In The Rebellion Against Nature we arrived, after dismantling every form of individual rebellion, at the conclusion that the true rebellion lies in generating a culture capable of conserving the abyss —the consciousness of finitude— and transmitting it. A culture of the abyss.
Now then, to conserve the abyss is not an end in itself, as though it were a matter of love for the void; one does not seek to conserve anguish out of penance. The abyss is fundamental, since only upon that ground is life lived as experience, and because only by living it with that intensity does there occur what makes existence something more than pure continuity. The culture of the abyss conserves the abyss in order to preserve the possibility of the instant.
The same movement that in that essay dissolved the abyss is the one that dissolves the instant. A world without an abyss is a world without distance; and without distance, as we shall see, no instant is possible. To conserve the abyss is, at bottom, to keep open the rift where the instant is still possible. The culture of the abyss is, before anything else, a culture capable of sustaining instants.
It remains, then, to understand what that instant is which must be sustained, and why —being the most valuable— it proves also the most difficult to attain.
By instant I do not mean simply the immediate or the rapid. The instant is not just any fleeting pleasure nor any momentary interruption. The instant is the point at which life suspends, even if only for a few seconds, the instrumental logic that normally organizes existence. That is, during the instant, the subject momentarily ceases to relate to itself as a project.
The mind does not withdraw entirely; only the instrumental mind. Calculation is suspended, the administration of the self; that constant projection toward the future. For a few seconds the structure that continually asks—what is this for?—ceases to operate.
It can occur in sex, in music, in contemplation, in creation, in an intense conversation, in grief, in the sudden comprehension of something that had been acting beneath the surface for years, or even in the healing of a wound. Though they are distinct experiences, they all share the moment in which the subject ceases to experience itself exclusively as a function.
Yet there another contradiction appears.
If the instant is one of the few places where a form of unadministered freedom still emerges, why is it so difficult to attain? Why not simply choose to live there permanently?
Because the instant, though it appears as an irruption, does not arise from nothing.
We might think that societies are organized around sacrifice simply out of scarcity. Civilization would be a mirror of life, which requires processes in order to obtain what is desired. Not everyone can have everything, given that resources are limited. Thus civilizations seem to have been configured from the beginning.
But even imagining absolute abundance, where every desire could be satisfied immediately, the problem would persist.
Because desire does not need only satisfaction. It needs longing.
Longing is what obliges the subject to traverse a process. It implies accepting, even unconsciously, that the object cannot be had at once; that to reach it one will have to sustain a distance and sacrifice instantaneous satisfaction. That sacrifice is not moral nor does it ennoble in itself; it merely allows desire to exist as such, preventing it from being consumed before it has charged itself with intensity.
To long is also to envision a future possibility. To ask from where and how it might be attained. What would have to change. The sensibility that would have to be developed. The position, or that which one would have to become, in order to sustain what is desired. Hence longing does not only point toward an object; it also transforms the subject who longs.
Longing does not only imagine the desired; it imagines the subject capable of attaining it.
The problem is that we enter a paradox: the instant escapes instrumental logic, yet it emerges only through processes that internally transform the subject.
Even those moments where life escapes control depend on prior processes. The sexual encounter needs a trajectory: the slow sedimentation of desire. Music does not produce ecstasy by the mere fact of sounding; it demands a formed listening, a developed sensibility, a certain interior history with sound. A masterpiece passes before someone without opening anything if the disposition to receive it does not yet exist. Creation does not arise from nothing: it requires exploration, failure, the accumulation of intuitions, prolonged contact with materials, obsessions, and forms. Contemplation, finally, is not such by the mere act of looking; it demands having developed an attention capable of sustaining itself without turning into utility.
Thus the experience of freedom requires time. Not only time understood as mere duration. It requires an internal transformation of the subject. It requires a process in order to emerge. And that process still serves, at least, the transformation of the subject itself.
The paradox is that the only point which seems to escape completely from the logic of utility needs first to serve, even if only for that escape.
Thus, that process still serves something. Yet the problem is not the process itself, because there exist processes —such as longing— that do not immediately produce anything useful and that, nevertheless, transform the subject to the point of making the instant possible. The problem, then, is what is made of that process; for example, turning it exclusively into performance.
That process, moreover, unfolds as much in the light as in the dark: a sustained pain, catastrophe, even contact with hatred and cruelty. What matters is the attention that observes, while the sign of what is lived is the spark that ignites it. The instant is not in the object nor does it fall from the sky upon just any subject; it dwells in the encounter between a consciousness that has condensed and a reality that functions as a detonator. Without the prior condensation, the spark does not catch. Without observation, hatred merely oppresses and is forgotten; observed, it condenses. That is, at bottom, the difference between lived-moment and experience: the disposition to be attentive to what occurs, beyond its intensity. Attention transmutes lived-moment into experience, and only experience condenses to the point of opening the instant. How that attention is cultivated —an anthropotechnics of observation— is the matter of other texts; here it falls to name it as the disposition to attend to one’s own life, whether it comes from the light or from the shadow.
Contemplation is of no use… but it transforms.
Contemporary technology advances under the promise of making everything immediate and automatic. Yet it is easy to glimpse that the excess of availability destroys precisely what it promises to maximize. Immediacy without process dilutes enjoyment: it delivers the object before desire has reached sufficient density to receive it.
Enjoyment arises from a sustained distance and from a prior transformation of the subject. Hence a completely optimized world —which thereby intends to increase experience— ends by producing less intensity. It will have more access and stimulus, more immediate satisfaction; but less experience. More available lived-moments; fewer instants capable of leaving a mark.
