Deconstructing deep time.

Has the idea of the end of the world captured your imagination? Ted Toadvine’s book The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology contends that a preoccupation with the world’s precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future. Toadvine integrates insights from phenomenology, deconstruction, critical animal studies, and new materialism to argue for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously the entangled temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and human durations. Here Toadvine is joined in conversation with David Morris and Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault.

Ted Toadvine is Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and professor of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University.

David Morris is professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault is a graduate student of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University.

REFERENCES:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (body of works including Phenomenology of Perception)

Immanuel Kant

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Michel Serres / The Incandescent

Martin Heidegger

Jacques Derrida

Jean-Luc Nancy

Jerome Miller

Henri Bergson

Edmund Husserl

James Playfair

James Hutton (Hutton’s Unconformity)

John Sallis / Stone

Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson / The Blind Spot

Jane Bennett

Donald S. Maier / What’s So Good About Biodiversity?

Ferdinand de Saussure

Émile P. Torres / Human Extinction

Rachel Carson / Silent Spring

Kyle Powys Whyte

Alfred North Whitehead / The Concept of Nature  

The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“The Memory of the World achieves two important things: it steers our understanding of Merleau-Ponty toward a temporal interpretation of his thought and, at the same time, it uses that reading to make a critical intervention amongst theories of environmental apocalypse. Ted Toadvine’s concept of ‘biodiacritics’ should lead to a reorientation of the ‘eschatological imagination,’ producing effects in knowledge that are as insightful as they are impactful. This is a wonderful book that is a pleasure to think alongside.”

—John Ó Maoilearca

Episode Transcript

Ted Toadvine (00:07):
Every moment of time is unique and singular. It
can't be reduced to ahomogeneous interchangeable
unit.

David Morris (00:16):
The way we encounter time keeps on opening
us up to something prior to us.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: This idea of how encounters with (00:21):
undefined
matter can be enriched by whatwe come to know about matter.

Ted Toadvine (00:31):
Hi, I'm Ted Totevin, professor of philosophy
at Penn State University andNancy Tuana, director of the
Rock Ethics Institute. And I'mdelighted to have the chance to
speak with everyone today aboutmy new book, The Memory of the
Deep Time, Animality, andEschatology. And I'm here with
two colleagues who I believewill engage us in a super

(00:53):
interesting conversation, andI'll just like to ask them to
introduce themselves. David,maybe you'd like to go first.

David Morris (01:00):
Hi. I'm, David Morris. I'm a professor of
philosophy at ConcordiaUniversity in Montreal to the
north of TED and, I'm veryinterested in having this
discussion today because of theremarkable content of this book
which is going to be interestingto so many people. Benjamin.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: Yes. Hi. I'm Benjamin de (01:16):
undefined
Carillon. I'm a graduate studenthere at Penn State University
with working with TED. I'm superexcited about this book, which
I've been reading many times nowbecause of the themes that are
there are precisely what I'vebeen interested in in the past
few years now.
So deep time, animality, andalso in the future, those are

(01:39):
very dear topics for me. So,yes.

David Morris (01:42):
Ted, I was wondering if I could start off
because Burjima has just saidthat he's happy to have been
reading this book. I feel likeI've been pre reading it because
I've heard some of the papersdelivered in initial form at
various meetings that we've beenat together, but one thing that
struck me in reading them alltogether, first of all, it's
quite an interesting bookbecause it brings together
phenomenology with critics ofphenomenology, with engagement

(02:04):
with the sciences in a mannerthat I think at the heart of it
really does draw on thisphilosophy that you and I work
on, Merleau Ponty. But it's alsoa striking book because I find
so much of you in it. Theirdescriptions of you sitting on
the beach and touching thepebbles and holding the ammonite
and so on. And it's, you know, abook that I think would be
interesting of course tophilosophers, to
phenomenologists but to peoplewho are thinking about the role

(02:25):
of science within the worldtoday, the role of the
environment to people inenvironmental humanities, to
people in the sciences.
And I thought it might beinteresting for them and for me
just to hear a little bit abouthow you came to write this book
and the way it really comes fromyou journeying around in the
world. It feels like you'rethere in nature and you're
having insights. So that's astriking way of writing.

Ted Toadvine (02:48):
Yes. Well, thank you, David. I'm happy to say a
few things about this. You know,I opened the book with an
account of just, sitting on thethe beach in Lyme Regis on the
on the coast of England and,hunting for fossils in the
pebbles. The strange experiencefor me of realizing that the
gravel around me was filled notonly with fossils that I was
finding, but also with bits ofhuman detritus that themselves

(03:12):
spanned a wide temporal range.
And I became very, very curiousabout what it means for us, for
our perceptions to move back andforth across different scales of
time, and I've been particularlyinterested in what it's like for
us to experience something asancient in a way that explodes

(03:34):
our capacity to reallyconceptualize it or even imagine
it. And so the very problem ofdeep time has perplexed me as a
philosopher. And I haven't feltthat the philosophical
tradition, especially, theEuropean traditions of
philosophy, haven't given memuch to work with to understand
deep time or our experience ofit. You might say that for

(03:56):
European philosophers, theytended to follow in the
footsteps of Immanuel Kant inapproaching time always through
subjectivity. For example,someone might claim that the
world apart from subjectivity,apart from consciousness,
doesn't actually have anytemporal passage.
What exists is just what existsat each instantaneous moment. If

(04:20):
you think of the world that way,then it's only through the
actions of subjectivity, throughthe actions of consciousness,
that what has passed getsrepresented as memory and what's
to come gets anticipated asfuture. You know, of course, in
our everyday lives, we think ofthe world as having its own
time, whether we're thinking ofthat time or not, and that's

(04:44):
certainly the basis for ourscientific accounts of time. You
know, we can think about thetime of dinosaurs, the
geological history of the Earth,or the Big Bang that initiated
the expansion of the universe.One response is to say that
these scientific ways ofthinking about time, we might
call that naturalized time orthe time of the world apart from

(05:04):
subjectivity, that this issimply derivative to from time
as we experience it, from ourmemories and anticipations.
It might be a usefulrepresentation of time, but in
the end, it's just anabstraction. It's a construction
that has value for us, butdoesn't actually tell us
anything about the world on itsown terms. But there's something

(05:25):
really unsatisfying about thatway of thinking about time. It
raises some profound quandaries.What is the relationship between
time as we experience itunfolding over the course of a
day or a year or a lifetime andscientific accounts of time when
we're thinking about the bigbang or we're thinking about

(05:46):
geological spans in terms ofmillions or billions of years.
Do we even mean the same thingby time in these two different
accounts? And how does ourexperience of time develop into
or give way to the scientificway of describing time? Which
one is more fundamental? Is itthe scientific account of time,

(06:06):
or is it time as we sort of feelit passing? That might sound
like a really nice philosophicalproblem for philosophers to sit
around and discuss in theirspare time, but I also think
that there are increasingly realpractical and political stakes
in how we relate to what we nowcall deep time.
And this expression, deep time,at first was taken up, as a way

(06:29):
of naming geological scales oftime, the billions of years that
shaped the formation of theplanet Earth. But we can also
think of deep time as havingnested scales, cosmic time,
geological time, evolutionarytime, and so on, and that these
scales of time intersect incomplex ways. Furthermore, we've

(06:49):
become aware of the immensedurations of the past at these
different scales. And at thesame time, we're increasingly
concerned about the immensescales of time in the future.
And this has practicalimplications when we think about
things like how we will wedispose of nuclear waste that
could continue to be reallydangerous for hundreds of

(07:10):
thousands or perhaps millions ofyears, or the question of
whether humanity is in danger ofgoing extinct at some point in
the future.
In short, a lot of people areasking real questions today
about what we should be doing toplan or manage the future in
ways that will avoid risks likeenvironmental collapse or human

(07:31):
extinction. Questions like thishave brought home the challenge
of trying to connect oureveryday experience of time, you
know, counted in days or yearsor generations with deep scales
of time that are counted inmillions or billions or even
longer scales of time. Some waysthat this challenge has been
posed recently, I think, forexample, the work of Dipesh

(07:51):
Chakrabarty talking about theAnthropocene, he says, you know,
there there's a problem of twocalendars or two scales of time,
human history on the one handand planetary scales of time on
the other. And our problem ishow to bridge those scales of
time, how to connect them. Butin in my view, we're starting in
the wrong place.
We're talking about bridginghuman time to deep time. I think

(08:13):
we need to start from a betterappreciation of the complex ways
that our temporal experience isalready immersed in and
entangled with innumerableintersecting durations of time
at all scales. So, you know,consider the fact that we are
ourselves material beings thatconsist entirely of elements of

