​Chapter 18

Birth and repetition appear to require a pre-existing temporal line: the cut would occur at a moment and its repetition continue afterward. Such a line would be another given preceding the act. The cut institutes its own before and after. Sediment carries that asymmetry forward and gives it duration. What the act inherits becomes its past as what it can no longer alter; the settling is present; future is unsettled. A later act may withdraw the authority of an earlier settlement, though it cannot make that settlement have never occurred.

Whitehead put this precisely: an actual entity, having reached its satisfaction, perishes subjectively and thereby becomes a stubborn fact, an object available for an act that follows. It does not recede into the past. It becomes past by losing the capacity to be otherwise. This means the past is not a region behind the present where things are kept. It is the sediment of completed determinations, and what enters it is a settlement that has stopped being made and has not stopped being repeated.

The apparent circularity is immediate. An act happens, and happening means occupying a moment in a time that was there. If the act institutes time, the act cannot have happened, since happening presupposes what it is supposed to produce. The argument seems to eat itself in a sentence.

The circularity arises when the settling is pictured as movement within a temporal container. Understood as a cut, it institutes the line's two sides. Deleuze's caesura, in the third synthesis, is a stroke that distributes an unequal before and after; the cut does not occupy the line, it produces the sides. And a cut does not take time in the way a process takes time to run. The birth of a distinction is not a short interval, which would only relocate the problem, and it is not a durationless point, which contains no occurring. The positing is not among what it posits.

Between one settling and the next lies the carrying out of the first. Write the settling as W and what it laid down as s. What follows is the same form applied again: W | s | s | s. John settles that need outweighs the prohibition; tomorrow he takes without settling anything, and the day after, and the month after.

The act supplies order and the sediment supplies duration. A cut institutes a before and an after, and the after is filled by repetition of what the cut laid down. Were W₁ followed at once by W₂, nothing would need to last — the two would border each other and no world would run between: W₁ | W₂. Duration is the stretch W₁ | s | s | s | W₂, and the world's time is the form in which what has been posited goes on being carried out.

A second will meets the first in that stretch. An act is over when it is over and offers nothing to encounter. What can be encountered is a boundary now in force, a path worn where someone first walked off the road. Call the wills W₁ and W₂. The meeting runs W₁ | s | s | W₂: the first settles and lays down s, the repetition is carried out, and the second settles against what the carrying out delivered. W₂ does not answer W₁. It answers s — a border already drawn, a word meaning what it means. W₁ may be dead, and the answer is unaffected.

W₂ leaves r, and r is carried out in turn, and a third will meets that: W₁ | s | s | W₂ | r | r | W₃. Each settling cuts into what the last one left in force and leaves something for the next to cut into. What is common between wills is the sediment, which is the only thing any of them can hand to another.

Duration is what makes a plurality of wills possible. Acts leaving nothing behind would not meet: each would go out with itself, and the next would have nothing to push against. A shared world is a shared sediment, and to be in the world is to be inside somebody's executed repetition — including the one being carried out as oneself. What a will encounters is never another will, only a form another will left.

Husserl and Derrida describe temporality already in operation, not its birth. Husserl took the lived present apart: retention is not memory, since memory recalls what is gone while retention holds what is still in the grasp; protention is not expectation. And what the analysis found at the bottom is that the living present consists of holding and anticipating — that is, of differentiated content. He describes the form of a temporality that is running, which is the only thing an analysis of consciousness can describe. Derrida then splits that present: every now, taken as a stretch, is threaded with traces of what has gone and anticipations of what is coming, and no pure point of presence turns up in the weave no matter how finely it is examined. He looks for the present in the fabric, where it is already split, and the search comes back with more fabric. Neither reaches the birth, because both are studying duration, and the birth is not a stretch of duration. Presence survives the deconstruction as what draws the line; the point on the line was dissolved.

Simondon describes such a condition as metastable: a state of excess potential relative to existing structure, in which incompatible demands coexist and none yet possesses individual existence. This is not a collection of constituted possibilities arranged in some hidden order and waiting. The resolving event does not select from stock — it invents a structure that resolves the tension, and in that operation it individuates the terms, establishes relations among them, and generates the temporal asymmetry. The prior tension becomes the past by being resolved; the inventing is the present; the capacity for further individuation is the future. An unresolved state has no inner time of its own, no sequence running inside it while it waits. It temporalizes only in being resolved.

The gap is an absence of sufficient ground for a single outcome, an informational tension rather than a material store. Metastability names how such a condition can be real without containing preformed possibilities.

Eternity has the opposite structure. Boethius defines eternity as the complete, simultaneous possession of unending life: everything present at once, nothing lacking, no succession. Augustine's semper stans, the nunc stans of the schoolmen, Maximus and his ever-moving rest — in every case eternity is fullness of presence, a maximum in which distinction has been taken up and resolved. The eternal now remains fixed because it is complete. This describes the opposite pole. The joint is not on the line because the line comes out of it; eternity lies outside succession as its fullness leaves no further possibility. Nothing can arise from fullness, which lacks nothing.

In Schelling's Weltalter drafts, a decision that splits eternity actively posits the past rather than just allowing a former present to pass — the dark ground repressed so that the present can be. The structure is nearly exact: the past produced rather than passed, the decision instituting the difference rather than occurring within it. What differs is what precedes the decision. Schelling has a Godhead in a state of groundlessness, a will that wills nothing, a proto-subjectivity that must become God — a pre-existing will, however dark and however unconscious. The theogony brings its cosmic forces with it, light against dark, expansion against contraction. No such machinery is needed: the settling is a resolution of an open question, and the past it produces is the fixing of what was inherited as no longer alterable, not the repression of anything.

Deliberation must be separated from the settling. A person deliberating takes minutes; neurons fire in sequence; the man at the table sat there for some while before his hand moved. All of that occurs in sedimented world-time and is measured by clocks that were running before he arrived. The settling is physically realized in world-time. Its instituting aspect is no further stage within that order. The preparation is extended and belongs to the order of completed determinations like everything else; the resolution is the switch of determination, and it constitutes the boundary rather than occupying either side. The account does not claim that a man's choice recreates the universe's time. World-time is the sedimented order of what has been settled, and it is not undone by a human will. A free act institutes a local asymmetry, which then sediments into that order and becomes another stubborn fact for whatever comes after.

Relativity supplies no invariant global present: simultaneity holds relative to a frame, and no now sweeps across the universe. The present is local by construction. Each settling constitutes as its past everything that could have borne on it, and as its future everything it can bear on.

A cut divides, and division leaves more behind than an order of moments. This and that stand apart, one and many are available to be counted, a case falls on the near side of a line or the far side of it. Time is one of the things a settling institutes, and the others sediment as it does.

Kant placed the forms of intuition and the categories in the subject, where they hold prior to anything given. A subject arising in a settling carries no such equipment: the forms are in force when he cuts, and he is among the things they have divided. Unity and multiplicity, cause and effect, extension and succession — sediment of the deepest kind, laid down first, hardened longest, and therefore the last to be visible as cuts.

A cut yields a difference. Language works on the differences themselves — it holds one apart from another, so that this division and that one do not run together into a single sorting of the world. The primary forms become available as forms only at that level. This makes language the one place where a cut is held out to be looked at. The oldest words carry the oldest cuts.