eric alliez - capital times_ tales from the conquest of time (theory out of bounds)

Capital Times

Sandra Buckley

Michael Hardt

Brian Massumi

THECB? OUT OF B O U N D S. . .UNCONTAINED

BY

THE

DISCIPLINES,

INSUBORDINATE

PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE...Inventing,

excessively,in the between...

6 Capital Times:Tales from the Conquest of Time EricAlliez

5 The Year of Passages Reda Bensmai'a

4 Labor of Dionysus:A Critique of the State-Form Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

3 Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition,Media, and Technological Horizons Eric Michaels

2 The Cinematic Body Steven Shaviro

1 The Coming Community Giorgio Agamben

PROCESSES

OF

HYBRIDIZATION

Capital Times

Tales from the Conquest of Time

Eric AlliezForeword by Gilles Deleuze Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele

Theory out of Bounds Volume 6

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis London

The University of Minnesota gratefully acknowledges funding providedby the French Ministry of Culture for the translation of this book.

Copyright 1996 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Originally published as Les Temps Capitaux. Tome I, Re'cits de la conquete du temps.Copyright 1991 by Les Editions du Cerf.

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted,

in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording, or otherwise, withoutthe prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290,

Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

L I B R A R Y OF CONGRESS C A T A L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C A T I O N DATAAlliez, Eric

[Recits de la conquete du temps. English]Capital times. Tales from the conquest of time / Eric Alliez ;

foreword by Gilles Deleuze ; translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele.p. cm. (Theory out of bounds ; v. 6)

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8166-2259-0 (he). ISBN 0-8166-2260-4 (pb)

1. Time. I. Title. II. Series.BD638.A3913 1996

115 dc2095-40926

The University of Minnesotais an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

To the child from Chile

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And then there is the matter of the highly improper manipulation of time. The shameful

tricks, the penetration of time's mechanism from behind, the hazardous fingering of its

wicked secrets! Sometimes one feels like banging the table and exclaiming, "Enough of

this! Keep off time, time is untouchable, one must not provoke it! Isn't it enough for you

to have space? Space is for human beings, you can swing about in space, turn

somersaults, fall down, jump from star to star. But for goodness' sake, don't tamper with

time!"Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium under theSign of the Hourglass

Contents

Foreword Cities Defence x i

Introduction xv

i The Accident of Time: An Aristotelian Study i

ii The Time of Audacity: Plotinus 27

in The Time of Novitasi Saint Augustine 11

iv Fides Efficax 141

ApOStil 241

Notes 243

Bibliographical Indications 2 9 7Index 309

ForewordGilles Deleuze

E R I C A L L I E Z is not out to expose conceptions of time or even to analyze temporalstructures. He speaks about various conducts of time.1 It might be said that thoughtcan grasp time only through a number of strides, which precisely compose a con-duct, as if you were switching from one stride to another, according to determinableoccurrences. Even more so, we will pass from one conduct to another, in differentmilieus and epochs, which relate the time of history with the thought of time. Inshort, multiple conducts of time, each of which reunites several strides. Within eachconduct, certain strides become strange, aberrant, almost pathological. But it is pos-sible that, in the ensuing conduct, they are normalized, or that they find a newrhythm they did not previously have. This introduction of deep rhythms withinthought, in relation to things and societies, is perhaps what inspires Alliez's workas we might see, for example, in the beautiful pages where he analyzes the histori-cal and noetic difference between Cosmos and Mundus.

Thus, a conduct of time as the number of the world's extensivemovement. It is evident that strides change according to the moving body underconsideration and the nature of the movement. There would be an encapsulationof times going from the originary to the derived, according to whether the movingbody is more or less perfect, its matter more or less light in weight, its motion moreor less reducible to cyclical compositions. But there would also be a decapsulationof time, according to whether its heavy matter faces contingency or linear accidents.

At the limit, an aberrant time undoes itself, becoming more and more linear,autonomous, abstracted from other strides, and sometimes falling and tripping.With meteorology, isn't such a time introduced into things? And with money, with"chrematistics," isn't such a time introduced into the community?

Without a doubt, there is a world soul, and the soul is itself aworld. Nonetheless, a mutation of thought is required for time to be defined as thecipher of the soul's intensive movement: this is a new conduct of time, with otherstrides. Originary time refers back to some synthesis carried out by the soul, whichat every moment makes a distinction between present, past, and future. This dif-ferentiation of time implies a double movement of the soul that leans toward whatcomes after (procession) and turns back onto what is before (conversion). This con-duct is less the motion of a sphere than the tension of a spiral. It could be said thattime falls, a little the way light does, with an idealized fall (the intensive quantity ordistance from the moment of zero) endlessly taken up in a return to the source. Thecloser one gets to zero, however, the more the stride changes, the more the fallbecomes a real fall: a new aberrant time takes shape in which the spiral disappearsin the froth, a time derived from distension that no longer lets itself be converted.

Perhaps the order should be reversed, leaving from the derivedin order to better aim at the originary, following yet another conduct, where theintensive becomes a kind of intentionality. The aberrant is reintegrated insofar assin has founded a time of distension, of diversion, of diverting. The possibility ofsetting up an "intention" that gives back the originary depends on new strides thatmobilize the faculties of the soul and inspire other rhythms in themnot only mem-ory, but also perception, imagination, understanding. What new aberration will arisefrom this?

The history of philosophy is a spiritual voyage; Alliez's original-ity is in marking the changes in conducts and strides at every stage. There is a pro-visional horizon to this voyage, and that is Kantian time: not as something foreseen,a goal, but as a line discovered at the end and of which a furtive segment here andthere is at first only glimpsed. The pure line of time has become autonomous ...Time has shaken off its dependency on all extensive movement, which is no longerthe determination of objects but the description of space, a space we must abstractfor time to be discovered as the condition of action. Time also does not depend onthe intensive movement of the soulto the contrary, the intentional productionof a degree of consciousness within the moment is what depends on time. WithKant, time ceases to be originary or derived, to become the pure form of inferiority,which hollows us out, which splits us, at the price of a vertigo, of an oscillation that

x i i, x i i i

constitutes time: the synthesis of time changes direction by constituting it as aninsurmountable aberration. "Time gets unhinged": must one see here the rise of anurban linear time that no longer relates to anything but the given moment? Neverdoes Alliez separate the processes of thought from those of things and of societies(rural communities, commercial towns, empires, cities, states). Or rather, things, soci-eties, and thoughts are caught up in processes without which the conducts and strideswould remain arbitrary. The force of Alliez's book is in discovering and analyzingsuch processes of extension, intensification, capitalization, subjectivation processesthat become something like the conditions for a history of time.

F o r e w o r d

Introduction

WHAT i present here is a history of the Conquest of Time, in the two senses of agenitive belonging both inside and outside the concept.

Potential time and power time the pure force of time shakingoff its subordination to the world's movement, provoking aberrant movements ofall kinds, and an abstract time, the instrument of all "machinations," the bearer, per-haps since the end of the Middle Ages, of the capture of being within representation.

Let's take this up again, from the start.A start that would be a point of departure rather than of arrival,

by putting the text back on stage in the chiasmus of research, between the beginningand the end, Marx and Aristotle.

A kickoff: Read Marx reading Aristotle. At first glance, every-thing seems very simple. The author of Capital begins by saluting Aristotle as thegenius of the great Greek Form, he who posited, formulated, if not founded, thepostulate of exchange between equivalents. And Marx is not wrong, for this propo-sition in its anodyne demeanor is upheld not only by the whole of the Stagirite's polit-ical philosophy, but also by what is essential in his physics and metaphysics. Whatwill be formalized as C-M-C (Commodity-Money-Commodity) is in effect par excel-lence a "natural movement" characterized by "need"whose number is moneyas "final cause." Whence a first aspect of time as the number of a natural movement

defined as a function of privileged moments (telos, akme): a "sublunary" time, near toitself in its political re-presentation, operating its declension of the community ofneeds in the mode of a reciprocity that makes the city subsist in a relation to othernesssimilar to the one that opens my own relation to myself. Let's say it is all in thesame movement, political exchange regulated by commutative justice, real equalizationaccording to that just measurement that corrects the aberrant movements that produceinequality; and self-presence, or "self-care" [souci de soi\\ subjectivation under thesign of an ethics that assigns to oneself (heautoi) the things that are noblest (kalos).1Subjectivation and temporalization designate the intersecting of human action withtime, where time is the occasion (kairos) for the just measurement (metrori).

