SubStance

SubStance 32.1 (2003) 40-43

The Past is Now

Eric Méchoulan

What would I like to know? Obviously, something that I don't already know. Like everyone else, I ask to be astonished. However, in a certain sense (and contrary to President Bush's proclamation that "the past is over"), only the past is truly new—thus only the past can still surprise me.

The present is simply what is at this moment: I act, think and feel in it; nothing in it is new, since nothing else inhabits it except what's there. The [End Page 40] future, for which I have hopes or recurring despair, can only offer me successive presents: this present, then that present, and then that one, etc. The future contains no novelty, for every time I leap into it, I discover there the present, nothing but the present. Whereas the past is continuous in me; it never ceases to inhabit me. What makes for its newness? The fact that each leap into the future, carrying into it what is now my present, modifies the past. In every present there is a sort of phase difference between this narrow sensation of the fleeting moment that appears only as what it is, and this ever-increasing sense of the past that I am reconsidering and that always appears as more to me.

My relationship to the future is discontinuous; my relationship to the past is continuous. As for the present, it articulates, in a chronic division, the continuous and the discontinuous. This is why the past alone can unceasingly offer me new surprises. This is why what I would like to know has to do with the past, to the extent that the past appears to me each time in a new light, shed by my present. Wittgenstein no doubt grasped something like this when he wrote in one of his notebooks: "He who has no tradition and would like to have one is like a man who is unhappy in love." Anomie or depression set in when the past offers no more surprises (for in reality my present is empty and my future is inoperative); then the past becomes a burden and a lack rather than a richness and a desire.

One might say that my habitual attitude is nonetheless to find surprises in what the future holds in store for me; but this is to believe that the future is always already there, all set behind the door, waiting in the dark to scare me or to dump a bucket of water over me like a mischievous boy. The sense of astonishment comes precisely from the fact that my past did not seem to lead in a linear fashion to what happens—which obliges me then to reconsider the past in order to link it to events that appear totally unconnected—hence the frivolous thrill of surprise. It's not the future that amazes me in the present that leads to it; rather, it is the past that surprises in the future that I discover. This is why in the present, both the contingency of what happens and the interpretation that connects it to my past, cohabit. The richness of this past in me depends on my powers of interpretation.

It is here that I am always stupefied by so-called "literary" works (as well as, on a denser and less seductive level, those arising from "philosophy"). For we cannot fail to be amazed that orally improvised or painstakingly written works still not only interest, but impassion people from very different eras. Except for historians, no one today reads the genealogical lists of antiquity, the manuals of the confessors of the 17^th century, or the treatises of jurisprudence of the 18^th century. However, one does not [End Page 41] need an advanced degree in literature to love Aeschylus, Dante, La Fontaine or Stendhal. It's as though "literary" works exemplified the very relationship that we have with time: in their present, they reconfigure the novelty of the past via the simultaneous interpretation they give...