The Memory of the World, by Ted Toadvine

Reviewed by Timothy Clark

Ted Toadvine, The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2024), xiv+329 pp.

The Memory of the World offers a kind of summa of Ted Toadvine’s work on the challenging borders of phenomenology. As the book’s back cover tells us, ‘It draws on work from phenomenology, deconstruction, critical animal studies, and new materialism’ in the development of a phenomenology alert to the environmental demands of the 21^st century. This project is ambitious while remaining centrally a reworking of Merleau-Ponty, the thinker who has offered the focus for Toadvine’s research career. This work has never been a matter of historical exegesis, but rather of engaging Merleau-Ponty’s work in continuing and contemporary debate.

The Memory of the World has three sections: on deep time, animality, and eschatology. Toadvine develops a phenomenology (some, though not Toadvine, would say ‘eco-phenomenology’) alert to perceptions of deep time, both in relation to the prehuman, to terrestrial life and geology, to animality, and to the impingement on contemporary culture of images of the near and deep future.

Phenomenology becomes a kind of terrestrial ethic: the sense of deep time, both past and future, underlines how ‘the unity of humanity and of all earthly life rests on the uniqueness of the earth, not as a scientific representation, but as the memory that is constitutive of our being from within’ (25). But this is certainly not just another phenomenologically oriented approach to environmental questions which deploys Merleau-Ponty in order to affirm some original oneness or kinship between the human and nature. Toadvine’s argument pivots on the challenging otherness of natural forms and other creatures, resisting too appropriative a conception of their kinship to us.

Phenomenology’s fundamental stance seemed to make it a prime exhibit for accusations of the supposed correlationism of Western thought (Quetin Meillassoux). However, if Merleau-Ponty has to be conceded as at times vulnerable to such arguments, Toadvine hints towards a ‘phenomenology that remains to be carried out’ (54), one against Meillassoux certainly, but also against Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that geological deep time is inaccessible to direct human experience,^[1] an inaccessibility now become toxic as ‘planetary’ realities impinge increasingly on inherited and anachronistic human-centric modes of thinking the world (271).

At issue throughout is the well-recognised need for a phenomenology capable of coming to terms with the demands of naturalism, as, for example, in David Wood’s essay of 2003, ‘What is Eco-Phenomenology?’ in the seminal collection Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, edited by Toadvine and Charles S. Brown in 2003.^[2] Eco-phenomenology would involve ‘an enhanced attentiveness to the complexity of natural phenomena, and the ease with which that is hidden from view by our ordinary experience’ (‘What is Eco-Phenomenology?’ (155)).

Toadvine’s objects of concern are diverse, variously elusive of traditional phenomenological methods: the ‘Anthropocene’, wildness, responsibility to future generations, the ‘apocalyptic’, the nature of life, a chapter on bees (‘The World of the Bee’), on Cezanne, Derrida on death, the notion of world/the world in Heidegger, Derrida, and Nancy. Toadvine surveys an exciting range of debate in post-phenomenological thought, though the book becomes weaker when it moves into the realm of cultural diagnosis, as in the long sections on eschatology. Environmental culture and debate across the world are surely far too plural to be captured by sweeping claims that there is a predominant form of general eco-apocalypticism, one challengeable as a simplistic sense of temporality closing off in its predeterminism both our ethical debt to the past and our responsibility to the future, depriving it of its unpredictability. Here, to offer a terrestrial ethic as a general mindset of debt-to-the-past and responsibility-to-the-future is not strikingly different from the ethical truisms of almost all environmental culture.

Toadvine reads Merleau-Ponty on the ‘memory of the world’ as ‘the asubjective and differential passage of nature from which we emerge and to which we remain liable’ (17). Unlike the priority of embodied subjectivity in Merleau-Ponty’s early and superseded Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945),^[3] Toadvine’s title phrase highlights ‘a reversal by which the things have us, rather than our having them’ (30-31). This corresponds to the practice of thought as a ‘[r]adical reflection’ that ‘must necessarily incorporate its own unreflective history’ (36). ‘The memory of the world’ is a double genitive, a chiasm, the transcendental/empirical notion of the body or flesh as forming an immemorial condition of reflection, which itself must be understood as ‘an event of nature that eventuates its own passage’ (42).

Broadly, this argument is a reworking of Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology of the ‘flesh’, reread as a condition of ‘alterautoaffection’. The Memory of the World builds on Merleau-Ponty’s argument that reflective consciousness is conditioned by the ‘elemental’ time of human and prehuman evolution, with ‘the anonymous, cyclical time of the sensing body in distinction from the narrative, historical time of personal subjectivity’ (6). The stress on the ‘alter’ before the ‘auto’ is Toadvine’s piece of fine-tuning in recognition of arguments such as Derrida’s (in his Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000))^[4] that Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of the chiasm of touching–touched in perception had overstressed co-perception and reciprocity, unity over the heterogenous.

