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Heaven Vacated
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Summary of
Jean Beaufret
"Hölderlin et Sophocle"
pp.16-26
What's This Commentary Got to Do with You?
In our lives, dramatic unpredictable events happen which change the course of events in our lives, but also change us ourselves in a very profound way. What is that moment like? It is as though the normal flow of time evaporated. We are left without the ability to expect what is to come, or to make sense of what has happened. It is as if time is emptied of all its contents. We are purely in the moment. And the immediate moment is unfilled and undetermined, and unconnected with the past and future which now seem to originate from this middle-point, as though we now will understand the past in relation to this current moment, and as well we now will see all future events following from this moment too. Yet maybe these moments are not so rare. Perhaps it is more of a matter of degree. That is to say, the future and the past are always originating now, although maybe only more-or-less explicitly to our awareness. And this is because the immediate moment is one of unpredictable and undetermined variation, from which we secondarily define the past and future. What would make the immediate situation a state of pure variation would be if it were constituted by differences and paradox. So the more intensely we feel the difference which makes the immediate situation what it is, the less we are living in a pre-drawn line-of time. We instead are always shooting out intensively like the differential tangent on a continuously varying curve. This is time at the heart of time, upon its grounding bedrock. This means that we are not fundamentally ‘in’ time. We need not see ourselves as being determined by a past and as determining a future. We could see ourselves more primarily as being immediate difference on the inside, in contact immediately with the differences in the world. When we more clearly see how we are constituted by difference, we can better grasp the reasons for why we are continuously changing.
Brief Summary
Jean Beaufret discusses certain Kantian influences in Hölderlin’s Remarks on Oedipus and Antigone. Hölderlin identifies a rhythmic point in the stories where the pace shifts. This break he calls the cesura, and it happens when the seer Tiresias predicts a future that is not implied from the story’s beginning. Oedipus for example should not be blamed for his crimes, so his suffering might seem unjust. In a way, the gods abandon time itself, because they cease to make time have an internal consistency; the end will no longer ‘rhyme’ with the beginning. But humans too need not act as though their actions will bring about a correspondence with their past. They need not at all view time as a story-line laid-out in advance. Instead, humans can be at the heart of time, in the a priori conditions of time and space. When the gods abandon us by no longer determining a content to the progress of time, it is like them vacating the heavens, leaving behind them a vast vacuum, a pure emptiness of time and space.
Points Relative to Deleuze
[Under Ongoing Revision]
[Under Ongoing Revision]
For Deleuze, our split-self is what explains the basis of time. And also, temporality in its rawest form is ‘rhythm’ for Deleuze, and in an even more basic form, time is void of all contents. Deleuze elaborates these ideas by looking at Hölderlin’s Remarks on Oedipus and Antigone, where he explains the disruptive rhythmic cesura when human-kind falls into an a priori pure and empty form of time. Oedipus Rex, for example, has two main parts, divided according to the pace of dramatic development unfolding in each section. The breaking point, the cesura, which balances the two unequally weighted sections, is the moment that Tiresias declares a past and future unknown to Oedipus. In fact, he declares Oedipus to be a person completely contrary to who Oedipus thought himself to been throughout his past. For all his life, Oedipus tried not to fulfill his prophesy of killing his father and marrying his mother. So in his mind, he absolutely is not such a person who would do these things. As it turns out, he in fact did do these things, but completely without knowing it.
1) So in the first place, we note that at the moment of the prophesy, Oedipus faces himself as a self completely foreign to himself. The next thing we note is that there is a lot of dramatic density and intensity at the beginning of the play. After the prophesy, it is a tortured gradual process of Oedipus self-unraveling. This means, at the point of the prophesy, we are experiencing a pure variation of speed. This makes it like an instantaneous change, which we see for example in physics’ instantaneous velocities. Before and after this moment we might regard their being extents of dramatic unfolding with their own general pace. But at the moment of change, in between these extents, is a quantity that indicates the tendency toward change. If we consider terms from the physics example, we could imagine this quantity as being like the relation between an infinitely small amount of time to an infinitely small amount of dramatic development. What we get is a value telling us the tendency toward changing in dramatic pace. But this tendency does not extend in space or time (it is based on vanishingly small values). It is non-extensive, and in fact, it would be intensive. The prophetic moment is an intensity, a piece of reality that is full of reality, but is not expressed explicitly in the actuality of the extending world birthed from these intensities. So in a sense, it is a pure quantitative variation, a pure difference, a difference without terms.