(08:34):
air, water, and bones. You know,we're 99% oxygen, carbon,
hydrogen or nitrogen. We areourselves material elemental
beings, but we're also livingorganic beings who have evolved
from and alongside other formsof life.
And of course, we are historicalbeings who inherit languages,

(08:55):
landscapes, cultures, lifeworlds whose origins stretch
back beyond our memory, but alsobeyond any recorded human
history. My aim in the book isto draw particularly on the
traditions of phenomenology, tounpack this richness of our
embodied temporal experience.And when we do, it becomes clear
that the divide between humantime and deep time is a false

(09:18):
divide, and that ourrelationship with time is far
messier, but also far richerthan we usually recognize. It's
not for me a matter of reducingtime to our subjective awareness
of time, but nor is it it abouttreating the time of the world
or the time of nature assomething outside of us apart
from us. Instead, the time ofthe world is something that we

(09:40):
participate in precisely becausewe are ourselves fully entangled
with it across innumerabledimensions.
There's a certain line that Ilike from the French philosopher
Michel Serres in his book TheIncandescent. He writes, in so
far as I am memory, Iparticipate in things. In so far
as they are things, they havememory. I think that's really a

(10:04):
profound meditation on what itmeans to think of ourselves as
memories, elemental memories,organic memories, as well as
cultural memories, and to thinkabout the world around us also
as itself, memories that areaccumulating and unfolding at
different durations, differentscales, in complex intersecting

(10:25):
ways. So the first part of mybook offers a phenomenological
foundation for thinking aboutdeep time.
In the second book, I take thisup specifically at the scale of
our organic lives as a site ofevolutionary memory. And I do
this in conversation with therole that animality has played
in continental philosophy and incritical animal studies. In this

(10:45):
part of the book, I respond, forexample, to Heidegger's claim
that animals are poor in worldby considering the world of the
bee and the ways that a bee'sworld both invite and refuse us
to in a kind of going along. AndI also defend Jacques Derrida's
rejection of biologisticcontinuism, that's his phrase,

(11:06):
that would eliminate alldifferences between humans and
non human animals. But I do thisnot to endorse any kind of
specialness for human beings,any human exceptionalism, but
instead to respect a creativedifferentiation that
characterizes the evolutionaryprocess.
And these themes come togetherfor me in the second part of the
book in my proposal to replacebiodiversity with what I call

(11:31):
bio diacritics. This bringstogether the understanding of
corporeal memory that I've beendescribing with the structure of
diacritical difference that wefind in language. I would say on
the one hand that it's prettyclear that we are the
accumulated memory, at least atthe genetic level, of all of our
ancestors stretching all the wayback to the last universal

(11:53):
common ancestor of life, somethree and a half billion years
ago. But that that linear way ofthinking about this memory or
this unfolding of timeimmediately needs to be
complicated because at eachmoment of that diachronic
unfolding, we could take asynchronic view of the
relationships between livingthings at that moment. And so

(12:14):
every one of our ancestors,every one of my ancestors going
all the way back through thehistory of life existed in
relationship to a myriad ofother living and nonliving
things that made its existenceand its survival and its
reproduction possible.
Those things that it eats, thosethings that provide its habitat,

(12:35):
the things that it competeswith, the things that it has
symbiotic relationships with,its pathogens, its microbial
associations, and so on, all ofthese relations, and even to
landforms, water cycles, theatmosphere. If that's true, then
we could say that theevolutionary history of life is
like an evolving diacriticalsystem that's composed entirely

(12:55):
of differences. Just as Idescribed our opening onto the
present as happening against thebackground of the whole history
of the universe, so our organiclives at this moment, our living
bodies right now, are memoriesof evolutionary history, and
they exist only as memories of,in a way, the entire history of

(13:15):
life and the system of relationsthat have formed within it at
every moment. I think this hasreally important implications
for how we understand our ownidentities and how we understand
our relations with otheranimals. It's a kind of, you
know, rather than thinking ofour identity in positive terms,
we would need to think of it asan exposure to all of the

(13:39):
differences of forms of life,not only now, but through the
course of the past and the waysthat we are in the memory of
those differences.
So often in the history ofWestern philosophy in Aristotle
or Descartes or even Husserl,philosophers have spoken about a
kind of stratum or a layer ofhuman beings, a kind of animal

(13:59):
nature or an animal layer onwhich human consciousness or
subjectivity or existence wouldsort of be added, something
added. But, I think that whatboth connects us with and
separates us from ordistinguishes from other forms
of life is the node we occupywithin organic memory. It's
something that we all share, butalso something that multiplies

(14:21):
the differences between us, bothas living forms and as
individuals. So in the last partof the book, subtitled
Eschatology, I actually shift myfocus a little bit from thinking
about the past in memory tothinking about the future, and
in particular, the absolutelimit of the future, the end of
the world. I investigate what itmeans for the world to end and

(14:44):
what's left at this end, andalso why we seem to take so much
pleasure nowadays in imaginingthe world ending, repeatedly
over and over again as ourmovies and books and video games
and so on repeatedly remind us.
This might seem an odd way todescribe our situation that
we're taking pleasure inimagining the end of the world,

(15:05):
but I think the fascination withapocalypse in popular culture,
it attests to a kind ofcatharsis. It's as if it
releases a repressed desire forthe world to to collapse. The
other side of that desire forthe world to collapse is our
commitment to absolute masteryover the future. I think this
idea of mastery over the futureis even part of what's at work

(15:28):
in our everyday ways of talkingabout sustainability, because
we're talking about sustainingthe present and thereby
preventing the future fromarriving. You know, we might
also think about the growingconversations around human
extinction.
People worried about humanextinction have started to
develop catalogs of all thepossible and speculative ways

(15:50):
that human extinction might comeabout, either through things
that we do or, you know, throughnatural causes. And the idea is
that we should devote ourenergies now, today, to managing
and minimizing these risks thatare perceived as either in the
near future or the distantfuture. I'm especially
interested in the ways that thisapocalyptic thinking has

(16:12):
structured environmentalism. Ithink it's done so by adopting a
particular way of framing time.I draw on Jean Luc Nancy's
notion of catastrophicequivalence to try to capture
some of the key elements ofthis.
Karl Marx had the idea thatmoney serves as a kind of
principle of equivalence becausewe can attach a price to

(16:32):
anything, costs and benefits,and then translate all these
into monetary value, into kindof equivalent units. When we do
that, we homogenize them. Westrip anything away that's
singular about this object thatwe're gonna attach a price tag
to. So there there isn't reallyanything priceless if everything
can be converted into a certaindollar amount. Jean Luc Nancy

(16:56):
takes this idea from Marx, andhe he points out that this
process of general equivalencenow extends well beyond
economics, and all of ourtechnologies now develop in the
direction of ever increasingintegration and globalization.
You know, when I turn on my cellphone, even before I turn it on,
how many global networks ofdifferent sorts is it connected

(17:18):
to and communicating with? Andwhat's required for that
communication to happen, forsound and video to, you know, be
uploaded to the cloud, for thecloud to be searchable by law
enforcement databases, for thephone to track my progress in my
car by GPS? This is all aboutfurther integration of units,

(17:40):
and that requires that all ofthis information be translated
into something homogeneous andequivalent, bits and bytes. And
whatever can't be so translatedis sort of left aside as
irrelevant. It's thisinterconnectedness of
equivalence that makes oursystems really vulnerable.
So, you know, there's been a lotof scramble lately to think

(18:00):
about how we're gonna protectcritical infrastructure from
hackers. And we see, you know,every time someone kind of takes
over some kind of network,financial or medical or what
have you, the cascading effectsof that through other systems.
But part of what Nancy wants usto think about is how this skews
our relationship to time. We'vebegun to think of time as

(18:22):
composed of just littlehomogeneous exchangeable units.
A minute today or a minute thereis always equivalent to a minute
anywhere else.
And we've begun to kind of planour lives and plan our calendars
around this kind of equivalenceor homogenization of temporal
bits. What's obscured by thatapproach to time is that it

(18:45):
covers over the essentiallyhistorical character of time.
This has really been broughthome to me by the work of Jerome
Miller and his count of robustevolution. You know, it follows
from what I've said earlierabout time that every moment of
our lives is unique and singularbecause of its relations with
time as a whole. No moment ofour lives is ever reducible to a

(19:08):
homogeneous and exchangeableunit.
And furthermore, the futureitself is never just another
present because that wouldeliminate time's historical
passage. The future is futureonly by constantly breaking over
open the present to what is notpresent, to what is not
assimilable to this present.This is what Miller calls the

(19:30):
traumatological character ofhistorical time, the fact that
the future always ruptures thepresent precisely by being
unassimilable to that present.And if that's the case, then all
of our efforts to calculativelymanage the future amount to a
repression of the future assuch. They're literally devoted
to ending the very unfolding oftime, and they therefore risk

(19:54):
bringing about the very end ofthe world that they purport to
be aiming to preserve.
I've only scratched the surface,but I feel like perhaps I've
gone on a bit long about,summarizing these key themes,
And I I wanna definitely inviteDavid and Ben now into the
conversation to talk about someof the things that they found
interesting in the book andmaybe to, you know, ask me to

(20:16):
elaborate on on what I've justsaid.

