Proust, Derrida and La Differance

La differance (Jacques Derrida) may be understood as a bit of information or as a quantum of consciousness. Either way, it is irreducible. The ‘cold’ that I experience directly and the ‘cold’ that I experience through my being aware that I am cold are both the same and different. 

Whenever A = -A (same = different) we know we’re not in ‘Kansas’ (aka the Set of Real Numbers) anymore. It is the same ‘cold’ but the different media of transmission means that my experiences of that same cold differ slightly. La differance is short for ‘infinitesimal difference’ and infinitesimal quantities lie outside the Set of Real Numbers. 

How ironic is it that our go-to model of the real world cannot account even for a quantum of actual experience! No wonder I want to repeal the Laws of Arithmetic.

Marcel Proust shares a similar insight in his Remembrance of Things Past (RTP):

 “The sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the Baptistry of St. Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, been restored to me, complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation…

“…the past was made to encroach upon the present, and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other… The moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment…” And so it was!

The Proust you know from the cafes was once the Proust of Italy and then the Proust of France but the Proust you know from RTP is the Proust of both Italy-then and France-now. Every there is, potentially, here; every then is, potentially, now and every now is eternal.

Proust does not remember Italy, he relives Italy, which is perhaps to say, he really lives it for the first time…but in France. When Proust was in Italy, his attention was divided between his experiences of Venice and his experience of himself experiencing Venice. But when Proust relives Italy from France, his intermediary physical body disappears and now, for the first time, he can fully experience Venice.

“Marcel, how was your trip to Italy?”

“Fine, except for my traveling companion.”

“Who was that?”

“Me!”

We spoil every experience by being there! (That was Sartre’s insight in Nausea.) When Proust relives an event, he does not recall selected, superficial qualia associated with that event, like a tourist with a smart phone; he recreates the event entire, and like an Ephesian Kierkegaard, he steps into it, re-experiencing all its qualia at once…not from outside-in, as perception and/or memory, but from inside-out, as something unknowable to Kant, noumenal experience. 

When Proust was in Venice, he was aware of Venice, but he was also aware of himself (as above) being in Venice. Quelle Domage! Likewise, when Proust is in France. But when Proust relives Italy-in-France, he is no longer aware of himself per se. Finally, he can be directly aware of experience itself. 

But he remains conscious. He does not lose himself in some sort of mystical union with the world. He remains conscious because the infinitesimal separation between Italy-then and France-now functions for him as la differance.

Actually, the phenomenon of differance enters into Proust’s experience twice, once as the infinitesimal unevenness of the titles, again as the infinitesimal spacetime separation between France-now and Italy-then. Separated in spacetime, the two moments are united by something more substructural, i.e. experience itself; viva la differance! 

Effectively, consciousness effects/reflects a ‘fold’ in spacetime that invalidates the familiar Euclidean metric. A tiny difference in the pitch of the tiles, the tinier the better, ideally the tiniest perceptible difference possible, becomes a worm hole for Proust, bending spacetime to make proximate points ordinarily far distant from one another. 

I am reminded of p-adic numbers: the closer they are to zero, the larger the quantity they represent. In Proust’s case, the narrower the differance, the wider the wormhole it creates.

I am also reminded of Bell’s non-locality (entanglement): two events indefinitely separated in space and time can nonetheless behave as one event.  

Is this a manifestation of the non-Archimedean structure of the real world? Check it out: If A is the combined experience of France-now and Italy-then, and B is the experience of ‘France-now’, and C is the experience of ‘Italy-then’, then both B and C are subsets of A but, counter intuitively, (B + C), France-and-Italy-now-and-then, has more value/weight/intensity for Proust than A itself…much more! A > B + C but (B+C) > A. 

In the real world, ‘operations’ are never commutative, transitive, associative, or distributive…unless by accident or coincidence. In every process, order is definitive!

Or, for you fans of Doctor Who, the Universe is simply a collection of red ‘phone boxes’…tiny phone booths that house vast, hexagonal interior spaces, like the TARDIS. 

Either way, this potentiality for heightened intensity is a product  of living consciously in a non-Archimedean universe. Revel in it!

The competing cosmology is summarized critically by T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday:

“Because I know that time is always time, and place is always and only place, and what is actual is actual only for one time, and only for one place, I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face…”

I’d rather live in Proust’s world; how about you? Fortunately, we do; and for that may I say, “Thank God!” For Proust, space and time are folded so that any two points may be arbitrarily close to one another. Events, no matter how far apart, may abut.    

While Proust’s epiphanies are dramatic, we all experience something similar most every waking moment of every day. Consciousness is the superposition of two images, slightly askew - differance as described above.  

Surprisingly, consciousness can be easily and simply modeled using just the lowly triangle, the fundamental building block of the material world according to Plato (Timaeus).  Consciousness can be modeled simply by treating the ordinarily static triangle as a dynamic process: 

X

↙      ↘

X’     →      Z

In this diagram, X is directly aware of Z and of itself (X’) being aware of Z. We could say that ‘X’s experience of Z’ proceeds from X’s awareness of Z and from A’s awareness of being aware (X’) of Z. In which case we would be characterizing ‘consciousness’ using the language adopted by the Council of Nicaea (c. 325 CE) to describe ‘God’, i.e. Trinity. 

Does that mean that you are God?  Far from it! But it does mean that you, and perhaps every conscious being, is ‘made in the image and likeness of God’…and that’s not half bad, is it?

Trinity is not the esoteric mystery we have been (mis)led to believe. Rather, Trinity is a fundamental structure of Being itself. It is just one way, an important way, in which creation mirrors the creator and we are indebted to Proust, Sartre, and Derrida for pointing this out!

***

Magritte, René. Time Transfixed. 1938, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.René Magritte’s Time Transfixed disrupts ordinary perception by merging incompatible realities, a locomotive emerging from a fireplace, much like Proust’s Italy-then and France-now collapse into the same experiential moment. Both challenge the fixed boundaries of time and place, revealing how consciousness can fold reality into unexpected juxtapositions.