claims#passence-as-mp-presence-of-absence

Passence (Décarie-Daigneault 2024) is a productive positive name for the modality MP triangulates negatively at IP p. 57 ("a presence of the past that would be absence")

ID: passence-as-mp-presence-of-absence Title: Passence (Décarie-Daigneault 2024) is a productive positive name for the modality MP triangulates negatively at IP p. 57 ("a presence of the past that would be absence") Status: live Confidence: medium Claim type: corrective Created: 2026-05-05 Updated: 2026-05-09 Sources: decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger, merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity Wiki homes: passence, institution, transtemporality

Claim

Décarie-Daigneault 2024's neologism passence (a portmanteau of passé + présence) is a productive positive name for the modality of past-given-as-implicated that Merleau-Ponty triangulates negatively at Institution and Passivity p. 57: "there needs to be a presence of the past that would be absence, it needs to be a certain absence." MP's apparatus for the late ontology — institution, sedimentation, stiftung, wild-being — handles the how of historical sense and the what of pre-personal layers but does not name the modality of being-given-to-perspective-as-past. Passence fills this gap on the modality side. The neologism therefore performs a small but consequential service: it gives the IP p. 57 modality a determinate concept that can travel across applications (cave-art encounter, ancestor-photographs, marginalia, destroyed-artwork-via-documentation, etc.).

Evidence

decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger §2.3 — Décarie-Daigneault explicitly proposes passence as the term for what MP describes only as "a presence of the past that would be absence" at IP p. 57. The neologism is deployed in §2.3 (Crooked Finger as inhabiting the cave in passence) and §3.3 (transtemporality as the structure that disposes passence on a coherent plane).
merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity IP p. 57 — the philological anchor. MP's hedged formulation ("there needs to be... it needs to be a certain absence") signals a modality whose specification MP defers; passence is Décarie-Daigneault's positive specification. The hedging is a feature, not a bug — MP gestures at a modality his existing apparatus does not name.
Cross-source false-friend caution: passence should NOT be conflated with Carbone's "mythical time" (Carbone 2004 Ch. 1; Carbone 2015 Ch. 4–5) or with Knight 2024's "Lethean body" Plotinian reading. All three readings are anchored in MP's "past that has never been present" formula but each sets it in a distinct register: psychoanalytic-temporal (Carbone), cosmological-emanative (Knight), singular-deferred-dialogical (Décarie-Daigneault). See motifs.md §"mythical time / past-that-has-never-been-present / Lethe / immemorial past" for the rival-readings articulation (updated 2026-05-05 with Décarie-Daigneault 2024).

Counterpressure / Limits

A skeptic might argue MP's hedging is doing real work, and the coinage over-commits him. MP's "there needs to be" is normative, not declarative; the modality is required for institution but is not itself a structural feature MP wants to thematize. Coining a term might be reading into MP a vocabulary he chose not to coin, perhaps because his existing apparatus (institution, sedimentation, Stiftung, wild Being) was already doing the work the neologism would perform. Counter-response: the wiki accepts passence as Décarie-Daigneault's contribution; it does not back-project the term onto MP. Scope of the claim: passence is Décarie-Daigneault's positive name for what MP signals; promotion above candidate requires either (a) independent secondary-source uptake of the neologism by another scholar, or (b) finding additional MP passages where the modality is signaled but unnamed (such passages would strengthen the gap-claim that passence fills).
Single-source ingest. The claim rests on Décarie-Daigneault 2024 alone. Future ingests should track for independent uptake or contestation.
The neologism may not stick. Recent French and Italian MP scholarship (which Décarie-Daigneault publishes in via Chiasmi International) sometimes coins terms that fail to gain traction. The wiki should track whether passence is taken up by other scholars; if not, it remains a within-wiki working concept rather than a settled neologism.

Payoff

The wiki's coverage of MP's late ontology has been heavily weighted toward the how (institution, sedimentation, Stiftung) and the what (wild Being, vertical Being, flesh). A vocabulary for the modality of past-givenness has been missing — except as cognate-by-cognate (haunting from Toadvine, mythical time from Carbone, Lethean body from Knight). Passence gives the wiki a singular-deferred-dialogical register distinct from the Carbone-psychoanalytic and Knight-cosmological registers. This in turn enables: (a) more precise reading of cave-art and other-trace cases on the wiki; (b) sharper articulation of transtemporality (which disposes passence on a plane); (c) cross-link to nascent-state (the deferred-dialogical extension of the term); (d) clearer typology of encounters with traces of the past, alongside the Toadvine-fossil-vertigo and the Carbone-mythical-time cognates.

Status History

2026-05-05 — created as candidate after the Décarie-Daigneault 2024 ingest. The 3-test gate for live status is partially passed (claim is contestable, evidence anchored at IP p. 57 + 2024 §2.3, counterpressure recorded), but promotion is held at candidate because the claim depends on a single secondary source. Promotion to live would require either independent uptake by another scholar or additional MP-side textual evidence that the modality is signaled-but-unnamed in passages beyond IP p. 57.
2026-05-09 — promoted to candidate → live under user pre-authorization for the twelfth Phase 8 run. Independent claim-promotion-reviewer subagent verdict: PROMOTE — clean 3-test gate. Test 1 (contestable formulation) PASS — the over-commitment objection (MP's hedging is doing real work; existing apparatus may already cover the gap) is articulated explicitly under Counterpressure. Test 2 (evidence traceability) PASS — Décarie-Daigneault §2.3 / §3.3 anchored at extraction-note lines 36, 41, 154, 227–234; IP p. 57 verbatim quote anchored at extraction-note line 154 (verified). Test 3 (counterpressure recorded) PASS — three distinct counterpressures with explicit scope discipline (the wiki accepts passence as Décarie-Daigneault's contribution and does not back-project). The reviewer noted that the Status History's prior framing — "the 3-test gate for live status is partially passed" but "promotion is held at candidate because the claim depends on a single secondary source" — appears to conflate the 3-test gate (which is gate-for-live) with the looser additional precaution about uptake; per CLAUDE.md §Claim Status Gates, single-source dependence is a supported-grade concern, not a live-grade blocker; the candidate→live gate is tests 1–3 only and all three pass. Confidence retained at medium. See wiki/.audit/synthetic-layer-2026-05-09-twelfth-run.md for the full reviewer record.

*Passence* (Décarie-Daigneault 2024) is a productive positive name for the modality MP triangulates negatively at IP p. 57 ("a presence of the past that would be absence")