Marx's immediate critique follows in the wake of the classics andof modern metaphysics.2 Aristotle did not get to the foundation, to the essence ofexchange that determines both its form and its content: labor, identified with the"common substance" of the two commodity objects that labor without which onecannot penetrate into the economic sphere properly called (of exchange value), thatabstract labor that underhandedly regulates the reality of exchange by definitivelyovercoming the qualitative plurality of different labors.3

From Aristotle to Marx, we have thereby passed from money,as a substitute for the social unit of need, to value, as the expression of the socialunit of human labor. "It is only the commensurability of commodities as objectifiedlabor time which converts gold into money."4 Labor time, the substance and mea-sure of commodities, inscribes time as the matter and measure of equivalence. "Justas motion is measured by time, so is labor by labor time; it is the living quantitativereality (Dasein) of labor."5

What happens between Aristotle and Marx is the scientific rev-olution, which subordinates movement to time, now an independent variable; theindustrial revolution happens, which no longer conceives the laborer as anythingbut labor time personified, as the quantitative determination of labor. Alienation or"aberration is now valid in itself and designates time as its direct cause."6 "Time iseverything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time's carcass. Quality no longer matters.Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day."7 The very principleof a market economy, abstract labor is what creates exchange value, what imposes thelaw of equivalences without any other relation to use-values qualitatively defined andsuited to needs. The most aberrant movement has become the everyday itself, thedaily mastery of time. Here is found the old curse: money is time. "Remember thattime is money," signs Benjamin Franklin. He is the founder of political economy.8

X V I , X V I I

It is well known that this movement is not and could not beabsent from the Aristotelian corpus. A subversion of the oikonomike founded on theteleological subordination of "exchange value" to "use-value," khrematistike is Aris-totle's M-C-M. Money is torn from its political condition of mediating need tobecome the number of an artificial and convulsive movement. The infinite move-ment of accumulation is what empties the city of its self-presence by achieving themetamorphosis of goods into commodities; it is what scientifically converts time intothe money form. Chrematistics is a poetic science, linked to "production," givingrise to an infinite and abstract product under the rubric of a wealth other than itself,apart from the oikos, where money replaces property, becoming an instrument ofappropriating expropriation. Interestwhat Aristotle calls tokoswould represent herethe essence of all profit insofar as it incarnates the most aberrant movement, theone the most counter to nature (the inverted filiation, the monstrous filiation ofmoney issuing from interest"Tokos hie mali medium est" [Tokos is here the mediumof evil], Ezra Pound repeats after the Scholastics), and insofar as it puts a price ontime, which it serializes. Interest is the "homogeneration" of time, the register of anabstract, infinitely divisible time. The "sign" of a creative time, or rather the "pro-ducer" of simulacra that make use of kairos as an object,9 interest displays an emptyform freed from this political presence and political finality that made beings coin-cide with self, and whose indefinite opening in the quantitative direction of chre-matistics has a major effect on the Aristotelian text: the definition of chrematisticknowledge never comes to term. Is this because "those who maintain the infiniteseries destroy the very notion of the good," as Aristotle explains in The Metaphysics"?He specifies that such a practice signifies the ruin of all scientific cognition if noth-ing can be known before one arrives at the furthermost elements of the definition,which is cited to appear outside of time.10

The suspicion here is that Aristotelian science stumbles againstwhat it indicates as being the first modern science by the speculation on timeand infinity that it implies,11 precisely situating in this blind spot something likethe final cause of the kineto-temporal unruliness of the sublunary world (economicand historical unruliness, but also physical and astronomical unruliness) wherethe status of time slips away as an indirect representation subordinated to motionand its conditions of "normality." In this way, the books of Aristotle's Physicsmost especially book IV of the Physics, which contains the definition of time asthe number of movement in relation to what is anterior and posteriorcouldconstitute the Grundbuch of Western philosophy, as Heidegger says, by reason of

I n t r o d u c t i o n

the conjuring operation inaugurated by them upon the forehead (or the back) oftime.12

Marx, on the other side of the great Kantian reversal, is a fullpartner in this history. His conception of a money commodity circulating within aworld ruled by labor-value understood as substance-value (by the identification ofMehrarbeit with Mehrwert that the physiocratic idea of surplus implies), "a mirroroutline of real unchanged events" (Bernard Schmitt) that consequently intro-duces no convexity, no convulsion in the economic field,13 reproduces alongsideabstract time the conjuring away of that potential time, of that "creative" time,whose most tangible index is furnished by the existence of finance capital. Financecapital represents, says Marx, the form of capital empty of content; it is eco-nomic determination in its pure form, it signifies the reversal of the true order ofthings on the basis of which money as such is already potentially value becom-ing valued. Because it capitalizes the essential dissemblance of potential time, itsempty form and its pure force, the critique of finance capital sums up the wholecritique of capitalism. But does it not also crystallize, in the operative autonomy ofits mechanical action, in the senseless efficacy of its nominalist structure, whatMarx admired in capitalism? "The most intensive advance of historical develop-ment..."14

Everything is reversed, for abstract, homogeneous time, the mea-sure of the exploitation and subsumption of the socius under the regime of equiva-lence (time is this regime's very matter), is undoubtedly opposed to every idea of acreative duration, though it invokes creative duration as its natural complement (beit only for this: the subsumption of society has turned itself into the production of society}, justas a science calls on the metaphysics that founds it. This potential time appears inthe Gmndrisse (which begins with a "Chapter on money," an exclusive form of valueand not, as Capital will develop it, a special commodity), along with the conceptionof money as a process creative of wealth, a tautology of power, in which what hasbeen previously presupposed posits itself and thus becomes the presupposition ofwhat its condition was.15 The process so described can find its reason only in a the-ory of the subject/capital as logical apparatus of capture, in association with theisolating of a value relation that turns circulation, by reducing space to time, intothe basis of production and reproduction.16 There, monetary exchange determinesequivalence. Money presents itself, positively, as an "instrument of production," as"real metabolism," as "infinite continuity of process."17 Moneythat is, the timeproductive of motion as quantity, along with the promotion of aberrant (alienating)motion, the ordinary perspective on time. "Time gets unhinged" because it has

xvi i i , x i x

overturned its subordination to the regulated movements it was measuring. It hasbecome a pure order of time as the "purely formal distribution of the unequal inthe function of a caesura" of any kind.18 Aristotle had an inkling of this underthe single name of khrematistike.

By dint of zigzagging back and forth, while staying within a kind of circle (the three-point circle Husserl describes at the beginning of the Krisis: the understanding ofthe beginnings, science as given in its present-day form, a development of meaning),everything has become clearer.

A choice must be made between two great options. Either, byprivileging the economic upsurge of potential time as abstract time, we are led toredeploy its genealogy from the point of view of its "pragmatics" (a modern theoryof money) within the framework of a cartography of the existing (Marx is inevitablypivotal in this but how can one manage its access without becoming an economist"for good"?), or else the problem of time must be posited as such, and the whole studymust be reorganized as a function of its history, of that history that has unfoldedwithin thought, within the world, according to times need it be specified? thatare not necessarily the same. Engaging the "movement" through which being, in theWest, has historically constituted itself as experience and as representation, as sub-ject and as object, this study will urge genealogy, and along with genealogy the anal-ysis of the practices of time, in the direction of an archaeology of potentiality. Thisarchaeology would strive to account, within the very historicity of philosophy, forwhat commands the scene of modernityand everything listed under that namethrough a certain montage of calculated specularization between time and subject.(An entire economy is implied, from economic and political capture to the captureof being: always a de jure violence whereby this capture contributes to the creationof that over which it exerts itself, and time in the manifestation of its very strengthas putting in crisis the notions of truth, of the real.)

We must then dive in well ahead of our stated project, and clar-ify/or itself & third dimension, one of subjectivation, of the production of that sub-ject without which mastery is inconceivable, insofar as dynamic, as pro-blematic, aspro-jection of the first two (temporalization and capitalization). Here, an inexhaustibledramatics is located: the subject as the drama of time having overturned its ownfoundation, time as the drama of the subject "carried away and dispersed by theshock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth."19 A subjectivity that is not oursbut is time itself, taking both autonomy and subjectivity with regard to every anthro-pology in order to assure the hermeneutic place of its modernity.


