Reviewed by: Time in Exile: In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lispector by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback Jason M. Wirth SCHUBACK, Marcia Sá Cavalcante. Time in Exile: In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lispector. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. x + 172 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $31.95 Although there has been a profusion of studies on exile, of the loss of home and the hunger for return, this beautiful and highly original work investigates the experience of exile from within. How does exile as such reorient our experience of time? Exile is typically construed as exile from a place, from one’s proper home. The exile is consequently nostalgic, longing for the nostos or journey back home. We seek to return to a lost past. But the internal constitution of exile suspends this scheme. Exile is no longer ecstatic, no longer the loss of what one was and consequently standing out, exposed to the future. Rather, the ecstatic constitution of time itself comes to a standstill and becomes static, “a movement without where-from and where-to, the movement of a meanwhile.” It is now the disclosure that there is no home to which to return, that time itself is not on the way from an origin to something new. Exile consequently “is not conceived from the ecstatic scheme of movement as change from-to” but, rather, the “suspended existence in the between and in the meanwhile.” It is no longer movement “as change from one place to another, from one time to another, from one state to another.” Schuback calls the time within exile “gerundive,” that is, neither a “tense” or “voice” but, rather, “a verbal tension,” which expresses “the on-going and whiling in the between.” It is an ongoing home in homelessness. “Existence in exile is, above all, existence exposed to the uncanny is-being, to the bare ‘is-existing.’” The “uncanny” translates unheimlich, which Heidegger so memorably analyzed in Being and Time. This term speaks to the loss of familiarity and the disclosure of strangeness as being no longer at home (Heim). This was not a temporary loss of one’s own but, rather, the disclosure that one has no home, that one is at home in such homelessness. “In exile homelessness without end.” This is the critical but difficult thought: “The uncanniness of home, of the homeland, of the homely came to light and in which home became homeless.” Schuback seeks to articulate this unending exile, that is, “to unfold the experience of gerundive time, of being while being, existing while existing, insofar as this gerundive experience of time corresponds most intimately and intensively to the experience of time within exilic existence.” She does so by engaging three interlocutors, one struggling with the limits of philosophy, another with the limits of writing as such, and the third with a new form of writing that directly confronts gerundive exile. Her first interlocutor is Heidegger, the master of the phenomenological analysis of ecstatic time. In Being and Time, Dasein is disclosed as ecstatic, but as Heidegger’s thought developed, it releases this anthropocentric starting point of an “experience of outsideness” and becomes increasingly aware “of nearness, of presencing, that grows from the insight into the whiling and abiding of being.” Heidegger realized that [End Page 154] “within exile time does not really pass, time remains in the meanwhile, moving without moving the whole past and the whole future.” Schuback’s second interlocutor, Maurice Blanchot, is the thinker par excellence of exile and withdrawal. Blanchot’s writing attempts to write without writing, expansively reiterating the X without X structure, as in to “live without living” or “to die without dying” or a “name without name.” Writing is a “continuous entrance into where one already is.” His fragmentary writing guards the absence of meaning neither because an original meaning has come and gone nor as a placeholder for a meaning still to come. Rather, “this meaning is the withdrawing itself,” an “immobile becoming.” As Michel Foucault presciently realized, Blanchot’s practice of writing finally severs time from the stranglehold of subjectivity, beyond either absence or presence but, rather, in the neutral time, the neither-nor...
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Oct 23, 2024
Laurynas Norus 
Open Access
