Retroactive Time

A love affair, a course of therapy, a book can alter the childhood we carry within us, and not merely the memory we keep of it. I call retroactive time this dimension of experience in which what happens now transforms what we will have been, at a moment when our age locks us into the time of clocks.

A childhood that changes after the fact

Someone, at forty, has a love affair that overwhelms them. They feel received for who they are, welcomed without having to conform, listened to with an attention they had never known. Over the following months, they begin to remember their childhood differently. Scenes they had always read one way take on another meaning, gaps they had taken for granted reveal themselves as gaps that could have been spared them, strengths they credited themselves with appear as the scars of wounds they had not seen. Their childhood, not merely the memory of it but the childhood as they carry it within, is altered.

We live this experience in the loves that repair, in the friendships that awaken, in the therapies that transform, in certain readings that illuminate, in certain experiences of fatherhood or motherhood that overturn what we thought we knew about ourselves. We rarely name it, because the tools we have inherited make it hard to say. If time is chronological, if the past is past, then the past cannot change, and childhood cannot be modified retrospectively. At most we can change our interpretation of it, which is already a great deal, but which does not exhaust what is lived. I want to argue that what is lived here is more than that, that the past itself is modified, in a sense that must be made precise, and that this modification opens onto a concept of time that is not that of ordinary chronology.

Freud’s deferred action, turned toward healing

Psychoanalysis forged a concept for this experience. In his clinical analyses, Sigmund Freud speaks of Nachträglichkeit, often rendered in English as deferred action or afterwardsness, to describe past events that take on their meaning, sometimes their traumatic meaning, only in the light of later events that reactivate them. A childhood scene that seemed insignificant when it happened becomes traumatic years later, when a new event reveals its scope. Jacques Lacan takes up this concept and develops it, showing that the subject is not constituted once and for all in a childhood that would then unfold, but within a looping temporality in which what one will have been depends on what comes to pass.

Deferred action is usually invoked to think about trauma, but it holds for healing as well. If the present can retrospectively reveal the traumatic dimension of a past event, it can just as well reveal a reparative dimension that had gone unnoticed, or defuse its traumatic charge by giving it a new meaning. The past is not merely reinterpreted, it acquires retroactively, in the present, qualities it did not have in its own present.

Bergson’s duration, where the past is reconfigured

In Matter and Memory, published in 1896, and then in Creative Evolution in 1907, Henri Bergson contests the chronological conception of time. The time that the sciences measure, time as a succession of equivalent instants, is not for him real time, it is a spatialized representation in which duration is treated as a line on which one would place points. Real time, which he calls duration, is something else. In Creative Evolution, Bergson puts it this way:

“Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. Since the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. […] Thus our personality shoots, grows, and ripens without ceasing. Each of its moments is something new added to what was before.”

In duration, the past is not behind us, separated from our present by a clean boundary, it is constantly reactivated, constantly reworked by the present that takes it up again. Memory is not a storeroom where we would go to fetch stored images, it is the very way duration unfolds, as a moving whole in which each instant carries what preceded it in a reworked form.

This analysis is consistent with the experience I described. If duration is this continuous movement in which the past is reworked in the present, then the past can be modified. Not that the facts that took place are changed, but the past as it exists in us, which is for us the only accessible past, is continually reconfigured. The childhood I carry today is not the one I carried ten years ago, and it is not the one I had at six either. It is this movement of duration that constitutes me.

Heidegger and the folded time of Dasein

In Being and Time, published in 1927, Martin Heidegger takes this critique further. Time is not an external dimension within which our lives would unfold, it is the structure of our way of being in the world. Dasein, the human being insofar as it exists, is temporally structured in an articulation of past, present, and future that is not a succession. Heidegger distinguishes an inauthentic temporality, our everyday functioning, in which time is lived as a chronology of separate moments, the present that is now, the past that is no longer, the future that is not yet, and an authentic temporality in which the three dimensions imply one another. The present I live is traversed by a future, the possibilities toward which I project myself, and by a past, what I have been and continue to be. My present choices reconfigure both what I will be and what I will have been.

This analysis meets Bergson’s by other paths, and it provides a framework for understanding what happens when an adult love modifies the childhood one lived. Such an event restructures one’s entire temporality, because it modifies what I am now, what I will become, and what I will have been.

The fire in the eighth arrondissement, and what we did not see of it

All of this concerns our relation to the real, and not only to time, because if the past can be reconfigured, it is because what we call the past is not a block of settled facts. Two conceptions of the real are opposed here, and I believe neither holds.