2) We normally consider rhythm as a regular pattern. But we could also think of it as being a feeling of change. A rhythm too steady would homogenize with itself. Our attention fades when a rhythmic pattern is too regular, like how we struggle to pay attention to every tick of a clock. So rhythm instead can be thought of as having a continuous variation. Rhythm could be the pure feeling of change. This then places the cesura at the heart of the dramatic rhythm of the tragedies.
We will see that for Deleuze, temporality in its rawest expression is a continuous quantitative variation in how things are given to us, that is, how they appear to us. In other words, the raw experience of the motion of time is an experience of rhythm, and at the heart of rhythm is an immediate break in our experience of the world and in our experience of ourselves.
3) The parts before and after the cesura do not ‘rhyme’. In Aeschylus’ tragedies, for example, it could be apparent to the characters that their actions will obviously bring tragic consequences. Oedipus story, however, does not fit this. He is punished even though he should not be held responsible for his crimes. And also, his tragic end is not the expected sort. Usually the characters suffer a painful death at the end of the story. Oedipus, however, goes on living. He wanders until eventually making a peaceful, painless, and glorious transition into the afterlife. So the beginning and the end do not rhyme, in his story. There is not the accordance like in Aeschylus where the initial crime finds its mete end. So at the cesura, it is like a poetic modulation. It is like writing a new poem in the middle, so that the next line does not rhyme, but seems like it should, because it caries-on from where the poem was previously developing. Deleuze regards this as the unbending of the circle of time into a line. We might find that this line is like the tangent line which could illustrate an instantaneous velocity, for example. It is a non-extending line of time. Not time as a linear continuity, like our historical time-lines. But time as a direction and tendency for development in that direction, expressed immediately and not over an extent of time. This would be time unraveling down upon its immediate a priori conditions, it being made of pure differential relations.
4) This pure form of time is empty. Beaufret makes this point very nicely. Normally in Greek tragedy, there is a fated path our lives follow, and it is dictated by the gods. But after Oedipus’ self-punishment, he is left to wander. So there is no longer a determinate content laid-out before him, at least not one that is clear in his moment of realization. And also, he had his own past pulled from underneath him like a rug. In that moment of disorientation, no past is clear to him, because at that moment when his own self becomes unclear, different pasts become equally believable and doubtable to him. So there is a complete suspension of the future and the past. And without future and past present to him, even the present loses its temporal meaning. We would not even say that he is in the present, because 'present' has little meaning without relation to past and future. Instead, we would say he is in pure immediacy. It is a non-temporal experience. Nonetheless, this experience demonstrates what lies at the heart of our experience of time. Hölderlin says that it brings us to the a priori conditions of space and time, their being pure and empty. It is not that time ceases to exist for Oedipus in his moment of realization, but rather that time is emptied of all its actual content. He experiences just the emptiness of time, what secondarily gets filled by actual events of change. Beaufret puts this very nicely. The gods reside in the heavens. When they ceased filling Oedipus’s life-time with fated content, it is like they vanished from the heavens. This leaves just the pure emptiness of the sky. This is like how he faces time not as filled by change or as flowing-by, but as the pure conditions of emptiness which allow secondarily for change to find its temporal relational ‘space’ of occurrence.
A main theme in Sophocles' Oedipus is the gods’ turning their backs on humans. So it is not atheist in the sense of us not believing in god. Rather, it is godless, in the sense of the gods existing while yet also ceasing to involve themselves in dictating the events of our lives. Oedipus is not struck-down by the gods. Rather, he is condemned to wander the earth. (16) Normally a tragic character dies from his crimes. In Oedipus’ case, he somehow survived. His death is delayed. His destiny then is no longer imposed on him. However, the indeterminacy of his destiny makes it more profound, and also more like our modern sense of the tragic, which is not violent death as in the classic Greek, but more of an abandonment to an indeterminate fate, with no recourse to divine determination. (17)
In a way, this is a shortcoming in the gods ability to interfere in Oedipus’ human life. We are no longer bound into a line of development in our lives that leads to a fate predetermined by the gods. Rather, we live entirely in the moment, but for that reason we forget ourselves. The gods usually represent a justice in time. They normally punish grave crimes with a tragic painful death. But Oedipus does not end this way. So time for him is different now. And there is infidelity both in time and in humanity. Because there is no fated divine justice in Oedipus’s life-story, there is no cyclical return of restoration and atonement. Instead, the beginning and end do not correspond to each other; they do not ‘rhyme’. So time itself has a sort of infidelity with itself. The time-path of Oedipus’ life is now wandering and indeterminate in a way. It constantly verges from its beginning. [It in a sense is a continual process of becoming low-fi, to borrow a concept from Richard Pinhas.] The other infidelity is on Oedipus’ part. He can no longer restore his life-situation to how it began. So he too continually diverges from his origin. He lives now only in the moment, with no faithfulness to how time will progress in a way that produces justice. (18)
So we no longer think of time as having a back-side and a forward-side that could harmonize or ‘rhyme’. We instead live in the moment where we feel not a cycle but something more like an oscillation of a sort, like our ship is rocking in the sea as it sails-on.
