Abstract
This paper offers a contextually inflected discussion of the extensive investment Paul Valery makes in going beyond formal understandings of time. To this end it takes the processual work Cahiers as both a repository of insights, and a practical motor of conceptual creation for new time concepts through its very writing and production. In a speculative engagement with Valerian concepts such as phase, prolongation as well as reconfigured relations between central categorical pairings such as quality-quantity and succession-simultaneity, the paper situates Valery’s writings on time with regard to their ambiguously critical attitude to a given image of philosophy as a form of verbal exercise ungrounded in empirical observation of local systems.
Highlights
Valéry makes in going beyond formal understandings of time
The composition of the body involves internal heterogeneities, raising the possibility that endogenous disparity7 or disjunction may be the condition of any unitary temporal experience, a disparity in deep complicity with the central role played by rhythm in Valéry’s attitude to time: “The perception of duration is due to the difference between the state of a sensible part of the body and the state in which it ought to be in order to maintain its equilibrium with the sensibility of the whole” (Valéry 2001, vol 4, p. 377)
A second consequence of Valéry’s critique of a formal notion of time and succession with no reciprocal envelopment with the “realization” of systems and functions is his revaluation of simultaneity in the context of rhythm and what generally went by the name of “association” in the psychology with which he was contemporary
Summary
Valéry’s engagements with Kant do not amount to an exhausting critical account or even lengthily elaborated explanations for disagreement, it is still possible to isolate certain objections he raises by way of an entry to his particular account of time at large. The composition of the body involves internal heterogeneities, raising the possibility that endogenous disparity or disjunction may be the condition of any unitary temporal experience, a disparity in deep complicity with the central role played by rhythm in Valéry’s attitude to time: “The perception of duration is due to the difference between the state of a sensible part of the body and the state in which it ought to be (less or not at all sensible) in order to maintain its equilibrium with the sensibility of the whole” This is why Valéry’s self-bestowed label “formism” (Idée Fixe) implies a “verbal materialism” (“Calepin d’un poète”), not leaving much room for a hylomorphic organization of materials from a center such as consciousness to which everything will be referred.
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