In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

IMMANENCE VS. TRANSCENDENCE 285
Immanence lies in the paradoxical projection of metaphysical effects
onto everyday reality. Some sections in Louis Aragon's novel Le paysan
de Paris (The Peasant of Paris) read like a manifesto for this aggressive
blurring of the border between Immanence and Transcendence: "New
myths are born under each of our footsteps. Where man has lived, where
he lives, legend begins ... It is a science of life that belongs only to those
who have had no experience of it. It is a living science that engenders
and kills itself. Is it still possible for me (I am already twenty-six) to
participate in this miracle? Will I be able to sustain this sense of the
marvelousness of the everyday?" (Aragon, 14). The narrator's wanderings
through "his village" (Paris) and the estranging attention that he
devotes to every material detail yield a revised concept-and a new
program-of metaphysics: "The notion or knowledge of the concrete is,
then, the object of metaphysics. The movement of the spirit tends to
make itself perceived concretely" (240). The young librarian and amateur
philologist Erich Auerbach shares Aragon's enthusiasm for the concreteness
and paradoxical spirituality of everyday life. Astonishingly for
someone outside academia, he thus dares to criticize the lack of concrete
detail in Racine's dramas of passion: "This hyperbole of sensual individuality
is all the more difficult to grasp as [Racine's] characters ... lack
a concrete worldly existence. They remain at an unworldly and unreal
distance. They are allegories, empty vessels of their autonomous passions
and instincts" (Auerbach, 379-380).
The ability of the sphere of Immanence to absorb transcendental
concepts and motifs is apparently limitless. When Jules Supervielle invents
a hero for his novel Le voleur d'enfants (The Man Who Stole
Children) who wishes to "control destinies as God does" (60), when
Gerhart Hauptmann has the protagonists of his play Dorothea Angermann
define fate as "ordinary everydayness" (73) and providence as
"randomness" (121), and when Sigmund Freud announces in his entry
"Psychoanalysis" in the Encyclopedia Britannica that the discipline
which he founded will increasingly become a "science of the unconscious"
(265), it is obvious that man, everydayness, and the unconscious
serve as substitutes for God, fate, and Transcendence. On the other hand,
there seems to be a threshold across which the absorbed Transcendence
returns like a revenant. One reason for this return of Transcendence is
the impossibility of celebrating the disappearance of Transcendence before
its former presence (or the previously existing belief in its presence)