ABSTRACT
But all that is so on condition that the privation which sustains the seeking be the absence of a term, the absence of what can be offered to the grasp and thus to anticipation-that is to say, the absence of an identical that would be stability and instantiation, able to present itself and be re-presented, to stand in a presence and be taken in hand or pointed at; the logical identity of an atom, of a point or an instant, at one and the same time-in the same present-pure where, pure when and pinpoint; birth or extenuation of what admits qualification and hardens in thickness; a something (etwas überhaupt), referred, despite its formalism, to things, to solids. Seeking where presence and absence evoke a time already understood as a flowing of things, an understanding of time therefore comparable to a flux or a current, as if it were composed of instants-contents, of qualities, which themselves flow. Time
therefore analyzed in terms of sensations which “fill” it-even if time, in this analysis, still claims to be a form, as if form did not repeat the stability, status, or identity of the contents. Sensations or “primary contents” or “hylé” that are interpreted as “quiddities,” as givens, as elements of knowledge or appearing. Analysis of time that has recourse to the metaphors of a liquid and its movement. But in terms of its particles, the instants pass, flow, but are retained or anticipated in Husserl. They penetrate one another in Bergsonian duration without the category of the Same, which still governs these descriptions, truly being put in question, not even by its many syntheses with the Other, its many co-positings or compositions, so many figures of simultaneity, of presence in the Same, and without the question wherein the Same is put shaking the repose of positivity, that is to say all this Identity. The other always remains an “other Same,” an other “identical to itself,” an “alterum idem.”