I will show that Aristotle discovered and covered over the irre-versibly circular dimension of that process that draws humanity and the world into"the ultimate figure of the labyrinth, the labyrinth in a straight line," and that the"onto-cosmo-anthropological" structure of his thought (to use Remi Brague's expres-sion) furnishes its most powerful indicator (chapter 1). His ontology is above alloriented by the cosmos, to pan kekesmetai: the Whole is organized! That is Aristo-tle's "cry" by virtue of a movement rigorously contrary to the one described byHeidegger. If Aristotle's physics supposes acceding to the domination of the onto-logical paradigm of the said Vorhandenheit, it is to the extent that it resists it withall its force in the name of the cyclical perpetuation of the same in the presence ofthat which is most sovereignly present, of that which is cosmos.20

If, on the side of the subject, Neoplatonism truly marks the start-ing point for this interminable history by determining the action-image that trig-gered time altogether (chapter 2), that action-image is nonetheless Christian fromend to end. For it would be nothinga mere animationwithout a dialectics oftranscendence (chapter 3) capable of actualizing it in the world, which no longerretains its principle of organization within itself, and of interiorizing it within a con-sciousness: theo-logically, upon the paradox of distance, unwinding its thread at thefirst commandment. So it is: in a single, long, forever Augustinian sentence with-out caesura, the ex nihilo creation creates not only the Earth but also that world ofthe Commandment regulated in its exteriority by the creator's order. If we dared:the dynamics of transcendence would be the red thread of abstract time, already inthe sense that there will no longer be any primary matter that is not determined by(the unitary mechanism of) the Idea (of God), that is not credited to that idea'sforesight and "calculation." By dint of representing this idea in the direction of itscompleted advance, late medieval philosophy gives its most precious and decisive"coloration" to a critical age whose subterranean force and pulsations echo well intothe scientific revolution of everyday time (chapter 4 and also to be discussed furtherin part II of the second volume of this work, still forthcoming), up until the tran-scendental elevation and normalization of this time, which attains with Kant the rig-orous definition of a formal, empty order, representable in terms of set and series.This is the ordinary time of the most aberrant movement, the crushing ensembleof dailiness itself, the most pitilessly straight line that splits the ego, equalizing it tothe unequal in itself, revealing it in its finitude by a burst that disperses and reassem-bles it, that summons it to the foundation of an order that authorizes itself by thetranscendental truth of its power (volume 2)that summons it to Power's transcen-dental foundation in Knowledge. Is neo-Kantianism the last word [le fin mot] of

this story (and Hegelianism, the word of the end [le mot de la fin]: from the law tothe state as possibilities of self-consciousness), making Platonism rhyme with social-ism under Hermann Cohen's pen?21 What is secretly in question here, in a corre-spondence that is complex but analyzable point by point, is the abstract machine ofcapitalism, and the capitalist analytics of totality (the subsumption of the world) whentotality is presupposed at every moment (the synthesis of being as method), while"the sensible real becomes existent \wird seiend] within the law."22 "The sovereignpotential of thought over being, which no absolute force can oppose," comes downto the axiom "thinking is calculating." For "progress, method is everything":23 function.

So it is that I have decided in favor of the second "archaeologi-cal" option. Not without having long pondered the difficulties of the task, of whichthe most immediate and at first glance nearly insurmountable one is the impossibledelimitation of the field to be explored except by what institutes philosophy as history.Vertigo. For if reason and just good sense impose a limit to the risks of the enter-prise by the attempt to restrict the amount of material at whatever cost, the condi-tions of the problem dictate their own necessity. With this first bit of self-evidence,it also became clear that only by following a "long temporality" is one capable ofproducing the progressive determination of the genetic and objective conditionsfor a proposition of the following type: between the subjectivation of time and thetemporalization, constitution of the subject, a line of force passes that forms the intrin-sic genesis of the Western experience even in its deviations. If there is a tautologyin the way the problem is determined, it is in the very principle of our story withits complex theme of discontinuities functioning against the backdrop of a "differ-ential" continuity that in its closing moments is able to "integrate" the hegemonicdevelopment of capitalism taking place only in the Christian West.

On this basis, it seemed to me that farther reflection was required.This continuity was no longer separable from an ideal complementarity withoutwhich, I believe, the research would have rapidly come to a halt. On the one hand,the consciousness that only one "itinerary" could be traced out of the set of remark-able points that form the historico-critical24 conditions of the problem; on theother hand, evidence of a distribution of the singular and the regular over the ini-tial corpus of the problem, but also and more fundamentally, particular evidence oftime's abstract line, representative as such of the sole singularities selected by thatline in order to determine them. Inside the field of singularities, then, the distinc-tion is exerted between the ordinary (according to convergence) and the remark-able (according to their divergences).25 Now, oddly, what we find at the same timeall but defined there is the ordinary practice of Christianity in its "axiomatic" func-


xx,xxi

tion of converging what essentially diverges, its aspect as nexus; along with the exem-plary relation of Christianity to Neoplatonism, when Christian theology is givenbirth to by a capturing operation that makes operational in the world (and hence"ordinary") the ("remarkable") utterances of the extraworldly individual.

If something was getting knotted together here, which woulddetermine the economy of times to come (the dynamics of transcendence), the out-line was, so to speak, all traced out, at least in terms of what would have to be con-fronted: Plotinus and Augustine, rupture, capture; the theological age, foundation;and at the end, all the way at the end, of the dynamics of transcendence, when theCopernican revolution was complete, was the Kantian critique, which leads to anepistemology that relates the two great axes of power and knowledge that were unitedby the scientific revolution back to the question, Was ist derMensch? What, finally,is the Subject outside of all intuitus originarius'? A purely logical function, the neo-Kantians would answer, with the autoaffection of the self as giving the definition oftime in a way inseparable from the transcendental genesis of the object as some-thing "given," and of Idea as a Method that rejects the sensible as a principle... thereverse in some way of the Augustinian "montage."

Put this way, the question of time led me into an inquiry thatcould be "foundational" only by confronting an unfounding (effondement) to useDeleuze's worddimension, which to my mind would be inseparable from the crit-ical labor of thought upon its own history. This critical labor takes place as soon asthought, in the construction of its objects, faces up to its essential relation with anOutside that nonetheless, insofar as it implies a becoming of forces, ought to bedistinguished from just any state of things ("Es gibt keinen Tatbestand").26 In a textpresented as a kind of philosophical last will and testament, Michel Foucault foundthe most exact words to speak of the "only kind of curiosity... which is worth act-ing upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate whatit is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself."27

By way of this "curiosity," I arrive at the third motif (after theself-evidence of the path to be taken, and its essentially limited aspect: in sum, amatter of evaluating the passage on its own grounds), which urged me to leap aheadand try out what follows. It comes down to a single word: apprenticeship. Learningto construct one's own problems, to discern the remarkable from the ordinary, totry out new ways of thinking our present, to recognize and cultivate the part ofintuition that generates every philosophical assertion, to create for oneself an ethicsthat lets one get lost in the labyrinths of true/false and strong/weak games, to pre-pare the first drafts of a thought still to come (this thought determines the mobile

XX I I , X X I I I

element of work at present), and tirelessly to work out the questions by relating themto the Idea that envelops them. It seems to me that there is, and ought to be, a lit-tle of all this in one's first philosophical essay, and this alone could make accept-able, if not necessary, the "gap between the work, the time spent in ascesis, and theresult attained."28 When a problem is sufficiently insistent to keep reinstigating yourresearch in new directions and to increase your "curiosity," what other choice isthere but to pursue the agenda of its variations by attempting to forge, while onthe road if necessary, the tools needed for the trip... and with advice, as much aspossible, from the best guides?

Gilles Deleuze, whose teaching and friendship have constantlystimulated my "studies," helped me and guided me throughout these years withunequaled availability and attentiveness. Isabelle Stengers gave me her remarks andcriticisms after reading different versions of this work; the seminar we ran together,first at the College International de Philosophic, then at the Universite Europeennede la Recherche, was the occasion for confrontation and renewal of this essay'severy moment.29 After the thesis had been defended, Maurice de Gandillac waswilling to reread the medieval chapter with extreme care; Barbara Cassin read theGreek chapters. Jean-Francois Courtine brought me the aid of his precious advicefor the final drafting of the manuscript. Luiz Costa-Lima, Michel Feher, BarbaraGlowczewski, and my trusty counselor Yves Lemoine helped bring the work tocompletion with their suggestions. When the book was ready, Heinz Wismannbefriended me by welcoming this impossible history of philosophy into the presti-gious series he edits. Finally (because I cannot mention everyone, in France and inBrazil, who was involved one way or another in this work), Felix Guattari, throughhis complicity, his encouragements, and his questions (in particular after the meet-ings of the seminar on schizoanalysis), accompanied the production of this bookfrom beginning to end. Together, we finalized the chapter titles and headings.

Capital Times refers to those capital sins whose root, Augustine would say, is Avari-tia, radix omnium malorum, understanding by that a certain "avarice of the mind"that comes from the knowledge of temporal things, and that also takes the form ofthe science of time, that time precisely that does not belong to God, following theformula echoed against usurers throughout the Middle Ages, those "instigators ofcapitalism," "merchants of the future, sellers of time."30 "Et ita vendit tempora Dei...Sed tantum tempus quod Dei est..." Since Jacques Le GofPs magnificent study,we know what unrestrained use the usurer made of the concept of purgatory, inwhat is beyond, in God's time if it exists, a time endowed with some rather strange


qualities: variable, linear, segmented, measurable, and above all "manipulable" bythe thread of a fantastic accounting. Time becomes the element most explicitly sus-ceptible of being measured,31 the object par excellence of the arithmetical logic pre-siding over the calculation of punishments. Thus, it is not only by allowing the usurerto be saved that purgatory contributed to the birth of capitalism, but also and aboveall by God's time becoming practically indiscernible from the usurer's time.