The first makes the real a finished totality, external to us, that would exist fully and that we would only have to discover. We would be like investigators facing an already constituted truth, of which our perceptions would grasp only a part, but which would be there, entire, independent of us. The second conception does the reverse, it reduces the real to our perception, and holds that there is no real beyond what we perceive of it, that to perceive is to bring into being. This second position has a grave flaw, it opens the door to absolute relativism and to denialism, for if the real is only my perception, then my perception makes law and no one can contest it.

I take neither side. What I hold is that there is indeed something outside us, but that this something is never given to us whole, and that we thicken it by adding facets to it, facets that are the perceptions of others. The real is neither to be discovered like a hidden object nor to be invented like a fiction, it is built by being made more complex.

I recently saw, on social media, the video of a fire filmed in a street of the eighth arrondissement of Paris, flames growing in front of a building’s door, explosions one could hear. My perception is to have seen those flames and that smoke, whether through the video or on the spot, and that perception is real. But I know at the same time that the real is far vaster than what I saw. I was not inside, I was not there before, I do not know what happened afterward, I did not see the scene from above. What is the cause of the fire, how long has it been burning, was the building destroyed, was it a spectacular flash in the pan or the start of a blaze that ravaged the neighborhood? None of this is in my image, and I am aware of it. To constitute the real of this fire, perceptions other than mine would be needed, that of the people who were inside, that of whoever saw it from the sky, that of before and that of after. And even then, a facet could appear later that would make everything be reinterpreted. The real is built in the confrontation of perceptions, and it always remains open to a new one.

The same fact changes according to the function we assign it. The morning after a big football match, the Trocadéro is strewn with wrecked cars and damage. From early morning, trucks and excavators clean the square, and within a few hours almost nothing is left. That battlefield will have been real only for the very few witnesses of the night, because we quickly erase the traces of a disorder we hold to be minor, tied to football and not to politics. The same damage, in a theater of war, would be photographed, filmed, documented as evidence of destruction. It would no longer be the same fact, because we would have given it another function. The material event is identical, the wreck is the same wreck, but the fact we draw from it depends on the meaning we grant it.

A flash in the pan or the burning of a city

The example becomes grave if we carry it over to incestuous rape. That a father sexually penetrated his child took place, outside any complete perception, as the flames took place. And yet that child may be in denial and not remember that it happened, or may have believed, because they were made to believe it, that they had asked for it and consented to it, or may feel guilty for having put their parent in difficulty. As an adult, they do not understand why they struggle so much with their partners. The story they tell themselves varies, and with it what the event constitutes within them. The penetration took place, as the fire took place, but what is a penetration, for how long, once or for years, by what gesture, how far? All of this is specified in laws that we revise, and which, in doing so, define how each person represents this real and decide what exceeds the limits of the bearable.

Someone who endured repeated rape over years may have dissociated to the point of no longer remembering what nonetheless took place. The psychiatrist Muriel Salmona, who has devoted her work to psychological trauma, describes dissociation as a safeguard of the brain in the face of extreme stress. In Le livre noir des violences sexuelles (The Black Book of Sexual Violence), published by Dunod in 2013, she writes:

“Traumatic memory is an emotional memory that has remained trapped and unprocessed, which makes one relive all or part of the trauma identically. […] To escape this danger, the only solution is to avoid igniting this trapped memory, by setting up avoidance behaviors and dissociative behaviors.”

The scientific status of traumatic amnesia remains debated, and that very debate supports my position, since an event can have taken place without being laid down as a lived experience, and be grasped again only after the fact. Conversely, someone who was raped only once may be destroyed by it for a whole life. A rape repeated two hundred times is, as an event, infinitely graver than a single one, and yet the two lives can be destroyed in the same way, like the fire that dies out on its own or takes the whole city. The fact is bound to its impact, and the impact depends on how the event is represented. Many women have lived relations with their partner that they took to be normal, until they recognized, after the fact, that they had endured marital rape. Their initial representation did not let them see it as a fact with harmful consequences, which does not mean it had none. The widening of awareness has lit up facets of the real that were not perceived.

It is therefore not a matter of reaching a hidden real whose true nature we would finally discover. It is a matter of making it more complex, of lighting up its facets so as to realize that it is vaster than the picture we had of it. The real is not something we reach, it is something we define in an ever more complex way. This precision saves my reasoning from relativist absurdity, for the real is indeed a construct, but there is not just one, and it is in the confrontation of these constructs that we thicken our existence as human beings.