David Morris (20:19):
Did I feel like I I wanna hear something from Ben
because, I I wanna ask aquestion first though. Because
Ben has these profound, thiswork that he's doing on, for
example, cave art and the waythat that gives us an ingress
into the depths of time thatyou're talking about. And you
did take a while, but look, youcan't talk about time quickly. I
mean, it seems to me you'rehelping us understand, and the

(20:40):
audience for this podcastunderstand, some of the central
themes. And I think some of themare, first of all, the body as
our access point into time, Thescales of time as massive
recursively nested going backinto things well before us that
are nonetheless participant inus and also I think the profound
theme of memory.

(21:00):
But when you were talking, Ijust wanted to offer up
something because we're talkingtogether on 04/12/2024, but on
04/08/2024, at least inMontreal, there was a total
eclipse, I prepared to thinkabout it phenomenologically but
it was more striking andunexpected than I could ever
have imagined. And it strikesme, you're trying to glimpse

(21:21):
this connection betweenourselves and prior scales of
time through things like thefossil, through things like
discussion of evolution. But onething that is striking about a
total eclipse is people aren'tprepared for what's going to
happen and it seems almostuniversally the case that even
people who think like what thehell, the sun is getting blocked
by the moon, that's justastronomy, in fact that's not

(21:43):
what's happening, there's aprofound transformation of our
relationship to the earth and arevelation of the cycles of
light and our connection tothose. And everybody who sees it
is just upended and transformed.And I think partly what they're
experiencing is something liketheir connection to time, to
scales of time beyond themselvesand I came up with this idea of

(22:06):
describing part of it in termsof what I'm calling time flight,
right?
So this moment, all of a suddenin the middle of what's supposed
to be the day, it turns to nightand the animals around you, the
birds, they're starting to dotheir night things and we're all
feeling it's later in the dayand then all of a sudden it's
dawn with this very, very weirdlight that's so strange and so

(22:28):
different than usual, Likeyou're on another planet all of
a sudden, but we've allexperienced or many of us have
experienced jet lag. Timeflight, it's like you're in a
plane going at 2,400 kilometersper hour west for a minute and
then swinging around and comingback. Your whole connection to
time is upended. You realize oursense of time of when it is in

(22:49):
the day, it's part of this cycleand cycle and cycle of the sun
and the moon and everything thatwent into that And it says
revelatory. I think people don'thave to be phenomenologists.
They just get it. People inMontreal cheered for this like
they cheer when the Canadianswent a hockey game, like the
whole city is just like, wow,Like there's a revelation of

(23:10):
that that is so profound that Ithink is great evidence for what
you're trying to tell us. It'snot the evidence that you are
mustering. It's a different sortof evidence that's slower. This
is like, boom, you're thrustinto the middle of Toadvine's
account of deep time and memoryand the way that our scales
coupled to other scales.

(23:31):
I don't know if you got to seeit, but, boy, if you didn't, you
better see the next one.

Ted Toadvine (23:36):
Thank you so much for that, David. I know Ben is
gonna wanna, say some thingsabout this too, because I, in
fact, had the pleasure ofviewing the Eclipse here along
with Ben and some other friends.The thing is that we had mostly
cloud cover, and we didn't thinkwe were gonna see anything, in
fact, but we went out anyway,and we did get a few minutes

(23:56):
just before maybe it was, like,five minutes before full
coverage. We we had severalminutes there that were really
breathtaking and profound.Although your description of
having had the full experiencereally, really makes me sad not
to have had the chance to dothat, and I I won't look forward
to the next time.
And I just wanna say that Ithink you're absolutely right
that that kind of experience canbring to the fore for us a sort

(24:20):
of step back from, our usualways of relating to time and
throw into relief for us thebroader scales and dynamics that
shape our present always, but byremaining in the background more
or less invisible to us behindthe memory screen, so to speak.
And now I agree also that theexperience of jet lag does this

(24:41):
in an amazing way. Michel Sainteactually makes the comment
somewhere that the folks who areoften taken as the great
thinkers of time, you know,Husserl and Heidegger and
Bergson never took atransatlantic flight. And so
they never experienced jet lag.They never had the sense of the
ways that their bodily timecould be thrown out of whack

(25:05):
with our conscious awareness oftime, our representations of
time, and what that might revealto us about the ways that we are
corporally embedded in and thememories of these, complex and
interlocked, intertangleddimensions and durations of
time.
I wanna give Ben a chance alsoto to talk about I know that he

(25:25):
had a profound experience of theeclipse and might wanna reflect
on that a bit.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: Yeah. You probably saw me with (25:32):
undefined
my attempt at, managing theglasses that were a little
complicated to manage. Anyways,no. I I absolutely agree that
there's something absolutelyfascinating here. Ted, your
account of like you were saying,David, at the beginning,
everything that sort of seems toemerge from this book,
especially like the thing thatled you, Ted, on the path of

(25:55):
those reflections, all seem toemerge from, sensible
encounters, encounters that comefrom sensorial events that can
be tracked down to an instantwhere something happened.
And this thing that happenedcreated something created, but
we could call maybe anunraveling of temporality, I
guess. I'm super interested inthe ways in which those events

(26:18):
can sort of disrupt thestructure of time itself and the
structure of our experience oftime and sort of lead us on a
sense of urgency of going in adirection or an investigation, a
sort of problem. Time becomes aproblem suddenly for us through
those encounters. I've been veryinterested in the way you frame
those encounters, especiallywith fossils. I won't come back
to that in a minute, but just toget get back to the subject of

(26:40):
the eclipse, because there'ssomething absolutely fascinating
in the eclipse.
David, you were mentioning allthe crowds sort of cheering in
Montreal. Unfortunately, here inPennsylvania, we only had the
chance to see a partial eclipse.It was pretty far along. It was,
about 95%, but we didn't get theexperience of total night and
then dawn and all of thesethings. We got something that

(27:01):
was pretty miraculous in myopinion, but but something that
really struck me about this isthe fact that it's an unraveling
of time that is also an absolutelike, in terms of collectivity,
in terms of social event, it's acollective synchronization.
We're all sort of for oncehinging or grasping time in a
way that we never do. It's sortof a suspension of time that

(27:24):
invites every human being justby the mere fact of being
earthlings and depending on thesun for existing basically, and
sort of being suspended in timeinto this absolute
synchronization of all of ourbodily rhythms, because we're
never aware of how the sunaffects our existence. We're
never really thematized. Itnever becomes a theme for us or,

(27:47):
an issue for us. But whensomething like an eclipse comes
in, there's this sense ofunraveling that, of course, just
disrupts our bodily rhythms.
As you were saying, it's nightand then it's dawn. All of this
happens in a way thatsynchronizes everyone. It's a
disruption of temporality thatis basically asynchronous
because it disrupts the sense,the very sense of what it means
to be synchronized. But at thesame time, it's perfectly

(28:07):
synchronized. Everybodyexperiences it at the same time.
Coming back to sensorialencounters, I wanted to ask
perhaps Ted, you just startedtalking about your adventure in
Lyme Regis and how you've beencollecting and hunting for
fossils. And I know that thosephenomenological encounters with
those material traces that bearthe traces of something like an

(28:30):
incommensurable past, is veryimportant for you in, like,
leading you in this path ofreflection. And fossils seem to
appear to be primary guide inthe book, at least, for this
sort of phenomenologicalinvestigation, on the geological
path. So you sort of describethese encounters with fossils as
sort of events that do somethingto the body that unravels

(28:50):
something like I was saying withthe eclipse. Yeah.
I just wonder if you could tellus more about this privileged, I
guess, status of the fossils.Because it seems that the event
of encounter that you'redescribing cannot only be
attributed to the old age of thefossil. Because if it was the
case, like anything, any pebbleon the sidewalk, any drop of
water in the windshield, wateris very old, it comes from

(29:11):
comets and stuff, or any gazeinto the night sky, seeing,
like, stars and stuff, thatcould take us on the path of a
disruption or unraveling of ourhabitual sense of temporality.
Of course, we see with theeclipse why it's extremely
disrupting because of the eventthat it's it is. But we never
look at the sun or the moonsaying, like, wow, this is very,
very, very old, and this is anencounter.

