The Middle – 2: Aevum Philosophicum
[Go ahead; look closer. It’s next to where just about everything Greek used to be trashed before it got cleaned up and anointed the Cradle of Western Civilisation. Yes; there, in that very same pile where you just dug up “limbo,” the one from which you’d once salvaged “libido.” The pile is marked “Medieval” though you can barely tell it’s so far out from the centre (apparently, there are gradations even in rubbish). It’s the pile from a period when Jewish and Islamic thought were thriving, side by side; perhaps that’s yet another reason why some of us prefer to think of it as “The Dark Ages.” But it’s the period nestled in between the Classical and the Renaissance, the period we also call “The Middle Ages.” That’s it; right there. We’re exactly where Winnicott wants us to be—in the middle.]
The Middle Ages can be a bit disappointing for those in search of serious debate re fabulous angelic dances on heads of pins as none really did take place within that period; but there is enough in it of the deliberations on the varieties of time and being that is actually worth revisiting, especially since such deliberations often created and criss-crossed “the middle.” The Ancients, Plato and Aristotle included, had essentially identified two measures of duration: eternity and time. Eternity belongs to being in its actuality and hence to that which is and is always already perfect; time, on the other hand, corresponds to change and potentiality, to that which becomes and is hence lacking. Duration in this context is as much a quality of being, an ontology, as it is an external standard of reference by which one may track an entity’s movements and transformations, as an abstract astronomical parameter for instance. Infused with the concerns of a theology of salvation that had set out to bridge the gap between the eternal and the timely, the intellectuals of Medieval Europe were faced with the task of reconfiguring their philosophical heritage in order to accommodate a new classification of beings, a new topography, and, consequently, a new time. Henceforth, man’s relationship to God was to be rethought in terms of analogy rather than the extremes of identity and difference; angels, considered to be neither godly nor human, needed to be accounted for; the souls of the innocent who, because of accident or history, had never been baptised deserved a purgatory as something not quite heavenly but far from the fires of eternal damnation. Ultimately, time, as a quality of being, had to be recalibrated in such a way as to reflect the emerging ontological diversity.
It was mostly the scholastic texts of the 13th century (beginning with the commentaries of Alexander of Hales and extending into the reflections of Albert the Great, Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Theodoric of Freiberg, and, finally, William of Ockham) that undertook this recalibration by introducing, debating, fine tuning, and, finally, completely abandoning the idea of the aevum as a time quality in between, and distinct from, the eternal and the worldly. This is an episode in the history of philosophy that illustrates the experience of a “set situation,” to use a term of Winnicott’s which anticipates the transitional object by roughly a decade(∗), a situation in which the child (philosopher) discovers the shiny spatula (the aevum), uses it, and makes it its own by picking it up, sticking it in its mouth, dropping it, and picking it up again (by conceptualising it, debating it, writing it, and debating it some more) till, at a certain point, boredom sets in and attention moves on to another object that lies at hand. This is a “total happening,” a complete experience with a beginning, a middle, and an end that the subject, any subject, deploys as it ventures outside the mutually exclusive disjunctions of eternity and finitude, inner and outer, hallucination and reality; and by venturing outside the disjunctions, and hence outside of both inner hallucination and outer reality, as opposed to out the one and into the other, the subject can take hold of time in a new way or take hold of a new time.
In between aeternitas, a complete and indivisible eternity without beginning or end, and tempus, a limited and ever flowing time of change and decay, the aevum is a created perpetuity; it has an origin but is infinite in duration; it is, in other words, eternal in its substance but finite in its actions. The aevum is a “diminished” eternity whose time moves, in succession, in vicissitudo, and where each moment tells of a totality rather than a transient passage. The aevum is the time-stop that holds all the parts that make up a world simultaneously; it suspends them in a moment so that, in fact, they do get to make up a world. This is the audible time-stop, as the note of a bell, a chime, or an alarm, the ticking of the clock mechanically produced for the first time ever in the late 13th century. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The aevum is also the time of libido. Indeed, and for Freud, the passages from narcissism to object love (via the ideal ego and the ego ideal), from repudiated homosexuality to paranoia (via negation and projection), from any one given modality, object, or aim of the drive to another, all happen in an episodic, spasmodic fashion. The unconscious does not drift seamlessly from one configuration to another so much as it hops, in fits and starts. Here. There. And there again. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. At each location and within each interval, the components are arranged in such a way as to make sense, be coherent, organised, and set. Addressing the drive’s developmental itinerary, Freud writes: “We can divide the life of each instinct into a series of separate successive waves, each of which is homogeneous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava” (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, 128). The time of the drive is altogether different from, on the one hand, the arrow, river, or wheel (the metaphors are aplenty here) of the time that is continuity, becoming, and decay and, on the other hand, the still and indivisible time that is permanence and perfection. The time of the drive is the time of counting, in integers; it is the time of the vicissitudo.
In this context, and while some translators have accused James Strachey of betraying the letter of Freud’s “Triebe und Triebschiksale” by rendering it “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” rather than, say, “Drives and the Fate of Drives,” Strachey’s, for me, is a faithful capturing of the spirit of the text’s most radical and innovative contribution. Of course, the “instinct” has a fate and hence a history; this is a position Freud had been tirelessly advancing since the days of the Three Essays. The idea that such a history does not always unfold in “developmental” stages but that it often involves discontinuous and yet self-contained and coherent totalities in the style of a vicissitudo(∗∗), totalities that, inherently, lack nothing and lead nowhere is an idea he had not treated as clearly and forcefully before.
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∗ See “The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation” in Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis.
∗∗ as with the drive’s reversal into its opposite, turning around upon the subject’s own self, repression, and/or sublimation
