In the instant of diamond time duration incarnates and shatters itself. Many types of duration must exist, this seems to be true almost ‘by definition’. Duration is, after all, a multiplicity. Yet the time that fascinates, that holds attention and throws itself upon us, captures and eludes us, is predominantly the moments of diamond time, daimon time. We uncover these moments not through attention – our attention is always held by this time, this daimon diamond time – but through thought. We are forced to think, in the most perfect example of the forcing of thought, by this encounter with diamond time.

The eternal return is perhaps the most celebrated thought of the diamond time. The difficulty is often in extracting any sense of the eternal return from the peculiar and slight traces it left, not least in the peculiar way in which the eternal return is brought back to the moment, to the instant logical game of that which is both there and not there, here and not here. There is no instant of the eternal return since it shatters the moment and explodes the instant, taking us directly into the daimon of time, diamond time.

Time is not a passing, a going or an arriving. Time comes. When it has come it never goes. Almost no human being exists who has not yet had time come to them but there will be some, just as there will some plants, some rocks, some stars for whom time has not yet come – although it will. Aion sits softly on the lap of all and none may avoid the diamond time, no matter may avoid the daimon of time. Aion holds all in time and captures all, in time.

The encounter, however, is that which thought struggles to arrive at. To encounter time is to become shattered by it, at least at its most potent, in its daimon diamond form. We live as time, of course, we project the horizon of temporality up to and into the moment of the possibility of our impossibility but this living of time, this ecstatic temporality, always lacks that which it dismisses as impossible presence. The transcendental condition of ecstatic temporality is diamond time.

No doubt it is difficult to extract thought from its almost inevitable subsumption of diamond time into the subject. Kierkegaard perhaps offers the most abject lesson in this loss. The eternal, encountered as truth, God, Christ and the choice loses Aion in the incarnation of the daimon. We seem to be told that it must be the idea, that which is conjured into existence ex nihilo from the pure power of the subject and yet in this case the instant absorbs time rather than embracing it. It sucks up into the present the eternal that simply couldn’t be here in a moment. Diamond time is instead that which none want to encounter, the explosive truth.

Robert Vallier reviews what looks like a fascinating book, Brett Buchanans’, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze.  During the course of the review the following struck me:

The animal has an Umwelt, surrounding and enclosing it, much like a soap bubble. Each animal has its own Umwelt, and one soap bubble may enclose many others within it or be enclosed in other, larger bubbles. Unlike Leibniz’s monads, these bubbles have windows, or at least intersect and interact with each other in concrete ways. The Umwelt is not merely given, but rather produced by the animal through the functioning of its body, its sensory and instinctual apparatus, and the objects it encounters. Uexküll devotes years of his productive life to the study of the Umwelt, its formation, and how it constitutes a ground for understanding animal being. From this research, several astonishing examples emerge, most famously the behavior of the tick; but more than that, two major theoretical constructs also come to the fore. First, the plan of nature constitutes a kind of melody. An extensive musical metaphor or "theory of the music of life" runs throughout Uexküll’s work, and later becomes important to Merleau-Ponty later on. Buchanan neatly summarizes and translates the metaphors, but misses an opportunity to return to and evaluate another philosophical source for Uexküll, namely, Leibniz. The soap bubbles may not be monads, but they exist in a kind of pre-established harmony in the composition of nature. It is this harmonious composition that constitutes the plan of nature, or better, the plan is a kind of musical score. Deleuze later characterized Uexküll as a "Spinozist of affects." Given this, it seems that the background of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant would be a particularly fecund area to mine in order to understand better the rise of modern biology. Buchanan can’t be faulted for not developing this background, for to do so would have doubled the manuscript. While some mention of it could have been helpful, the absence of it stands as an invitation to his readers to engage in further research in this direction.