Taking a photograph, and saying not a word about it

I run photography workshops where I work on this confrontation, following a simple rule. Each person takes photographs, then comes the moment of looking at them together, and I forbid the author to speak. The person who took the photo explains nothing, says neither why nor how, and it is the others who say what they see, each from their own gaze. The effect is clear. The author receives, on their own image, visions they had not thought of, and comes away enriched, and since each does the same with the others’ photos, everyone is thickened by everyone’s gaze. If the author explained their intention, the real of the photo would shrink at once to that intention, and no one would see any longer what one can see as long as the explanation has not been given. A photograph does not have a single meaning that its author would hold and deliver, it has as many facets as there are gazes upon it, and it is their meeting that makes it real.

An object that changes depending on whether one observes it

The analogy with physics is tempting and must be handled with care. In special relativity in 1905 and then general relativity in 1915, Albert Einstein showed that time is not absolute, that its measured duration depends on the frame of reference, on speed, on gravity, and that space and time form a four-dimensional spacetime in which the separation between past, present, and future has no absolute meaning. This physics speaks of the measurable time of physical events, not of the lived time of human experience, and a rigorous physicist would refuse the analogy, because the retroactivity of psychic meaning has nothing to do with relative non-simultaneity in physics. With that caution in place, the analogy remains suggestive on one point. It accustoms us to thinking that our everyday categories about time, the immutable past, the unknown future, the present that flows, are useful approximations in practical life but do not describe the ultimate reality of time, even physical time. If the physicists of the twentieth century had to abandon absolute chronology to describe the universe, perhaps human beings reflecting on their experience of time may allow themselves, too, to abandon it in order to describe what they live.

Quantum physics pushes this intuition further, provided one does not confuse the planes. A quantum object is neither a wave nor a particle. In Quantique : rudiments, published by InterÉditions and the CNRS in 1984, the physicists Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond and Françoise Balibar propose to call it a “quanton,” to mark that our classical images of wave and particle are both inadequate and that neither grasps the thing in itself. In the Young’s double-slit experiment, as long as one does not observe which slit the electron passes through, it behaves like a wave and produces an interference pattern, and as soon as one tries to observe it, it behaves like a particle and the pattern disappears. The wave is not a thing one could perceive, it is an operative concept, and the act of observing transforms what one observes. Wave and particle are ways of seeing, not the things themselves.

Quantum physics has brought to light another idea, distinct from the first, which is called quantum entanglement. When two particles have interacted or come from the same process, they form a linked system whose properties remain correlated whatever the distance separating them, so that they must be treated as a single system and not as two independent objects. Albert Einstein saw in this an absurdity, a “spooky action at a distance” that, in his view, ought to prove the quantum theory incomplete. In 1982, at the Institut d’optique in Orsay, Alain Aspect settled the debate experimentally, using pairs of entangled photons, by showing that the correlations predicted by quantum mechanics do indeed exist, a result for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022. Two particles, even separated by a great distance, can thus behave as one whole. Separability, the idea that two things distant in space would necessarily be independent, ceases to be self-evident.

I am not saying that our psychic lives obey quantum mechanics, that would be a confusion of planes. I merely note that the most rigorous physics has given up two pieces of evidence that nonetheless seem to us beyond question, the idea that a thing would have a fixed nature independent of any observation, and the idea that two things separated in space would be without connection. If science has had to accept a real in which observation takes part in what is observed, and in which distant elements remain bound together, then to think a human real that is built in the meeting of gazes, and a past that is reconfigured from the present, ceases to be a fantasy.

Railway time, or how a convention becomes obvious

Our relation to everyday time rests on a belief, that of an hour that would be an external, objective datum. Yet unified time is recent, and it was born of a practical need. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, each town lived by its own solar time, set by the position of the sun, and when it was noon in Paris, it was eighteen minutes to noon in Brest. As long as people traveled on horseback, these gaps bothered no one. The railway changed everything. To run trains without collision and keep to timetables, a common hour was needed. As early as 1840, the British companies set all their clocks to London time, and in less than twenty years the English abandoned local solar time. In France, the companies imposed Paris time, the stations displayed two hands, one for local time, the other for Paris time, and unification became law on 14 March 1891.