In effect, if purgatory becomes an annex of earth and effacesevery clear demarcation (a poet revealed the great action of usura in this regard),32if it has only one outlet, then it opens out not onto paradise but onto the everydayitself. This is very logical, we can agree, as soon as the birth of purgatory is inscribedinto the heart of that movement of salvation in the world that reaches its climaxwith ascetic Protestantism's "ethics of profession," as soon as its system appears onthe horizon of the "ethics of conviction" and the promotion of intention (the "anal-ysis of intentions") that must have brought about the great change of aural, indi-vidual, and private confessions, which opened up the "pioneer frontier" of intro-spection and personal responsibility ("these were the beginnings of psychologicalmodernity").33

In the immanence here of a religious, social, and historical axiol-ogy whose effects can be pinpointed immediately, Capital Times can be seen to meanthe nexus between temporalization, capitalization, and subjectivation. It belongedto the logic of things that the form of the expression tended to espouse the singu-larity of each of these "knots," the stride of each of the examined conducts of time. Idid not think that the whole ought to be homogenized after the fact by a singlesystem of writing and organization.

The Accident of Times

An Aristotelian Study

Many the wonders, but nothing

Beyond man, more strangely, gets up to go.

... the oldest and most primitive Sophocles, Antigone

personal relationship is that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: it was here that

one person first encountered another person, first measured oneself against another.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

F O R A moment, we stayed within a kind of circle... the circle of the understandingof beginnings and the development of sense that left no other choice: we had, inHusserPs terms, to "zigzag" backward and forward. Between Aristotle and Marx,Marx and Aristotle, from the greatest violence to the highest anxiety, our under-standing of the beginnings gave shelter to a certain abstract figure of time, bothanodine and excessive, mysterious and anonymous, a certain insubordination of capi-tal time freed from the planetary rule that presided over the destinies of the worldand over the destiny of the Greek polis.

Our task is already laid out before us if no circle closes uponitself without every completion representing the possibility of a deviation, withoutconstituting a circuit bifurcating itself in the difference of its repetition. Our task isto be situated at the point of time's bifurcation in order to let it roll [pour que c,a sederoule]. In order that the circle (of time, of the search for lost time, too) face upto the question that triggered the departure: that the history of the conquest oftime be brought out as a form of the most radical change, that the genealogy ofcapital/time be brought out as the archaeology of the metaphysical figure (eidos) of"capitalism" (it will have to be shown too, of course, that capitalism is a metaphysi-cal figure) a geology of modernity.

In its beginnings, this movement is expressed in the irreversiblemode of a provocation of what is unequal in and of itself. It is the convulsive move-ment of what does not come back to itself, the specter of what does not come backinto itself, thereby breaking the natural motion of need that had bodied forth inthe notion of reciprocity that led to exchange, and from exchange to the polis thereby drawing the entire astrologies of the Same into an abyss of dissimilarity.1

M-M'. After money understood as the number of need, the mediator of an exchangethat compensates for divergences from the equilibrium (C-M-C) insofar as the unitof measure is "in truth" the need that holds and maintains all things together (pantasunekhei);2 after a time subordinate to the circulation of commodities as to the cir-cular motion of celestial bodies, the spare change of cosmic exchanges, always definedby the manner in which it incarnates privileged moments and positions (accordingto Henri Maldiney's expression, it opens no other horizon than that of a futureforeclosed by the enclosure of time), there succeeds a time seized by a certain "some-thing" forever new that grows in its heart (the briskly increasing number of capital-ization) and throws the economy of the spheres off balance. A potential time thatsubmerges and forces movement, which projects and dissipates it in the labyrinth ofhomogeneous and irreversible series. An abstract and creative time that, for havingforsworn its supralunary content, for having overturned its model of eternity, andfor having espoused the eis apeiron progression of chrematistics, no longer finds itsrule in the motion of the world and imprints its own unruliness [dereglement] upon it.

The situation develops to the point that movement itself is whatbecomes abstract, what relates to any given moment at least virtually, what is nolongeras Plotinus will assert after he had considered movement to be completelydefined at every moment"linear or circular except by accident."

This is the time of dislocation. The earthly sphere is dislodged.

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This is the time of the world crisis marked by a break in theharmony between soul and world.

This is the time of the great uprising against the cosmic orderthat "held" the multiple anomalies of the sublunary world under the sway of themetaschematism of the Planetarium only by curving movement in such a way thatlocal motion passed through set points and planes (the cosmo-theological frameworkof the Timaeus that underlies the Physics);3 the uprising against the "economic" order,too, which joins and enjoins the members of the koinonia by making them grav-itate around the meson (the ontopolitical adjustment of the Nicomachean Ethics).

From this disintegration on, Aristotelian thought could not avoidinscribing the principle of Order into the heart of the corpus.4 Whence, already,the enigma so often reiterated that the stated theorist of the polis surfaced at themoment of its dissolution. Yet Aristotle was also the first about whom it could legit-imately be asserted that his ontology was wholly a politics of being. Under the nameof ousiology, he mounted a general economics of value opposing the truth of thingsto the crisis initiated by chrematistics and relayed by the Sophists: words and coinsno longer refer to themselves, within the determination of a generative economyof the sign opening onto the sole regimen of linguistics and economics.

Chrematistics or Unequal ExchangeWhat about the system of this practice for the Aristotle of the Politics, for the Philoso-pher grappling with the "chrematistic" subversion of a mercantile economy thatdetaches wealth from property, wrenches money from its mediating condition, with-draws exchange from the law of equivalence to derive a profit from itthat substi-tutes interest for the social unit of need, the natural referent of the monetary sign?5

Here, on the surface of the Aristotelian narrative, arises the untimeliness of a hybridscience, without regards or moorings, distinguishing itself from the oikonomia ruledby use-value inasmuch as that circulation becomes the source of a limitless mone-tary wealth: "money is the beginning and the end of this kind of exchange" (emphasisadded), the M-C-M cycle. A science of money whose bad infinity haunts the organic-ity of the body politic by unsettling the postulate of exchange between equivalents.

Aristotle seems not to rest until he has accentuated the line offracture between oikonomia and the art of acquisition that "being nearly connected[dia ten geitniasin} with the preceding is often identified with it [the confusion betweenthese two forms is what has caused some to think that the acquisition and infiniteaccretion of money is the final goal of the economy]. In fact [as though he were

T h e A c c i d e n t o f T i m e : A n A r i s t o t e l i a n S t u d y

correcting himself]; although they are not very different, neither are they the same[esti d'oute he ante tei eiremenei oute porro ekeines]. The kind already described is givenby nature; the other is not [esti d'he men phusei he d'ou phusei auton], but rather isgained by experience and art [tekhne]."6 Could this last clause, however, not justifyin and of itself the radical alterity of chrematistics? Did the Stagirite, in a polemicagainst Solon, not take care to specify that the quest for and establishment of anunlimited wealth did not in any case signify the accumulation of a "true and natu-ral" wealth obtained through excess, and diverted from its instrumental role (the roleof action in the service of praxis, of good living) with a view to the satisfaction ofneeds in the happy life of the oikos'?7 Is the other nature of this wealth what impliesthe expulsion of chrematistics from domestic economy, removed from the naturalplace where all property comes to be inscribed? What sense can be given, then, tothis impossible affinity, if it is indeed a break that cuts open the text?

This break, this opening, already falls as an effect whose appara-tus can be readily summarized. As opposed to domestic economy, which, as a prac-tical knowledge tied to a praxis limited to the time of the act, has its own end in itself,chrematistics appears as a poietic or productive science, turned toward the productionof a work external to the agent, with no inferiority at all. Whence the infinite char-acter of the production of its end, that is, the product (wealth "scientifically" pro-duced through an action becomes means of production, endowed with a time properto it), if infinity is that which "taking it quantity by quantity, we can always takesomething outside."8 The man ofpoiesis being always as if outside himself is the rea-son why he must find in the order of knowledges the absolute end that will circum-scribe his relative end within the organic unity of the nomos, of the isonomia, (by)assigning him his natural place.9 His very definition is at stake. Now, the quest fora definition of chrematistics undertaken in the Politics does not succeed: remainingshapeless, chrematistics will occupy no rank within the hierarchical order of knowl-edges and acts. Shapeless, because the form of a thing is what it has that can be boundor set upon within a definition (logos). How can the limits of something that has nolimits be defined? (It can already be seen that chrematistics recuperates somethingof the indetermination and ungraspable potential [dunamis] of the primal hule, ofthe "Urhyle," casting into the logically ordered series of natural forms those mon-strous productions by which the resistance of becoming manifests itself.) Is thisbecause "those who maintain the infinite series destroy the good... Further, thosewho speak thus destroy knowledge" (nothing can be known before arriving at thefurthermost and indivisible elements of a definition)?10 It is tempting to say that fromthe Aristotelian perspective this problem is posed for every art and every technique.