(29:33):
We don't describe them asencounters because it's sort of
in the background. But thefossil seems in the way in which
you describe its materiality andthe way in which you, like,
manipulate with your hands, thefossil, it seems that there's
something more, happening.

Ted Toadvine (29:47):
Yes. Excellent. Thank you, Ben. So I do think
that there's somethingparticular about fossils,
something peculiar about theirtemporality that makes them
really fascinating, and it isn'tsimply a function of their age.
But I would also say thatfossils don't need to be
involved, and the experience ofthe eclipse is a great example.

(30:07):
But I'd also what always comesto mind for me is maybe the the
most famous invocation of a kindof temporal sublime experience
is actually one described byJames Playfair. He describes a
trip he went on in 1788 withJames Hutton. James Hutton is
often described as the father ofmodern geology, and they went on
a trip to view a particulargeological formation that

(30:31):
nowadays is known as Hutton'sUnconformity, which is found at
Siccar Point in Scotland. Andwhat makes this formation so
fascinating, what made itperfect for Hutton, is that you
have these horizontal layers ofstrata that were once the bottom
of the ocean, and then on top ofthose, standing more or less
vertically, are other layers ofstrata, and then on top of those

(30:53):
vertical layers, more horizontallayers laid down. And Hutton
said, when you consider how longit must have taken for every
layer to form, and then youconsider how whole sort of
sandwiches of of layers getturned on their ends and then
more layers on top.
Hutton was a uniformitarian, sohe argued that all of these

(31:13):
layers had to be formedbasically according to the same
processes that we know today.And when we consider how long it
would take for those layers toform and then to be, you know,
shifted around in that way, itwas just an unimaginable span of
time from the point of view ofearly geologists. And what, when
Playfair wrote about this, afterHutton's death, he said, and

(31:34):
this is the famous line, themind seemed to grow giddy by
looking so far into the abyss oftime. And so just standing
there, having Hutton explainwhat was going on is enough to
give you this feeling ofvertigo, this feeling of
freefall. That experience isoften something that comes up
when people are confronted withdeep time.

(31:56):
But as you say, Ben, I oftencome back to the encounter with
the fossil and we use the wordfossil nowadays in a very
precise way to mean the trace ofa former life, which hasn't
always been the case. Literally,it's just something dug up. And
so for a long time, fossilsincluded just minerals and so
on. But if we think about thetrace, something that's

(32:16):
obviously the trace of a pastlife, then it intensifies in a
peculiar way this encounter withdeep time because I believe of
the very intersection ofdurations that gets captured,
that gets entangled in thatsensible material thing. Any
fossil is the trace of a uniqueevent, that life, that singular

(32:39):
life.
And to the extent that weencounter it as a trace of that
life, there's something about itthat invites us to enter into a
kind of, to enter into itsworld, to take up, at least in
our imaginations, its manner ofbeing and its relation to its
surroundings. We might even saythat we are invited into its

(33:01):
time, into its duration, or thetime of its life as an event.
But at the same time, the fossilis also stone, petrified. It's
embedded in its rock matrix, andit intersects with the time or
the duration of stone, which issomething that we kind of
encounter as immemorial asalways having had been there in

(33:22):
the way that it is. I found, areally interesting passage in
John Sallis that talks about thetime of stone.
In his words, it's as if stonecomes from a past that has never
been present, a pastunassimilable to the order of
time in which things come and goin the human world. So what I
think fascinates us about thefossil is the way that it

(33:43):
embodies or incarnates thestrange intersection of time,
the time of a singular life andthe anonymous immemorial past of
stone. And that means that itboth invites us and refuses us,
kind of like the way Heideggerdescribes the refusal or the
withdrawal of the thingliness ofthings. And I wanna be clear
that I don't at all mean tosuggest that the perception of

(34:06):
fossils is somehow innate ornecessary as if it doesn't
depend on all the ways that ourperceptions are informed by our
scientific knowledge, ourculture, our histories, and so
on. So I'm not positing somekind of natural perception that
would be universal or purifiedof what we know theoretically.
I think our sense perception isalways historically and

(34:27):
culturally contextual. Thatsaid, I think it's really
fascinating that our ancienthuman cousins, including the
Neanderthals, were themselvesfascinated with fossils, and
that fossils clearly played akind of symbolic and spiritual
value for them. They fashionedthem into jewelry. They buried
them with their dead and so on.And the idea that fossils were
traces of ancient life is also,of course, well known to the the

(34:51):
ancient Greeks.
It's interesting to consider towhat extent our having to kind
of rediscover or relearn thatfact later might just be a
contingent aspect of the historyof Western culture and the
influence of Christianity.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: Yeah. That's absolutely (35:03):
undefined
fascinating. One thing thatcomes from this, I guess, the
way in which you describe this,value of the fossil, it's sort
of specificity in terms of sortof its crystallization of the
meeting of two absolutelyheterogeneous and absolutely
incommensurable rhythms ofexistence, A life that is so
fleeting. The life of ashellfish takes a couple years,

(35:27):
I guess. Whereas the duration ofthe stone can span for so long.
This sort of crystallization ofthis meeting of two durations is
absolutely fascinating. Andalso, what you were bringing up
this idea that there needs to bea sort of culturally informed or
historically informed gaze orsensibility to what we're

(35:50):
manipulating when we look atfossils, when we think about
fossils is also superinteresting, because of course,
the stratification of thesediments that have these
beautiful shapes and stuff couldbe just perceived as something
that was brought up veryquickly. But you sort of need to
have this educated notion of howlong it takes for Streta to

(36:14):
accumulate to sort of appreciateand encounter it in this sense.
I've been very fascinated in thepast few years about this idea
of how encounters with mattercan be enriched by what we come
to know about matter and how ithelp us experiencing even more
disruptive encounters the morewe know about, materiality in a

(36:34):
sense, and the more we getinterested in. The more we
become, as Deleuze would say, webecome sensible to the signs of
the matter or the rocks, orthat's sort of how Deleuze
describes the wind in which wecome to learn about things by
becoming sensible to the signsof what we want to experience.

David Morris (36:50):
I think I wanted to, maybe intervene there and
connect up with something I'vebeen thinking. Listening to Ted
talk about the fossil inresponse to your question, you
could very well be right but Ithink Ted's book and point is
gonna fall apart if it were onlyby way of education and language
and knowledge and informationthat this came into view. Now I
was thinking as phenomenologistswe often want to vary across

(37:12):
different cases to find what'sstructurally similar through all
of them. And now we have on thetable Ted's well developed
example, the fossil. I broughtthe solar eclipse example to the
table.
We have the geological strata.And I think Ted has given us a
kind of underpinning ofsomething that's happening in
all these cases. You brought outthe singularity point, Ben, in

(37:34):
discussion. So we'reencountering this here singular
thing, but we're encounteringit. I think Ted was emphasizing
that we need an openness to thehistory of time.
There's a history of time thatprecedes us and I'm very
intrigued by the chapter onchronopoesis. I think that's the
first chapter after theintroduction, maybe on page 35
or so, especially. Ted isalerting us to the simple point

(37:55):
that the way we encounter timekeeps on opening us up to
something prior to us. And Ithink that opening up to
something prior to us has to bethrough something singular
that's sort of thrown up in thedetritus of time like a fossil
or the formation or now thecontingencies of the cycle of
the moon and the sun. Like,we're the only planet in the
solar system that has totaleclipses.