This identical time, because it is sent out in parallel to everyone, takes on the appearance of an external, objective fact. It is nothing of the sort. It is a single piece of information addressed to all at the same moment, a shared subjectivity that organizes everything, and that ends up naturalizing what is only a representation. The gap with Brest has not disappeared, by the way, it has only become invisible. When the sun sets and I telephone someone in Brest, it is already night at my home in Paris while it is still day over there. We live, at the same instant, before our very eyes, two different realities, and yet we do not doubt for a second that it is “the same time” between us. This experience proves that common time is not natural, that it is a convention. If we hold it to be natural, it is because we have chosen to organize our lives by it, the time of arriving at the office, the time of the appointment, the time of the call.

One may object that it is enough to plant a stick in the sun to see the shadow move and recover exactly the time that is shared with us. That is true, and the shadows of the trees will follow the same path even if all humans disappear, according to the rotation of the Earth. But what matters is what we do with it. The meaning we give to that movement, the graduation we set, the division into twelve slices that we hold to be equal, all of this we choose. One could graduate otherwise. Days do not all have the same length, the sun does not rise at the same hour or in the same orientation, and near the polar circles a day can last six months and a night six months, so that the people who live there receive an organization of time that no longer bears any relation to the shadows around them.

Other cultures graduated time differently, on the same Earth and under the same sun. Greek philosophy already distinguished three words where we have almost only one, Chronos, the time that flows and is measured, Kairos, the opportune moment, the one to be seized, and Aiôn, the time of cycles and of living duration. Other civilizations divided the year by the cycle rather than by the line. The Maya ran two counts together, a sacred calendar of two hundred and sixty days, the tzolk’in, and a solar calendar of three hundred and sixty-five days, the haab, whose combination returned to the same point only every fifty-two years. The French Revolution showed, here and barely two centuries ago, how far this freedom of division can go. The Republican calendar, in force from 1793 to 1805, replaced the seven-day week with a ten-day décade, divided the year into twelve months of thirty days followed by five or six days outside the months, and even briefly instituted a decimal time in which the day had ten hours, the hour a hundred minutes, and the minute a hundred seconds. The same sun, the same shadows, and yet a wholly different architecture of time. These divisions are not errors that science would have corrected, they are other ways of inhabiting the same movement of the sky. Our hours, our minutes, our seconds, our year of three hundred and sixty-five days are one convention among other possible ones.

Why time sometimes feels long and sometimes short

The subjective perception of time has been the object of precise research. Sylvie Droit-Volet, a professor of psychology at the University of Clermont Auvergne, has for years studied what she calls temporal distortions, and her work shows that our estimation of durations depends on our emotional state, our attention, our body. Fear causes an overestimation of time, because faced with danger the body activates to react quickly, the internal clock speeds up, and the moment seems to last a long while. Attention works the same way, since the more a task absorbs us, the less attention we pay to time, and the faster it flies. Droit-Volet has developed a theory of embodied time, “grounded time,” according to which our temporal judgments derive from the sensorimotor and emotional states we experience in our interactions, especially social ones. As she sums it up, it hardly matters what time is, or even whether it exists scientifically, for if a person experiences it and is able to estimate it, then psychologically it exists.

We all experience this. With certain people, a three-hour conversation passes like an instant, elsewhere an hour of waiting never ends. One may object that if I spend three hours daydreaming in every direction, it will indeed have been three hours. No doubt, from the clock’s point of view. But during those three hours, things may have happened in my perception of time that were entirely different from what I would have lived had I stayed tied to the timed unfolding. Clock time and lived time do not coincide.

Living next to the university of my twenties

Space works upon time, and the return to a place shows it well. When we go back to a place from our childhood that we have not seen for a very long time, we feel a sense of going backward, memories well up, and the perception of time becomes unsettling. The same place crossed every day seems to us, by contrast, purely ordinary, without thickness, even though we may have been crossing it for just as long. The everyday has the thickness of all that took place there, but this thickness stays invisible as long as habit covers it over.

I have been experiencing this for about ten years, because I live right next to the university where I studied nearly forty years ago. The place of my twenties has become the ordinary backdrop of my comings and goings, and it takes a displacement, an absence, for its charge to resurface. Gaston Bachelard called this attachment to places “topophilia,” and in The Poetics of Space, published in 1957, he argues that the house of childhood remains in us like a pattern that organizes our reveries and our memories. The sociologist Perla Serfaty-Garzon, in Chez soi : les territoires de l’intimité (At Home: The Territories of Intimacy), published in 2003, shows how the places where we live sediment our history and become the support of a memory that does not know itself. It is the Proustian experience of involuntary memory, where a place or a sensation reopens all at once a time we thought lost. Movement in space acts upon the time we carry, and moving away from a charged place can release what nearness kept buried, just as returning to it can suddenly give back its thickness to what the everyday had flattened.