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We are obliged to return to the letter of the text of the Politics ifwe wish to grasp the disjunctive function in action as it works out the triage betweenthe no-place of chrematistics and the hearth of economics:

[Exchange] arises at first from what is natural, from the circumstance that some have too little,others too much. Hence we may infer that retail trade /kapelike/ is not a natural part /kata

phusin/ of the art of getting wealth; had it been so, men would have ceased to exchange/allage/ when they had enough... This sort of barter /metabletike/ is not part of the wealth-getting art and is not contrary to nature, but is needed to satisfy the natural /kata phusin/

wants of our self-sufficiency /autarkeia/. The other form of exchange grew logically /kata logon/out of this one. When the inhabitants of one country became more dependent on those

of another, and they imported what they needed /eisagesthai hon endeeis/, and exported whatthey had too much o//ekpempein hon epleonazon/, the use of money /he tou nomismatos

khresis/ necessarily /ex anagkes/ came about. For the various necessities of life are noteasily carried about, and hence men agreed to employ in their dealings with each other

/pros sphas autous/ something, which being intrinsically useful / khresimon/, was to have the use[ khreian/ of easily changing hands /eumetakheiriston/ in order to get the necessaries of life, for

example, iron, silver, and the like. Of this the value was at first /to men proton/ measuredsimply by size and weight, but in process of time /to de teleutaion/ they put a stamp upon it, to

save the trouble of weighing and to serve as a sign /semeion/ of the amount of the metal.When the use of coin had once been discovered, out of the barter of necessary articles arose the other

art of wealth-getting, namely, retail trade /kapelikon/; which was at first probably [isos]a simple matter, but took on a more professional air /tekhnikoteron/, as soon as men learned by

experience whence and by what exchanges the greatest profit /kerdos/ might be made.Originating in the use of coin, the art of getting wealth is generally thought to be chiefly concerned

with it, and to be the an which produces riches and wealth.^

Chrematistics properly called would thus issue from a retail trade(kapelike} initially limited to the sphere of needs able to be inscribed on the autarchi-cal body of the koinonia, a small-time commerce that, if it is not originarily derivedfrom a counternatural art of acquisition, probably (isos) never existed under a non-chrematistic monetary form.

Let's pause here over the purely economic explanation of the ori-gin of money. The invention of money as an accounting unit, as a means of circu-lation, metron and meson, would be determined by the growth of the city insofar asit makes distant trading a necessity in order to compensate for the impossibility ofa collective autarchy, the sine qua non condition of political freedom and autonomy.


This traffic in foodstuff remains "natural" because it allows for the reestablishmentof a self-sufficiency that is not at all self-sufficient, with the provisioning of "thevarious necessities of life." Thus Aristotle, like Marx, has money (nomisma) born ofthe exchange between communities.12 But, in distinction to Marx, far from havingmoney crop up spontaneously from direct barter, Aristotle defines it in terms of aconvention (nomos) between collectivities designed to facilitate their commercial rela-tions. Expressed in the briefest possible way, this is the meaning of that develop-ment that assimilates monetary "constraint" to the delimitation of a general spaceof circulation and comparison spilling beyond the sovereign territory of the polis.

"We grasp here," comments Edouard Will, "the contradictionbetween the introverted existence of the city (requiring autarchy) and the conditionfor this existence, a broadly extroverted economy (the negation of this autarchy)."13Let's say the principle of a conflicted reality situated beyond the sphere of justice,for political autarchy is an ideal impossible to be realized given that "complete autarchy"exists only "as a manner of speaking."14 It remains to be known if the self-evidenceof the model stifles all answers to the question of the passage of the kapelos in thechrematistic sphere of monetary accumulation, for everything takes place as if the"transpolitical" use of money contained its own mainspring, though a hidden one,veiled to some extent by the text's "evolutionary" dimension.

The question is obvious: what about the sovereignty of moneyas a means of circulation? A second answer, perhaps just as secretly Aristotelian asMarxian: money turns value into a flow that tends to escape the juridical frame ofpolitical territoriality. In other words, money aims to trace out its proper space as aprivate space, split off from the political. (Just read Solon, Lysias, or Demosthenes,or consider Athenian legislation on the provisioning of wheat.) Would it be becausethe function of money as a mere medium of exchange (as an intermediate term: theopposite of an end) is essentially precarious from the moment the apparatus opens ontotime, "as long as the sale is not followed by a subsequent purchase," because "noone directly needs to purchase because he has just sold"?15 As opposed to barter,monetary circulation splits the immediate identity of these two acts by introducingthe antithesis of selling and buying, which appear as mutually indifferent, separatein space and time. The linkage C-M-C should really be written C-M/M-C. "Andfor future exchange [huper de tes mellouses allages]" writes Aristotle in the NicomacheanEthics, "if we do not need a thing now [ei nun meden deitai], we shall have it if everwe do need it [ean deethei] money is as it were our surety [egguetes]."16

Thus, under the cover of need, money as a means of reserve, asa temporal reserve, maintains the initiative for its holder in relation to the reverse

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circulation of M-C/C-M, M-C-M in its condensed expression. Money mediated inrelation to itself via the commodity appears in the final analysis as its own unit.The "dissociation" of exchange, along with the stocking of commodities and mone-tary accumulation, is precisely what allows for speculation and the quest of auton-omous value for its own sake, reflected in the mirror of the commodity represent-ing nothing more than money, which turns exchange into a rather odd affair whoseessence is dual (a duel). It is a duality before being an equivalence, in which thereversal of the means/end relation creates the order of merchants by opening upthe duration of the durable. Thus we can verify that "the buying power of moneyexpresses the temporal dimension of circulation when it takes the C-M-C form...Consequently, the ambivalence of money is expressed by the irremediably conven-tional character of all measures of its buying power. What is essential is found inthe reactions this measure is capable of triggering in private behaviors."17

In this use of money to speculate on a future result, "foreverbanking upon future profits" (Marc Bloch) rather than discharging the accounts ofneed, the emporos (the sea merchant, who is never mentioned here) has nothing tobegrudge the kapelos. The emporia is kapelike: what differentiates the two forms ofexchange is the scale of operations, not the mode of functioning, which inevitablyworks "to someone else's detriment" (ap'alleloi, negative reciprocity) in subvertingand alienating the mediator.18 This is at the opposite pole from the model on whichthe development of the Nicomachean Ethics rests, grafted on justice, of which we aretold that it has probably (isos) never been verified under a nonchrematistic mone-tary form.

In following the convention of reserve, it is soon discovered thatmoney, which appears as a sign only insofar as it itself is wealth, the market valueof the metal, and the metal's affect (the sign of the amount of the metal that is "notalways worth the same"19), is probablynever a mere means of circulation, apractical guarantee of the circularity of exchanges and of the equivalent form ofmoney as the measure of values, a pure homogenizing convention that makes goodscommensurable in view of satisfying needs and harmoniously developing exchanges.Under ideal money is real money, money properly called, the infinite potential of money that"measures all things" because it is the measure of all things, just as man is for the SophistProtagoras.20

"It is in the world market," writes Marx, "that money first func-tions to its full extent." It is in the exchange between city-states, Aristotle tells us,that the money form mediatedly arises. That social potential thus becomes the pri-vate potential of individuals under the cover of political affirmation.21


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On the one hand, the genesis of money proposed by Aristotle iscommanded by this "needy," chreiatistic (from khreia: need) exteriority for whichmoney is the conventional substitute. On the other hand, the money form, intro-duced with the appearance of "international commerce," does away with all consid-erations about the needs of others,22 the only guarantor of the virtue of exchange,of exchange as a social bond... all of which at one stroke comes down to explainingmoney through chrematistics and chrematistics through money. It is as if moneyhad never been a mere means of exchange, as if its function as "common measure"was legitimating in advance, behind the formal equality of the terms made commen-surable, the inscription of an infinite debt turning virtually every exchange into ameans of monetary production and appropriation and all money into money "withinterest," into time-money, and turning all wealth that escapes its natural place,the oikos, into "progressive value, money that is forever burgeoning and growing,and, as such, capital." From there, every "economic" exchange is turned into a "chre-matistic" exchange.

