Time in Exile by Marcia S Cavalcante Schuback;

Author:Marcia S Cavalcante Schuback;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2020-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Time Being

(Reading Gerundive Time with Clarice Lispector)

Where am I going? And the answer is: I’m going.

—Clarice Lispector

Reading Time and the Time of Reading

In the previous chapters, I attempted to show how Heidegger and Blanchot approach the is-being, the gerundive temporality that marks the experience of time in exile. Heidegger does it more explicitly in terms of “presencing” and “whiling,” and Blanchot in terms of “effacing” and “disappearing.” Both come close to what I am calling the is-being, in their discussions about the “neuter” departing from the urgent necessity to leave behind deep-rooted habits of thought and language. In his late work, Heidegger connects the question of whiling and abiding with thoughts on Gelassenheit, releasement or serenity,1 and Blanchot follows the Levinasian path of the thought of passivity. What matters in these central verbs, in the German lassen and in the French passer (which the word passif comes from) is the “pas,” the step and the not, the step [not] beyond. Both Heidegger and Blanchot left behind to us, their readers, the most anguished works of thought and language about the search for leaving and about abandoning the search for a beyond. Both were in search of a step beyond the need for stepping-beyond; both were in search of a thinking and writing of the withdrawing of being itself, the withdrawal of the presence of the present, assuming, albeit in very different ways and paths of thoughts and language, that a “not,” a “ne pas,” belongs originarily to being itself and to the event, to recall a passage by Heidegger in the Contributions to Philosophy that reads:

To be sure, a “not” does essentially occur in the hesitant withholding if grasped more originarily. But that is the primordial “not,” the one pertaining to being itself and thus to the event.2

The experience of leaving, lassen, quitter, abandoner, passer, is a difficult one; as much as the experience of being expulsed and disseminated, the leaving and the guilt of leaving mark strongly this difficult experience that is exile. Perhaps, rather than of exile, we should speak of leaving, or in the language of Osip Mandelstam, we should speak of “the science of departure.”3 In their attempts, Heidegger and Blanchot remain caught up or entangled within the need to overcome overcoming, to transcend transcendence, a situation of anguished absence of exit. They remain captured by the figure of truth as unconcealment, of appearing in withdrawing, which, it should be noted, is a narratival figure of the apocalypse. Of course, we should not forget the differences that distinguish them, but, at the same time, it is difficult to deny how they share the figure of absence and absenting, of fading away, and its crepuscular silvery realm of transitivity. Against the hegemony of presence and its domain of entities and substantial meanings, Heidegger and Blanchot propose nonetheless a thought of the “there is,” it is, it gives, the “Es gibt” in Heidegger and the “il y a” in Blanchot. Both understand the temporality of the neuter

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