Why blog? To write a dated entry, one might think, is to mark time, to say: I was here on this date and this time, or I am still here, growing older, improbably old, but here nonetheless. Unless it is not to mark time, but its suspension – to break with the demand that you make profit from time spent. The demand, that is, to spend time to give yourself more time; to work hard today for a tomorrow of leisure that is endlessly deferred.
Do not try to mark time when time itself is deferred. Write from tomorrow, as the Surrealists said, from the day after the revolution. Do not try and save time; this is the opposite of giving time. But what would that mean, to give time? To pay attention? Or to train your attention so you can mark what demands attention in the passing of time?
Thinking, for Husserl, begins with the reduction, the epoche, the suspension of time. It is the thought of suspension, of epoche, which draws Heidegger to the moods of anxiety and boredom. You are given time itself in this suspension. Time itself? Rather, we might say, the suspension of time. For boredom is time for nothing, is it not? Boredom is time suffered rather than time lived.
But perhaps with boredom we catch sight of something like the malaise of time, of time’s suffering from itself. What does this mean? It is a way of invoking the way time escapes us. In French, you are said to give yourself death – this is what it would mean to kill yourself. Time would give itself in that oceanic boredom when even suicide would be impossible.
To suffer time – what would this mean? To mark time’s suspension in the passage of time. To divide the instant in itself. To experience time devouring its own breast, like the mythical pelican. Or to see time reborn from itself, as Aphrodite was born from the forehead of Zeus. And to be given time. To be given time in which to mark time’s suspension.
Lars Iyer's Blog 