As exaggerated as it may seem at first glance, couldn't this deduc-tionin some way: posaccount for the progression that led Aristotle to "strug-gle against the common opinion according to which money is the common measure,""to stress that money passes for a middle term, which it really isn't," because in truth(tei aletheiat) need is the only common measure?23

This equivalence nonetheless remains insufficient, for it is capa-ble of engendering the illusion of a first (?) dialectical representation of the moneyform. (Through Boisguillebert, we know of the slave of commerce who becomesits master, or rather its tyrant; and under Marx's pen, the valet acceding to the titleof sovereign and God of commodities: chrematistics always appears as the perver-sion of the alienated mediator.) To resume my thoughts into one formulation: onehesitation may hide another. It is thereby to be understood that if Aristotle "hesi-tates," it is not before the problem of the commensurability of use-values (he elab-orates a theory of need irreducible to every classical approach to the measure ofvalue outside of exchange).2* If Aristotle himself tells us where "he falters," to useMarx's expression, it is not before the insufficiency of his concept of (exchange)value, but before the concept of use (value) as the foundation for a political-economicexchange (C-M-C) whose historicity becomes hypothetical in the course of attempt-ing to define chrematistics.25 To the point that if "they are not very different," it isperhaps not so much because chrematistics appears as the threatening reverse side orthe emancipated form of economics, but rather because the political science of exchangelocates its principle only in the (de)figuration dictated by the critical imperative.26 It

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must be noted here that by following out Aristotle's track, the entire Marxist analysisof Spaltung turns out to be affected at the very level of this immediate form of cir-culation; it is opened up to the efficaciousness of the Critique, for which "theinequality of exchanged values is but an accident."27

Riding Backward on the Beast of TimeAt the point of concluding the chapter of the Politics dedicated to chrematistics,Aristotle introduces a new element into the analysis:

The most hated sort of trade, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out ofmoney itself, and not from, the purposes it was meant to serve. For money was intended to be used in

exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth ofmoney from money /tokos: born, engendered] is applied to the breeding of money because the

offspring /ta tiktomena/ resembles the parent. That is why of all modes of getting wealth this isthe most unnatural.2*

Thus tokos, interest, whose root tek- evokes the son being calledby the name of the father, cuts itself off from the order oiphusis and of natural repro-duction to become the symbol of a monstrous filiation. If money does not engenderinterest but is engendered by it in some fashion, doesn't that invert the Just Rela-tion of Generations? Isn't the child giving birth to the procreator? Money wouldnot only be, as Shakespeare believed, an agent of divorce between son and father (afactor of dissolution) but more originarily a factor of filial inversion. Interest wouldthus appear to be the operator of this counternatural filiation that diverts moneyfrom its "economic" origin by establishing, under the pretext of differed exchange,a debt taking the form of a monetary creation money engendering money. In thissense, interest would resume the chrematistic exchange to the extent that it forcibly(biaios} gives the initiative to money.29 Profit-creating capital would be but a derivedform of interest-producing capital. In short, chrematistic techniques would obeywhat we call banking techniques.

Arnaud Berthoud warns that this is a strange and difficult ideato grasp, for it immediately must be added that interest would no longer be discern-ible solely at the moment of borrowing: it would be intimately bound to every useof money detached from its normative function as intermediate term (meson} under-stood as the simple monetary expression of equivalence. Tokos would be the namegiven here to the device transforming exchange into an activity of "scientific" pro-duction whose effects the Politics has taught us to measure. Detaching money fromits political condition of mediation, this activity mobilizes and expropriates wealth,


monetarizes and dissolves ancient property, completes the metamorphosis of goodsinto commodities, and finally converts reciprocity into mutual debt. Interest is no morethan the number of the movement of (monetary) growth following the desire formoney that binds individuals to each other in the radical injustice of a debt that noth-ing can acquit. As cipher of desire, interest imposes "that relationship to objects,which we call subjectively our desire and objectively their value."30 As number of thesimulacrum, interest operates in a world of exigencies at once impersonal and inter-personal. Berthoud writes that "growth is just the effect of a game of desire withmoney," and interest "the product of measuring currency by the desire for money."31

Interest is the effect of a disproportion establishing inequality in terms of a caesuraby which the permanence of money no longer coincides with the social presence ofneed, or with the immanence of an end with each act of exchange, but with the dif-ferance of a power (and not of a consuming) obliged to ignore the "concrete time"of presence in order to drain the surplus formed by each sequence of chrematisticexchange.

By another pen we read:

Whose Child do you harvest?... Who sets the Child backward upon the Beast of Time?...You have stolen Time... You have bent Time with the Tooth of Lust, torn the Hem of

Righteousness, and the Wind may enter and the Cyclone follow!... Made of Society into anUnknown Quantity and this we are not built to bear... You counterfeit thereby changinga Known Sum into a Sum needing Recount. Have you not, therefore, made the whole of

Society a Dupe?32

Chrematistics thus empties the city of its presence to itself byfreeing the (monetary) sign of any relation to its natural referent. Need and its rep-etition marked the place of things within the limits of an identificatory present inwhich potential becoming actualizes only what is already there, what is authenticbecause it always is: organized like cosmic realities having to serve as a model formoral and political conduct.33 Need and its repetition condensed the community'scollective memory, expressed the proper time of the polis. With a fundamentallyGreek gesture, this proper finds its sense by reducing the amount of time in thePlace of the City according to a topic presenting the con-gruency of the heteronomousfigures of need, the com-parison of the singular terms of exchange as pure possi-bility of the One-same's difference from itself. The figure of chrematistics is hence-forth prescribed, inscribed, within the alteration of the order of cobelonging, throughthe wild "temporalization" of the eventless reversibility of political space a posi-tion of insubordination allowing the "scientific" modernity of its production, of its

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dangerous infinity, to be foreseen. The sign becomes a producer of events (and inevents there is something that is determined only "through the introduction of afragment from the future event")34 as the instance that assures the advent of a neworder in a single dimension, and the sign no longer appears except under the index-ical form of a speculative becoming through which thought is as if it were thrownoutside itself. Having the effect of breaking up the (supertemporal) reciprocity oftransactions guaranteed by commutative justice, monetary "speculation" affects the(ethical) reflexivity of need and of righteous action as well as the (political) reflec-tion "in which every present reflects itself as present at the same time representingthe former,"35 closing back on itself. Speculation determines a break in the onto-cosmological circlewhere ontology was oriented in terms of the cosmos only tothe extent that the cosmos's own regime was that of an ontological model thatwas subordinating the economic to the political, the science that is "sovereign"(kuriotates) in the play of the same.36

The present of the polis, or the political present, had its root,as it were, in a perfect tense of the state; that is to say, in a telos confounding itselfwith the limit, perns, where the close of an action is carried out in the form of itsoccurred being (the satisfaction of need) on the basis of an arkhe (justice) subtractedfrom the sequence of events through its integration into a totality, koinonia, indis-sociable from the constitution of the whole of reality in the kosmos. This is finallythe situation that, according to Henri Maldiney, defines the diathesis of the Greekperfect, where actuality and potentiality are indiscernible in a consciousness that"is above all presence... in a copresent worldin a dateless empeiria."37 And theact, in the coinciding of present and perfect ("at the same time one thinks, and onehas thought," Metaphysics IX, 6, 1048 b34; translation modified), is what makes thepotential pass "into action," a potential completely relative to the being in action,to the eidos to which it was predestined.

In sum, because potential (dunamis) is the name of a being-appropriated-toward-an-end, change occurs in Aristotelianism only when effectedin a telos that gives its name to the change;38 where time henceforth finds its truebeginning because change can be grasped only in the perfect, "in the first moment[it] was carried to its term" (en hoi protoi epekteleste he metabole), in a form assimi-lated to the immobile destiny of the completed act, to the preestablished designthat sub-tends it to the past of something that has always already happened.39

The perfect tense is therefore referential time, time viewed retrospectively by plac-ing oneself at a final point. The present, the present instant that divides earlier fromlater, the dialectical nun, originates in the sense of closure so defined by the Stagirite:


"It [the point of time that divides] always belongs to the later affection."40 If it isright to say that the dividing point is already the future to the extent that the telos,last in terms of its genesis, is first in nature with reference to the thing,41 it must beadded that the beginning of the future, logically distinguished from the end of thepast, is within that end only the payment due [echeance] on the past having come toterm, from which the future comes forth \pro-vient].