The instant, in order to be an instant, must leave a mark. That is why it endures. It is not merely a memory. It is the point where experience condenses in order to transform the subject. The instant is that moment between the before and the after.
This also reveals that, in order to reach that condensation, a prior experience is needed: to experience, to explore, yes, but with attention to life. Precisely for that reason, an optimized world would dilute experience and turn it into mere lived-moment.
A lived-moment is to be awake, to do what one has to do, what one believes is owed, or, simply, what satisfies immediately. It has a result, but not necessarily an observation that concentrates what was lived to the point of deriving in transformation. It is pure continuity: the premise of an optimized world, the climax of a utilitarian society.
Hence the subject trapped in that logic so resembles the “last man” denounced by Nietzsche.
The paradox of a society oriented toward optimization is that its great longing consists in eliminating the very conditions of longing: it wants to reduce all waiting and to anticipate every desire before it comes to be formulated. If desire needs distance and process in order to exist, a civilization that seeks to fulfill everything immediately is not making more desires possible; it is diluting the very notion of desire.
And this need not be thought of as a conspiracy. There is no need to imagine a hidden instance directing it; it suffices to observe the impersonal logic of technique and the market, the control without a sovereign that I described in The Rebellion Against Nature —the antechamber of tecno-nature—: everything tends to reduce uncertainty.
If that tendency is consummated, the cost will not be only the loss of certain pleasures: the very possibility of transformation would be lost. Without longing there is no process; without process there is no experience; without experience there is no condensation of life; without condensation of life there is no instant. The result will be constant lived-moments and stimuli: ever fewer events capable of leaving a mark.
A humanity without transformation would begin to resemble less a community of subjects and more a swarm: beings oriented by flows of stimulus. The logic of optimization pushes toward an ever more controllable existence. No one decided it from the center: it was molded to our shape as creatures. It is the human being itself who, conscious of its finitude, wants to control everything out of fear and wants everything faster in order to win time against time. There is no conspiracy because none is needed. It is we ourselves, in our most elemental form.
A species that developed consciousness of its finitude could end by using that very consciousness to build the conditions of its own deactivation. That is, the survival of the species together with the dissolution of what made human experience something transformative. We are deactivating that which torments us so, and we are doing it collectively without having explicitly declared the project.
A distinction must be drawn between lived-moment and experience.
The lived-moment is what occurs and passes through the subject without necessarily modifying it: routine, the stimulus quickly replaced by another. Experience, by contrast, leaves a mark because it observes and reorganizes the way in which the subject perceives.
In that sense, the instant is experience in its most concentrated form: the point at which a series of lived-moments, observations, longings, losses, and processes attains sufficient density to transform the subject.
The instant occurs only when an internal transformation reaches a certain intensity. It is not enough for something to happen outside; the subject must have reached a point where that something manages to open it. That is why a song, a body, a conversation, a work, or a landscape often mean nothing for years and, all of a sudden, become an event.
The instant would then be the moment in which experience is finally seen as a transformation of the subject and of its perception of the world. From there, experience opens a different lens. It changes the way of looking. It does not necessarily advance in a linear sense. It changes. It explores.
If this is so, life reveals itself as an irregular succession of transformative instants, breaking with the idea of a continuous line or a homogeneous accumulation of days. Some transformations profoundly reorganize the subject; others simply heal a specific zone, open a sensibility, or allow one to look at something in another way. To heal a trauma, to traverse a loss, to comprehend a desire, or to discover a beauty are distinct forms of the same phenomenon: the moment in which something accumulated in silence attains sufficient density to leave a mark.
Hence Gaston Bachelard would say that the only durable thing is the instant: because it transforms. Against Bergson, for whom the real was duration —the continuous flow that drags the past along with it—, Bachelard inverts the terms by positioning the real in the point and not in the current. The problem is that his instant erupts almost gratuitously, detached from the trajectory; a flash that owes nothing to the past would occur for no reason at all. On the other hand, Bergsonian duration, left to its own inertia, is mere lived-moment: life that passes without condensing. Bachelard is right to see that what leaves a mark is the instant, but it does not fall upon just any subject: it opens only to a consciousness that has sedimented. One might also think that the instant is inherent to time; but then it would occur in a stone as well. It is not: neither in Bachelard’s notion nor in the one we describe here is the instant exterior to lived time. Both depend on perception, and that is why our instant is phenomenological and Kantian. Time is not something in itself, it is the form of our perception. We know of time only as it befalls us.
The problem, then, no longer consists simply in choosing between immediate pleasure and transcendence. The question lies in how to conserve experiences capable of interrupting the permanent administration of the subject.
The instant is a momentary rift where life ceases to organize itself entirely around utility. Even that rift, however, needs time, longing, and transforming observation in order to open.
If someone were to find the genie of the lamp and ask, as their wish, to be able to desire anything, at any moment, and obtain it immediately, at first glance it would seem they had attained the most cunning form of pleasure and formulated the most intelligent wish. But, paradoxically, they would have attained the opposite: the end of a habitable life.
Ironically, our civilization is building that wish without need of the genie.
An existence without distance eliminates longing; and without longing, desire empties itself. To be able to desire everything without wanting to desire anything: that is the paradox.
* One might object that there exist strange instants, perceptual flashes that erupt without any process at all. That is better explained from the function of the brain than from consciousness: they are lived-moment, not experience —they pass through the subject and are gone, without leaving a mark—. The instant of which I speak here touches what remains, that which feeds the I, and opens only to a consciousness that was already transforming.
