasy of the man with two noses in Mangogul's Dream, in an addition to the Bijoux indiscrets whose buffoonery clearly refers to castration anxiety (Ver, II, 200-204 ; DPV, III, 261-266).

The beam thus appears each time as the theoretical instrument of the refusal of refiguration : it initiates the constitutive process of the figure, but it initiates it only through a castrating experience of disfiguration. Diderotian thinking on time as constituted in a bundle is based on these models of experimentation and observation situated at the frontier of science and imagination.

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But for Diderot fiction is merely the archive of a more general, more universal phenomenon that is the experience of thought. From the disconnection of historical time and its neutralization by the narrative refiguration of the fictional narrative (Ricoeur), we move on to the radical abolition of time in the universal experience of thought understood as a beam device, as neantization and as a refusal of refiguration.

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