This is so much the case that need in the Ethics, like change inthe Physics, has "its final term [telos] in its first principle [arkhe] and its first principlein its final term."42 Playing within this structure, the intervaling present, stretchedbetween two needs, neutralizes the tension between desire and value. It is nothingmore than the nonincidental accomplishment, which forms the pour-soi of experi-ence, of the em-peiria in its "political" version, the pour-soi of a certain interioriza-tion of the limit where the transformation of the act into a state of the subject iseffecteda subject whose future, and desire, has only to be foreclosed in the extin-guished term of need.

Whence by enfeebling the general sense of Aristotelian tempo-rality, chrematistics substitutes a concrete time subordinate to the needs that scanit (a time that is aspectual and limited, alive and singular with a-genetic presence)with an im-perfect (ateles) time, without Anteriority and hence abstract, open (indefi-nitely) and serial (the series, already, of "propitious" moments), infinitely divisible,and whose access is furnished by a future that is banking on current value. The futureis the magnetic pole of value.

Note that in Greek, the future is, along with the subjunctive thatexpresses the category of will, the sole mood to have a strictly temporal sense whereone is acting upon time as it arrives and that one anticipates and summons. Thatone makes happen. The future institutes a power, a doing, a creation (poiesis) that isirreducible to a past, which keeps casting me always into the direction of futurity.43

Every doing is endlessly to be recommenced. Not even the order of material repe-tition and reproduction re-presents (the) accumulated time (of the past); it is ratherthe very process of infinite accumulation in (the) time (to come). Aristotle didn'tget it wrong. It is just that the future affirms the unraveling of a creative temporal-ization; it un-covers the unlimitedness of time and the ambiguous, "opportunistic,"present of the kairos;44 it opens onto the time of premeditation and of foresight, ofthe intention and pre-tension of the ego anchored in the project that it has machi-nated in advance as a function of the kerdos it had banked on. The ego does notdecide; it is itself determination and decision, it "slices," decides (decidere) the tem-poral flow and with this caesura makes a split capable of drawing off a difference from

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repetition of exploiting the repetition of need. Now. Now made equal to what is initself unequal, the desire of the ego, the ego of desire cannot exhaust its potentialwithin the sole horizon of acquired and actual perfection, complete its movementin the repose without incidence of the perfect, in the stable autarky of being regu-lated in its determination by the eternal return of the same and of time circling aroundthe "now." Now, "you have twisted Time with the Hook of Concupiscence"...Everything becomes anticipation within the series of time, in relation to "that purelyformal distribution of the unequal as a function of the caesura." If money bears withinitself an ineffaceable debit, it is because time, converted into the money form, isdiscovered as an empty form, a pure order of time, quantitative and differential, mea-surable and coinable, which nothing can come to fill. The time without qualities ofa future-oriented humanity that cuts time into segments of linear duration that areput to profit in order to realize investments and "accumulation." And so time itselfis "invested": there is no advance but in time, no payment due that is not temporal.

Capitalization or the futuristic conquest of time... a chronothesis.So it goes with chrematistics: it is for Aristotle literally a ques-

tion of time, the business of a time that creates simulacra, the fiction of a "nonwealth"at a remove from the polis, far from the equilibrium of property. It designates finallythat depoliticizing (de-realizing) anticipation that can derive profit from exchangebecause it is inscribed above and before the monetary equivalence it develops, onthe tangent of the space of comparison and on the curve of appropriation that itkeeps inextricably enveloped.

I was going to make the case, in agreement with Berthoud, thatthe essence of all profit is only the effect of a game of desire with money. We nowsee that the chrematistic-monetary relation is never anything but a certain usage oftime; that the exchange value of time,45 freed from a presence to itself that was fix-ing and measuring the movement of goods and bodies, freed from the real move-ments it was measuring, is deployed as valorization in the mercantile speculationthat invested it. For Aristotle, it expresses the movement making out of a simu-lacrum-measurement the means of its own proliferation. The simulacrum of mea-sure, the number of the simulacrum, because, Berthoud adds, "the desire for moneyproduces its measurements for pursuing its object," capitalization; "the increasingseries is only the increase of a measurement without being the increase of any particularobject" (emphasis in the original). Money is not the measure of a preexisting substance(ousia), true wealth, the wealth of the oikos, without exteriority or ornamentation,declined according to units of need. It is nothing. Nothing but the all-powerfulnessof exponentiality. Nothing but the invention of the "inexponential," abstract wealth


of the world of values: signifying that its total is really equivalent to nothing, or justabout. Precisely. And in this nothing, in this instant that has come, ostentatiously,outside of all need, far from all presence, what turns out to be dissolved is the car-dinal reality of time as subordinated to objective and actual motion (that accompa-nies an action), motion-time that constituted something like the lodgment andy/m-tion of every being and every thing. That time dissolves to the profit of a time thatis unhinged, no longer referring to anything but the tightly bound network of simu-lacra. The hinge, cardo, Deleuze recalls, "is what ensures the subordination of timeto those properly cardinal points through which pass the periodic movements whichit measures." Something of Aristotle's famous definition of time as the number ofmotion (arithmos ara tis ho khronos) will be recognized here, the definition that Marx,after Hegel, is not far from repeatingbut in a sense that reveals, if not the trig-gering process, at least the repressed double: abstract time as perspective, the num-ber of the motion of unequal exchange; or "demented time or time outside thecurve that a god gave it, liberated from its overly simple circular figure... in short,time revealing itself as an empty and pure form... in order to assume a mercilessand straight form."46

Understand: off its rocker [devergonde].Along with Sophocles and Thucydides, Aristotle was obliged to

discover the strange powers of this anomalous time that is no longer so much theobject of the original discussion between kerdos and dike as the very subject of chre-matistic secession. This secession is what brings to the surface "amid the rubbleand broken bits of the city-state, consigned to being commodities, the idea of anew world, a new life, and a new political orderalong a single dimension."47 Thencomes the most worrisome of times (for apolis man, "with no city, no site"), thetime of the soul's boldness and of being's dissonance, the time of the fear of God.The time of dissension, where "money stands alone before God" because "it amassedin itself everything that is most venomous in the temporal..."

"Through whatever frightful adventure, through whatever me-chanical aberration, through a gap, through a deregulating, through a monstrous follyof the mechanism, what was only supposed to serve exchange completely invadedthe value to be exchanged. It need not just be said, then, that the scale of values hasbeen overthrown in the modern world. It needs to be said that it has been annihi-lated, since the apparatus of measurement and exchange and appraisal has invadedthe whole of the value it was supposed to measure, exchange, appraise. The instru-ment has become matter and object and world."48 This is the modern world accordingto Charles Peguy.

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It appears that its "modernity" clings to nothing, perhaps, otherthan the globalization and schizoid universality of that originary reversal that com-mands the decentering, the deregulation, and the monstrous folly of the temporal mech-anism. Let us dare to take a step farther, which would allow us to think the formand content of time as staged together. We could then say: taking on both the ancientand the Christian worlds with the same contestation, with a single disequilibriumthat reduces them both to "a single and common disaster," the modern (world) isnot what comes after a "first," a first false movement onto the stage of the world.Instead of the natural and reflected movement of physical representation, the forcedand capitalizing movement of the Psukhe would lead the world, would knock it offits hinges as the embryo of a modern and unhinged drama, whose true hero wouldbe the one Heidegger calls "the individual tied to the mode of scientific thought."49

It would be rather as Peguy wants it, though in a very strange way, this first time inthe history of the world. It's "from the beginning" that it is for the first time: theexact degree to which the very idea of a first time becomes enigmatic. First, becauseit exists "since the first time," in the way of a hollow mark that would haunt thesocial in its most constant operation: coding desire, facing up to the hauntingeffect of decoded flows.50 Then, since even before coming into existence, this mod-ern world already acts as the exorcised limit that works progressively, like the antic-ipated potential that operates regressively and inverts time's shock wave by liberatingthe flows of desire. It all happens a little as though the chrematistic deregulationwas what repeated in advance the capitalistic operation of decoding without in anycase producing a capitalism properly called. Finally, it should be emphasized thatthis reversal bearing Clio's mark implies that retrospective categories produce effectson the same level of contingency as prospective categories.51 It all "begins" by theneed to comprehend history retrospectively in the light of "capitalism."

Aristotle's tragic modernity, those pages written on the versoof history, anticipating and repeating the end to represent it in order to conjureaway the indispensable origin of a dislocated time, deviating from the curve givento it by some god, demiurge, or archon... this is the Aristotle whom Peguy hon-ored as the only Modern among the Ancients.