(38:17):
They're really weird and rare,and it's just like this bizarre
contingency of the size of themoon versus the sun and their
distance. And we even get to seethese. And my dad actually was
telling me when there's a lunareclipse on the earth, the
astronauts on the moon see asolar eclipse of the sun, but
it's totally boring because theearth is so much bigger than the

(38:38):
disc of the sun when you'relooking back at it. So it's like
none of the exciting stuff thathappens here with total eclipses
happens there. Like, that's justa fossil of the sizes of things
that happen to cough up in oursolar system.
So we're the one planet thathappens to have, what I've been
thinking of as being revealed inthis is our eyes are earth born.
We're earth born. Like, there'ssomething about our earth

(39:00):
bornness that then it's not justus, it's the other creatures.
That was part of theextraordinary thing. Like,
everybody on this planet who wasin Montreal living and seeing
and queued to everybody washaving this weird ass thing
happen.
I wanted to bring that to bearbecause first of all, Merleau
Ponty, we know in the primacy ofperception, little synopsis,
like this thing that I'm tryingto do in phenomenology, it's not

(39:22):
trying to get rid of a study ofessences, it's just trying to
bring it down to earth. TED isbringing time down to earth by
making us notice how it's notjust in here. And I don't think
you could notice that the fossilis something interesting to
study in the first place unlessTed is right. Like there's
something fundamental about, youknow, it's like sucked in the
wall, that point where what'shis name? He touches the bench

(39:43):
and he feels his death in thetouch of the bench upon him.
And I think Ted is trying tosay, all of a sudden I'm feeling
deep time. And that's whatHutton is seeing in the
formation. And that's what Ithink everybody in Montreal,
including the birds, wasexperiencing when the solar
eclipse happened. What I'mfinding interesting, Ted, is
like there's this book, TheBlind Spot by Evan Thompson and
a bunch of people saying, Hey,science is forgetting the role

(40:05):
of subjectivity but you're doingthis other thing saying, Hey,
you all can't forget about howour experience of subjective
time hooks us into something somuch bigger and before us. So
Merleau Ponty in the Institutionlectures, at a certain point, he
cites Colette, the novelist,saying birth isn't somebody
coming through the door that'sbeen opened up and you're saying

(40:26):
time, like there's somethingpretty profound there that's
really exciting in your book.
I I want you to say more aboutthese passages about repression,
Merleau Ponty on repression.Like you make this beautiful
argument that to put it simplyfor the broader audience that
hasn't read your book, it's likeour being part of something
bigger and my subjective timebeing part of something bigger
is something that I repress. Puta hostronoprene and you can't

(40:48):
repress it anymore. Put me in asolar eclipse, you can't repress
it anymore. Give me a fossil,how can we repress it?

Ted Toadvine (40:55):
You're raising, well, of course, you're making
really super interesting andfascinating points, and I
appreciate that my book hashelped to inspire some of them,
but I think you're also bringinga lot of really interesting ways
to develop these ideas further.And the language of repression,
what's really interesting to me,where that sort of comes from in
my discussion in the earlychapters is Merle Ponte's own

(41:17):
description of the fact that wedon't live one time, that
there's a kind of time of mynarrative self. There's a story
I tell myself about my life andwhat I'm doing right now. And,
you know, someone could couldsay, tell me about your day. And
I would tell them, you know,well, I got up and I did this
and I did this.
And we've got this nice sort ofnarrative. Or tell me about your
plans for the future. What whatare you gonna do in your group

(41:38):
when you graduate? We ask ourstudents. And so you've got this
sort of narrative conception ofthe time of your life.
But at the same time, your bodyis itself involved in, entangled
in all kinds of periodicrelations and durations. You're
breathing all the time. Yourheart is beating, and it doesn't
just beat like a clock. It'sresponding to the temperature in

(41:59):
the room and to, you know,things that are exciting you.
And it is itself, you know,wired into you know, entangled
with all the events going onaround it, but it it's keeping a
time of its own that's entirelydistinct from the distinct from
the narrative time I tell myselfabout.
And, you know, meanwhile, mybones, which are themselves
minerals, you know, I love thefact that a whole series of very

(42:20):
different scholars from JohnLlewellyn to Jean Luc Nancy to
Jane Bennett have emphasized ourown minerality. The fact that
our bones are, you know, areminerals that are in some sense
participate in the time ofstone. They are themselves kind
of degrading in their ownfashion, you know, as we age.
Our minds, our conscious senseof time is sort of, like a

(42:42):
figure against the background ofthe ways that we are living a
whole nest or a whole tangle ofdifferent durations. And we
often do repress those rhythmsand durations.
So for example, if I'm startingto get hungry in this
conversation because my body hasa certain rhythm of eating and
digestion, or if I suddenly hadto excuse myself for the

(43:06):
restroom, then it would bebecause my body doesn't respect
my narrative time. Andnevertheless, everything about
time as I think I experienced itas a nice little unfolding story
over the course of my daycouldn't exist at all without it
taking for granted all of thattime happening in the
background. You know, then wecould extend this to broader

(43:26):
levels, taking for granted myevolutionary history and
everything that that brings tomake up who I am, taking for
granted the cycles of of day andnight and the seasons and so on.
And so I think, you know,there's a kind of way that in
order to think of myself as mysubjectivity, I have to kind of

(43:46):
repress what I, at anotherlevel, always know is true in
terms of my own embodiment andmy insertion into the elemental
and the organic and all of thesedifferent scales and happenings.
Merleau Ponty at one point callsthe body an inborn complex in
the Freudian sense, and I thinkthis is exactly what he means.

(44:06):
I have really enjoyed unpackinga bit of the deep time aspects
of the book, but we haven'treally talked very much about
animality or about eschatology.Maybe there's some some ways
that we can move from where weare to that.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: Yeah. I think, David, you had (44:19):
undefined
some nice, reflections about biodiacritics. I just wanted to add
to what you were just sayingthen about when you you were
talking about how the the rhythmof the heartbeat, let's say,
doesn't respond to a sort ofmaster clock, but is sort of
entangled. And I I just thoughtthat it was extremely
interesting because you used theidea the the expression that

(44:40):
your body doesn't respect yournarrative time if you were to,
like, respond to a bodily needright now. It's funny to think
of how, like, it sort of revealsthe sort of encroachment between
meaning and materiality andsense and materiality in a way
that is very deeply meaningful.
It just, like, reaffirms thisidea of Merleau Ponty saying
that my body is the pivot of theworld or pivots du mon, you

(45:01):
know. It's like, sayingbasically that if my body can
disrespect my narrative time andmy tasks or the goals that I set
for myself today as a goal orsomething, I can also disrespect
my buddy to my my narrativetime, I can have like terrible
breakup that makes my heart gosuper fast and make me terribly
depressed. And my buddy canreact to my narration of myself

(45:24):
in this sort of pivot role,which I think it sets up really
nicely this sort of nesting ofmeaning within the body. So very
interesting. But, yeah, I Ithink it's it's also a good way
to segue into some evolutionarybio diacritic sort of
consideration here, which is,the second part of the book,
which is absolutely fascinating.

David Morris (45:43):
It just struck me. I I was thinking about this and
listening along and learning. Iguess my memory of this book is
distorted because the chapter ona relation to animals where I
think you make your essentialcontribution to Merleau Ponty
studies, it hinges on I thinkyour exposition, your brilliant
exposition of this notion ofMerleau Ponty's of our having a
strange kinship with animalsthat we're kin to them and

(46:05):
different from them. We need tounderstand our difference from
them through our not beingdifferent than other animals. We
are animals.
Part of your biocritical insightand concept hinges on that but
I'm sorry to be obsessed by thisthing that happened to me on
Monday. I have a strange kinshipwith the other animals with
time. It's like you there, youbirds, you and me, we're feeling

(46:26):
the same thing and that'srevealing that we have a strange
kinship with the planet. Timeisn't up to us. It's at the
pleasure of being on thisplanet, being lit in a
particular way.
Our strange kinship with deeptime, let's put it, is not
unrelated to our strange kinshipwith animals because why are the
birds doing it? We've inheritedsimilar chronobiological

(46:48):
apparatuses that are sensitiveand anticipating of being on
this here planet together. Andwe think we're carrying around
time within us, but in fact,that's a memory as you put it of
these deeper evolutionaryprocesses where if we really
wanna understand them, thelanguage of our living bodies
being in time is the biodiacritical evolutionary

(47:09):
language. It's a language writin genera and inheritances over
massive cycles and again, werepress it. Why?
Because the genius of evolutionis to let us walk around having
a sense of time and knowing whenwe got to eat and stuff like
that and we're carrying itaround in the pulse of our
bodies and then it turns out,no, you need some cues. One of
my friends says, that was thegreatest lighting cue in the

(47:32):
world ever of the eclipse.Right? The cues were cued into
all these layers.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault (47:38):
I was wondering something similar
about how you describe in youraccount of the bio de critical
and the memory that we inheritfrom our animality and how this
sort of idea of an animalstratum is sort of founded on a
sort of past that was neverpresent for us, just like the
past of, the immemorialgeological deep time. It was
never present to us either. So Iwas wondering about precisely

(48:01):
that what you what David wasjust describing, this sort of,
the way in which those two typesof past that were never present
present themselves or or sortof, like, play a role in our
present. Can we think of them asplaying a similar role in the
unfolding of our humanity? Andhere, I just want to quote one
of the most insightful ways offraming this, relation to the

(48:24):
deep past that you laid out inthe chapter in this in chapter
two in the elemental past whenyou say that there's this
prehistory that haunts the worldfrom within.
And this haunting of thisfeeling that there is a quasi
presence of the past that makesthe present possible, all the
while not being its first causeor something like that, or being

(48:44):
sort of chain of events that ledto where I am, but something
deeper, something that there isa sort of remnant of the past
that is active, and that istruly there as present, but as
past also in my present, and inthe same way that you were
describing how my metabolism andthe way in which I breathe the
way in which all of these sortof animal memories unfold in my

(49:06):
daily existence without meknowing about it, and also how
my bones participate to thegeological time of the Earth, as
as you were just saying. Isthere sort of a link between
these past of animality that wasnever present to us and the
geological deep time that you'redescribing?