‘Memory’ is the pivotal term in this study, doing a huge work of conceptual synthesis. Late in the book Toadvine recalls Michel Serres’s claim that everything can be considered a ‘memory’, ‘an inert or subjective memory’ (277).

‘Memory’ has then to be read as a neologistic concept here, one that tries to hold together widely disparate elements into an overall argument. The book’s Introduction prefigures arguments about ‘life as the figured memory of its diachronic evolution’, said to embody ‘the ontological memory of evolving life’, while biodiversity is to be rethought as ‘the biodiacritically embodied memory of life’ (21).^[5] The ‘uniqueness of the earth’ is affirmed, ‘not as a scientific representation, but as the memory that is constitutive of our being from within’ (25).

‘Memory’, as opposed to ‘record’, ‘inscription’ or ‘trace’, implies efficacious agency of some sort, a continued and even continuous link backwards, as well as something being registered sensuously, however remotely. It is here that the concept seems to come under strain. For instance, why is it always ‘memory’ in the singular when Toadvine has also described well ‘our embodied immersion in the memory of the world’ as ‘tearing us apart, scattering us across an incommensurable multiplicity of temporal flows and eddies’ (46)?

The way ‘memory’ drifts towards being a term of overstretched intellectual containment is felt especially in the use of Elizabeth Grosz’s argument in Chaos, Territory, Art (2008).^[6] The context is a key stage in Toadvine’s argument seeking a rapprochement between naturalism and phenomenology, to address questions of the human/animal difference which elude the inherited conceptual traps of the biologism/humanism alternative. Toadvine relates some of Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on instinct to Grosz’s ‘account of evolution as sexual selection’ (91), so that, ‘rather than understanding evolution as adaptation for survival, these accounts locate nature’s impetus toward creative differentiation in the pleasurable intensification of sensation, which itself involves the continual folding of abyssal differences into the body’ (91-2). This seems remarkably crude, almost a kind of vitalism, given that sexual selection is only a crucial facet of evolution in some forms of multi-cellular life. Even then, evolution entails factors vastly outside any realm of individual sensation and much that is aleatory or a matter of contingent statistics, as in so-called ‘genetic drift’.

The memory of the world is often ‘memory’ of the immemorial. The central challenge of the book is to engage those numerous cases where clear, direct phenomenological access is not possible, such as with the vastness of deep time, the otherness of other and of nonhuman lives, the elemental-terrestrial, the future. How can ‘memory’ relate to these? Toadvine’s phenomenology works by taking up resistance to direct access as something that is itself felt, often as a ‘haunting’ (the word ‘haunt’ is ubiquitous) or as the undergoing of an experience of resistance (‘the resistance that the unreflective offers to the reflective’ (192)). For example, in the experience of the elemental ground of our existence, or the Levinasian ‘there is’, our conscious ‘world’ is said to relate to the ‘evocation of an immemorial past that constitutively haunts our lived experience of time’ (191).

However, is Toadvine sometimes relaying experiences of limits to direct phenomenological access, its gaps, or opacities, as if these were fuller of immediate felt content than they actually are? The repeated references to the would-be perception of deep time, etc., as feeling ‘haunted’ surely relate far more to the underacknowledged effect of understandings mediated by scientific reading.

The opening accounts of the author’s fossil-hunting for ammonites on the Dorset coast instantiate this question. The various objects found along the beach under eroding cliffs, including the odd fossil, certainly range extreme time scales, say ‘from two years to two hundred to two hundred million’ (3-4) , but it seems questionable to argue that an experience of such time scales occurs ‘prior to any explicit conceptual knowledge or mental representation’ and that this ‘is more fundamental than any thematic belief about the precise age of the object in my sight or in my hand’ (4). After all, before the development of geology, ammonites were widely seen as sorts of petrified snake or as evidence for supernatural events. In Toadvine’s phenomenology of ammonites a challenge for thought seems presented too specifically as a sort of immediate sensory encounter: ‘The phenomenological encounter with the vertigo of deep time, of which I catch a glimpse in the fossil, is the echo within my body of an asubjective time of matter, of an unfathomably ancient passage that haunts the heart of the present’ (59).

The rich variety of topics in the book shows phenomenology working as kind of boundary discourse, one that places itself directly and often excitingly in the challenge of that which eludes phenomenal access. But a sense of a limit is not necessarily some sort of felt adumbration of what is beyond it.

1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2021), 47. ↑

2. ‘What is Eco-Phenomenology’, in Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, edited by Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (Albany, NY, SUNY Press, 2003), 211-233. ↑

3. Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris, Gallimard, 1945). ↑

4. Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris, Éditions Galilée, 2000). ↑

5. ‘Biodiacritics’ is Toadvine’s coinage to express ‘the parallel between life and language as historically evolving webs of differential relations’ (7). ↑

6. Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory, Art (New York, Columbia University Press, 2008). ↑