Of course, we should refrain from letting ourselves be abusedby this "modernity" by giving it a philosophical import it doesn't have. Its signifi-cation is symptomatic. It is reduced to sheltering the dynamics of an impulse whosetemporal apparatus will never be thematically explicated. As we have said, the defi-nition of chrematistics doesn't come about; it gets lost in the series of simulacra,gets blocked in the strange menagerie of potentialities that surface one after the


other out of hubris and overwhelm the concept (horismos) by sweeping away its limit,the limited instant of the nun conceived as horos. Defined it can scarcely be, exceptby threatening the keystone of the Aristotelian institution, in which its historico-metaphysical possibility and fragility are condensed. That keystone is astronomy,or rather astro-^gy as covering over the question of the sense of sublunary timethat leads back to the representation of the circular movement of the heavens, whichenvelops all things in opposition to everything that happens (this is the excess of sense:sense in its excess and not in its lack as what measures the growth of entropy).52Once again, an ontology of the most "natural"53 movement elides the problem ofthe supplement of origin, of the supplement of soul that brings to time only acciden-tal discernment and measurement (this is the sense of the excess: excess through"internal sense" or ipseity as the lodging of atopos, apolis manand not throughthe violent nature of a movement that, despite the effort to tear bodies from theirnatural place, still continues to oppose the effective emancipation of place withininfinite space).54

The Accident of TimeCouldn't we object to this final point, essential to Aristotle's demonstration? Isn'tAristotle himself the one who asks, on at least two occasions, "whether if soul didnot exist time would exist or not"?55 Doesn't he answer, as one customarily summa-rizes this passage that is difficult to read and that has singularly divided its com-mentators, that if the soul is the only thing that can count, without a soul there can-not be any time as number of the movement between earlier and later? Even more,didn't he come to this definition after having shown that "we perceive [aisthanometha]movement and time together [hama]," specifying that, even in the dark, and withno affection (paskhomen) in the body, if any movement takes place in the soul (en teipsukhei), it seems (dokef) "at once" that some time has indeed elapsed?56 Taking arecent interpretation as an example, should we conclude that the Kantian break,just as the Heideggerian reprise of the Kantian gesture, was prepared by Aristotle'sPhysics IVstill the founding book, the Grundbuch of Western philosophy, in Hei-degger's formulation previously citedgiven that time is there (already) under-stood as the form of what can take place only en tei psukhei, as "the form of innersense"?57 The stakes involved in the question justify a quick return to these twopassages in their context, and first 219 a, about which Octave Hamelin wrote inself-congratulation: "It is indisputable that Aristotle, unconsciously and despite him-self, takes a step here in the direction of idealism."58

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This piece is introduced by the following consideration: "Whenwe perceive [aisthometa] and distinguish [horisomen] a change we say time has elapsed;evidently time is not independent of movement and change."59 If sensation is initself a movement,60 the question quickly becomes: can it be said that time is (already)the number of the soul's movement, or, to be more precise, is it identified with theanterior-posterior structure of the aisthesis, which marks the alterity of instants,unites time and movement without any objective movement being necessary?Grave confusion is possible, for at no moment does Aristotle imply any inferencefrom the conditions of the perception of time and the experience of internal dura-tion to some real dependence on the being of time. He merely says that perceivingtime is to have the sensation of at least an internal change that reveals the existenceof time to us. This is a "realist" preoccupation stated on the basis of the telos ofphysical science, of "the phenomena always and imperatively given to percep-tion,"61 "since it seems that there is nothing outside and separate in existence fromsensible spatial magnitudes."62

So, after the thesis that identified time with movement had beenassailed under the cover of common sense, it was inevitable that the common experi-ence of inner sense be consulted directly to show that time can in no case be con-ceived without movement, even if only "mental." In conclusion: "Time is eithermovement or something that belongs to movement. Since then it is not movement,it must be the other."

Editors have the habit of stopping the text here and of openinga new paragraph centered on the relation between anterior and posterior (219 a 10-2 5),in which it will thereafter be a question of elucidating this "something that belongsto movement" that is time. One will nonetheless pick up on the fact that theselines give their true orientation, or determination, to what precedes. If Aristotleenvisions nothing more than local motion, it is not because he is constrained bya Physics whose proper object it is, but because this motion is "the most generaland fundamental."63 Moreover, Aristotle specifies (1) that "the distinction of beforeand after holds fundamentally [kurios], then, in place," and (2) that the anterior-posterior is, with regard to its substratum, movement itself, and with regard to itsessence, something other than movement, later to be verified as nothing other thanthe numbered number of movement. The distinction is important, as indicated byBoethius's conclusion, related by Simplicius: "Nothing prevents the numericalfrom existing even without what is numbered, just as the sensible exists without whatis sensed." 64


This numerical is what institutes the founding being of time,identified at the end of Aristotle's inquiry with the circular movement of the firstheaven, the sole measurement, "the cause, within each movement, of eternal unifor-mity," and of its place in the economy of the universe.65 This numerical, independentin its profundity from the numbering soul, is what will never become an actualnumber or be numbered except "as an effect of the perception of time"the "actu-alization within thought of the numerical existent in being," according to FatherFestugiere's felicitous expression.66 To make the existence of time depend on thepresence of the soul would be to fall into the sophistical fallacy that, by neglectingthe substratum, assails the privilege of substance, in the style of the Sophist Antiphon'swords, later taken up, it is said, by the Peripatetic philosopher Critolaos: "Time isa thought [noema] or a measurement [metron], not a substance [hupostasis]."67

This leads us to the second passage we wish to examine. Butfirst, without further commentary, let us read the Stagirite's conclusion: "and it isonly when we have perceived [aisthesis] before and after in motion that we say thattime has elapsed." This same consideration a little later introduces the famous def-inition of time, where the reduction of the temporal to the local is carried out bythe intervention of a circle (the sphere of fixed points) that verifies none of theproperties of the sublunary movements whose last cause it is supposed to be. Alreadythe cosmological closure presents itself as meta-physical.

Now look at Aristotle's final answer to our problem, namely: istime but a construction of the "soul's intellect" (psukhes nous), a "noumenon" or formof what can only happen en tei psukhef?

Whether if soul did not exist time -would exist or not, is a question /aporesein/ that may fairly beasked; for if there cannot be someone to count /arithmesontos/ there cannot be anything that can be

counted /arithmeton/ either, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is eitherwhat has been counted /erithmemenon/, or what can be counted /arithmeton/. But if nothing but

soul, or in soul's reason /psukhes nous/, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there tobe time unless there is soul. Unless time is what is found then to exist /all' e touto ho pote

on estin ho khronos/, if, for example [hoion ei/, movement can exist without soul.The before and after are attributes of movement and time is these qua countable, they are time.68

Right up until the substratum is taken into account, the move-ment of the text is produced on the basis of an aporetic reasoning, an aporia whoseformal deconstruction is operated, modeled, in an important passage from the Top-ica (V, 9, 138 b27-37). (Is there any need to recall that the argument developed isinscribed "in flagrant contradiction with Aristotle's constant teaching, which posits

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the priority and the independence of the object of cognition in relation to cogni-tion itself,"69 with the ontological priority of the cognizable over the cognizing?)

Aristotle more or less says that nothing forbids apprehending athing through its potential (air through the breathable, in this case time throughthe numerical), on the condition nonetheless of not passing then from potential toact in order to show that its nonactuality entails the nonexistence of the thing to bedefined, and conclude what is proper about this thing from its nonbeing becauseessence and accident will have been confused, disregarding that "the accidental alwaysimplies predication about a subject."70 Here, we can recognize that paradox of pred-ication that forms what is properly called Aristotelian ontology, its "pure thought,"which presents itself as writing that investigates the real only with book I of thePhysics, whose systematic chains of reasoning it articulates in their critical gesture.Thus, "if the subject is the predicate, the predicate is not the subject." So much sothat it would no longer be the property of air to be breathed when air could easilyexist in the absence of an animal actually in the process of breathing; similarly, timedoes not at all require as a condition of existence that it effectively be numbered bya numbering soul.

Isn't it precisely the impropriety of the Sophists to limit theiranalysis to the domain of accidents, attributes, potentialities, and relations, forget-ful that essence, "of which they have no correct idea," is primary?71 It is also knownthat the Aristotelian refutation of sophistry goes through the distinction betweenaction and potential, between being by itself and being by accident, between essentialpredication and accidental predication. These are distinctions that cannot be under-stood except by supposing the fundamentally antepredicative being of the truth:the ontological truth, which must be anterior to perception so that a primacy ofthe thing can exert itself in sensation and govern the act of knowledge that has noother upshot than to identify the thing in itself in order to accomplish its properfunction of homoiosis. These distinctions suffice to dismiss arguments that are solelyapparent, having only the appearance of science (to make us believe that the "truthlay in the appearance"),72 while, as specified by the Sophistical Refutations, "onesolves arguments that are properly deduced by demolishing them" on the basis ofthe signifying plan of a science of

eric alliez - capital times_ tales from the conquest of time (theory out of bounds)

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