Ted Toadvine (49:24):
Yes. Thank you. Thank you both. Those are really
rich and interesting questions.I have been thinking for some
time about the ways thatphenomenologists talk about our
our animality, especiallyMerleau Ponty, but also thinking
a lot about Derrida's concernsover emphasizing a kind of
continuity, a kind ofbiologically based continuity

(49:46):
with animals.
My students are all very eager,very quick to say, oh, humans
are animals too, but that theycan't really, elucidate quite
what that means apart from justsaying, well, you know, it's a
evolutionary process. And itactually it took me a while to
appreciate what was missing inthat account. What brought me to

(50:06):
really see a connection betweendeep time in the geological
sense and evolutionary time wasthe dissatisfaction that I had
with our existing concepts ofbiodiversity. I was working with
some colleagues at theUniversity of Oregon, Nikolai
Merar and Brenda Bohannon, onsome of the problems with the
perceived view of biodiversity,and a great example of this is a

(50:28):
book by Donald Meyer, What's SoGood About Biodiversity? Meyer's
book is detailed and verycompelling as a kind of
exhaustive critique of all thereceived views about the
normative value or theecological value of
biodiversity.
You know, often when people saybiodiversity today, they're just
talking about species diversity.But, you know, the way
biologists, the way ecologiststhink of the notion today is

(50:50):
really the diversity of life,its variability, and its variety
at all scales, from genes toecosystems. The challenge, of
course, is that to talk aboutdiversity here, you have to
identify units and then you haveto, you know, agree on certain
ways of measuring theirvariability and their their
variety. Meyer says, you know,we take whatever natural holes

(51:12):
and then we cut them up intotheir bio parts, as he calls it.
This is his phrase.
He says they've been sliced anddiced in strategic and tractable
ways, which is strong language.But, you know, it really
captures something about the waythat we approach the notion of
biodiversity. And it alwaysassumes that the units we're
beginning with are kind of givenpresent things and that their

(51:34):
relations of difference can thenbe measured in static ways at a
particular moment in time. As Ibecame unhappy with that, I was
asking myself, well, what is itabout the differences of life
that matters to us? It's gottabe something more than this way
approaching it.
What are those differences? Istarted to think about the ways

(51:56):
we understand differences in alanguage. So that's where the
diacritical and bio diacriticscomes from, is that I started to
think about Saussure's idea ofdiacritical difference, which is
that language is nothing butdifferences. It's differences
all the way down. And so you canthink about this in terms of how
we learn a language at the levelof sound.

(52:18):
You have to learn todifferentiate between the
significant phonemes of thatlanguage between mat and cat and
hat or between sing and sang andsung, when you can hear those
differences, which are unique tothe particular spoken language,
then you kinda know what tolisten for. You know where the
differences are to be found. Thesame thing is true then for at
the level of the meaning of alanguage, which is that to learn

(52:41):
the language, you have todiscriminate between meanings
that might otherwise be close.What's the difference between
this synonym and that? When yousort of can take on the those
differences, that's the sort ofmeasure of the expressive power
for you of the language.
And of course, these differenceschange over time. Languages
evolve. And so the differencesin how a language is spoken or

(53:04):
the words that it has in itsrepertoire undergo
transformations. We candifferentiate then between
thinking about all thedifferences that make up the
English language right now. Youknow, those meanings are what we
try to capture in a dictionary.
Or we might think about thedifferences over time
diachronically, for example, ifwe're thinking about how Latin

(53:26):
evolves into French, forexample. From whichever
perspective, Saussure's biginsight was that language
doesn't consist of positivethings. It's not preexisting
units. Those units have theirmeaning. Those nodes of
difference have their meaningonly in terms of how they fit
together within the whole.
And if a word drops out ofcirculation or we invent a new

(53:48):
word, it sort of jostles aroundthe other words so that the
meaning of where each one existswithin the whole undergoes a
transformation. Language sort ofvaries as a whole. And so I
began to ask myself, what wouldit mean to think about the
differences of life from thisdiacritical perspective, not as
a set of strategic, intractable,predetermined bio units, but as

(54:10):
differential relations thatevolve through time. If we do
that, we arrive at verydifferent conclusions about the
value of any species. You know,it isn't just the loss of a
species, isn't just the loss ofone unit.
It actually transforms thewhole. It's a loss to every
other node of difference withinthat system of differences. And
so extinction on this view isnot about the loss of one

(54:33):
species, however rare orvaluable, but it's about the
loss of a whole ancient andunique memory and all of its
future possibilities. It's likethe loss of an entire language
family in a way. From my pointof view, this gives us a
transformed view of who weourselves are and what it means
to talk about a kinship withother creatures that is much

(54:55):
richer than just the kind ofnotion of biological continuity.
It means we have to think aboutthe evolutionary process in a
more richly temporal way. Thisisn't just about something in
the past. I'm struck, forexample, by the idea of the
blind spot of our eyes, which isthe point where the optic nerve
has to pass through the retinaof the eye on the front, and it

(55:17):
needs to get to the back, and soit has to pass through a hole in
the retina, and our minds fillin so that we don't see a big
hole in our vision, but in fact,it's just an extrapolation from
what we're seeing in the areasnearby. And, of course, the
blind spot is it becomes its ownkind of symbolic philosophical
metaphorical term. So we canbegin to talk about someone's
blind spot in ways that gettaken up in our culture and

(55:40):
given their own meanings.
But the very fact that our eyeshave a blind spot, there's no
necessity to that. It's entirelya consequence of our the
contingencies of ourevolutionary heritage, and we
know this particularly wellbecause cephalopod eyes, eyes of
squids and octopi, they don'thave blind spots. Theirs formed
through a different evolutionarypathway, and their optic nerve

(56:01):
is on the correct side of theretina and doesn't need to find
a way to get to the other side.So just something like this,
just that the this is one waythat we are the memory of a
process that includes not onlyour particular filial ancestors,
let's say, but also all thedifferences, the nodes of
difference, that made up life asa whole in the moment where they

(56:22):
were living their lives in thesame way that in a certain
sense, all of language isinvolved anytime that we express
ourselves.

David Morris (56:29):
I guess I just wanted to try to tease out the
way that this is anotherinstance of a structural
principle of experience in life,which is when one is talking
about our life and ourperception and probably living
in general, I think this wouldapply to any sphere where we
find living beings, the agent ofthe living and perceiving and
being animal or whatever cannever be sort of localized and

(56:51):
delimited within somecircumscribed sphere. There's
these endless nesting of layersand scales through temporality
and now you're giving us theevolutionary vision. I'm not me,
I'm my microbiome. I'm not onegenome, I'm polygenomic. I'm not
here right now.
My mitochondria are going backmillions and millions of years
to the female lineage of myspecies because that's just the

(57:15):
way it is and yet that verything gives birth to somebody
who comes to take it as obviousthat it's just me here doing my
stuff. It is a blind spot thing,it's also a repression thing,
but earlier on Ben was talkingabout the role of learning to
say things about things,learning how to speak about
matter and language and so on.And your mention of the

(57:35):
diacritical, there's sort oflike a linguistic structure that
always exceeds you. Like you getto speak your language, but you
aren't your language. There'ssomething else speaking inside
of you.
But that's not the way we feelabout language. And language
looks to be something that canbe policed but it can't be
policed. It's living andevolving and breathing. I think
I wanted to point that out toask you because you did want us

(57:56):
to think about your third partand your third part of your book
is about the stories that wetell about how we're all gonna
die or something of that sort.Not just us, but everybody, the
whole world.
It's all gonna go to hell.That's a very old story. You
know, there's stories about howwe came from somewhere and there
are stories about how we'regonna go to hell together. And,

(58:18):
you're trying to bring some ofyour insights to bear on those
eschatological stories and someof the presumptions that I think
you're thinking are wrong andmistaken. It's sort of like
patrolling the diacriticallimits of language to frame the
way we tell eschatologicalstories.
So maybe the point is we try todo that so we seize the future

(58:38):
that we wanna have destroyedinstead of the future as it's
really gonna happen. I'm notsure about that one. Ed?