The film freezes into past what was my present

Right now, I am revisiting my whole past, and I believe this stems from everything I am trying to think through here. I am entering a new stage, in which writing takes up far more room and in which I feel like doing new things, a gentle transformation rather than a break. The paradox is that nothing, outwardly, tips over. I left the university at twenty-seven, and for more than twenty-five years I have had my own company and a great deal of autonomy. And yet I feel very strongly a fresh start, as I felt one at twenty-six. At twenty-six it was not the beginning of my life, and neither is it today, and that is exactly what strikes me, I have the impression of a cycle rather than an accumulation. I am thirty years older, but I do not feel essentially different, nor on the threshold of an end, I feel before the same questions, with another experience, as if at a new departure. This may stem from the fact that my catastrophic marriage made me lose all my material possessions, so that, on that score, I find myself in a situation close to that of my twenties, when I had just bought my first apartment and everything was still to be built.

Last year I was asked to make a documentary about the teaching at the primary school where I had been a pupil. The filming brought me back to the places of my childhood, and little by little I renourished them with a new everyday, which was added to the old one without erasing it. Something strange played out there, which I would like to try to name. The school itself goes on in its present, day after day. But the film freezes an instant that has already become the past, including for the school of today. What was my present at the time of filming, a present in which my schoolboy past rose up again, is now a past for all those who watch the film. Present and past are therefore not fixed positions on a line, they are relations that change according to where one speaks from and the moment at which one speaks. My present of filming was already the future past of the viewers, at the same time as it reopened my childhood, and three times held together in the same gesture of filming.

This is where the cycle meets retroactive time. The return to a place or to a stage does not bring back an identical past, it makes two very distant presents coincide, that of my twenties and that of today, and this coincidence does not close time into a loop, it reopens the future. To feel that I am starting again is not to repeat, it is to experience that what I will have been is not yet fixed, and that what I will be is no more fixed than that. For a long time I took this loop for a nostalgic return toward the past, and I now understand that it is the opposite, a new meaning I give to what took place. I used to give these stages of my life a certain meaning, and by acting today I transform my present, which transforms my past, which in turn transforms my future. The loop runs both ways, for it is because I transform my present that I transform my past, and it is because my past is transformed that it can in return transform my present and my future. I find again, strangely, an energy of life and of building.

Here is an example. A few days ago, a friend who is a real estate agent, five years younger than me, suggested I visit a studio apartment. Given my age and the fall in my income, I held the idea of buying to be impossible, definitively shelved. We visited that studio, which I will not buy, and, both of us having had lives that had not let us build, we realized together that investing for our old age was becoming thinkable again, at fifty-six and fifty-one. This meeting, the intuition he had to call me and the reason I agreed to follow him, opened and authorized something for us. A future I believed closed reopened, and in doing so it changed the meaning of my past, which was no longer the story of an irreversible loss but the upstream of a possible new beginning. The present did not only modify the future, it modified what my past meant. All of this changes things in my life, really.

“It’s for your own good”: one event, two facts

Everything that precedes finds its sharpest point in a book that changed our view of educational violence, C’est pour ton bien (For Your Own Good) by Alice Miller, published in 1980. Miller analyzes there what she calls “poisonous pedagogy,” that education which justifies violence as beneficial to the child. Many people recount that the blows they received set them straight and did them good, and the victims themselves believe it was for their own good.

A distinction is called for here, between the event and the fact. The event is the blow struck, the material gesture of the parent upon the child. The fact, on the other hand, is not the gesture, it is the interpretation given to it, and it is the interpretation that decides what “really” happened. Justice knows this, claiming to judge on facts and proof, while one and the same gesture becomes there two incompatible facts:

• on one side, the established fact is a form of violence, and it may lead to the parent’s conviction;
• on the other, the same gesture is held to be a healthy educational act, which earns the parent praise, including from the one who received the blow.

It is not the same fact, and yet the event is rigorously the same. What creates a fact, then, is the interpretation given to it. And what we call facts, those we hold to be the most objective, are in reality a fabric, a rhizome of subjectivities. They become facts only because a common law shares them, a law that is not always written, and which naturalizes them to the point that we believe them objective, exactly like clock time. The person who received the blow naturalizes the rightness of the gesture, while another, in another culture, will see in it the worst of assaults.