By living in the moment, and thereby forgetting themselves, humans give birth to a new memory of themselves that is even more profound. They see themselves more authentically as being apart from the gods. (19)
We might here consider Kant’s distinction between the phenomenon and the neumenon, putting aside what he says about sensible cognitions being intellectual ones as well. Hölderlin reads Kant differently than does Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. (20)
Recall how Hölderlin writes that the gods are nothing more than time. He also says that in the utmost form of suffering, there exists nothing but the conditions of time and space. These conditions are not like affections, which give us content. There is no content to a priori space and time. Kant calls them pure or empty forms of space and time. Before Oedipus, the gods determined the time spanning-out before a person’s life. The gods in a way are like the content to time. But when they depart from us, as if leaving the sky, do they not leave us with a pure void, an empty heaven, the pure form of space and time in all its vast emptiness and purity?
God is no longer “cette immense horloge de lumière qui mesure ce qu’elle manifeste et manifeste ce qu’elle mesure”. (21)
Before, the Homeric time of the gods prevailed. But with Oedipus, during such extraordinary moments of inner confusion when the gods become faithless to humans, we enter a time and space that is as empty as a desert. (22-23)
We then pose a question: so, there is this empty time which is more like an a priori “condition” for our temporal experiences; how then are we to comprehend it as having an end which does not “rhyme” with its beginning? Beaufret says that we must in the first place remain within the context of the tragedies, and consider their beginnings and ends, rather than jumping to conclusions regarding temporality in general.
At the beginning of his Remarks on Antigone, Hölderlin returns to this idea of the cesura. On the one hand, the cesura is what forces-together both sides of the tragedy, yet as a break, it as will is what places them over-against one another. The cesura is the balancing point, and it leans more either toward the end or the beginning, so to balance the ‘weight’ of the paces of dramatic development. Hence, each tragedy has a different “rhythm”. At this cesura point when the dramatic pace explodes, gods and men are forced together. (23)
We also saw divine prophetic intervention in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. Cassandre foresees the murders and return of Orestes. But this prophesy does not serve as a cesura. What she says is something expected. [Oedipus’ crimes were unknown to him, so the consequences were for him unforeseeable. Agamemnon, however, when sacrificing his daughter, could know ahead of time that this would later bring grave consequences. As well, Agamemnon was rightfully reluctant to walk-upon the red carpet, which he knew would insult the gods.] In Aeschylus, the story in a way is finished even as soon as it begins; the telos or final end is set from the beginning. (24) Oedipus, on the contrary, begins nobly. His crimes were unintentional and unknowable. His later blind wandering does not at all rhyme with the beginning. It is like a note that does not fit, as if a new melody started playing, or a new poem began from the middle of another one. [A cesura is a break in the sense of a new time beginning immediately. But as the beginning, nothing fills it. Deleuze might have us see things as always this way. Each moment is a new beginning. We are ‘ever begun’ or ‘always initial’, rather than the more common motto, ‘always ever’. This 'always initial' is like the innocence of becoming; we are always initiates, ever having our first experience, which is the experience of the pure difference of immediacy.] The cesura breaks-apart what has happened ‘so far’ ('thus') from what shall happen ‘henceforth’, making a fundamental change in the path of development.
We might trace Hölderlin’s understanding of this sort of a radical break to Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Here, becoming moral is not just an improvement, but a true revolution within us, a complete change of our heart [Herzenänderung]. In this case of a fundamental internal transformation, the beginning and end of someone’s life will not rhyme. (25) Here then we can see what is probably another Kantian influence on Hölderlin’s thinking. (26)
Beaufret, Jean. "Hölderlin et Sophocle," preface to Hölderlin: Remarques sur Oedipe. Remarques sur Antigone. Transl. François Fédier. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1965.
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