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault (58:44):
No. Well, my questions, I think the
the main points of reflectionsthat I have on the third part of
the book are mostly about thatprecisely this what does this
future this envisioned futurethat we don't really know
exactly how to understandalready because we we can make
the contours, of how wecollectively understand this

(59:04):
possible projected future. Butmy question is mostly about what
does this potential future doesto the body now? So how does
this future exist in ourpresent? And what does it do to
the present in a sense?
And thinking about that,because, of course, we've been
already talking a bunch of howdifferent modalities of time

(59:24):
coexist in the present, and thatthe the past is never just the
past, it's haunting the thepresent, it's projecting us
towards the future. And now, thethird part of the book is really
about how the future folds intothe present and even informs the
past. Right? It informs at leastour understanding or even the
haunting of the way in which thepast we allow the past to hunt

(59:46):
ourselves. We started thinkingof how everything is going to
collapse.
And at the same time, we thinkabout how everything is going to
collapse, we think about whatwe're everything that we have
that is going to collapse cameto be that way into a certain
process into a certain past, andwe come to realize the richness
of the process that led usthere. That's a little bit what
Ted you were just saying abouthow the extinction of a species

(01:00:08):
is sort of the extinction of awhole family of languages,
because it's also all of thesebio diacritical processes are
these processes of selfdifferentiation and
differentiations between whatwill come to become individuals
be with that will becomeindividuated into species or
into individual specimens. Allof these bear within themselves

(01:00:30):
a certain past and beingconfronted to their collapse. If
we're thinking about an animalspecies that's going to come
extinct ourselves, thinking ofhow everything that we've been
doing led to this point in thepresent. The present lives.
It's sort of a firsthandtestimony of what it would mean
for all of these long, laboriousprocesses of differentiation,

(01:00:52):
what it would mean for them tocollapse and to basically go
extinct. And what I'm wonderingabout that is looking forward
and not looking sort ofswitching the gaze, not looking
back at what we were losing, butlooking forward. What does it do
to us? What what do you thinkhistorically, thinking of our
future in those terms, in thosetypes of narratives, what are we
doing to ourselves, basically,while while we're thinking of

(01:01:15):
the future in those terms?

Ted Toadvine (01:01:17):
Yes. Thank you, Ben, and thank you, David. So
you put a lot on the table, andI don't know that I'm gonna,
address all of it, but pleaseredirect, if I don't. I'm
thinking about how just howrecent our knowledge of
prospects of the deep future areand how they emerge for us more
or less simultaneously with ourrecognition of the depth of the

(01:01:40):
past. We haven't known very longthat species can go extinct, and
it was a hot topic of scientificdebate up until Cuvier.
It took even longer for us toconsider that human extinction
could be a real possibility.It's a recent book by Emil
Torres, Human Extinction, thatmakes the case that Christianity

(01:02:02):
played a big role in making itso difficult for us for so long
to admit the possibility of ourown extinction. But suddenly
when we begin to realize that,yes, other creatures have gone
extinct, then we begin to think,well, what about us? Could this
happen? Initially, we imaginedplagues or we imagined, you
know, massive volcanoes or whathave you that might eliminate

(01:02:25):
us.
But increasingly, of course,especially after world wars in
the twentieth century, westarted to imagine that, hey, we
could do this to ourselves. Wecould build the big bomb. There
were people writing speculativefiction about human extinction
due to huge bombs even beforeHiroshima and Nagasaki. Our
imagination had taken us there.And so suddenly human extinction

(01:02:47):
becomes something that we coulddo that is a possibility for our
future.
And of course, with RachelCarson, whose book Silent Spring
was published in the run up tothe Cuban Missile Crisis, and
she explicitly links herconcerns about DDT with concerns
about nuclear warfare, then webegin to think about our

(01:03:08):
environmental situation assomething where we could destroy
the world. I think that thatkind of projection of a future,
of a potential apocalypticfuture, is sort of first made
possible for us by what we'velearned about the past, but it
also sort of draws us intothinking about time and our
relationship to time in veryproblematic ways. It leads us to

(01:03:29):
want to master the future. Youknow what? I come back to the
question of why do we enjoy somuch watching movies, movie
after movie, of the worldending?
You know, and they tend to havea kind of common structure where
there's a big collapse and thenthere's there's that little band
of people who survive, right?There they are, holed up in the
whatever it is, you know, andthey're taking stock of the

(01:03:50):
resources that they've got. Whocan hunt and who can cook and
who's gonna do this? Who can fixthe car and get us some gas. And
there's a kind of clarifyingsimplicity that we really love.
Just bring it all down. Youknow, maybe we're not even gonna
be one of those people, butbring it all down and start
over. Start fresh. That's partof what makes it really exciting

(01:04:11):
is the starting fresh. But ourenvironmental situation is the
result of long spans ofcolonialism, slavery,
capitalism.
Whose dream is it to start freshand wash all that away? This is
an insight that really broughthome to me by Potawatomi
scholar, Kyle White, who says,that's a settler fantasy. The

(01:04:32):
apocalypse is a settler fantasy.For indigenous people, they've
been living through apocalypseafter apocalypse at the hands of
settlers. And now we'd like tojust say, oh, let's wipe it all
away and start over fresh.
Because when we do, then our ourresponsibilities, the debts that
we owe for the world that we'vecreated, get washed away with
it. So there's a kind ofpleasure of apocalypse that is

(01:04:54):
the fresh start. That's a kindof liquidation of the past, a
refusal to remember how we gothere and to take responsibility
for it. But there's also, Ithink, in our apocalyptic
thinking, our eco eschatologies,there's a way that imagining the
future of the planet as sodependent on us. Part of what's
going on with the Anthropoceneis the idea that it's not nature

(01:05:17):
anymore that's making thedecisions, it's human beings.
Right? We're in charge now. Wecan make good decisions or bad
decisions. Right? And we need tomake the the good decisions.
But, gee, isn't it convenientthat at the very moment when we
think it might have been a badthing to be mastering nature,
then now we become absolutemasters of nature. Its very
future now depends on us. Wecould flip the switch and it

(01:05:39):
could be gone, or we can decidenot to. Gee, all of a sudden,
it's still all about us. TheAnthropocene intended to give us
some some humility, but in factends up reinforcing a certain
sense of the mastery of nature.
And so I find all of this quitesuspect, and I think it has a
lot to do, once again, with howwe think about time and our

(01:05:59):
relationship to time. And so Ithink it requires us to start
thinking about what temporaljustice at deep scales of time
would look like. A couple ofways of approaching that topic
get discussed in the book, andone is Jean Luc Nancy's idea
that we deepen our relationshipto the present. So, as I

(01:06:19):
mentioned when I was starting usoff, every moment of time is
unique and singular. It can't bereduced to a homogeneous
interchangeable unit.
And so what would it mean tostop calculatively managing what
we expect to happen in thefuture and instead really attend
to what presents itself to us inthe present, to really be

(01:06:42):
receptive to the singularity andthe uniqueness of the moments of
time in which we are immersedand entangled, which of course
are not instants. The now for usis many durations. It's what I'm
doing with my life right now asmuch as it is what's happening
this minute. Another very richsuggestion comes again from Kyle

(01:07:04):
White who discusses in somedetail what he calls spiraling
time, And he's describing theirindigenous experiences of time,
but he also invites settlers toask themselves some very
important questions. Forexample, how is the world that
we're living in now the dream ofour ancestors?
How did they in fact bequeath tous a certain envisioned future?

(01:07:29):
My ancestors, my settlerancestors, had for themselves a
goal, and in a certain sensethey they've accomplished it,
and in so doing have continuedthe apocalypse for others. And
if I consider the way that I amengaged in the cycling of time,
then I might ask myself today,what kind of ancestor do I want
to be for those who are comingafter me? This is resisting the

(01:07:52):
idea that all times areinterchangeable because where we
exist in this spiraling of timewill be very much a matter of
our responsibility, how we takeup what's been bequeathed to us,
how we take responsibility forwhat we have inherited, and also
what we leave to those who whocome after us.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault (01:08:12):
No. That's truly interesting because
you too, David, have been veryinterested in the way in which
the idea of like a master clockthat homogenizes time as like
deeply colonial ramifications.Right?