The stake is not theoretical, it touches an entire life. One might think it is better not to touch it, that it would be cruel to turn into trauma what someone held to be a benefit. But here is what this reversal makes possible. The person who believed they had been corrected for their own good was perhaps striking their own children in turn, in the continuity of what they had naturalized. To recognize after the fact that it was violence is to interrupt that transmission, and to make oneself capable of inhabiting one’s present differently, of becoming a subject again where one was the object of a history one had not chosen. The past does not change in its material facts, but the fact it constitutes within the person does change, and with it what that person will do with their life.

This is the meaning of Miller’s best-known formula:

“The maltreated child will become a maltreating adult, unless, in childhood, they had a helping witness.”

This witness is what allows suffering to be recognized as suffering, and therefore the event to become another fact. When the witness is lacking at the time, it can come after the fact, and the adult encounter, therapy, reading then play this role of belated witness, reconfiguring what childhood will have been.

I do not write all this from an external point of view. My eldest son took his own life a little more than three years ago, a few months short of his twenty-third birthday. That he is no longer here inverts the order of time, in which parents are supposed to disappear before their children, and this inversion, beyond the trauma it is for me, leads me to think things I might never have thought about. This experience, which I wish on no one, is part of me, and it makes me see things I could not have seen without it. My only path for life is to live with it, to learn from it, to be enriched by it, even though it is the most terrible experience there is. In any case, it makes who I am.

I also suffered, as a child, sexual violence, in proportions doubtless less extreme than others, but which nourish my way of living in the world and the richness of my gaze. When one has lived through domination, when one has been humiliated, denied in one’s dignity, and has become aware of it, one becomes able to spot these processes outside oneself, and therefore to be of use. This is how one can enrich the world even out of one’s most terrible ordeals. Life is built in its real, however undesirable, and that real too, through retroactive work, can become a fact other than the one it was at the moment the event took place.

Stepping out of common time as a condition of freedom

All of this has a practical bearing, and it is this bearing that decides whether these conceptions are worth anything, since they are worth something only if one can make use of them to better understand what happens to us. Our age structures our lives down to the second, by the telephone above all. Electronic calendars, notifications, news feeds keep us in a permanent urgency. A team of researchers at the CNRS has shown that digital interfaces, by tipping us into automatic modes of attention control, make us lose freedom of choice and make us less capable of reaching our own ends. This chopped-up time does not let Bergsonian duration do its work, nor Freudian deferred action unfold in the silence it needs. And it inscribes everyone in the same time, that identical time born of the railways, which we take for an external datum when it is only a shared convention.

Retroactive time exists, whether we attend to it or not. But to make it effective in our lives, to be able to see our own past differently, we need moments in which we are not in common time. Without such moments, we remain its prisoners, with no freedom in relation to time. Here are a few concrete avenues. Unplug the telephone for part of the day and simply watch the sun move across the sky, receive the shadow it casts when there are no clouds, and live this movement without graduating it into minutes, putting into it one’s own subjective scale. Grant oneself spaces free of shared cultural codes, where torsions of time become possible. Meditation, therapy, deliberate slowing, the regular withdrawal from digital tools, often treated as individual affectations or wellness techniques, are something else. They preserve in our lives the possibility of a temporality that belongs to us, where retroactive work upon oneself can take place, where the past can be modified in the present. Turn off notifications, set in advance periods of disconnection and hold to them, this too is what the researchers who study attention recommend, not to flee the world but to hold oneself in it as a subject.

To live the present is also to transform the past

If I care so much about thinking these questions philosophically, it is because they decide how one inhabits one’s life. Retroactive time is not a speculative curiosity, it is the condition for living really in the present. It is often said that to inhabit the present is to keep to the instant, neither to dwell on the past nor to lose oneself in the future. I believe it is more than that. To be present is indeed to live the present, but it is also to work it, and to work the present is, in the same gesture, to transform the past, because it is from now that it is decided what all that has taken place will have meant. The presence I care about, and which I have sought to elaborate elsewhere, is not a fixation on the instant, it is the act by which one takes back in hand the meaning of what one has been in order to make it the upstream of what one is becoming.

This is why the practices that draw us for a moment out of common time are not a luxury. They are what make this work possible, by returning us to a temporality in which the past stays open. And this is why everything that locks us into the contrary, the urgency of notifications, the time chopped to the second, the naturalization of a convention taken for a law of nature, is not merely tiring, but keeps us in the state of object, depriving us of the hold by which we might become subjects of our own history. To recognize retroactive time is not to settle an abstract question. It is to admit that one is never done becoming, and that this holds for what one has been as well.