David Morris (01:08:24):
Well, it's pretty striking that, Ted was talking
about the way Christianity mighthave impeded us from thinking
about extinction. But I'vestudied in some detail Mexica
ontology. We call them theAztecs incorrectly, but for them
it's perfectly obvious that thisis the fifth sun cycle cosmos.
There have been others before,there'll be others after. It's a

(01:08:44):
strange way that we've, in thisculture, come to think about
time.
All this talk of time, though,is also making me think about
where we are, sort of practicalclock time for ourselves and our
listeners. And I know that, Benwas thinking about your title,
The Memory of the World, and Iknow that you're drawing that
from Elle Pontie. I thought itmight be good to see if we can

(01:09:04):
approach some kind of ending ofthis conversation toward a new
beginning through what's reallystriking about that phrase
because I think from listeningto you talk about the book
today, Ted, part of what's atstake in that phrase, the memory
of the world is for us toremember what we've repressed,
what Christianity might haveforgotten, all these things.
Remember that there's a world.Remember that you're part of the

(01:09:25):
world.
Remember that these things thatwe touch, that we feel that we
sense, the time that weexperience, this is coming from
before us, but also even morestrikingly, I think you're
asking us to remember that theworld itself has a memory, that
there's some kind of rememberingand making sense and storing up
and developing something quiteimportant that was there even

(01:09:46):
before you came on the scene andthat's what we tend to forget.
So I wonder if that's the rightway of thinking about what's
meant by the memory of theworld. Is that why you put it on
the cover? What's going on withthat?

Ted Toadvine (01:09:58):
Yes. Thank you, David. I think perhaps your
ruminations on the title of thebook are even more profound than
what I could have offered. So, Iwish that, I'd had you there to
recommend it to me even sooner.The Memory of the World is, it's
a quotation that comes fromMelle Ponty, and it's one that
he uses in the Phenomenology ofPerception, his book from 1945,

(01:10:19):
and he doesn't say very muchthere to explain what that
expression means.
And then it comes up again inseveral of his lecture courses
in the 1950s and and even insome of the notes for his final
book that got publishedposthumously in The Visible and
the Invisible. In my book, Idon't take the time to kind of
work out the intellectualcontext and genealogy of Mel

(01:10:40):
Punte's use of this expression,but there are some things that
he says that inspired mythinking for the book as a
whole. And I can say somethingabout how those have shaped my
thinking and why that led me toselect this as a title. In
phenomenology perception,Merleau Ponty uses this phrase,
the memory of the world, in thecontext of describing what he
sees as a certain tension, acertain paradox even, in our

(01:11:03):
everyday perceptual experienceof things. If we think of space,
we know that we experience theworld from a certain specific
location within it.
I see the table or the wall frommy location in space, which I
know is limited. I don'tdirectly perceive the other side
of the table. I don't see thepart of the wall that the
table's in front of, and so on.But even though my perceptions

(01:11:26):
are always limited in this way,they're always localized and
from a certain point of view, Istill perceive the things around
me as having perspectives thatgo beyond what's immediately
perceived by me. I see thistable that I'm sitting at here
today as a real table, and I seethat as a real wall.
I don't see them as carefullyconstructed illusions. I see

(01:11:47):
them as being available to beseen from many other, infinitely
other perspectives. And thisisn't a conclusion that I draw
mentally. It's not, something Iimagine or something I represent
to myself. It's an integral partof my perception itself.
I perceive the table as a tablethat has infinitely number of
different visual perspectives onit. So to perceive the room

(01:12:11):
around me is to open onto itfrom a certain location within
it, which means opening ontohorizons that extend beyond what
I can perceive from where I am.And that means that in my very
perception of this room isenfolded its relation to what
lies beyond it. You know, as Isit here at the table and look
at the table, it it sort ofincludes within it a reference

(01:12:33):
to what's outside my door,what's downstairs, what's down
the street, what's in the nextstate over, what's at the bottom
of the ocean, what's on themoon. All of that is in a
certain sense implied in,implicated, tangled up with my
being here in front of thisthing in this at this moment in
space.
In short, you could say that anyopening onto space entails a

(01:12:55):
kind of relation to all ofspace, and it's only through a
specific insertion into spacethat I can enter into that set
of relations. Now everythingI've just said about space is
also true of time. We open on totime through what's happening
now, although that now is not aninstantaneous point. It it's
always a duration, and it'salways a duration that's in a

(01:13:15):
complex tangent of relationswith other durations. And this
means that we're temporal onlyby living through certain
temporal happenings or eventsthat encompass and overlap and
are encompassed by otherhappenings.
Every present happening carriesthe past along with it, and it
anticipates the future. And justas every spatial perception

(01:13:36):
unfolds a relation to all ofspace, every temporal happening
unfolds relations to the wholescheme of time. This isn't just
something subjective. It's notjust in our memories or in our
anticipation. You know, we knowour memories can be wrong, but
the background of our temporalexperience is a commitment to a
truth of the past, to a truth ofthe past of the world as a

(01:14:00):
whole.
And that's what Merleptonte herein phenomenology perception
calls the memory of the world.Now I started off by saying
Merleptonte thought there'ssomething paradoxical in this
experience. It is, he says, aparadox that's kind of
constituent of all of ourperceptual experiences. And
that's because the fact that weintend all of space through our

(01:14:21):
opening onto space from righthere, and the fact that we
intend all of time through ouropening onto time from right
now, that tempts us to forgetthat we open onto space and time
always from a certain here andnow. So we start to treat space
and time as fully determinate,as if the world consists of

(01:14:41):
ready made things alreadyarranged in a spatial and
temporal system.
And our sciences just continuealong that elaboration of this
fully determinate world in termsof systems of relations that are
composed of instantaneousmoments, whether it's spatial
points without depth or temporalinstance without duration. Now
that scientific view of spaceand time is certainly useful.

(01:15:05):
It's essential for a lot of whatwe, have been able to accomplish
technologically, but it's anabstraction from space and time
in their full concreteness. Whenwe treat space as composed of
points lacking any depth, whenwe treat time as consisting of
moments lacking any duration, welose the very distance and
duration and horizonality thatmakes what's there different

(01:15:29):
from here and that makes what'sthen different from now. To open
onto the past as past or to openonto the future as future can't
be about converting them intoanother present moment within a
fixed set of relations the waywe do when we imagine a timeline
that's made up of points in setrelation.

(01:15:50):
So the paradox of all of ourexperience is that somehow we
open onto the real world, butthat this world is not a
determinate world. It maintainsits openness, its
indeterminacies, its horizons.It's the real world itself that
has horizons. Things are fartheraway from me or nearer, and so

(01:16:10):
they can't be fixed intosomething determinate and made
up of fully presentinstantaneous moments. Merleau
Ponty finds kind of confirmationin his ways of thinking about
things some years later whenhe's reading the works of Alfred
North Whitehead in his book, TheConcept of Nature.
Whitehead says there that theprocess or the passage of
nature, as he calls it, is themost concrete happening or the

(01:16:33):
most concrete event of time. Andso he rejects the materialist
view that's dominated thehistory of Western thinking,
which is the view that allnature exists in a kind of
instantaneous present. Instead,Whitehead argues that the
creative unfolding of nature isa happening that at each moment
involves all of time. In hiswords, he says, the operative

(01:16:57):
present must be sought forthroughout the whole in the
remotest past as well as thenarrowest breadth of any present
duration, perhaps also in theunrealized future. That's a
quote from Whitehead's TheConcept of Nature.
Commenting on these passages inhis own lectures on nature,
Merleau Ponty says, if we wannaunderstand the process of nature

(01:17:20):
in itself, we could say thatnature is the memory of the
world. The whole aim of my bookis to start from that rich way
of thinking of time and of thepassage of nature and bring it
to bear on how we think aboutdeep time in particular and how
this gives us a starting pointfor relating the time of our

(01:17:41):
lives, our experienced time, forseeing that it is necessarily
connected with, in a certainsense, all of time. So I've set
out really just to followthrough the consequences of
that, and that's why theexpression, the memory of the
world seemed to capture my themeso well. Is it time?

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: That's beautiful. (01:18:02):
undefined

David Morris (01:18:04):
What a great book. And, thanks for taking the time
to talk through this book, whichI think is gonna have a really
good impact on a broad audience.And I hope this podcast will
help with that. This has been aUniversity of Minnesota Press
production. The book The Memoryof the World by Ted Toedwein is
available from University ofMinnesota Press.

(01:18:25):
Thank you for listening.